ENThe decades following the end of World War II in East Central Europe have beenall but lost in myth – popular historical narratives of the period do not standup to scrutiny. The old communist accounts of liberation and reconstruction were never fully convincing, and the fractious nationalist narratives of resistance to Soviet rule do little more than scratch the surface of events. Still, the story of universal national resistance proved its usefulness during the Velvet revolutions that toppled communist regimes in 1989, and it retains a strong position in popular memory through out the region to this day. But the end of the Cold War also ushered an era of methodological innovation and empirical discovery based on access to previously closed archives and the proliferation of published memoirs by people from all walks of life. Theories of histoire croisée and multiple modernities have helped to transcend the rigidly opposed narratives of East versus West; of communism versus nationalism.They help to contextualize the history of the lands subjected to successive Naziand Stalinist occupations in a pan-European perspective, by underscoring how transnational processes of industrialization, urbanization and mass politics led to a range of outcomes across liberal and illiberal regimes during the twentieth century. [Extract, p. 1]