Experts continue to debate one of the most important political questions of the twentieth century—why did Communism collapse so suddenly? These essays suggest that a wide range of forces—political, economic, strategic, religious, add the indispensable role of the principled statesman and the brave dissident—brought about the collapse of communism.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated into independent countries, the West hailed the collapse as a victory for democracy. The dismantling of the Soviet Union as the centralized economic system required the separate countries to establish their own economies, assemble political structures, and reconcile territorial issues. As a result of the disintegration, many peripheral wars have ensued. This book looks at the transformation of politics throughout the world as new military and economic alliances were established after the Soviet Union’s breakup.

In Soviet times, anthropologists in the Soviet Union were closely involved in the state's work of nation building. They helped define official nationalities, and gathered material about traditional customs and suitably heroic folklore, whilst at the same time refraining from work on the reality of contemporary Soviet life. Since the end of the Soviet Union anthropology in Russia has been transformed. International research standards have been adopted, and the focus of research has shifted to include urban culture and difficult subjects, such as xenophobia. However, this transformation has been, and continues to be, controversial, with, for example, strongly contested debates about the relevance of Western anthropology and cultural theory to post-Soviet reality. This book presents an overview of how anthropology in Russia has changed since Soviet times, and showcases examples of important Russian anthropological work. As such, the book will be of great interest not just to Russian specialists, but also to anthropologists more widely, and to all those interested in the way academic study is related to prevailing political and social conditions.

Winner of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Slate "A terrific work of history." —Dan Kois, Slate "A vivid, fast-paced narrative." —Andrew Meier, New York Times Book Review The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world. In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic—it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews—including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary—Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken—and the opportunities we failed to take—in that pivotal moment.

Based on extensive original research, including interviews with key participants, this book investigates the sudden and unforeseen collapse of communist power in Poland in 1989. It sets out the sequence of events, and examines the strategies of the various political groupings prior to the partially free election of June 1989. This volume argues that the specific negotiating strategies adopted by the communist party representatives in the Round Table discussions before the elections was a key factor in communism’s collapse. The book shows that on many occasions, PZPR decision-makers ignored expert advice, and many Round Table bargains went against the party’s best interests. Using in-depth interviews with major party players, including General Jaruzelski, General Kiszczak and Mieczyslaw Rakowski, as well as Solidarity advisors such as Adam Michnik, the text provides a unique source of first-hand accounts of Poland’s revolutionary drama.

Publisher Description

Distinguished historian of the Soviet period Robert V. Daniels offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. In a tightly woven series of analyses written during his career-long inquiry into the Soviet Union, Daniels explores the Soviet experience from Karl Marx to Boris Yeltsin and shows how key ideological notions were altered as Soviet history unfolded. The book exposes a long history of American misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, leading up to the "grand surprise" of its collapse in 1991. Daniels's perspective is always original, and his assessments, some worked out years ago, are strikingly prescient in the light of post-1991 archival revelations. Soviet Communism evolved and decayed over the decades, Daniels argues, through a prolonged revolutionary process, combined with the challenges of modernization and the personal struggles between ideologues and power-grabbers.

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 1989 and 1991.

During the last thirty years Eastern Europe has been a place of radical political, economic, and social transformation, and these changes have affected the cultural industries of its countries. This volume consists of twelve chapters by leading international researchers. Stories are documented of various organisations that once dominated the ‘communist music industries’ — such as state-owned record companies, music festivals, and collecting societies. The strategies employed by artists and industries to join international music markets after the fall of communism are explained and evaluated. Political and economic transformations that coincided with the advent of digitalisation and the Internet intensified the changes. All these issues posed challenges both to record labels and artists who, after adjusting to the rules of the free-market economy, were faced with the falling record sales of records caused by the advent of new communication technologies. This book examines how these processes have all affected the music scene, industries, and markets in various Eastern European countries.