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This book is even better than the first one (in my own opinion).For years,we were told that the front lines of the cold war were in Europe with the third world serving as a battlefield where the superpowers can fight proxy wars.Before this book came out we were very familiar with the CIA's role in Iran,Guatemala,Guyana,indonesia,Chile and other places using dirty tricks and covert operations to promote american interests.This book details the KGB 's equivalent operations.We learn that the KGB sponsored a "Hostile takeover " of india;that it was in close contact with Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro and that it was the main support for the ANC during the apartheid struggle.The book shows that although the KGB had numerous tactical successes ,in the long run this could not help the Soviet system as communism was a flawed ideology and doomed anyway.
This book was a very good history lesson of the Thirld World and showed how the Soviet Union's meddling shaped it. Despite its length and sometimes monotonous feeling, you walk away with a lot of information and a nice history lesson.
The author describes the sinister activities of the KGB in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East from the conception of the USSR until its undoing in about 1990 or so.The facts that are presented are mind bogling, there seem to have been no ethical limits for the KFB.The book is not a non-fiction book for the average layman, but it seems to be geared more towards historians, or VERY interested laypersons. It lists too many facts and details, which at times becomes boring.One would have hoped for more facts about the historic background of the specific time and place, and less details / names. (Of course the professional reader has no need for this.).It takes some perseverance to finish to book.
It is a well written study of how the KGB tried to manipulate and fight the cold war in the third world. At the end of the Cold War, in the third world as in many other fields the Soviet's economy could not afford the price. The writers argument which I think is correct is that the KGB was one of the major means used by the Soviets to spread communism throughout the world.
Yet little of it is presented here. Unfortunately for the USSR, either the form of communism that took shape in these third world countries produced a rival for example China or they became a major drain on the Soviet economy. I was a bit disappointed though after reading at the start how this new and great archive was now available.
Often they were more inventive and clever then their enemies. Overall there seemed little radically new in the book although there are some new and interesting points. For example in South Africa, I never realized how much the USSR and South Africa must have traded during the apartheid era in diamonds.
Often they were played by the locals just like the US.
To be fair probably from a scientific point of view this is the most correct form to do so, however at some point the reader becomes a bit bored. The book is a very interesting continuation to the first volume of the metrokin archive. I would howerver like to point out that at the middle of the book the form of writting of the book becomes very dull because all the charpters are prepared in the same way. Chapters that speak of Iraq, Syria, Israel and Afganistan are very interesting, specially because they purport the russian or soviet point of view for strategical analisys. Nevertheless its a good book and provides good information.
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