ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between violence and democracy in Eastern Europe. To some extent, it may be seen as a pioneer study. Although by the second half of the 1990s the sheer volume of literature dealing with Eastern Europe has become quite impressive, its coverage has been rather uneven. Not surprisingly, the research on the region has often been policy-driven and closely correlated with the rapidly changing political landscape. Thus, in the past decade or so, the focus has been on the collapse of the communist rule and the ensuing process of transition to democracy, and there seems to be no end to the stream of publications dealing with this issue.1 In fact, a new subfield of what used to be called ‘communist studies’ emerged in the process, that of ‘transitology,’ and some of the best talents in the Soviet/Russian and East European field went at each other with gusto, trying to come up with the most complete and/or realistic paradigm or model of transition to democracy.2
