Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders, first published in 2002, examines the strategies employed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to build leadership authority. Political leaders often use a combination of coercion, material reward, and persuasion, but Professor Breslauer focuses on the power of ideas, as leaders use them to mobilize support and to craft an image as effective problem solvers, indispensable consensus builders, and symbols of national unity. In Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (1982), he documented Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's domestic policy strategies; this book handles domestic and foreign policies. All chapters compare Gorbachev and Yeltsin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev, mostly analyzing the changes in policy, the strategies, and the political dilemmas that are common to all four administrations. The book discusses the ways in which authority building was affected by political constraints unique to each of the stages.

SINCE World War II, Soviet policy in the Third World has gone through regular, frequent cycles, marked by different emphases in the choice of foreign policy targets and by different expectations about the nature and magnitude of the gain to be had from foreign policy initiatives. Stalin was generally disinterested in global competition in regions that were assumed to be dominated by the “imperialist” camp; he tended (with some exceptions) to deny support to nationalist regimes and radical social movements alike. Khrushchev's break-out into the Third World in the 1950's focused on nationalist regimes (India, Indonesia, Ghana, etc.) as well as radical social movements (“national liberation movements”); it was based on the expectation that, in the near future, there would be a large number of socialist states in the Third World, and that they would become allies of the socialist camp against the imperialist camp.

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