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In the Bolshevik Revolution, violence played a major role. The reasons for this lie in the ideology of communism, first and foremost in the movement's concrete pre-history and social background. For the communist pioneers, violence was an inevitable attendant circumstance of historical upheavals; Lenin raised it to a Manichean friend-or-foe scheme. The Bolshevik party absorbed the existing potential for violence within society; in the Civil War, this hardened into its own culture of violence, which the NKVD in particular embodied. Overcoming this culture of violence was a major achievement of de-Stalinization. Adapted from the source document.

In the twenty years since the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, various scholars of history, women's studies, sociology, political science, and reproductive rights have studied the occurrence of abortion in these formerly communist countries. Although some have sought to question the notion of "abortion culture," most look to these countries as places where abortion was tragically prevalent and accepted. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the assumed knowledge concerning abortion and how this obscures understandings of abortion in formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. By creating genealogy of "abortion culture," this research seeks to trace the history of how abortion came to be understood as a moral issue, the power behind these understandings, and the resulting consequences. Throughout history, abortion has been understood many different ways until evolving into the understanding that it is negative, it is a moral issue, it is a medical issue, it should be limited, and should only occur rarely. These taken for granted understandings have shaped how abortion in formerly communist countries have been researched and discussed. Beyond academia, these understandings have resulted in a pairing of communism and abortion designed to discredit both.

Trots titeln East Central Europe and Communism: Politics, Culture and Society 1943–1991 täcker denna bok alla eight Östeuropas tidigare kommunistiska länder, inklusive »vildarna» Jugoslavien och Albanien som inte kontrollerades av Moskva. I varje land granskar Ramet kronologiskt kommunisternas politik och maktkamp, ekonomiska konsekvenser som industrialisering och jordbrukskollektivisering, men inte minst politikens effekter inom kultursfären, inklusive kyrkorna, samt kvinnornas ställning, vilka är viktiga men ofta försummade ämnen. Hon konkluderar med funktionalisten Robert Mertons terminologi att det kommunistiska systemet inte fungerade i något land med växande missnöje och opposition som icke avsedda eller insedda följder.
Despite its title, East Central Europe and Communism: Politics, Culture and Society 1943–1991, this book covers all eight ex-Communist states in Eastern Europe, including the mavericks Yugoslavia and Albania, which were not controlled by Moscow. Ramet chronologically analyses the communist policies and power struggles in each country, and consequences such as industrialization and collectivisation of agriculture. Not least, she looks at effects in the cultural sphere, including the churches, and the changing situation for women. Ramet concludes, using the sociologist Robert Merton's terminology, that the communist system did not work in any of these countries, and growing disaffection and opposition are among the unintended and actual results.