Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe.

For people so obviously eager to rid themselves of communist rule, Eastern Europeans seem to be electing a lot of Soviet-style politicians these days. This past October, Polish voters gave the Democratic Left Alliance, a party primarily of recycled communists, a 20 percent plurality in Parliament, and second place went to the formerly Communist-aligned Polish Peasants Party. In Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, former communists remain a significant voice in politics.

In Exit into History, Eva Hoffman explains the apparent paradox of these newly elected communists by putting a human face on the aftermath of 1989's revolutions. Beginning in 1990, she traveled the main streets of the former Eastern bloc's capital cities and the backroads of its villages. From Bulgaria's parliamentary rotunda to a gypsy tavern in rural Romania, Hoffman reveals how life in post-communist Eastern Europe has fallen well short of almost everyone's hopes. Interviews with people in the streets--from former Polish censors to Bulgarian taxi drivers--illustrate how difficult the transition from comrade to citizen has been. The problem, it turns out, is that being a comrade had more than its share of advantages.

For all its repression, communism stabilized standards of living, controlled inflation, and made unemployment nonexistent. Work might have been thoroughly unsatisfying, and there could well have been four superfluous people performing each task, but at least jobs were available. In Poland, nearly everyone was worse off economically in the two years following the fall of communism, and the country's unemployment rate hit 14 percent this year. Hungary's unemployment rate could climb to 20 percent by January; the Czech Republic suffered a 35 percent fall in industrial output between 1990 and 1992. Comecon, the trading arm of the Warsaw Pact, recently collapsed. Not surprisingly, hyper inflation has set in; in Romania, a kilogram of sugar that cost 20 lei in 1989 now costs 500 lei, and in Warsaw apartments currently range between $15,000 and $80,000.

Complicating this economic downturn is a set of core beliefs that you'd expect to find in a people who just spent the last 40 years living in socialism. Surveys of nearly all Eastern European countries show that 70 percent of the population think the state should provide a job, a national health service, housing, education, and other services. Living in pre-1989 Eastern Europe seems to have been a bit like life in a hospital: unpleasant, but the basics were taken care of, and you never had to expend much energy. The arrival of political freedom has brought with it the slow demise of that intensive care culture, and, not surprisingly, a lot of the patients aren't happy.

The decline of communism also brought about social splintering of which violence in Bosnia is only the most notorious example. Asked if things had been better before, a Polish biology teacher makes this point to Hoffman: "No, of course not. Not better--but they were simpler. Us, Them. It was a predictable game. Now it's all up for grabs, there's no one to blame." Living under communism provided a common enemy, but after victory, the union that once bonded intellectual and shipyard laborer vanished.

This fracturing is reflected in the explosion of new political parties throughout Eastern Europe. In Romania, 74 parties battled for a parliamentary majority; in Poland, 29 parties out of 67 won seats in the 1991 election. Most of these organizations--the majority anti-communist--hate even the idea of party discipline because it reminds them of the bad old days. Their number and lack of unity diffuses their strength, which helps facilitate the election of a lot of communist retreads who take advantage of the clogged up system.

For Eastern Europeans the work has just begun. The revolution, as Hoffman's book makes clear, was the easy part.