The collapse of the USSR in the views of the third party: Analysis of memoirs of Japanese diplomats Edamura Sumio and Sato Masaru

Abstract

The final years of the USSR and the person of its president M. Gorbachov are the focus of numerous Russian researches connected with history, politics, economics and other fields of social science. This topic also has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in Western countries and Japan. The Gorbachov epoch is viewed in a very particular was in in Japan: the former Soviet president is very popular up to the present among people and scholars and he was supported by the Japanese politicians and authorities because of his ‘perestroika’ course. In recent years the historical period from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s is being reconsidered in Russian social science, especially due to the 25th anniversary of the USSR’s collapse. This article aims to cover these events as they were seen by Japanese diplomats who became the witnesses of the dramatic transformations in our country.