John Michael Montias

By the end of the 1950s, it looked to all the world as if Eastern Europe were safely back in the Communist fold. The Hungarians were still stunned by the defeat of the revolution; the irascible Poles were finally subdued; the Czechs were laboring under the most severe repression since the death of Stalin; the Rumanians and the Bulgarians seemed, as usual, to be bearing their yoke with docility; the Albanians were too few, too far and too inconsequent to deserve the world's solicitude. Jugoslavia was effectively quarantined by Moscow and her revisionist influence was at an ebb. The 1956 interlude was over. It was hardly possible to detect at that time the forces that a few years later were to challenge the renewed order and breed confusion and disarray in the Communist ranks.