The Leninist Legacy
The Leninist Legacy

Author(s): Ken Jowitt
Subject(s): Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Post-Communist Transformation
Published by: CEEOL Digital Reproductions / Collections
Summary/Abstract: Eastern Europe’s boundaries—political, ideological, economic, and military—have been radically redefined twice in less than a century. As Tony Judt has written, at the end of the First World War, “the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a truly momentous event in European history) left a huge gap in the conceptual geography of the continent. Of what did Central Europe now consist? What was East, what West in a landmass whose political divisions had been utterly and unrecognizably remade within a single lifetime”? In 1989 the Soviet bloc became extinct as Communist parties in every East European country added the loss of political power to their earlier loss of ideological purpose during the phase of “real socialism”; and the Soviet Union, the “stern, . . . impersonal, perpetual Center” of this imperium not only tolerated but instigated its collapse. The result is a no less significant gap in Europe’s “conceptual geography” than seventy years ago.

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