This book seeks to explain two recent, remarkable, and related events: the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1990 and the dismemberment soon thereafter of the Soviet, Yugoslav, and Czechoslovak states. The forces that seem to have driven these processes were the interaction between the institutional design of socialist regimes and states, on the one hand, and the considerable expansion of opportunities for change in the 1980s. The end of socialism and of the state, therefore, were both abrupt and long in the making. And both sets of events spoke to the power of socialist institutions even as these institutions were collapsing.

Embedded in the issues of regime and state collapse, however, is a series of other important questions that this study addresses as well. In particular, there are the variations in how and when these regimes and states ended. Why, for example, were some regime transitions peaceful and others violent? Why did Yugoslavia end in war, and the Soviet and Czechoslovak states through a peaceful process? Why did socialism collapse, first, in Poland and Hungary, and only later in the Soviet Union – despite the immediacy of the Gorbachev reforms in the latter? This leads to a final puzzle that speaks to commonalities rather than variance. Why did all the Communist parties of the region, despite their differences in socialism and circumstances, lose their hegemonic position? The answers to these questions are also largely historical-institutional in nature.