Interfacing the Soviet Bloc: Recent Literature and New Paradigms

Historians have given considerable attention to the relationship between space, travel, and power for some time now. Perhaps one of the more interesting recent developments has been the movement of thinking about these issues from the margins of history closer to the mainstream. Scholarship on the post–World War II Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has yet to find a comfortable fit within this new canon – and there are good reasons for this hesitant start. The Marxian “specter of communism” may not have needed a passport or special clearance to haunt all corners of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but by the middle of the twentieth century most people, objects, and ideas inhabiting the Soviet bloc certainly did. “There are boundaries one must not cross,” the Polish communist General Wojciech Jaruzelski told the striking Solidarity activists in July 1981, as he warned