i didn't spent nearly as much time with shevardnadze. i had one interview in moscow in the foreign ministry, but that's more than anybody else had. so, i don't know, in the kingdom of the mind, the man is king perhaps. but i watched him over time as well. c-span: the interesting thing i noticed that in your liner notes, your acknowledgements you sign off on this in the introduction at january 1991. this book was written long before the coup attempt. >> guest: yes, it was. i made some changes as late as this last spring and early part of the summer, but even that was before the coup attempt. but a lot of the things that happened -- later you can see them sort of growing. you can almost see the seeds growing in this book as the hard-liners get more authority in moscow, as the military begins to interfere more with what gorbachev is wanting to do, even in 1989 and 1990, as the consequences of the change in eastern europe began to be felt in the soviet union. c-span: you also interviewed cap weinberger? >> guest: yes. c-span: and you talk a

on the soviet side because gorbachev and his foreign minister shevardnadze and. one of the questions that one has to ask about the process of ending the cold war is what was it that made the ussr jump? why did they resist western pressure particularly the american pressure for so many years in the 14th, 15, 60s and 70s and yet they started to make massive concessions in the second half of the 1980s. what i found was contrary to what mikail gorbachev bikes to suggest. the change of attitude to the problems of the soviet internal crisis did not occur only when he came to power in 1985. the materials showed the politburo repeatedly looked at the fundamental economic, social, religious and indeed imperial problems with relation to eastern europe that it confronted, problems that it couldn't afford to solve than the old way of as the soviet economy was going through the plughole. it was draining away resources particularly after the invasion of afghanistan at the end of 1979. so repeatedly in the first half of the 1980s the politburo was looking at matters that it had