ABSTRACT
Stereotypes regarding the collapse of state socialism in East-Central Europe abound. The regimes were never legitimate, but rather imposed on the countries of East-Central Europe and collapsed when the Soviet Union could no longer keep them alive through force. They offered failed models, Utopias that succumbed to harsh realities. Their peoples did not want to live in a lie, but in truth destroyed the hated regimes. They represented a system that declined and disappeared because it proved to be unreformable.1
