A number of recent works on communism and its legacies in Eastern Europe have focused on the blurred line between remembering and knowledge making, inviting historians and other scholars to reflect critically upon their own assumptions about the meanings of that experience, about nostalgia, and about personal ideological bias, with an eye on how we can better understand this period. Paulina Bren's recent monograph and Maria Todorova's edited volume are two notable contributions to this growing literature on the nuances of lived communism.

The fruit of more than a decade of research, The Greengrocer and His TV aims to bring color and depth to the way in which the communist regime in Czechoslovakia sought to rebuild stability and legitimacy after the Prague Spring. Since the end result is well known to anyone studying the history of communism in Eastern Europe, Bren's difficult and important task was to map out the various paths attempted, the choices made, and the overall process by which ideology, institutions, and the behavior of the population as consumers of visual entertainment worked together or at odds to arrive at 1989's “Velvet Revolution.” She reminds us that what failed to happen and the choices abandoned along the way are essential for fully comprehending the complexity of the communist system (or of any modern state, for that matter), an important lesson for all those trying to carve out new niches for research on the region. By the same token, the book exemplifies the difficulties of convincingly arguing for specific meanings of such failures or absences.

Starting with the image of the vacant pedestal that used to support the Stalin statue in Prague and the lore that surrounded it, the author establishes a few important lines of argument. The first, though only intermittently explored in the rest of the book, is the centrality of the Soviet Union for the Czechoslovak Communists in articulating any “correct” ideological stance while attempting to reclaim legitimacy vis-à-vis Czechoslovak citizens. The second important element for understanding cultural production in post-1968 Czechoslovakia is an absence already suggested: With Stalinism supposedly gone but Leonid Berzhnev's troops on the ground, the task of the Czechoslovak leadership to subdue any critical voices became a tortuous one. A third issue, well developed in the book, is a corollary of the first two: While needing to genuflect before the Soviets by purging intellectual and other professional leaders of the Prague Spring, Czech President Gustav Husak and his adjutants found themselves unable to succeed in navigating the tricky waters of consumer desires without the input of these qualified “technocrats.”

Thus, what followed was a convoluted process of trial and error by which television producers, writers, directors, and actors were brought in, some after having been purged, under the strict supervision of the party apparatchiks, to create socialism with a clear conscience. The author deftly tells this complicated story, which sometimes veers toward the absurd and self-contradictory. Initial purges that embarrassed and alienated many cultural producers were slowly replaced by attempts to compromise with them, so as to renarrate the Prague Spring events and the years leading up to 1968 in a manner acceptable to the party leadership.

In the party-controlled visual discourse, the 1960s reemerged as a period of loss of direction, hysteria, and overall disruption of the peaceful and successful building of socialism in Czechoslovakia. Such “bread and circus” techniques worked in part, and Bren takes us through the journey of how scripts and actors were chosen, and how viewers reacted to the products they were offered. One of the book's most original contributions is to show the extent to which the communist leadership cared about what viewers thought about the shows they were watching on TV. The very fact that letters from viewers were collected, archived, kept, and on occasion used in reports made by TV producers and party apparatchiks to articulate particular plot choices for the shows is remarkable.

Another important thread in The Greengrocer is the discord among Czechoslovak dissidents after 1968, and in particular after Charter 77 came out. In identifying the complicated paths taken by producers of culture in their relationship with the party leadership, Bren shows that dissidents were often ineffectual in their actions, disagreed over goals and focus, and seemed at times more elitist than the one-party state they were critiquing when it came to speaking to the desires of real people, as opposed to metaphoric greengrocers. Her critique of the dissidents opens up a new page in rethinking what intellectual dissent meant for average people living in Eastern Europe under communism.

Although the book is original, important, and interesting in all the ways described, it also suffers from a number of frustrating features. The author takes issue with the image of the greengrocer as sketched by Vaclav Havel for projecting an elitist notion of morality onto a two-dimensional figure. Given this position and the title of the book, I expected the greengrocer to become a more three-dimensional, multifaceted presence. Yet the audience makes its presence felt only occasionally and is, in fact, much more the object of attention by party leaders and cultural producers than a complex living agent. I appreciate the difficulty of recovering these voices and the author's attempts to find such voices. Yet I found it rather strange that after praising oral history as an important new development in studying the history of communism in Czechoslovakia, she neither used such methods nor explained why not.

Another frustrating aspect of the book is Bren's use of existing scholarship. There are nods here and there to some authors, but I found the analysis lacking in direct engagement with the ways in which other historians have looked at post-totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia and beyond and how she wants her own work to be considered in this larger scholarly field. Given the rich secondary bibliography, especially the Czech language sources, I had hoped that she would have explained more directly to the readers where her analysis of sources identified by others differs from and enhances the existing scholarship.

Remembering Communism represents the fruit of a different type of endeavor, but also adds new depth to our understanding of communism in Eastern Europe. It is the result of a long process during which the contributors worked separately and together through workshops, training sessions, conferences, and overall intellectual guidance from editor Todorova. The essays offer a rich array of analyses that are interdisciplinary in approach, broad in the specific topics explored, and wide in geographic coverage, from the Soviet Union to the southern Balkans. By the same token, the book does not aim at comprehensiveness in terms of topical, disciplinary, and geographic coverage. Its unifying construct is analyses that are overtly and productively focused on the discursive relationship between past and present. The subtitle of the volume, Genres of Representation, reflects this connection among the individual contributions.

The introduction to the volume provides an excellent articulation of the benefits and limitations offered by specific disciplinary approaches. The editor argues forcefully for the need to disentangle more clearly the relationship between remembering and knowledge making if we are to move beyond either nostalgia for or demonization of the communist period. The 20 years that have passed since the end of communism seem like a good moment for taking stock of these directions and bringing greater sophistication to analyses of that period, an impulse similar to that driving Bren's book. The transparency and introspection of Todorova's analysis sets a high standard for the rest of the volume, and individual authors rise to the challenge to various degrees.

The volume is divided into five sections—“Institutional Discourses,” “Oral History and Anthropology,” “Archives and Memoirs,” “How Textbooks Remember,” and “Visual Memories”—delineating various theoretical and methodological approaches to the communist–postcommunist period. Most of the contributors, the majority of whom hail from the region, present research unfamiliar to English-speaking scholars in a knowledgeable and accessible way. In terms of engagement with existing scholarship, virtually all of the contributions show an impressive understanding of relevant works in English, French, Russian, and German, in addition to the languages of the case-study countries. This is an achievement hard to overstate. In addition, the angles of analysis chosen by the individual authors reveal new aspects about topics familiar to scholars of communism: how the “West” functioned in the utopian discourses of East European intellectuals; how various populations, such as displaced Macedonians in Hungary and Bulgarians in Ukraine, responded to the attempts of the socialist regimes to mobilize and discipline them; how archives (documentary, visual, aural) shape knowledge; and how forgetting and remembering are intimately connected in making meaning about the communist past.

It is impossible to comment substantially on all 16 studies in this limited space, and so I am providing a couple of examples of what this volume offers and where it falls short of its promise. Riki Van Boeschoten's essay on Greek and Macedonian populations resettled in Hungary after World War II provides an excellent example of how a relatively unknown case study that might be superficially dismissed as a footnote to the impact of communism in Eastern Europe can, in fact, shed light on many important social, cultural, and political issues. The author uses a combination of methods that range from what “home” and “family” meant, how people identified with different communities, and how they appropriated various communist and nationalist ideologies over time. The piece enables the reader to see the dynamics of individual paths through the apparently solid, but in fact very porous, ideological landscape of communist Eastern Europe, all the while placing this case study in conversation with theoretical scholarship on nationalism, modernization, identity, family history, and Alltagsgeschichte.

The best of the pieces in the collection, such as Todorova's analysis of the discourses of remembrance that have developed around the figure and legacy of Georgi Dimitrov or Miglena Nikolchina's discussion of intellectual dissent in late communist Bulgaria, display the same discursive self-reflexivity and engagement with their own assumptions and the scholarly fields in which they play. A few pieces do not rise to this level of analysis, such as Tanya Boneva's, which represents more of a straightforward oral history. Overall, however, the volume sets up a high standard and opens up avenues for future research, challenging scholars in many disciplines to look in new directions and to borrow and use theoretical and methodological insights from other disciplines. I look forward to the next installment of Todorova's project, as hinted at in the final paragraph of the introduction.