Imagine all history written as if all people, even women, mattered. Until a couple of decades ago, that was at most an aspiration for those of us working on East European history. Since then, however, and especially with the fall of Communism, feminist scholars have made significant inroads toward achieving this goal. This review essay reflects on the contributions made by five such studies that focus on different aspects of women's lives under state socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Romania. In one way or another, each author asks similar questions about the relationship between the Communist ideological emphasis on gender equality as a core moral value, on the one hand, and the policies and actions of these regimes with regard to women, on the other hand. Moreover, all studies focus on how women themselves participated in articulating, reacting to, and in some cases successfully challenging these policies. In short, they present us with excellent examples of how pertinent gender analysis is for understanding the most essential aspects of the history of Communism in Eastern Europe: how this authoritarian regime transformed individual identity and social relations.

The heart and soul of a society is often much more fully revealed in its imaginative literature than in such self-conscious statements as political manifestos or constitutions. It is this soul-baring quality of imaginative literature which explains, even if it does not justify, the primacy in Soviet literary criticism of political and ideological concerns over such factors as psychological honesty and aesthetic efficacy. The neglect of the transpolitical, transideological subtleties of literary art makes Soviet literary criticism seem very mechanical and heavy-handed to most non-Marxists. Of course this kind of critical analysis is not inappropriate to some of the hack work generated under the rubric of “socialist realism.” However, Western critics are often equally ideological in their own way, even towards Soviet literature of intrinsic artistic merit. Indeed, this essay itself runs the risk of abusing art by subjecting a charming little Soviet story, “Instructress Asta,” to political analysis.

The social status of ethnic minorities residing in a state is one indicator of the level of democracy in each newly formed or restored democratic society.

As is generally known, the contemporary demographic situation in Estonia is fundamentally different from that of the prewar period. The autochthonous minorities who lived in the prewar Estonian Republic—Germans, Jews, Swedes, Finns, but also native Russians (living in the northern and southern areas of the Peipsi lake)—were lost after World War II together with a change of Estonia's eastern border by Soviet authorities in 1945. This left Estonia a very homogeneous country where Estonians formed some 97% of the population and where the entire population was made up of Estonian-speakers.

The international community has expressed great concern about the treatment of the Uzbek minority in the south of Kyrgyzstan and has called on the majority community to make major efforts to improve the situation. The article compares the treatment of minorities in Kyrgyzstan with analogous situations in the Balkans and contends that, given the European-style ethnonational state model and democratic political system that have been adopted by independent Kyrgyzstan, such calls are unrealistic.

Nationalism became the bane of the Soviet empire. The disintegration of the USSR due to nationalistic forces has occurred with a swiftness that few, if any, Western Sovietologists anticipated. The four Central Asian states, with high rates of population growth and a strategic location at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, now acquire a new significance. Of these Uzbekistan, with a population of twenty million, seventy percent of whom belong to the titular national group, looms largest in terms of demographic and economic potential. The population of Uzbekistan is almost twice as large as the other nascent Central Asian nations combined, and despite severe ecological damage, produces almost two thirds of the cotton in the region, along with natural gas, gold and other minerals.