National Network for Equitable Library Service

On December 26, 1991, an event of extraordinary importance in universal history took place.It involved the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event of enormous repercussions that almost no one had anticipated. In fact, only the historian Andrei Amalrík and Nobel laureate and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, two Russian dissidents, had enough courage and vision to forecast that such a seismic event would take place. Although it is indisputable that the Cold War had come to an end, there are more than a few who intend to continue analyzing the current global situation from the perspective of a historical period that ended four decades ago. Claiming to understand the present with the paradigms of the Cold War-even to a large extent with those espoused by the Left and Right-is a very serious mistake with consequences that are extremely harmful. History has continued to move forward, and just as it would have been foolish to claim to understand Europe of the end of the nineteenth century on the basis of what life was like for Napoleon, who was finally dethroned in 1815; it is absurd, and even ridiculous, to try to understand our world on the basis of what the Cold War entailed.