The collapse of the USSR created major economic shocks and hardships for the member countries. This obviously creates political turmoil.
With the collapse, many of the countries were faced with a choice:
A. Try to maintain socialism as a single country and face the full might of the west who is no longer focused on the USSR as a whole.
B. Privatize your national economy and sell off your social safety nets for dirt cheap. Accept foreign investment in order to get absorbed into the western sphere in hopes of alleviating the pain.
Most chose B.
If you have political turmoil, economic hardship, and wide scale rapid privatization, well... You get fascism.
While the book isn't exclusively about this phenomenon, Parenti covers it in Blackshirts and Reds.
Also, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise gives a very in depth look at the dissolution of the GDR and Germany's turn to liberalism.
The collapse of the USSR created major economic shocks and hardships for the member countries. This obviously creates political turmoil.
With the collapse, many of the countries were faced with a choice:
A. Try to maintain socialism as a single country and face the full might of the west who is no longer focused on the USSR as a whole.
B. Privatize your national economy and sell off your social safety nets for dirt cheap. Accept foreign investment in order to get absorbed into the western sphere in hopes of alleviating the pain.
Most chose B.
If you have political turmoil, economic hardship, and wide scale rapid privatization, well... You get fascism.
While the book isn't exclusively about this phenomenon, Parenti covers it in Blackshirts and Reds.
Also, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise gives a very in depth look at the dissolution of the GDR and Germany's turn to liberalism.