The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe

Gale Stokes' The Walls Came Tumbling Down offered one of the most respected interpretations of the East European revolutions of 1989 for many years. It provides a sweeping yet vivid narrative of the two decades of developments that led from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Highlights of that narrative include, among other things, discussions of Solidarity and civil society in Poland, Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the bizarre regime of Romania's Nikolae Ceauescu and his violent downfall. In this second edition, now appropriately subtitled Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, Stokes not only has revised these portions of the book in the light of recent scholarship, but has added three new chapters covering the post-communist period, including analyses of the unification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union, narratives of the admission of many of the countries of the region to the European Union, and discussion of the unfortunate outcomes of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession in the Western Balkans.

• The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague
• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
• Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century  And After
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
• The Cold War: A New History
• Developments in Central and East European Politics 5
• Cold War Europe: The Politics of a Contested Continent
• 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe - Updated Edition (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics)
• Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II
• Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968