Bringing together a wealth of historical documents, memoirs, essays, and literature from Eastern Europe, this highly successful book vividly illustrates how the most original and challenging minds of the region have understood and reacted to Stanlinism and its successors since the end of the Second World War, ultimately showing how Eastern Europeans have made the journey from Stalinism to a new pluralism. The book creates a rich mosaic of political and historical development in these countries, presenting extracts from the works of Leszek Kolakowski, Czeslaw Milosz, Milovan Djilas, George...

Defying Stalin and his brand of communism, Tito's Yugoslavia developed a unique kind of socialism that combined one-party rule with an economic system of workers' self-management that aroused intense interest throughout the Cold War. As a member of the American Universities Field Staff, Dennison Rusinow became a long-time resident and frequent visitor to Yugoslavia. This volume presents the most significant of his refreshingly immediate and well-informed reports on life in Yugoslavia and the country's major political developments.
Rusinow's essays explore such diverse topics as the first...

Gale Stokes' The Walls Came Tumbling Down offered one of the most respected interpretations of the East European revolutions of 1989 for many years. It provides a sweeping yet vivid narrative of the two decades of developments that led from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Highlights of that narrative include, among other things, discussions of Solidarity and civil society in Poland, Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the bizarre regime of Romania's Nikolae Ceauescu and his violent downfall. In this second edition, now...