Why So Easily Some Family Reasons For The Velvet Revolution

When communism was ushered into Czechoslovakia, it was supposed to last forever – yet over eleven days in November 1989, this supposedly eternal order collapsed. Why did it fall apart so easily? This respected sociological essay, written in the pivotal years of 1989 and 1990, is now available for the first time in English. Ivo Možný tells the story of a despotic state expropriating the Czechoslovak family and subjugating the personal sphere in exchange for promises of a bright collective future, only for the regime to be vanquished forty years later by the very institution it had dispossessed. The essay explains the reasons for communism’s downfall, examining the private aspirations of whole swaths of nameless social actors that left hardly anyone interested in keeping the regime afloat.

Drawing on analyses of the socio-cultural context of East and Central Europe, focusing on the Czech cultural dynamics of the Cold War and its aftermath, this book examines the making and breaking of centrally-controlled book production and reception.

Gendering Post-Socialist Transition presents economic, political, social, and cultural effects and traces of system changes in the lives of women and men after 1989 in 11 countries of Central and Southeastern Europe. The contributions by nine research teams from different countries look into the meaning of these changes for the relationships between men and women, for gender roles and representations, and for the development of normative discourses about femininity and masculinity. With respect to gender relations, these case studies deal with changing values and mentalities in transformation and once again show that poverty, social exclusion, nationalism, social systems, and healthcare systems all have a profound gendered dimension. (Series: ERSTE Foundation Series - Vol. 1)

Since 1989, the theme of the onset, the course and future of the change in post- socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, was interlinked with the dismantling of the old authoritarian regime and introduction of the new democratic one. It has been at the centre of attention of politicians, media and the public at large, and it has entered the field of interest of the social sciences as well. For ethnologists and anthropologists this theme represents a unique historical experience and it creates the opportunity to observe the key processes of changes in specific conditions of the "living laboratory" of a current social reality. The collection of papers published in this issue has similar objectives. It brings empirical, mostly case studies, of cultural and socio-economic changes in rural and urban communities in Central and Eastern Europe, namely in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. Individual contributions explore the ongoing process of social, economic and cultural transformation in post-socialist societies and its impact at the local and regional micro-level.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

-- Karen J. Vogel, Perspectives on Politics ...