Review: 'Socialist Escapes. Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989'/ Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, Alexander Vari. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. ISBN 978-0-85745-669-4

The editors of this volume have written on Central-Eastern European history before (i.e. Jewish Prague, antifascism in the GDR) and the contributors vary from PhD candidates to scholars teaching in the United States and Europe. They include David Tompkins, who published on the subject of music making and reception in Poland and the GDR in the Stalinist era and Mary Neuburger, co-editor of a volume about consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe.[1] The essays contained in this compilation reflect the diversity of their authors' interests and expertise and address a wide array of historical practices in countries of the Soviet bloc that enabled their citizens to create spaces of relative freedom within the confines of the regimes in which they lived. Interestingly enough, many of the authors point out how the regimes themselves, knowingly or inadvertently, provided these opportunities and tried to encourage or control them, depending on the local circumstances and the time period.