With the advent of Gorbachev, two new words, perestroika (reform) and glasnost' (openness), entered the Western vocabulary. They also served as the bywords for economic and social change that continues to this day. Simultaneously, the search for a solution to the economic ills of the former USSR has led to a rediscovery and a re-examination of the past. In this context, scholars of the successor states to the Soviet Union will find much of interest in the works reviewed here which take us chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the late 1980s.

In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.

Indeed, much of the tension in relations between Paris and Washington, Paris and Bonn, and Bonn and London is that none of Germany's former enemies and present allies want to be left behind when the moment comes to make a new European order with the Russians. The Germans do not wish to be left out either…. The basis of the problem…is what to do about the Germans….

The first volume under review is the outcome of a five-day conference held in Italy in July 1989. It was the first gathering of representatives of national historians’ associations affiliated to the International Federation for Research in Women's History/Federation International pour la Recherche de l'Histoire des Femmes (IFR WH/FIRHF), or rather of those associations which could afford to send representatives. IFR WH/FIRHF is an Internal Commission of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences. Its purpose, obviously, is to promote the serious study of women in history and the role of women within the profession.