Communism related content 

Modern visitors find interesting, beautiful new things more attractive than sad, beautiful old ones. Imagine that you are attending a conference (call it Agenda 2010) in the...

Open eyes and minds trumped faith in communism, but, as the US healthcare debate suggests, reason and evidence sometimes fail to get a hearing in democratic discussion....

The political arguments in post-communist countries are not easily reducible into the classic left-right split. The terms ‘left' and ‘right' do not mean much in politics...

Russia's revival might be Western-style pragmatism, but it might be something more sinister. Four comforting bits of conventional wisdom are as follows: 1) Russia has no...

The West lacks the authority and the means to continue exporting its world view to ex-communist countries. When communism collapsed, the West had all the cards. The...

After the election as prime minister two years ago of the Kaczynski Brother – the one without cat hairs on his suit – two million young Poles voted with their feet, going...

If you ever lived in the grim communist prison camp that called itself the ‘German Democratic Republic', or had friends or family who did, it is easy to flinch at ‘Das...

Laughing at Poland's government for its incompetence, provincialism and narrow-mindedness is to miss the point. The crusty, prickly conservatives of Law and Justice –...

When you hear that since the collapse of Communism, there have been only 18 months without the ex-Communists being in power in Poland (either in government or the...

Reading the latest annual survey from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) of the progress of the ex-captive nations in economics and...

Every couple of years since the early 1980s, I make a really big journalistic mistake in covering Eastern Europe. I think I may have just made another one, in writing that...

Some of the tools are rusty; others are just plain useless. The skills I struggled to acquire in communist-era Eastern Europe now seem as quaint as the ability to hunt a...

MEPS from the new member states are expected, once they take their seats in the assembly, to make supporting a resolution condemning communism andits crimesa priority. The...

THE letter-bomb campaign could mark the re-emergence of politically motivated extremist groups in Europe, according to security experts. Italian officials investigating the...

PERMIT me to pass along a few last words on the subject of the EU split over Iraq, and especially French President Jacques Chirac's bizarre scolding of eastern European...

A rare moment of levity temporarily roused slumbering reporters at the conference when Chris Patten and Pascal Lamy flashed hitherto sequestered senses of humour. Patten...

Commission officials are hard at work preparing a thoughtful answer to a written question posed by Socialist MEP Joe Wilson, who is convinced that we are not alone. "Does...