ABSTRACT
From the perspective of historiography, the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 were perceived as the beginning of a new era that would bring fundamental changes in the interpretation of this period. It seemed that the epoch of grand narratives of law-governed historical processes had also come to an end. Francis Fukuyama even declared the end of history, now that the struggle of the Cold War had culminated in the victory of the righteous, Western liberal democracy and market economy. Almost the same conclusion was reached by Karl Popper, who claimed that the notion of history as a suprapersonal power with its own direction had suffered a decisive defeat with the termination of the Cold War.1 There were high hopes of an impending revolution in historiography due to the supposedly vanishing bipolar mindset and to the opening of the Eastern archives, providing scholars with new evidence.2 The end of the Cold War thus represented a unique opportunity to expand our understanding of the Cold War era. In practice, however, the newly available materials seldom generated new approaches, or even new research questions.
