"Since 1989, it has been possible to review what has been published both at home and abroad on the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and, no less importantly, on the Soviet Union itself, from a new perspective. A New Europe for the Old? asks whether the master narratives that circulated so widely in the West in the half-century since 1945 remain valid.". "A New Europe for the Old? provides greater sympathy for the complexity of societies, and argues for greater tolerance of those that are small and do not cast a long shadow in the world of today. In the twenty-first as in the twentieth century, they may be engines of change, both as a result of the disorder that they produce as well as the ways in which their values, however seemingly antiquated, survive and prosper, and not only in their native lands. This volume will intrigue historians and European studies scholars alike."--BOOK JACKET.