"This is a refreshing new approach to east European communist regimes. While most work concentrates on economic weaknesses and political oppression, this book has an innovative focus: the relationship between state and society and the regimes' attempts to control the citizens' private sphere, the failure of which was a major contributing factor in their collapse. I warmly recommend it!" - Ivan T. Berend, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), "Why and how were communist societies attractive to those who lived in them? Why and how did they become less and less attractive and eventually intolerable? In his remarkable study Roman Krakovsky offers what he calls pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which help us answer these questions but also highlight the need for further research. With originality and wit, he analyses the changed social construction of time and space under Czechoslovakian communism - initially inspiring hope in progress but eventually triggering disillusionment as the promised progress was not sustained. The imposition of `too much order' began to produce its opposite, until the last great attempt to reinvent the world collapsed. Krakovsky's jigsaw is rich and suggestive and very rewarding." - Ben Barkow, Director of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, `In State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia, Roman Krakovsky considers the heart of communism: its desire to master time and space. This book's revelations are very often groundbreaking and their implications go far beyond communist Czechoslovakia. This is important reading for all scholars of twentieth century Europe.' - Paul Gradvohl, Jr Professor, University of Lorraine, `One of the finest examples of a younger school of French studies on the social history of communism distinguishing themselves from the international mainstream by their unique blending of history in the tradition of the Annales school, socio-anthropological (Bourdieu) and (post-) structuralist thinking (Foucault). English readers will have the opportunity not only to learn a lot about how communist rule and its ideology functioned on the micro-level of everyday life but also to get acquainted with the specifically French epistemological `idiom' in contemporary history writing which deserves a broad reception in the international community of scholars of modern history.' - Thomas Lindenberger, Director, Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism, TU Dresden