ABSTRACT
The revelations of glasnost confound the certainties of generations of Western opinion-formers. The ambiguities, ironies and paradoxes of the reform movements in the Soviet Union and parts of Eastern Europe are well explored in Jeffry C. Goldfarb's timely and thoughtful Beyond Glasnost: The post-totalitarian mind. The two movements which bring Central Europe back on to the agenda of history the unravelling of the post-war settlement and the disintegration of Soviet-style Communism are interrelated at every point. Discussing such diverse figures as Havel, Kundera, Baranczak, Michnik, Haraszti and Konrad, Goldfarb finds in them all manifestations of a post-totalitarian culture which, he claims, it is the strategy of glasnost to emulate, denature and emasculate. In the Soviet Union itself, glasnost has served only to reveal intractable and perhaps insoluble economic problems, but this has not prevented Western observers from discerning signs of large-scale restructuring.
