Archive for February, 2014

Feb 18 2014

Bounded Carnival with Limitless Memory

The author, Padraic Kenney, argues that social and political movements changed the relationships between communist states and their populations in the years before 1989 in such a way that made possible the seemingly sudden revolution. He uses the term carnival to highlight the plural and joyful nature of many of the phenomena that constitute his […]

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Feb 05 2014

The Principal Argument

In my reading of The Walls Came Tumbling Down by Gale Stokes, his thesis was valid – that an abandonment of the prospect of reform had vital, and causative, importance in the eventual collapse of communist regimes in 1989. That fundamental point is accurate, in that the abandonment of reform as an approach to improve […]

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