Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule

Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. xiv, 210 pp. List of Abbreviations and Glossary of Terms. Index. $37.95, paper.During the Cold War it was good to be a political scientist-concepts such as deterrence held sway over international relations, and Kremlinologists studied who stood next to whom in May Day parades. Now, we must pass the torch to the historians. As this important recent collection demonstrates, recently accessible archival materials, combined with new and challenging post-communist historiographies, have allowed historians to reshape many of our received assumptions about life in the "Other Europe" behind the Iron Curtain.The essays in this volume are organized chronologically and by state-thus we begin with the first example of "revolt"-the Soviet-Yugoslav split, and end with the revolutions in 1989. Editors Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe have written a useful thematic introduction, which lays out some important assumptions, even as they stress that they have required no common approach save that the authors' collective contribution represent the very latest research in each of the states and episodes of revolt or resistance covered. Although the focus is on the "flashpoints" of Cold War history (e.g. the East German Uprising of 1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-81), the authors and editors agree in virtually every case that resistance and revolution have to be understood as belonging to an elastic spectrum. Unrest, whetiier expressed in elite machinations or in intellectual or popular guise, was endemic to the system and the region as a whole. Although difficult to discern an overall "common pattern of development," the editors usefully introduce a potential four part typology: 1) national communism; 2) intellectual dissent; 3) armed peasant resistance; and 4) popular protests against communist rule. A caution is in order, but in any event is clarified in the case histories: often more than one type of resistance was at play; and revolts or rebellions were often populated by different groups with mixed motives and multiple contradictions. Moreover, they and the contributors stress that such episodes must be contextualized in the complex histories of each state-antecedents, proximate and structural causes, interrelationships between state and society, tensions between national histories and Muscovite domination-all must be explored. Finally, they remind us that ". there was nothing inevitable about the collapse of communism. " (p. 8). Some Cold War "lessons" have been affirmed by the research in tiiis collection and bear repeating, such as the role of rising consumer expectations and the morphological failure of command economies in meeting them, the key role played by independent organizations such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, as well as the importance of the "Gorbachev factor" in the promotion of peres troika and glasnost in the USSR and the replacement of the Brezhnev Doctrine with the "Sinatra Doctrine. " However, to what we already know, this collection adds both substance and nuance. Economic dissatisfaction alone was not enough to generate social mobilization, yet turning inward and focusing on family, friends, and comfortable living was not a clear-cut indicator of societal indifference either. …