THERE IS NO FREEDOM WITHOUT BREAD!

Pleshakov (History/Mount Holyoke Coll.; Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of WWII on the Eastern Front, 2006, etc.) recounts the slow dismantling of Communism in Eastern Europe, a process that took years but that accelerated markedly in 1989.

Much of the narrative is set in Poland, where shipyard strikes had been commonplace since the 1970s, and where the Solidarity movement, abetted by Pope John Paul II, took root as a true workers’ response to a communist regime led, curiously enough, by a former nobleman. Communism took time and effort to uproot, notes Pleshakov, not just because it was expansive and had lots of secret-police agents at its disposal. It also had a social contract, such that “people accepted the state not just because of terror and intimidation, but also because of free health care, free housing, and free education.” Moreover, he adds, while there was undoubtedly a Soviet empire, each satellite state was markedly its own. “Contrary to popular belief,” writes the author, “in Eastern Europe Stalin did not clone regime after regime after regime…[he] realized that the cookie cutter approach to communism did not work.” Consequently, in Poland only ten percent of the land was collectivized after World War II, very unlike the situation in the Soviet Union. Unlike so many revisionist historians, Pleshakov lays only the smallest credit for the collapse of communism at Ronald Reagan’s door, instead carefully noting the many internal forces that were moving against red regimes—including resurgent religiosity. The author also gives due nods to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was perceived differently in different places—for Poles he was the personification of the Evil Empire, while “for East Germans, Gorbachev was the wise man of the east, an inspiration, a model of sorts.”

The broadest of surveys, but useful in recapitulating events that, though recent, are largely forgotten.