There Is No Freedom Without Bread!
1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The conventional story of the end of the cold war focuses on the geopolitical power struggle between the United States and the USSR: Ronald Reagan waged an aggressive campaign against communism, outspent the USSR, and forced Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."
In There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, a daring revisionist account of that seminal year, the Russian-born historian Constantine Pleshakov proposes a very different interpretation. The revolutions that took place during this momentous year were infinitely more complex than the archetypal image of the "good" masses overthrowing the "bad" puppet regimes of the Soviet empire. Politicking, tensions between Moscow and local communist governments, compromise between the revolutionary leaders and the communist old-timers, and the will and anger of the people—all had a profound influence in shaping the revolutions as multifaceted movements that brought about one of the greatest transformations in history.
In a dramatic narrative culminating in a close examination of the whirlwind year, Pleshakov challenges the received wisdom and argues that 1989 was as much about national civil wars and internal struggles for power as it was about the Eastern Europeans throwing off the yoke of Moscow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a collection of complex domestic conflicts and economic discontents, argues this shrewd historical study. Historian Pleshakov (Stalin's Folly) surveys upheavals in postwar Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Poland, "the mother of the Eastern European revolution." He finds a variegated tapestry of states with different degrees of economic and political liberalization and often considerable popular support for the welfare protections and social mobility they guaranteed citizens. They also enjoyed substantial latitude from Russia: the Berlin Wall, the author reports, was an East German initiative, only reluctantly approved by Moscow. The turbulence leading to 1989 was equally complicated and factional; the disturbances that brought down Communist regimes were often touched off by their own violations of Marxist orthodoxy especially with that reliable riot starter, food price hikes. (Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, with his proletarian opposition to industrial speedups, comes off here as something of a primitive communist himself.) Pleshakov's characterization of 1989 as a civil war is perhaps overstated, but his sardonic narrative offers a savvier, richer take than the usual hymns to national liberation.
