Latest in Soviet Union
A review of Mariana Budjeryn, “Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).
Organizations of veterans of the Afghan War have played a central role in building domestic support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the early 1980s, Soviet intelligence began Operation Infektion—a campaign to erode trust in the U.S. government by orchestrating a series of scientific papers and news articles arguing that the U.S. government created the HIV/AIDS virus.
Editor’s Note: President Trump's justification of his foreign policy often draws on bizarre theories and bad history. One of the worst recent instances was his claim that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan because of terrorism. This is wrong, but it raises the question of why Moscow did invade. Seth Jones of CSIS dissects Trump's claim and, drawing on Soviet archives, lays out the rationale behind Moscow's decisions.
Daniel Byman
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When the Mueller investigation began in May 2017, many people hoped that it would shed light on what was perhaps the central question regarding Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. election: whether the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Russian government’s interference operation.
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A review of Oleg Khlevniuk's Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (Yale University Press, reprint edition, 2016).
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