The Great Transition: American Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War.

• Author: Friendly, Alfred, Jr.

The United States pushed the Soviet empire to its knees and won the Cold War. No, the USSR collapsed of its own rotting weight, and Japan won the Cold War. Option three: A brilliant Kremlin leader, besieged at home and long misunderstood abroad, perceived the irrelevance of superpower military competition to the overarching new challenges of global security and engineered a strategic retreat toward sanity in East-West relations.

Those who prefer Thomas Carlyle to Caspar Weinberger will lean toward the last of the summary verdicts proposed above and will find in Raymond L. Garthoff a potent ally. His latest, massive (780 pages) study of the Cold War's finale piles up a tower of evidence for the view of Mikhail Gorbachev as the catalyst and inspired conductor of this century's grandest peaceful realignment. Or, as the author concludes:

Gorbachev pressed ahead with his unilateral actions and concessionary negotiations not owing to the Reagan hard line and military buildup, but despite it. He was determined to change the name of the game... He did not lose the arms race, he called it off.

Wrapping up the Moscow-Washington diplomatic record from 1981 through 1991, this analysis comes as no surprise. Gorbachev's "impact," Garthoff writes, was "the single most significant factor" in reversing superpower confrontation. "Only a Soviet leader could have ended the Cold War. . . " and "Gorbachev set out deliberately" to do so. "His avowed acceptance of the interdependence of the world, of the priority of all-human values over class values, and of the indivisibility of common security marked a revolutionary ideological change." Gorbachev "was the first Soviet leader to see the world in post-Leninist terms." And so on.

Whatever future analysts think of such encomiums, they will surely bless Garthoff for the thorough scholarship of The Great Transition and its predecessor volume, Detente and Confrontation (1985), out in a revised edition this year. Separately and together, the two works are authoritative contemporary history. In assembling and ordering so much of the primary record and supplementing it with a wealth of illuminating, secondary sources, Garthoff has done for the final decades of Soviet-American relations what the Venerable Bede did for the early centuries of English Christianity.

The result is an essential reference work, if not always the liveliest reading. Official Soviet prose, even of the Gorbachev era, is turgid. Long citations set the...