The idea underlying the present theme issue developed during the 1990s and was established as a project between 1997 and 1998. To some extent, our undertaking was prompted by the wave of new Soviet Russian and East European studies literature (especially from the region itself) emerging in the wake of the transformation of 1989–91, since when there has been a veritable revival of the totalitarian approach. Narratives were organised along the well-known dichotomies of passive victimised societies and victorious, omnipotent and relentlessly oppressive party-states. As in western scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, historical and other studies of cultural and intellectual life under communism tended again to be coached in terms of conflicts between political rationality asserted with totalistic pretensions and idealised ‘communities’ of ‘knowledge’, ‘professionalism’, and ‘arts’, or in terms of conflicts between ideological and political legitimisation and ‘the uncompromising search for truth’ or ‘artistic experimentation’. Communist attempts politically to control knowledge and artistic production, their early efforts to secure monopolistic positions for particular epistemological and aesthetic paradigms (as in class-relativist science or socialist-realist art) have been seen and presented as a one-way imposition from above.