This book begins with a lengthy chronology of events in eastern Europe from 1918 to 1990. For the purposes of this volume and in the eyes of many historians, the twentieth century started after the end of the First World War and ended in 1990. This short century has made up for the missing decades in redoubled, overwrought intensity.

The volume brings to print the proceedings of a conference held in 1990 at Rutgers University on this timely topic. It is also a Festschrift of sorts, which is evident from the dedication to Stephen Fischer-Galati, long-time editor extra - ordinaire in the field of east European studies in America. For the last few decades, the East European Monographs series and the journal East European Quarterly, which Fischer-Galati edited, did more for more scholars in east European studies than possibly all other North American presses and journals put together. While many authors who published in the series (not to mention reviewers) grumbled about its mixed quality and loose copy-editing, both the Quarterly and the monographs brought historical and social science research about eastern Europe to the public, when it might otherwise have remained in the proverbial drawer. Until 1989 less specialized presses often turned away east European material, invoking (even from the perspective of the small academic market) its marginality. Through the series and the journal, Fischer-Galati, along with a couple of other editors, kept the field from being completely crushed in the rough waters of the Cold War, when eastern Europe was to the mainstream little more than an afterthought to the Soviet colossus.

Fischer-Galati is logically the author of the volume's introductory essay en - titled ‘Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century: “Old Wine in New Bottles”’. As elsewhere in his prolific work, he is a master of grand generalization. His most important theme here is that democracy in eastern Europe is not now and has never in this century been within easy reach, and that this difficulty with demo - cratic practice has been primarily a function of internal, and not, as others have argued, external, factors.