Surge To Freedom: The End Of Communist Rule In Eastern Europe

J. F. Brown had scarcely completed a thick volume on eastern Europe (noted in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1988) when the 1989 revolutions, which surprised him and everyone else, impelled him to write a new one. Far from repudiating the earlier work, however, he draws on it in tracing the trends leading to the revolutionary events that have transformed the east European states. He shows how Gorbachev's evolving policies combined with internal pressures in each satellite to produce the explosions of 1989, and how the contagion spread to Yugoslavia and Albania. There is no surer guide than Brown to an understanding of these events, and no one better qualified to describe the complex and daunting problems facing the new noncommunist governments.