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The Demise of Communist East Europe: 1989 in Context (review)

Robin Okey has written a ane, concise evaluation of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. He is a historian rather than a transitologist, and The Demise of Communism provides a corrective to the narrower perspective that has dominated socialscience discussions over the last decade. Okey’s view of 1989 is not only deep, placing the end of Communism in the contexts of other revolutionary moments and of Communism itself, but also wide, ranging across the region with ease. Eastern Europe, as depicted here, comprises the countries that were independent in 1989, from Poland and East Germany through Yugoslavia and Albania, without the western Soviet Union. One of the great strengths of the book is its judicious treatment of the Communist period. As Okey argues, a serious review of that era is necessary in order “to show the successive stages by which illusion after illusion was stripped away until the original energy sustaining the experiment had burned itself out” (p. 73). Indeed, the willingness of Communist leaders to give up the ghost so quickly and quietly makes sense only in this context. At the same time, Okey follows all the threads leading to 1989: the squandering of reformist projects, the economic failures, and the emergence of vibrant oppositions nearly everywhere in the region. Although he pays due attention to the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and other international factors, the book’s focus is decidedly domestic. Okey has a feel for social, economic, and demographic trends and has unearthed a wealth of tidbits that illustrate a decline that was at once inexorable and eminently avoidable. Okey also sets the moment of 1989 in a socioeconomic context. He treats events in Poland and Hungary as preludes to the upheavals of that autumn and suggests that, without the downfall of the hardline regime in East Germany, one could imagine that reforms in Poland and Hungary would have remained conaned to those two countries. The decisive moment, in his view, was Hungary’s decision in early September to open its borders, letting out East Germans eager to emigrate. This step, Okey avers, “set in train the fall of dominoes in the socialist camp” (p. 85). His argument here situates change amid international pressures and decisions by Communist reformers, and away from the people (though Okey could have acknowledged the extent to which pressure in Hungary to open the borders for the refugees came from below). Nevertheless, Okey makes clear that 1989 was a revolutionary year in three respects. First, his analysis draws attention to the dramatic ideological change that Communists