"In this book, Stephen F. Cohen reveals what has really happened in Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy.

Drawing on many years of studying and living in Russia, Cohen shows that what American officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophe and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam: the unprecedented demodernization and destabilization of a fully nuclearized twentieth-century country."--BOOK JACKET.