Book review: The New Russia

Mikhail Gorbachev’s latest book contains plenty of righteous anger at the state of modern Russia but is marred by being one-sided and presenting a lack of context for the general reader, writes Neil Robinson.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV’s greatest asset — his decency — is also his greatest weakness. As leader of the Soviet Union between 1985 and its collapse in 1991 Gorbachev struggled to make Soviet socialism “humane and democratic”, to use his own words.

This was a noble ambition. Gorbachev knew that there was a huge deficit of what he called “social justice” in the Soviet Union.