THIS IS THE LATEST, and will certainly not be the last, contribution to the voluminous literature that attempts to explain the collapse of East European communism in 1989. Focusing on Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary and Poland, Saxonberg draws on a broad range of theoretical and conceptual approaches including Marxism (utilising class-based analysis and concepts such as ‘objective interests’ while rejecting historical materialism), neo-institutionalism and political psychology. In doing so, he attempts to produce his own synthesis of the underlying and proximate causes of the communist collapse and thereby to account for the varying importance of elite-level negotiations and mass street protest in each case, which he sets out neatly in a summary model at the end. Saxonberg begins by examining the underlying causes of the collapse which, he argues, was rmly rooted in the failure to carry out successful reforms of the planned economies. His analysis here (as in the rest of the book) is critically underpinned by the interactions between a particular three-level con guration of what he terms postulated (objective), institutional and subjective class interests. His argument, in effect, boils down to the idea that economic reforms failed because they encountered too much resistance from certain groups within what he refers to as the ‘ruling corporate entity’. It was this failure to introduce meaningful economic reform that, Saxonberg argues, is the key to understanding the regimes’ subsequent loss of ‘ideological legitimacy’ and the emergence of Gorbachev as Soviet leader. All of this, of course, begs the question of whether or not these economies were actually ‘reformable’ in the rst place? In his discussion of the impact of Gorbachev on Eastern Europe, Saxonberg argues that the Soviet leader did not try to promote reforms and generally chose to play the role of passive bystander. For example, he presents evidence to suggest that Gorbachev’s famous warning to his East German comrades during the height of the anti-regime protests that ‘history punishes those who act too late’ was actually directed at a Soviet audience. He also claims that Gorbachev helped to prevent the communist reformers led by Strougal from gaining power in Czechoslovakia in 1987. The problem here is surely that Saxonberg’s dichotomy between ‘passive bystander’ and ‘active player’ is too Manichean and does not properly account for the fact that the ‘demonstration effect’ of Gorbachev’s reforms must have exerted some indirect pressure. Saxonberg himself tacitly acknowledges this when he admits that Gorbachev’s ‘passivity in the end came close to actual support for change’ (p. 127), that his ‘glasnost policy encouraged reform communists and oppositional movements’ (p. 163, my emphasis) and ‘the citizens of Eastern Europe to believe that change could come to their countries as well’ (p. 366). Moreover, it is a shame that the analysis here does not include Bulgaria and Romania, where there is evidence that Moscow backed reformers in the local communist parties in their efforts to overthrow hard-line leaders in a more pro-active way than Saxonberg’s hypothesis suggests. There is also some confusion in Saxonberg’s discussion of the regimes’ ‘legitimacy crisis’.