Promises of 1968

"Vladimir Tismaneanu has assembled a highly qualified group of authors and a diversity of perspectives from the retrospective and self-critical to the somewhat nostalgic for fadedyouth, along with some country-specific essays about experiences further East. Poland's educated young were in general a 'special population'—not all were Jewish, but a large number were. Irena Grudziñska-Gross offers an excellent summary of this drama of "spoiled children,Marxists and Jews," placing herself among the dramatis personae. Ceauqescu was, after all, 'a latent neo-Stalinist, a sly Antonín Novotný, not an Alexander Dubcek', and was steering his country toward the peculiar blend of domestic repression and foreign policy nonalignment that persisted in Romania until 1989. On some level, are 'Paris' and 'Prague' to be taken equally seriously? Charles Maier's essay is the only attempt to 'make sense of it all.'As he puts it, the expectations (some added afterward) that surround what turn out to be 'great years' have a lot to do with what we think amounted to success or failure. We can look back on 1848 and see romantic nationalist revolts as failures in some senses, but not in others—1848 did not emerge triumphant in 1849, but no definitive judgment was possible until more time had passed."—Journal Of Cold War Studies

"Vladimir Tismaneanu wrote the volume's introduction. In it he not only summarized all the contributions, but also reminded us that 1968 was a "transnational movement of revolt against the status quo beyond the East-West divide" (p. 1) which, ironically, led to liberalism reasserting itself in a revival of democracy in the West and to the eventual disintegration of communism in the East. In the book's conclusion, Charles S. Maier, an historian at Harvard University, opined that the 1960s were a reaction to the previous decades by young people who rejected the discipline of their elders. 1968 was also a repudiation of the Yalta Agreement of 1944 by which the USA and the Soviet Union tried to control the world. The rebels of 1968 felt alienated by their societies and sought self-fulfilment in various ways. These papers are a good introduction to 1968 in Europe."—Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes

"The case studies will serve as valuable additions to any advanced-level undergraduate or postgraduate course on '1968', especially the latter's intellectual dimension. The volume also presents a thought-provoking contribution to transnational history: whereas 'transnational moments of change' synchronize events and processes in different national contexts, this volume, by revealing fundamentally different frames of reference imposed by the different political realities in Cold War Eastern and Western Europe, demonstrates that synchronicity does not mean similarity."—Slavonica

"This book offers a vision of 1968 as a time when exciting ideologies pulsated throughout Europe and then suggests an eastwest difference: that the ideologies going through the capitalist west were dangerous ones, guided by irrational utopianism, while those in the state socialist east were emancipatory ones, marked by a rejection of utopianism and an embrace of a liberal universalism that would finally make themselves clear during the next turning point of 1989. As the book's subtitle indicates, the book offers essentially a conservative reading of 1968... the commentators on the west are highly critical. The essays devoted to 1968 in eastern Europe have a quite different hue. They are all sympathetic refl ections, either by participants or contemporary observers. The longest chapter by far is Mark Kramer's superb dissection of the genealogy of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, based on a close examination of Kremlin archives and written with the care and attention to detail that we have come to expect of Kramer. We learn that invasion was not a foregone conclusion and that, once it began, it ran into many unexpected problems, beginning with the inability of the hardliners to capture formal control of the party"—Slavic Review