My generation in Eastern Europe

was caught in the middle of two revolutions (1944 and 1989), which instead of moving history ahead pushed it backward. We thus at first made a U-turn—a tortuous one, to be sure—from underdeveloped capitalism to underdeveloped socialism, but because socialism and underdevelopment are strange bedfellows, we have since discovered we were on the wrong path and are trying now to return to where we started. The drama of that generation is what this book is about.