Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War

This book examines Soviet policy towards Asia in the 1980s. It brings bilateral narratives – accounts of Soviet relationships with China, India, Japan, and other Asian players – into a metanarrative showing how the Soviet leaders, from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, saw Asia as a theater for superpower contestation, and why their regional policies ultimately failed. The book is based on multilingual research in the archives of Russia, China, India, and other Asian and European countries, and on interviews with policymakers, including several presidents and prime ministers. Weaving these untapped sources into a novel interpretative framework required years of intensive research and writing.