An analysis of the mounting dysfunction and political instability within the Soviet Union.

Approaches to take advantage of the evolving political landscape in the Soviet Union to leverage and promote US interests via Soviet policy proposals.

Predictions about the next four years in the Soviet Union's evolving political and cultural landscape, including that internal protests against perestroika will dominate the focus of Soviet leadership, that perestroika and its attendant backlash will in turn redistribute funds away from military spending, and that ultimately, these and other conflicts and pressures will promulgate the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An intelligence analysis from the CIA covering recent changes to the Soviet Union's state structure and leadership reorganization, legal reforms, economic resource allocation, foreign policy etc. under Gorbachev's more powerful position.

Anatoly Chernyaev’s notes from the Politburo session on June 20, 1988, during which military spending, party membership, the progress of perestroika, and CPSU organizational leadership were discussed.

Reagan and Gorbachev's first conversation during Reagan's 1988 visit to Moscow.

An analysis of Gorbachev's new economic policies.

A transcript of an SED Politburo Session discussing Hungary's decision to open its western border and allow East German citizens to cross into Austria.

In this extraordinary conversation, Solidarity’s leader fears the collapse of the Wall would distract West Germany’s attention - and money - to the GDR, at the time when Poland, the trail-blazer to the post-communist era in Eastern Europe, desperately needed both. "Events are moving too fast," Walesa said, and only hours later, the Wall fell, and Kohl had to cut his Poland visit short to scramble back to Berlin, thus proving Walesa’s fear correct.

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.