ABSTRACT
The result has been the widespread misinterpretation in the 1980s and later of both the reason for the establishment of a relatively long-lived Soviet rule, and for its eventual decay. Both were interpreted much more – almost exclusively – in terms of the Great Power interests that also indeed played some part in the story. The shift in interpretation can be judged from a quite simple test about the self-description of those who lived through the great political and social transformations of eastern Europe. In the 1940s and 1950s, when East Europeans thought about what marked them out they gave the answer of the vision: “communism”. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, that appeared either problematical or downright unattractive, and so there was an alternative answer in terms of Great Power realism. The East Europeans then claimed that they were, in one word, defined by “Yalta”. Thus the more the actual meeting of Stalin with Roosevelt and Churchill in February 1945 receded into the past, the more important and epochal seemed the event.
