Description:
Many historians of the postwar period regard the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, a poor Caribbean island with a feckless Marxist government, as a misguided historical sideshow. English prime minister Margaret Thatcher did, too, remarking, "if you are going to pronounce a new law that whenever communism reigns against the will of the people ... the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world." London-based historian and strategist Brian Crozier begs to differ. The invasion of Grenada marked the first time since the Russian Revolution of 1917, he writes, that "a Communist government in a sovereign state had been removed by an outside power's military force." Given the bloody effects of Communist rule around the world, Crozier suggests that outside intervention was not at all a bad thing, and he charts the growth of the Soviet state with apparent regret that someone did not put an end to it long before 1991, when the USSR disintegrated in the wake of an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Some readers may take issue with Crozier's right-of-center analysis and his support for such regimes as the dictatorship of the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet, but they will not easily fault his careful scholarship, supported by hundreds of pages of documents from Soviet archives, as he relates the tangled history of the Marxist-Leninist experiment. --Gregory McNamee
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