August 2022
When I read my cousin and newspaper columnist Grace Housholder’s articles on her summer 2022 travels to Eastern Europe, I recalled my articles from a similar trip taken some 30 years earlier . . . and written for the same newspaper, the Kendallville (IN) News-Sun! In 1991 I reported on what I saw in a fast-changing Eastern Europe, just six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. A promotion announcing my series in the News-Sun touted the series to residents of northeastern Indiana as an inside look at life after communism at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing. With Russia now waging a brutal and unpremeditated war against neighbor Ukraine, words like “deportation” and “domination” are again in daily vocabulary. But so is “determination” on the part of the peoples of Ukraine and Eastern Europe to defend their freedom.
The first article, dated August 24, 1991, is titled “Poles Feel the Pinch.”
The second article, dated August 26, 1991, is about a Plock, Poland, a city trying to reinvent itself after communism. It also had a sister city relationship with a city in Indiana, where I worked as a newspaper reporter in 1987.
The third article, dated Augusts 27, 1991, recounts the story of a Polish spy during the Soviet era.
The fourth article, dated August 29, 1991, tells about one of many Americans in those days who moved to Czechoslovakia (shortly before it split into Czech Republic and Slovakia) to assist in its economic transition by matching American MBAs with local companies looking to modernize.
The fifth article, published August 29, 1991, recounts how some hustlers in Prague, Czechoslovakia symbolize new economic freedoms.
The sixth and final article in the series, dated August 30, 1991, tells the story of dangerous environmental problems left behind by the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia.
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 