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Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book evaluates the social consequences of the post-1989 transition from state socialism to free market capitalism across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Blending ethnographic accounts with economic, demographic, and public opinion data, it provides insight into the development of new, unequal, social orders. It explores the contradictory narratives on transition promoted by Western international institutions and their opponents, one of qualified success and another of epic catastrophe, and surprisingly shows that data support both narratives, for different countries, regions, and people. While many citizens of the postsocialist countries experienced significant progress in living standards and life satisfaction, enabling them to catch up with the West after a relatively brief recession, others suffered demographic and social collapses resulting from rising economic precarity; large-scale degradation of social welfare that came with privatization; and growing gender, class, and regional disparities that have accompanied neoliberal reforms. Transition recessions lasted for decades in many countries, exceeding the US Great Depression in severity. Some countries still have not returned to pre-1989 levels of economic production or mortality; some have lost more than one-fifth of their population and are projected to lose more. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this book deploys a sweeping array of data from different social science fields to provide a more holistic perspective on the successes and failures of transition while unpacking the failed assumptions and narratives of Western institutions, Eastern policymakers, and citizens of former socialist states.

During the UN Decade for Women, representatives of the world's governments came together for the first time to discuss the issues of equality, development, and peace in official intergovernmental forums, opening up an unexpected new front in the ongoing Cold War. While western women were concerned with legal and economic equality, socialist women in the Eastern Bloc argued that women's equality with men was useless in a world full of racism, violence, underdevelopment, colonialism, and war. Over the course of the decade, women from the developing world came to embrace the idea that feminist struggles could not be separated from the underlying political and economic conditions in which women lived, aligning themselves more closely with the socialist world. Through a case study of the Bulgarian Women's Movement, this article presents the UN Decade from the socialist women's point of view, and argues that their contributions to the early international women's movement should no longer be ignored.

The Ataka party plays up ethnic and religious intolerance to garner far-right support for its far-left political agenda.