Jacques Rupnik

Initial review: I picked this book up second-hand in Hay-on-Wye. It is a study of the politics of the Communist Bloc countries in the post-war period; as a book written in 1988, I was interested to see how the author saw the future, so I skimmed the last chapter. It is an excellent example of what G.K. Chesterton called "the game of 'Cheat the Prophet'...the young people listen kindly and politely to what the old people say...then they go and do something different." Jacques Rupnik's analysis was that Gorbachev was no reformer, that it was naive of the people of Eastern Europe to believe this, that Gorbachev could not afford for the Communist Bloc to disintegrate and so he would have to strengthen Moscow's hold on its satellites, and that Nikolai Ceaucescu of Romania would in due course be replaced by a Moscow nominee. Yugoslavia barely merits a mention and is not even considered in the summary closing chapter.

In one respect, though, Rupnik was right - that Gorbachev would have to put his own people into positions of power in the Moscow hierarchy as vacancies arose. In the event, he never got the opportunity, and his departure after the August Coup ushered in change that would have bdeen unimaginable to contemporary readers of this book.

(Longer review follows.)… (lisätietoja)