Customer Reviews

Is Communism Dead Forever?

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This book provides a graphic description of a crumbling communist power and the stumbling steps toward capitalism that followed. The detailed descriptions of real people and their lives under both old and new regimes keeps the reading interesting. If you've ever wondered why, now that communism is dead these countries can't just pick up the pieces and move on you should read this book.

An extraordinary book, that can make all of us to think deeper to what we can do that things like those not to happen again... A book that could be written only by someone who lived in the free world and spent enough time in the now-in-transition countries, to understand exactly what happened there and what could be done to help these countries. It is very difficult for people from there to find by themselves the answers to their questions, and it is difficult also for somebody who didn't live there to understand how communism changed the people's minds. This book has exactly these answers, presented in an elegant manner and in an easy to understand way, by study cases. And the question from title has not an easy answer. I lived there, I didn't like communism and so almost all of the population, but this still existed for 45 years. The communism destroyed any knowledge or instinct of freedom and made the people to be afraid of major changes until 1989, when the contradictions grew so much that erupted in a popular riot, there where the governance was so blind to accept any change - Romania. And now, those people discovered the values of free market and democracy, but they have also to learn again the rules of the game. The book helped me to understand this and to see what it could be done many years ago, when very few of us had the courage to predict these events. I recommend this book to everybody, both for study and personal knowledge.