This essay reviews a recent book by Serhii Plokhii, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union . Focusing on the role of the USSR's union-republics, especially Russia and Ukraine, in the breakup of the country, the book explains why efforts to hold the Soviet Union together ultimately proved abortive. The book, like earlier literature, debunks tenacious myths about the dissolution of the Soviet Union—myths that have been discredited before but are worth rebutting again—and provides an in-depth account of the final weeks of the USSR.

Using previously unseen British Cabinet Office and Foreign Office papers obtained through the UK Freedom of Information Act, this article shows how a change in Britain's stance in the Cold War was initiated in 1983. As a result of this process, the British government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided to move to greater engagement with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Distrusting the Foreign Office as an institution, Thatcher asked for papers from eight outside academic specialists, on whose analyses she placed considerable weight. The desire for East-West dialogue was strongly favored by Foreign Office ministers and officials, whose advice, paradoxically, was more readily accepted by Thatcher when similar policy recommendations (though with some differences in analysis) were made by the academics. The invitation to Mikhail Gorbachev to visit Britain in 1984, prior to his becoming leader of the Soviet Union, had its origins in a Chequers seminar involving both academics and officials on 8–9 September 1983. This was the beginning of an important, and surprising, political relationship that transformed Britain's militantly anti-socialist prime minister into the strongest supporter—certainly among conservative politicians worldwide—of the new leader of the Soviet Communist Party.