The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Just one

guest today, a return visit by the ethnographer Kristen Godsy who

specializes in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe.

Gonsie was on the show in August, discussing a piece she wrote for the New York Times with the

engaging title, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.

The Reasons, More Leisure, better social protections, and greater

gender equality.

As Gotsy said in the interview, to appeal to women under capitalism helps for men to have money,

under communism they had to be interesting. Now she's out with a new book,

Red Hangover, Legacies of 20th Century Communism published by Duke University Press.

Its structure is unusual for an academic book, a series of essays interspersed with fictional sketches that evoke the complexities of life under communism and the poverty and displacement that came with its demise.

Much of her work is focused on Bulgaria, but she also reports in the experience of

East Germany after the wall fell.

In the book, Godsy quotes a Bulgarian friend who was once an enthusiastic proponent of

what Western development experts used to call the transition,

but it has been quite disillusioned by the course of the last 28 years. She says,

I thought we were fighting for freedom, for democracy, for principles that I believed in,

but it was all a lie.

What we have now is worse than what we had before.

I used to think that maybe we did something wrong, but now I realized that the whole thing was rotten

from the start.

1989 was not about bringing liberty to the people of Eastern Europe.

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