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

Robin Okey has written a fine, 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 social-science 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 confined 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 underwent as they sat down to negotiate with the opposition. Second, in contrast to those who emphasize the lack of violence in 1989, Okey draws attention to the constant threat of violence as a marker of revolutionary change. Third, he notes that the events of 1989 moved with the rapidity characteristic of revolution. His frequent references back to 1789 help to make these points persuasive.

In the second half of the book, Okey examines the post-Communist transformation of polities and economies but takes his story only through the early 1990s. He does not pretend to offer a thorough survey of post-Communist events and, indeed, does not even provide a brief narrative of the Yugoslav wars. Readers with any knowledge of the region will find nothing new here, and one wishes that Okey had been able to look at the transition as a (more or less) completed process—which arguably it was by 2004.

The book will occasionally be rocky going for undergraduates, who are the presumed audience. Okey scatters the text with hundreds of illustrative bits of data, sometimes spanning the region in the course of a paragraph—a style that can be frustrating even for the specialist. On the whole, though, this book can serve as an introduction to the collapse of East European Communism. With its emphasis on social and economic trends, it is a good counterweight to the diplomatic and political focus dominant in the...