The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism.

• Author: Harden, Blaine

Thinking back over the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, two images bully their way into my mind's eye.

First, the central square in Sofia, Bulgaria, on a clear, cold Saturday afternoon in November 1989: Half a million Bulgarians stand together, many of them weeping and hugging strangers. They are stupid with joy. In a nation that has never known anything other than government-by-thugs, they are suddenly and bewilderingly free. After four hours of singing and chanting "Dem-O-Kratz-See-Ya," a computer operator named Mario Musilev walks home with his wife. Both are drunk on visions of the future. "It is a situation in my country that I just can't believe," he says. "We have no tradition of democracy. But we can learn."

Second, two years later, the ruins of Vukovar in the former Yugoslavia on a rainy November afternoon: The Serb-controlled Yugoslav Army is hosting a press luncheon to explain why it had to pulverize this city on the Danube in order to save it from the Croats. Before the meal, the Serbian high command stops the bus in the front of a bombed-out hospital. As reporters pile off, a Serb officer explains that "massacre victims are to the right." In a garden, heaped together in the mud, are the bodies of about 60 civilians, many of them elderly men and women. Several of them have skulls that appear to have been popped open with axes. Grayish brain tissue has spilled on their faces and shoulders. Eyes have been gouged out and arms hacked off. After showing off the dead, whom reporters are assured were all killed by merciless Croats, the Serb tour guide explains it is time to eat. Soup and bread are served in a freezing hotel dining room that has been ventilated by months of Serbian shelling. Plum brandy is poured and a wild-eyed Serb colonel makes a toast: "I would ask you to see the fate of Vukovar as the reincarnation of fascism."

I don't think I am alone in succumbing to the power of these images. Similar pictures of joyful revolution and nauseating violence have come to dominate whatever shared recollections Americans may have of the changes that erupted in Eastern Europe in 1989. Sadly, the endless procession of violent television images coming out of the former Yugoslavia may have by now purged memories of the extraordinary civility that characterized most of Communism's fall. Does anyone remember that dissidents in Prague advised demonstrators in Wenceslas Square not to step in flower beds while kicking out Communists?

Violence is easy to write about, easy to photograph, and it fascinates. But by...