ABSTRACT
The communist era has left an indelible impression on the region. In terms of human effort the achievements were in many respects heroic, and contemporary Western literature reflects an element of the triumphalism that marked some of the early development projects. Social scientists appreciated that the West was not typical of the world as a whole and that the Soviet Union was inevitably generating a distinctive economic and social system. But with decision-making impossible to scrutinise and travel complicated by bureaucratic restrictions it was difficult to separate reality from communist party propaganda claims which were the nearest approximation to ‘official publications’. It was only in the 1980s in the context of the Western offensive over human rights, fortified by the structuralist movement seeking greater political awareness in social science, that the ‘unbalanced’ nature of the system became widely understood. Even so, there continued to be a mismatch between some Western scholarship engaging with elegant models of socialist construction and the thrust of underground literature from the region pointing to human rights abuses, environmental crises and, above all, a priority for personal leadership goals in policy implementation. Material from the region may have been high on reports of insensitive bureaucracy (not necessarily restricted to communist systems!) but Western assessments remained all too circumspect regarding the barriers to economic efficiency.
