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In this book, the author surveys performance of the Soviet Bloc states in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) for evidence of unusual levels of assistance using aggregate data obtained from IMF and IBRD sources.

First published in 1997, this volume consists of chapters placed before a series of meetings organised by the Rome-based international School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) which reviewed the prospects relating to the countries of the Former Soviet Union and of the other members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The authors include Western experts, as well as distinguished commentators from Russia itself. Among the latter are Georgi Arbatov, Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexei Arbatov. An earlier volume of chapters deriving from this same series of meetings was still in print at the time of original publication in 1997, namely Rising Tension in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.

Based on a wide array of original documents from over 20 archives in Eastern Europe, the US, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, this paper traces the complex interplay between Havana's revolutionary ideology and pragmatic state instincts which governed Cuba'a relations with the Soviet bloc from the ouster of Fulgencio Batista until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It overviews their relations by hearing the candid voices of Moscow's closest East European allies (Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia) regarding Cuba's continuous transformations. Additionally, the views of the other East European socialist states, which were not among Moscow's closes backers, namely Albania, Yugoslavia and Romania, are also taken into account. In so doing, this paper seeks to enrich our understanding of the complex trajectory Cuba, the Soviet Union and the remaining East European socialist states underwent in their struggle against the common enemy, the United States. It also seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the interplay between the realist imperative of state survival and the ideological drive of revolutionary expansionism, which marked Havana's relations with the East, the West and the South throughout the Cold War.

"The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries' informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale"--

"The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries' informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale"--

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: to drop or not to drop? / Juliane Fürst -- Dropping out in spirit -- The biography of a scandal : experimenting with yoga during Romanian late socialism / Irina Costache -- The imaginary elsewhere of the hippies in soviet Estonia / Terje Toomistu -- Art and "madness" : weapons of the marginal during socialism in Eastern Europe / Maria-Alina Asavei -- Student activists and Yugoslavia's Islamic revival : Sarajevo, 1970-1975 / Madigan Andrea Fichter -- Intellectual dropping out -- Reader questionnaires in Samizdat journals : who owns Aleksandr Blok? / Josephine von Zitzewitz -- The spirit of pacifism : social and cultural origins of the grassroots peace movement in the late soviet period / Irina Gordeeva -- Dropping out of socialism with the commodore 64 : Polish youth, home computers, and social identities / Patryk Wasiak -- Dropping out in style -- "We all live in a yellow submarine" : dropping out in a Leningrad commune / Juliane Fürst -- Ignoring dictatorship? : punk rock, subculture, and entanglement in the GDR / Jeff Hayton -- "Under any form of government, I am partisan" : the Siberian underground from anti-soviet to national-bolshevist provocation / Ewgeniy Kasakow -- Dropping out economics -- Living in the material world : money in the soviet rock underground / Anna Kan -- Socialism's empty promise : housing vacancy and squatting in the German Democratic Republic / Peter Angus Mitchell -- Conclusion: dropping out of socialism? : a Western perspective / Joachim Häberlen -- Bibliography -- About the contributors