Books in the Cold War International History Project series

A riveting new look at a key event of the Cold War, Failed Illusions fundamentally modifies our picture of what happened during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Now, fifty years later, Charles Gati challenges the simplicity of this David and Goliath story in his new history of the revolt.

Sergo Mikoyan, who died in 2010, was a historian specializing in Latin America and in Soviet-Latin American relations. Svetlana Savranskaya is a research fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Why would one country impose economic sanctions against another in pursuit of foreign policy objectives? How effective is the use of such economic weapons? This book examines how and why the United States and its allies instituted economic sanctions against the People's Republic of China in the 1950s, and how the embargo affected Chinese domestic policy and the Sino-Soviet alliance.