This book believes that the Soviet Union will not relax its stranglehold and will continue to dominate Eastern Europe's cultural, social, and economic policies. It assesses the contemporary state of affairs in Eastern Europe from an historical perspective.

Rumania faced the problem, shared by other independently minded communist states in the era of the Soviet bloc, of pursuing independent policies in foreign and intra-bloc relations and in its domestic affairs without provoking the Soviet Union to a military reaction. The efforts of the Rumanian leadership in this direction were aided by the fact that there was no politically relevant pro-Moscow elite that could take over if Ceausescu and his followers were deposed by force. Writing his study during the communist period, Professor Fischer-Galati concludes that the future of Rumanian...