Publisher's Synopsis
The communist experience in Central and Eastern Europe has been one of the most extraordinary political experiments of the 20th century. Its long-term effects, moreover, will continue to be felt within the countries subjected to it for many years to come, as they struggle to return to democracy. In this book, George Schopflin provides an analysis of what communism sought to do, how it was first able to sustain itself in power against considerable popular opposition and why it collapsed, after four decades, in exhaustion.;Schopflin's argument is a political one: communism came to power by a combination of force and guile, but as its promises of a secular utopia proved vain, it was unable to gain the popular backing that would have given it leeway to change. Communist ideology began by offering a boundless vision of prosperity, but within a short period of time it grew rigid and, eventually, emptied of content. Its modernization project turned out to be a distorted version of Stalin's industrialization plans, imposed on Central and Eastern Europe without any regard for local conditions.;When attempts were made to adapt communism to local needs, the Kremlin stepped in to block these initiatives, as happened in Hungary and Poland in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland again in 1980-1. By the 1980s the stagnant system of Soviet communism, with its rigid agenda, had lost its legitimacy, leading to collapse in 1989. George Schopflin's analysis of these processes offers an insight into the nature of revolutions, modernization, and the relationship between rulers and ruled in totalising societies, concluding with an assessment of the difficulties of post-communism.
