RUSSIA:
• Russian Revolution: October (7th November) 1917
• civil war
• Stalinism (1930s, 1940s, early 1950s)

MARXISM:
• religion: the ideology justifies what the state does
• economic principles
• dialectics
•inexorability of history
• „different world“ (See Jochen Hellbeck)Jochen Hellbeck

RUSSIA:
• Stalin dies in 1953
• Khruschev´s secret speech 1956, denouncing Stalin´s crimes
• mild liberalisation (mid 1950s-early 1960s) „The Thaw“ /(Solzhenitsyn)

RUSSIA:
•  from late 1960s: Brezhnev: „really existing socialism“ (authoritarian retrenchment)
• 1970s – „deténte“ (rapprochment with the West, on the basis of what each side has, will retain)

RUSSIA:
• early 1980s: stagnation, decomposition of the system: geriatric leaders Andropov, Chernenko.
• Gorbachev: „We can´t live like this.“

RUSSIA:
• from mid-1980s Gorbachov´s „glasnost“, „perestroika“
• 1990s: Yeltsin´s years of chaos, free rein given to Western ideologues and companies
•Putin years: some retrenchment towards authoritarianism, but still much freer than under communism

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE:
• Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland – taken over immediately: smooth transfer from Nazism to
Communism
• Austria occupied by the Russian army until 1956
•Czechoslovakia „free“ until Feb. 1948

STALINISM IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE:
• Also arbitrary arrests, labour camps
• Stalin´s death in 1953, hence stagnation, attempts at liberalisation (East Germany 1953, Poland,
Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968)

„Fall of communism“ in November – December 1989:
• Western intelligence agencies failed to predict this!
• No one knows why it happened – Gorbachev stopped controling Eastern Europe

POST-COMMUNISM:
• Eastern Europe: various countries of the former Soviet Union reverted to blatant authoritarianism
(Belorussia)
• Others, including Central Europe – different degrees of „post-communism“

WHAT I MEAN BY POST-COMMUNISM:
• the communist regime discredited all systems of moral values
• extreme cynicism and individualism
• lack of pluralism, tribalism, ideological slavery

WHAT I MEAN BY POST-COMMUNISM:
• International issues acquire (comic), totally misinterpreted local meaning:
See the anti-missile system controversy in the Czech Republic 2006-2009
The Czech Peace