Word: ashe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...blame Ash for failing to explain the beginnings of the antidomino effect. But in this, the weakest essay of the five, he at least could have mused in a more explanatory...
...second section succeeds precisely where the first one fails, as Ash traces the changes in Hungary to the statesanctioned reburial of 1956-hero Imre Nagy. By acknowledging his enemy, Ash explains from the streets of Budapest, Janos Kadar, a darling of the West, made his own rule an unresolvable paradox. The ensuing changes were inevitable...
...With Ash's essay from Budapest, we begin to see the true beauty of his accounts--he explains the logistics of the democratic movements in such a way that each step naturally proceeds from the last. Although no one claims to have predicted the changes in Eastern Europe, Ash's hindsight makes the refolutions seem completely logical, almost obvious. In an historical era that almost defies prediction, this is an unusually helpful perspective...
After Budapest, Ash's accounts get even better. In describing the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, he avoids the melodrama that has plagued so many other accounts. He tells of one German man who crossed the East-West border several times, just for the hell of it. And he tells of thousands of East Berliners, picking up their 100 Deutschmarks "greeting money" and going shopping for the first time...
Almost half of this brief 150-page book is dedicated to Ash's experiences in Prague, where he witnessed the formation of the opposition movement firsthand and up-close. His precise analysis of the Czechoslovakian refolution won him acclaim within opposition circles and is equally brilliant in hindsight: "In Poland it took ten years," Ash explains. "In Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days...