The Faces of Democracy in the Revolutionary East Bloc

Cover pictures on books about 1989 and its aftermath typically depict the faces of frustrated citizens: sometimes a group of disaffected workers or youth, sometimes thousands of people massing in the streets.Who were these people?How did they get there?What did they want?And what came of it all?Almost four decades later, the answers to these questions are more pressing than ever.Nostalgia for authoritarian regimes has summoned popular support against democracy.Through a barrage of 'fake news' that frames the end of the Cold War as a Western plot and power grab that decimated beautifully stable socialist wonderlands, power-hungry demagogues and their oligarchic supporters have incited many Europeans to undo the democratic accomplishments of revolutions that climaxed in 1989. 1 Understandably impatient with neoliberal capitalism, yearning for an idealised past of their youth or unable to clearly remember what the so-called socialist regimes had really been like, contemporary Europeans at both political extremes succumb to nostalgia akin to a tendency among mid-Cold War late-to-middle-aged West Germans, who reimagined their youthful 'normal lives' in a halcyon Third Reich.This misreading of the late East Bloc epoch forgets the achievement attained 1 Russian schoolbooks maintain that East Germany was simply annexed by the West, making it that much more fraught that this same dogma is ubiquitous in Western discourse.Marina Jung, 'Russian