This book contains the first comprehensive history using extensive primary sources to trace the 1977 earthquake disaster response by the Ceauşescu communist regime, contextualizing its contribution to the public risk that remains in Romania's capital Bucharest. It traces a history of one authoritarian government’s disaster response linking its decisions and ultimate inactions to contemporary public risk. The book begins with a stand-alone chapter to introduce readers to twentieth-century Communist Romania and contextualize the Ceauşescu regime’s response. It provides insights into how Radio Free Europe filled the information vacuum, how the political police, the Securitate, worked as first responders, and how scientific experts debated the best course of action. It examines how the regime requested specific foreign assistance and activated its Securitate abroad to encourage such, prioritized restoration of the economy, and "encouraged" domestic cash and labor contributions in the name of recovery. The book examines how the disaster response abruptly ended, leaving thousands of structurally unsafe buildings. It explains the contemporary seismic risk and post-communist mitigation efforts to reduce it. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and policy-makers in the fields of history, disaster studies, urban planning, politics, and those interested in communist-era Romania, Europe, and Eurasia; totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

Yosef Govrin was the Israeli Ambassador to Romania in the twilight of the communist era. Govrin describes Israeli-Romanian relations as he observed them from 1985 to 1989 after which the leader of Romania was deposed.

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”

A comparative analysis of the 1989 regime changes in East-Central Europe from the perspective of transnational history and comparative politics.

This book examines transitional justice in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, exploring their attempts to come to terms with the gross human abuses which characterized their communist past. It considers transitional justice in all its aspects, explaining why different countries adopted different models and how successful they have been.