Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein: Taking Stock of Shock. Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions

Almost overnight," the authors of this important book highlight, 400 million people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia found themselves in transition from state socialism and central planning to free markets and liberal democracy.The results of this unprecedented structural change left much to be desired.For many of these people, the 1990s were a shock in which they saw existing certainties quickly being dismantled.By the end of the decade, 45 % of the population of the post-communist countries lived below the poverty line ($5.50 per day).The scars of this experience run deep, as the authors stress, and have left a lasting imprint on political preferences.The benefits of transition were "divided so unequally that majorities of the population no longer support the transition paradigm" (15).Rightwing populism, anti-liberalism, and nationalism are among the salient political expressions of widespread dissatisfaction with the outcomes of transition.At the same time, many postsocialist countries have experienced strong Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and, for many people, individual living standards have improved as well.To sew these different developments together is one of the objectives of this book, jointly written by a social anthropologist (Ghodsee) and a political scientist (Orenstein), both based in the U.S. and well-known for their scholarship on postsocialist transformation.Ghodsee and Orenstein stress that transition produced winners as well as losers.Not only their sympathy but also their main research interest is clearly with the latter.In more than 200 pages they bring together vast information from different domains to document the social disruption produced by transition.The amount of data and literature analyzed make this book a valuable reference work-with an important qualification: non-English language publications are left out.Another inherent limitation, that does not reduce the value of the book, comes with its ambitious scope covering 29 countries: regional and national variations, although mentioned, are of less importance than the overall picture.You cannot write about a forest if you want to describe each tree.So, connoisseurs of the fate of specific countries might be in for some disappointment.