Автор: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Название: The Revolutions of 1989
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 1999
ISBN: 9780415169509
Серия: Rewriting Histories
Язык: English
Формат: pdf
Размер: 10,6 mb
Страниц: 284

This volume appeared precisely ten years after the world-shattering series of events widely known as the revolutions of 1989. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly inexpugnable system, collapsed with a breath-taking velocity. And this happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insoluble inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for selfregeneration. After decades of flirting with the ideas of intrasystemic reforms, it had become clear that communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, and even against the existing order.

The volume highlights three major themes: the deep-seated meanings of the collapse of state socialist regimes in East Central Europe; the nature of revolutions at the end of the twentieth century; and the role of critical (public) intellectuals in politics.