MARC Record from marc_overdrive

LEADER: 02659nam 2200277Ka 4500
008 000000s2009 nyu s 000 0 eng d
040 $aTEFOD$cTEFOD
006 m d
007 cr cn---------
020 $a9781588369178 (electronic bk. : Adobe Digital Editions)
037 $bOverDrive, Inc.$nhttp://www.overdrive.com
100 1 $aKotkin, Stephen $q(Stephen Kotkin).
245 10 $aUncivil Society$h[electronic resource].
260 $aNew York :$bRandom House Publishing Group,$c2009.
500 $aTitle from eBook information screen.
520 $aTwenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded--and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies--East Germany, Romania, and Poland--to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class--communism's establishment, or "uncivil society." The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany's pseudotechnocracy to Romania's megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland's cult of Mary to the Kremlin's surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.From the Hardcover edition.
533 $aElectronic reproduction.$bNew York :$cRandom House Publishing Group,$d2009.$nRequires Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 5432 KB).
538 $aRequires Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 5432 KB).
653 #0 $aHistory
653 #0 $aNonfiction
653 #0 $aPolitics
655 7 $aElectronic books.$2local
776 1 $cOriginal$z0679642765
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