Eastern Europe

Communist Eastern Europe, 1945–1989: imposed regimes, secret police such as the Stasi and Securitate, the uprisings of 1953, 1956 and 1968, and 1989.

• The Securitate: Romania's Communist Secret Police

  How Romania's Securitate, built under Soviet advisers in 1948, ran arrests without trial, the Pitești tortures, a typewriter registry and plots abroad.

• The Stasi: How East Germany Spied on Its Own People

  How East Germany's Stasi used 91,000 officers, 189,000 informants, secret prisons and 'quiet terror' to control a nation — and what its files revealed.

• Albania's Cultural Revolution: The First Atheist State

  How Enver Hoxha copied Mao's Cultural Revolution, closed all 2,169 of Albania's churches and mosques in 1967, and jailed priests for baptisms.

• The Berlin Wall and East Germany's Deadly Border

  Why East Germany walled in its own people: the flight of 2.7 million, the Berlin Wall, mines and a shoot-to-kill order — and the hundreds who died.

• Romania's War on Faith: The Churches Under Communism

  How Romania's communist regime abolished the Greek-Catholic Church, let its bishops die in prison, jailed priests like Gheorghe Calciu and bulldozed churches.

• Hunger for Export: Food Rationing in Ceaușescu's Romania

  How Ceaușescu's drive to repay Romania's foreign debt brought ration cards, unheated flats and empty shops in the 1980s, until the regime fell in 1989.

• Yugoslav Market Socialism: The Third Way That Failed

  Tito's self-management promised a middle way between capitalism and Soviet planning. It ended in foreign debt, mass emigration and 2,000% inflation.

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