Dismantling Communism: Common Causes and Regional Variations
The organizers of this undertaking, Rozman, Seizaburo Sato, and Gerald Segal, have taken a formula normally guaranteed to disappoint--making a book of a conference assembling participants from several quite different countries--and turned it into a success. This is one of the more stimulating and helpful explorations of what has happened to communism in Asia, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It works, first, because the authors--British, Japanese and American--have made a real effort to think through these great processes of change; second, because all of them have a sound grasp of basic social science concepts, carrying them to a deeper level of analysis; and, third, because the editor pushed them to redo their original efforts, reaching for stronger comparative perspectives.
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