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Constantine Pleshakov
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There Is No Freedom Without Bread!: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism First Edition, Kindle Edition

by Constantine Pleshakov (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

The conventional story of the end of the cold war focuses on the geopolitical power struggle between the United States and the USSR: Ronald Reagan waged an aggressive campaign against communism, outspent the USSR, and forced Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

In There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, a daring revisionist account of that seminal year, the Russian-born historian Constantine Pleshakov proposes a very different interpretation. The revolutions that took place during this momentous year were infinitely more complex than the archetypal image of the "good" masses overthrowing the "bad" puppet regimes of the Soviet empire. Politicking, tensions between Moscow and local communist governments, compromise between the revolutionary leaders and the communist old-timers, and the will and anger of the people—all had a profound influence in shaping the revolutions as multifaceted movements that brought about one of the greatest transformations in history.

In a dramatic narrative culminating in a close examination of the whirlwind year, Pleshakov challenges the received wisdom and argues that 1989 was as much about national civil wars and internal struggles for power as it was about the Eastern Europeans throwing off the yoke of Moscow.

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  1. ISBN-13
    978-1429942294
  2. Edition
    First
  3. Publisher
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  4. Publication date
    October 27, 2009
  5. Language
    English
  6. File size
    2.6 MB
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a collection of complex domestic conflicts and economic discontents, argues this shrewd historical study. Historian Pleshakov (Stalin's Folly) surveys upheavals in postwar Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Poland, the mother of the Eastern European revolution. He finds a variegated tapestry of states with different degrees of economic and political liberalization and often considerable popular support for the welfare protections and social mobility they guaranteed citizens. They also enjoyed substantial latitude from Russia: the Berlin Wall, the author reports, was an East German initiative, only reluctantly approved by Moscow. The turbulence leading to 1989 was equally complicated and factional; the disturbances that brought down Communist regimes were often touched off by their own violations of Marxist orthodoxy—especially with that reliable riot starter, food price hikes. (Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, with his proletarian opposition to industrial speedups, comes off here as something of a primitive communist himself.) Pleshakov's characterization of 1989 as a civil war is perhaps overstated, but his sardonic narrative offers a savvier, richer take than the usual hymns to national liberation. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Praise for There Is No Freedom Without Bread

“Clear and beautifully lyrical . . . Of all the books that mark this anniversary, [There Is No Freedom Without Bread] is one that must be read. Pleshakov writes history with a human face.” —Gerard DeGroot, The Washington Post

“A savvier, richer take than the usual hymns to national liberation.” —Publishers Weekly

“Pleshakov embeds original perspectives into a lively narrative . . . The human factor comes out in this readable rendition of the end of communism.” —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003ENPHYE
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (October 27, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 27, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.6 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 299 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0374289026
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

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  1. Constantine Pleshakov

    Constantine Pleshakov

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  2. Constantine Pleshakov

    Constantine Pleshakov

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    Constantine Pleshakov is a Russo-American author born in Yalta, Crimea, in 1959. A former foreign policy analyst at the Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies in Moscow, he emigrated to the United States in 1998. He teaches at Amherst College. Pleshakov's new book - "The Crimean Nexus: Putin's War and the Clash of Civilizations" - is scheduled to be published by Yale University Press in January 2017. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • gary
    5.0 out of 5 stars There is no freedom without bread
    Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Good book. I have read a lot about the fall of communism in Europe. This book gives a nice description about some of the experiences that occurred.
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  • Siegfried Sutterlin
    5.0 out of 5 stars demythologizes the Cold War and provides reality
    Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2009
    Adherents to the conventional Western view of the Cold War will be surprised by Pleshakov's book. With fine research and a good command over relevant primary sources, he provides impressive accounts of the political bickering and, what he terms civil wars, over decades in all communist East European nations, except Yugoslavia. In so doing, he demolishes naive notions that have been relentlessly pounded into us for forty years. After reading the book, no one should believe the self-glorifying slogan that "we won the Cold War." Pleshakov, for this historian, provides a major contribution to what I believe is the correct conclusion, namely, everyone lost during the Cold War.

    He starts, quite correctly, in World War II with Catholic Poland, the nation which suffered the most and with admirable objectivity and balance describes wartime and post-war events. He focuses in Karol Wojtyla who, later as the Polish Pope, makes a decisive contribution to the fall of communism. While weaving the dramatic tapestry of Poland, Pleshakov skillfully and appropriately selects relevant historical facts and literature and synthesizes them in ways that enhance the reader's understanding of complex events. He fulfills the profound task of the historian to connect seemingly unconnected events into a meaningful whole.

    This is not a book that pays tribute to anyone. It is not a paean nor panegyric to anyone. It relentlessly describes realistically the personal characters and deeds of Gomulka, Walesa, Jaruzelski, Kadar, Gorbachev, Honecker, Zhivkov, Havel, Ceausescu, et al., the good and the bad, the ironies and the duplicities and the successes and failures.

    What emerges is an eerie similarity and not its opposite to Western political machinations. Each of the East European nations was differentiated in its internal political-cultural and economic patterns. None were really dominated by Moscow to the extent to which Western views would have it. There was only one true dictatorship and that was Ceausescu's Romania, and he acted as a dynasticizing aristocrat mixed in with plenty of the habits of Wall Street bosses and current Western politicians. All were surprisingly nationalistic and, with the possible exception of Ulbricht's and Honecker's East Germany, each was bound more to its own nationalism than to ideological international communism, (an element too much neglected by U.S. politicians also during the Vietnam War).

    Unable to control the discontented people, discord, contentiousness and bickering arose in all of them due to economic shortcomings and maltreatments. Pleshakov is brilliant as presenting the political and, at times, highly personal and intimate unfolding and evolving of the politicians gradually losing control more and more and desperately trying to retain it. New factions arose, new movements, poets, priests, students and opportunists, all called for reforms and promised solutions.

    The Soviet Union under Gorbachev, suffering from enormous economic burden wrought by corruption and the military cost of Afghanistan, was indifferent to the domestic problems of its presumed satellites. Gorby told them it was their domestic problem and he would not interfere. That encouraged more pressures for internal reforms and the various civil wars eventually toppled communism.

    Pleshakov's book is laced with fascinating anecdotes and minor events that succinctly add to the drama. Here we have Kissinger proposing to the Soviet Union in '89 a "U.S.-Soviet Condominium" over Europe to prevent European mischief and Ceausescu daringly criticizing Russia's invasion of Afghanistan among many elements that will intrigue the reader and keep him fascinated from the beginning to the end.

    While Pleshakov is brilliant at presenting micro and macro political events at the personal and governmental levels and concludes that there is no freedom without bread, he does not explain sufficiently why there were catastrophic economic failures. That would require another book. In the epilogue, he describes the looting that materialized after the fall of communism and correctly relates it to the fact that democracy also involves social engineering and that free markets can impoverish a nation just as much as central planning. Though he doesn't say it, one is left with the implied conclusion that ethics is all important and needed.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • Paul E. Richardson
    5.0 out of 5 stars A breath of fresh air
    Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2010
    The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this November is sure to witness a multitude of new books, republications, retrospective news stories and countless replays of Ronald Reagan's stirring 1987 Berlin speech ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!").
    But what we can be sure of is that there will be few in-depth news reports, and many of the same tired, superficial conclusions about Cold War winners and losers. (In the end, it was not Gorbachev who tore down the wall, but masses of young Germans, after a confused, weakened East German leader misspoke.)
    And so a book like Pleshakov's is a breath of fresh air. Delving deep into the events leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire, Pleshakov portrays them in the context of domestic imperatives. Within each regime were those for and against the status quo, and most times events were the result of these two groupings clashing with one another in some guise, independent of larger, international forces. The 1989 revolutions were less battles of Germans or Romanians against occupying Russians, than Germans versus Germans, Romanians versus Romanians.
    Chock full of revelatory details, There is No Freedom Without Bread! offers invaluable context for anyone interested in understanding how, and why, the world fundamentally changed two decades ago.As reviewed in Russian Life.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Hannibal Smith
    3.0 out of 5 stars Would Get Another Star If He Had A Better Editor
    Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2009
    After reading this month's Foreign Affairs and seeing the glowing review that this book garnered in a crowded field of books addressing this topic, I immediately bought myself a copy. Then, I saw what else he wrote and I groaned. The Tsar's Last Armada might have been the most poorly written work of history I've ever read - never has it been more apparent that English was not the author's first language than it was there.

    Sadly, this is also apparent in this work. The book itself is rather sound; well-researched, concise, lively, and compelling. His depiction of Pope John Paul II's life and role in the demise of Communism was strong, and his ability to synthesize the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as a whole as quickly and clearly as he did is a commendable achievement.

    Yet, this is a freshman English comp's professor's worst nightmare. He peppers the narrative with trite terms such as "All and all," "the dark side," and "rolling the dice." At times, I half-expected him to rhetorically inquire as to "where's the beef?" The use of literary metaphors such as Kafka's "Metamorphosis" are equally useless in driving the prose. As with the "Tsar's Last Armada" I really wanted to enjoy the book more than I did, but I couldn't get past the how the lack of literary polish took away from an otherwise quality effort.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Giorgio
    4.0 out of 5 stars Interessante storia della nascita, maturazione e caduta del socialismo reale.
    Reviewed in Italy on February 25, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Un'attenta descrizione della parabola che hanno conosciuto i regimi comunisti in Europa orientale. Interessante soprattutto la parte finale sulla fine dei regimi in Europa orientale
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