ABSTRACT
Jack Matlock, US ambassador in the Soviet Union during the crucial years of the dissolving Soviet empire, has recently put down his experiences and expectations in an elaborate attempt at writing current Russian history. The message is that neither a return to the Soviet system of social and economic control, nor the reassembled Soviet empire is a conceivable future development, the first on account of the bad performance of the system compared with market economies, the second because such an imperialist development would stand in the way of the healthy economy that would be required to maintain imperial power. 1
