In this episode we discuss two recent takes on the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the socialist bloc. What began with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the socialist regimes of Central Europe and the Balkans (from Czechoslovakia to Romania), led, in 1990, to the end of Europe's last Stalinist regime in Albania and culminated, in 1991, in the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale U Press, 2021) “rethinks the inevitability of the Soviet collapse” by carefully reconstructing the political landscape of the Gorbachev years. Lea Ypi’s Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2021) is a deeply political but also autobiographical account of ideas and experiences of freedom in socialist and post-socialist Albania.

Music The Internationale, in Albanian Felicitá, a citation of Al Bano and Romina Power´s classic by Strannye Igry (1985)

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