num_pages: 240
description: Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern historys most miraculous occurrences communism implodedand not with a bang but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross drawing upon two decades of reflection revisit this crash. In a crisp concise unsentimental narrative they employ three case studiesEast Germany Romania and Polandto illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents so-called civil society than of the bankruptcy of a ruling classcommunisms establishment or uncivil society. The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germanys pseudotechnocracy to Romanias megalomaniacal dystopia from Communist Polands cult of Mary to the Kremlins surprise restraint Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.
language: English
title: Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
publisher: Modern Library