The young people of the next century will need to make this imaginative effort in good measure because of events that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989, when suddenly and--all hindsight to the contrary--quite unexpectedly the hitherto subjugated and passive peoples of Eastern Europe appeared in the streets and threw off the hollow regimes that had ruled them for forty years. In the space of a few months the nations of Eastern Europe, which since 1948 had been considered simply adjuncts of the Soviet system--a bloc of subservient satellites tied by iron apron strings to the motherhood of revolution--showed themselves to be full participants in the drama of European transformation, or at least expectant participants. Economically devastated by forty years of mismanagement, the East Europeans proved to be considerably less politically devastated by forty years of living a lie. Within a few months most of the East European countries established new, non-Communist governments that superficially looked a good deal like democratic systems elsewhere in Europe, began or promised economic reforms, and repudiated the Communist parties that has seemed all powerful only one or two years earlier. How could this have happened with such speed and thoroughness that the old regimes already have receded into the mists of a futile and lost past?

The answer given in this book concentrates on the decay and collapse of communism in Eastern Europe since 1968, the year when an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led forces ended any realistic hopes that the system of central planning and totalitarian political aspiration could reform itself. But the historical setting in which the decline of "real existing socialism," as East European communism styled itself in the 1980s, took place is a very broad one. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a significant milestone in the history of the fundamental transformation human societies have undergone over the past few hundred years. Even though this process has no generally accepted name--the industrial revolution, the great transformation, the energy revolution, the great transition, and many others have been proposed--it is clear that something quite remarkable has occurred. Devices that convert chemical energy into useful work through electricity and internal combustion engines dominate the daily life of the industrial world. Information systems, beginning with printing by movable type, moving onto the newspaper and the telegraph, and today characterized by television and the computer, daily place enormous amounts of data into the hands of billions of people. Transportation systems, limited two hundred years ago to the speed of the horse, now routinely move large numbers of people and goods at high speeds hundreds, even thousands, of miles in a single day. In the industrialized world most human beings no longer live in rural areas as they did for ten thousand years after the invention of agriculture but in huge urban agglomerations, often covered with foul-smelling air. Gender relations, family linkages, work habits, ways of dying, care of the sick--in short, every aspect of life--has changed, often dramatically, in the last few hundred years.

East European history from World War II until 1989 can be characterized as a sudden, spasmodic movement of imposition of [the] principles of mature Stalinism followed by thirty-five years of adjustment, tinkering, reform, backsliding, and frustration. In broadest terms this history can be divided into halves, the period before the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when it still seemed possible that socialism could work, and the period after 1968, when almost everyone realized it could not. . . .

. . . [E]fforts at economic reform came to an end in 1968 when political events . . . led to the crushing of the "Prague Spring" by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops. The invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent enunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that the Soviet Union would aid any previously established socialist regime to stay in power, marked the end of the era when serious people could hope that it would be possible to change the socialist system from within, either economically or politically. By giving notice that it would not tolerate any fundamental deviations from a neo-Stalinist model of socialism nor permit any meddling with its East European sphere of hegemony, the Soviet Union chilled the new winds that had been blowing through Eastern Europe.