When the Berlin Wall fell, euphoria swept both East and West. Many dreamed that communist dictatorships would be transformed overnight into capitalist democracies. Fly-in-fl y-out advisers such as Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs advocated radical reform to jumpstart the ‘transition’, a term coined by Western economists and quickly embraced by Central and Eastern European politicians. Progress seemed guaranteed, and at a rapid pace: in 1989, Sachs promised that if Poland followed his recipe of instant privatization and liberalization, inflation would vanish and the standard of living would begin to rise within six months.

In reality, of course, transition was nasty, brutish, and long—both for countries that experimented with Sachs’ ‘shock therapy’, and for others that delayed reform. Throughout the 1990s, all Central and Eastern European nations subscribed to the goal of democracy and free markets, but their trajectories diverged. As the decade drew to a close, Slovenia’s GDP per capita was three times that of Romania, and while Lithuania consolidated its democracy, in neighbouring Belarus opposition leaders and journalists ‘disappeared’ routinely.

Such disparities and failures were often misunderstood by external commentators: for a long time, the Englishlanguage academic literature on transition was dominated by outsiders with preconceived notions. Only recently did Western scholars begin to seek the insights of people who actually experienced transition firsthand. Europe: Lives in Transition contributes to this trend by presenting the thoughts of Central and East Europeans about their everyday lives after communism. Editor Bettina van Hoven, a lecturer in cultural geography at Groningen University in the Netherlands, has compiled several studies drawing on interview and focus group research.

The book is original in organizing chapters not by author but by theme: identities, relationships, production, consumption and power. The contributors to the volume have translated and contextualized quotations by Eastern and Central European respondents, adding flesh and blood to the theoretical skeleton. Thoughtfully sprinkled throughout the text, the quotes succinctly expose the transition’s contradictory nature:

Well, of course things have improved, because before I had a Russian television and now I have a better one.
– Polish electrician in his 50s

Most people don’t go anywhere to meet with others or do something. They hang in front of the TV mostly. But there is nothing to go to either. And if you go into town, you are always harassed into buying something.
– unemployed East German in her 40s

Because now I see what opportunities there are, I eat at McDonalds, go around in jeans, and don’t… I don’t know… stand there in queues for vinegar. It’s another world, it’s America, ha, ha.
– Polish teenager

Unfortunately, the spontaneity of such quotations is sometimes overshadowed by needless justifications for including them. It is commendable that the editor admits her own cultural and ideological baggage as a Western feminist seeking to ‘empower’ East German rural women. Van Hoven moralizes at length about ‘giving a voice’ to the neglected. She and the other contributors— all from the West—self-consciously raise questions about how researchers position themselves as insiders or outsiders. While valid, such post-modern introspection takes up too much space, sometimes interfering in the effort to allow locals to speak for themselves. In the end, it is the original words cited in Europe: Lives in Transition that make the book worth leafing through—especially for readers curious about the paradoxes of post-communism.