Author Description

This is a personal view, from ground level, of a revolution that never quite finished. Of how it re-emerges, in demonstrations and uprisings, on a regular basis. How the demons of the past--of collaboration, of unsatisfied national identity, above all, of poverty--continue to haunt the present. Blood drips on Nick Thorpe's head as he tries to escape the Romanian secret police with a dissident's statement hidden in his clothes. Through the autumn and winter of 1989, Thorpe hops from revolution to revolution, from Budapest to Prague, from Leipzig to East Berlin. And he gets to Romania in time for the bloody finale. But with the victory of democracy, his work was only just beginning. Thorpe guides us through the dramas and traumas of the 1990s, "jungle capitalism," a taxi blockade in Hungary, and the miners' invasion of Bucharest. He camps with Vaclav Havel--who borrows his sleeping bag. As Yugoslavia collapses, he reports from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia. The book concludes in the present day, with the impact of the crisis of capitalism, twenty years after the crisis of communism. Nick Thorpe began reporting from Budapest in February 1986, the first Western journalist to be based there. For the BBC, "The Independent," and "The Observer," he covered the dying years of Eastern Europe's regimes, then the revolutions that toppled them. As the BBC's Central Europe correspondent, he continues to report from there to this day, charting the successes and the failures of a revolution that never quite reaches its goal.