In 1976-1977, when he was the Paris correspondent for La Presse, a Montreal-based daily paper, Louis-Bernard Robitaille traveled to Eastern Europe several times. His travels led to the four texts in this book, which focus on East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Moscow and Tbilisi. The unique atmosphere that reigned on the far side of the Iron Curtain, paired with the author’s fascinating encounters and his fine sense of observation of cities and their inhabitants, raised all sorts of questions in his mind. Without taking himself overly seriously, Robitaille tries to understand daily life on the far side of the Wall and to decipher his interviewees’ attempts to free themselves from the oppressive atmosphere of the Party.

As a man of the left who kept his independence, Robitaille states that, as a journalist, Communism was the major political story of his time. Fascinated by the bizarre creature that managed to build a huge, open-air prison in the Soviet bloc, he wonders about the speed of its disintegration: how could it have disappeared so quickly, when everyone thought the Communist monument was indestructible?

Four reportage-style texts that are at once droll, charming and overflowing with anecdotes about life in Eastern Europe in the 1970s.