Lin and East Europe

A Carnival of Revolution by Padraic Kenney examines the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe (or Central Europe as Kenney calls it) in 1989. His main argument is that no one series of events brought about the collapse in 1989. Many people, even today, call the year 1989 a “miracle” or a “sudden surprise”. However, Kenney argues it was a revolution with a long time coming, sometimes 20 years in the making.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down by Gale Stokes examines the same time period, but takes a much different approach. Both books explain a myriad of causes leading to the year 1989, but Stokes offers a more linear approach, suggesting most everything through the 70s and 80s had a cause and effect, but Kenney’s work offers a much more complicated turn of events.

The novel begins with an intro titled “Concrete Poetry” and continues in that metaphor–quickly swaying between countries and years and topics merging them all together in a hodgepodge (or carnival) that eventually sparked the collapse of 1989. Between interviewing actors and workers, Kenney paints the pluralism and multitude of agendas that moved, not necessarily against communism, but towards improvement. The movements of the book between subjects and events serves, like concrete poetry, to show the confusion and multitudes of the actual decade before the revolution.

While Stokes uses headlines and news stories to paint a broad picture of Eastern Europe, Kenney takes his audience on a much more complex and in depth journey. Therefore, I think it’s crucial that I read Stokes before Kenney. Stokes helps even the most ignorant of readers (me, for example) understand the broad overlays of the revolution of 1989 and its causes. Kenney, meanwhile, shows the chaos of the grassroots movements (because there were certainly several agendas) and how the uprisings of 1989 were, by no means, a surprise.