Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe.

• Author: Shilling, Halle

For people so obviously eager to rid themselves of communist rule, Eastern Europeans seem to be electing a lot of Soviet-style politicians these days. This past October, Polish voters gave the Democratic Left Alliance, a party primarily of recycled communists, a 20 percent plurality in Parliament, and second place went to the formerly Communist-aligned Polish Peasants Party. In Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, former communists remain a significant voice in politics.

In Exit into History, Eva Hoffman explains the apparent paradox of these newly elected communists by putting a human face on the aftermath of 1989's revolutions. Beginning in 1990, she traveled the main streets of the former Eastern bloc's capital cities and the backroads of its villages. From Bulgaria's parliamentary rotunda to a gypsy tavern in rural Romania, Hoffman reveals how life in post-communist Eastern Europe has fallen well short of almost everyone's hopes. Interviews with people in the streets--from former Polish censors to Bulgarian taxi drivers--illustrate how difficult the transition from comrade to citizen has been. The problem, it turns out, is that being a comrade had more than its share of advantages.

For all its repression, communism stabilized standards of living, controlled inflation, and made unemployment nonexistent. Work might have been thoroughly unsatisfying, and there could well have been four superfluous people performing each task, but at least jobs were available. In Poland, nearly everyone was worse off economically in the two years following the fall of communism, and the country's unemployment rate hit 14 percent this year. Hungary's unemployment rate could climb to 20 percent by January; the Czech Republic suffered a 35 percent fall in industrial output between 1990 and 1992. Comecon, the trading arm of the Warsaw Pact, recently collapsed. Not surprisingly, hyper inflation has set in; in Romania, a kilogram of sugar that cost 20 lei in 1989 now costs 500 lei, and in Warsaw apartments currently range between $15,000 and $80,000.

Complicating this...