Thirty years ago, the revolutions across the Eastern Bloc brought the end of Soviet-style socialism in Europe. With the defeat of those who sought to reform the system from within, it was the partisans of liberal democracy and “free-market” economics who most shaped the years that followed. The neoliberal restructuring that spread from East Berlin to Vladivostok brought profound social shifts. And yet it wasn’t wholly unprecedented.

We often think of the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s as a Western phenomenon. With the decline of the rapid growth that had marked postwar decades, the rising neoliberals went on the offensive against the public sector and labor movements across the core capitalist countries. But as a new book argues, this neoliberal revolution wasn’t limited to the West – for the “reforms” that the neoliberals pushed were also adopted by self-described “socialist” regimes in the Eastern Bloc.

Adam Fabry is author of The Political Economy of Hungary. From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the early forms of neoliberalism under the one-party regime, the factors that brought this state to collapse, and the combination of neoliberal restructuring and nationalist authoritarianism under Viktor Orbán’s rule.