In early spring 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev asked Colin Powell: ‘what are you going to do now that you’ve lost your best enemy?’ For many this was to be the pressing question of world politics.4 But no one wondered what the Soviet Union was going to do now that it had lost its ‘best enemy’. With the end of the Cold War, the circumstances of Soviet existence had changed profoundly. The ideology, which had been a central foundational and organisational element of the state, was gone.
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© 2004 Nick Bisley
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Bisley, N. (2004). The Vulnerability of a Great Power. In: The End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000544_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000544_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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