Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

On tonight's program, the writer Ivan Klima, who in 1968, against all reason, returned home to Czechoslovakia

after the Soviet tanks rolled over the Prague Spring.

He's written a compelling memoir about surviving not only Nazism but also communism.

Some of my colleagues in the West,

they had a feeling we were heroes, but we were not heroes.

We were not directly persecuted.

We were only not allowed to publish that was all.

Ivan Klima later. Plus, we all know science fiction literature and film,

but science fiction theatre?

Well, Sarah Dillon, one of our new generation thinkers, is sure it's on the rise. We'll find out.

But first, as EU countries limber up for elections next week, and 25 years on from 1989, we look at that part of Europe which has no settled name, or rather too many names,

Eastern Europe, East Central, New Europe, even old Mitter Europe.

Whatever happened to its dreams of 1989, cultural as well as political, and whose dreams were they anyway?

Until the end of the Cold War, most of

Eastern Europe, from Poland to Hungary, from Romania to Ukraine, was generally said to be part of the

Soviet or Eastern bloc. But go back to the late 19th century, and those same countries often

belong to empires, for instance, the German, the Russian or the Ottoman. Well, to help us assess

what followed the giddiness of 89, I was joined earlier on the telephone from Budapest, by the

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