The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe

Based in part on interviews with key participants which the author conducted in 1992, this crisply written chronicle of Eastern Europe's struggle for pluralist democracy from the crushed Prague Spring of 1968 to the present is an expert, panoramic guide to a rapidly changing scene. Stokes argues that Poland's Solidarity was a self-limiting movement that sought a partnership with government. A Rice University history professor, Stokes offers a devastating portrait of Romania's former megalomaniac dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, analyzes tensions between the new Czech and Slovak republics, and blames the former Yugoslavia's civil war on the narrow policies of Serbian and Croatian leaders. Eastern Europe's fitful transition from centralized planning to market mechanisms, he observes, is taking many forms, including the creation of thousands of interlocking directorates in Hungary and a new Polish regime's ``shock therapy.'' Stokes also surveys the region's volatile ethnopolitics, including anti-Semitism and racism. (Sept.)