For Baudrillard by the end of the 1990s with the collapse of communism, the era of the strong ideas, of a conflicted world of revolution and universal emancipation, is over.
Schulze's subject is always the moment when Communism turned into post-Communism: an era of decomposition.
In a quite similar vein, the explosion of capitalist instincts in China has gradually undermined the tenets of Mao era communism, paving the way for a "market society", along Karl Polanyi's ideas in The Great Transformation (1944), where material prosperity, productivity, and prices displace principles of solidarity and redistribution.
At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 Khrushchev had launched the communist era, promising that by 1980 the foundations of communism would be laid.
It is a theme inseparable from the context in which Kundera was raised, the world of Soviet-era communism, a context which fascinated and to some extent baffled western observers in the 70s and 80s, and on which his novels seemed to open a unique window, bringing its complexities to life with unmatched irony, melancholy and intellectual rigour.
"Welcome to the era after communism," the mayor snarled.
The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography this year, delves into Oppenheimer's personal, scientific and political life, which collapsed under accusations of Communism during the McCarthy era.
The collapse of Soviet and east European communism came in an era dubbed by some as "the triumph of bourgeois capitalism" in the west.
A crucial resource for anyone studying twentieth-century history, propaganda, communism, the Cold War era and its conflicts, the Soviet Union, film and documentary, military history, media studies, cultural and social history.
But Sultanbekova's career trajectory would have been impossible for her mother or grandmother, living under communism during the Soviet era, when private entrepreneurship could easily earn you a prison sentence.
