In the popular Soviet-era movie An Irony of Fate, a bout of drinking leads a Russian man to board a flight to St. Petersburg by mistake. Upon arrival, he hails a taxi and tells the driver to take him to his apartment on Construction Workers' Street. The ride takes him through a familiar landscape of seemingly identical apartment buildings, public service signs extolling socialism, and milk and bread shops with innovative names like “Milk” and “Bread.” After reaching his address, he enters a nondescript building and takes the lift to an equally nondescript two-room apartment. He then goes to bed with no idea that he is in the wrong city.

Two decades into the transformation of the Eurasian space, this premise is implausible. If the watchword of the communist era was conformity, the watchword of the postcommunist world is diversity. The bustling streets of Prague are a far cry from the drab thoroughfares of Minsk, and the faux-rococo design of Moscow's Manezh Square has little in common with the staid old-European atmosphere of central Zagreb. The hardwiring of the planned economy cannot be easily replaced, but the scope of change across countries in a relatively brief period is remarkable.