How are beer and revolution connected? How do you organize lustration? What drugs exist under socialism?
Thirty years ago, the socialist project ended in Eastern Europe: in the states of the Warsaw Pact, democrats came to power, while communists became part of the past. The history of the socialist bloc included an enormous number of storylines—contradictory, complex, and interesting (propaganda and the shadow economy, dissidents and informers, Vanga and Wałęsa).
The authors of this book—journalists Dmitry Okresht and Egor Sennikov—will tell how the countries of the former socialist bloc lived (from Poland and Hungary to the GDR and Czechoslovakia), why that visionary political project ended so quickly there, and why today many of them have turned to Euroscepticism.