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Editor's Introduction This is the second special Social Research issue dedicated to Central and East Europe.  The first was actually a double issue and appeared in Spring and Summer 1988.  As before, we are extremely grateful to the Central and East European Publishing Project for their generous support, which has made these issues possible.  Both issues have afforded me and my coeditors the chance to travel to East Europe, for which we are also very grateful.  For the first issue we traveled to Warsaw, Budapest, and East Berlin in February and June 1988.  For the current issue we visited Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague in May 1989.  (We omitted a stop in Budapest this time, since the coeditor of this issue lives in Budapest.)  These trips were exciting, dismaying, and instructive.  They left us with vivid and treasured memories of extraordinary people. Neither of these issues has been easy to do but for extremely different reasons.  For the first issue, the reasons were bad.  For the present issue, the reasons are good.  Assembling the papers for the first issue was made difficult by the ever-obvious repressiveness of the authorities.  Coming from the United States, where virtually anything can be said, where words are cheap and rarely taken seriously, one quickly learned an ironic lesson.  In a repressive society, words have power.  In parts of Central and East Europe up to only a few months ago, words were treated with deadly seriousness.  Very little could be said and what was, was tightly controlled.  Getting papers and getting them out was a risky business - risky for the authors, that is.  Once having the papers, there was then the problem of trying to translate, edit, and revise them long distance when telephoning or communicating by mail was either impossible or unlikely. When we set off on the second trip to East Europe to gather material for the current issue, remarkable changes were occurring in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary.  When we arrived in Warsaw, Poland was in the midst of an election.  People were lining up on the street to buy copies of Gazetta Wyborocza (Election Gazette), the Solidarity paper edited by Adam Michnik, and many of the people we met in February 1988, who then were under constant surveillance by the police, were now running for office.  A striking change also was occurring in Hungary.  (In fact, during our stay in Moscow, Gyorgy Bence, the coeditor of this issue, learned that he had been reinstated in the university after seventeen years.)  But the momentous events that were to occur nearer to the end of 1989 had still not happened.  When we arrived in Prague, Havel was still in prison and all the people with whom we met, all of whom were dissidents, were working as stokers and charladies or at some other menial jobs.  Their harassment by the police was an everyday event.  Now those people and their friends are running the country.  They are the president, the prime minister, the ambassador to the United States, rectors of universities, and professors.  While this story will never lose its power, it is too well known to recount here.  But why then, with all the dramatic changes that have taken place in the last months, has it been so difficult to put this issue together?  Now our authors do not face the risk of reprisal for publishing in the West.  Anything can be said and published.  The problem now lies elsewhere.  Put simply, many of the papers written before the Wall came tumbling down and the party was toppled in Czechoslovakia became obsolete overnight.  Like the election in Nicaragua, no one, not even our authors, who had risked a great deal to make it happen, predicted the rapid demise of regimes that six months ago still looked cemented in place.  So what to do? There was very little hope of getting new papers, particularly from our authors, many of whom are now too busy creating and living political lives to write scholarly papers.   The few more recent papers we were able to get hold of were rushed into print by some other journal or paper which publishes more frequently than we do. We recognize that the solution to this problem we have adopted is not ideal, but few solutions are, and perhaps you will agree it is, at least, a serviceable one.   First, some papers we intended to publish some months ago we simply decided to exclude, because they no longer seemed relevant.  Second, we asked all the authors of the papers we are publishing to provide us with the date around which they were written.  These dates accompany the papers and will at least allow you to know what the world was like at that time.  We also invited our authors to add last-minute postscripts to their articles but, of course, since revolutionary changes did not magically bring with them functioning communication systems, we failed to get them all in time. These provisos notwithstanding, it is our view that this issue significantly adds to our understanding of the unprecedented changes that are and have been occurring in Central and East Europe. ARIEN MACK

Recommended Reading Central and East European Social Research, Part II Vol. 55 No. 2 (Summer 1988) Central and East European Social Research, Part I Vol. 55 No. 1 (Spring 1988) The East Faces West; The West Faces East Vol. 60 No. 4 (Winter 1993) Nationalism Reexamined Vol. 63 No. 1 (Spring 1996) Gains and Losses of the Transition to Democracy Vol. 63 No. 2 (Summer 1996) The Future of the Welfare State Vol. 64 No. 4 (Winter 1997) Privacy in Post-Communist Europe Vol. 69 No. 1 (Spring 2002) You may also be interested in the other issues in our transition series

 
 
 

    East Europe: Where From,
    Where To?

    Editor's Introduction                                             Arien Mack                                                                    241

    Social Theory in Transition                                   Gyorgy Bence, Coeditor                                                245

    Perception of Politics in
    Polish Society                                                       Mira Marody                                                                 257

    The Dual Power of the                                           Agnes Horvath
    State-Party and Its Grounds                                   and Arpad Szakolczai                                                  275

    Economy and Polity: Dynamics                              Lena Kolarska-Bobinska
    of Change                                                              and Andrzej Rychard                                                   303

    Beyond the Image: The Case
    of Hungary                                                             Maria Csanadi                                                            321

    The "Gray Zone" and the Future
    of Dissent in Czechoslovakia                                   Jirina Siklova                                                             347

    1989: The Negotiated
    Revolution in Hungary                                            Laszlo Bruszi                                                                365

    A New Look at Old Wisdom                               G. Ch. Guseinov
                                                                                and D.V. Dragunski                                                       389

    Transition from
    Authoritarianism to Democracy                           Wlodzimierz Wesolowski                                                 435

    A Revival of Liberalism
    in Poland?                                                           Jerzy Szacki                                                                    463

    Authoritarian Modernization and
    the Social-Democratic Alternative                       Oleg Rumyantsev                                                            493
 

Gyorgy Bence teaches in the Department of Social and Moral Philosophy, Faculty of the Humanities, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest.

Laszlo Bruszt is a reserach fellow in the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Maria Csanadi is a member of the Institute of Economic Sciences, Budapest.

D.V. Dragunskii is a contributor to Twenthieth Century and Peace.

G. Ch. Guseinov is a member of the Institute of World Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

Agnes Horvath is a research fellow in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law, at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest.

Lena Kolarska-Bobinska is associate professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Mira Marody is associate professor in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw.

Oleg Rumyantsev is a member of the Institute of World Socialist Systems of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

Andrzej Rychard is associate professor in the Institue of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

Jirina Siklova is in the Department of Sociology in the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University, Prague.

Jerzy Szacki is a professor in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw.

Arpad Szakolczai is a research fellow in the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Wlodzaimierz Wesolowski is a member of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.