Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Summary/Abstract: Tismaneanu’s report, though a bit too self-referential for my taste, is rescued by its conclusions, which, shorn of highly rhetorical language and deferential quoting, are generally right, even in the absence of empirical evidence. A quarter of a century after the fall of communism, contemporary East Central Europe still bears the stigma of Communist totalitarian experience, still has not mastered its totalitarian past, and its citizens still have a bad conscience about their role in the area’s contested history. The only new development is that Putin’s Russia, in addition to whitewashing the Soviet contribution to East Central European totalitarianism, which has been Moscow’s pursuit for well over a decade, is now engaged in Milošević-style land grabs, something that the West ignored in the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 but can no longer ignore after Moscow’s subversion in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.

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