ABSTRACT
Any reader with some interest in Cold War history or contemporary international relations might wonder why he or she should bother to skim through, let alone read yet another volume on the end of the Cold War. The literature on the issue, this potential reader might rightly note, is already so vast as to fill an entire library with scholarly books, edited volumes, journal articles and monographs of all kinds, not to mention the huge amount of writings made available on the Internet by the many research institutions or projects which have been dealing with these events ever since they took place barely two decades ago, nor the vast media production, including hugely successful television series. He or she might point, in addition, to the already very large corpus of primary sources relating to these events, whether the impressive number of memoirs written by political leaders or officials involved in one way or another in these events or the growing amount of archival documents which have been made available by governments, sometimes very soon after the events, and which continue to expand as years go by and the ‘normal’ period of thirty years – the legal duration after which most governments make diplomatic documents available to historians – nears. So, he or she may ask, what is there to be said or written on the topic that is not already known?
