Uncivil society

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded--and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies--East Germany, Romania, and Poland--to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than…