From approximately 1945 to 1989, Eastern Europe’s governments, often called people’s democracies, were dominated by communist parties. These countries included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, The German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Nominally and ideologically, this meant a worker’s state where all material needs were met, and private property ownership was limited as part of a commitment to a social revolution that abolished class conflict and promoted equality. In practice, this meant one party rule, state control of the economy and mass media, the promotion of secular atheism over organized religion, and censorship and surveillance to curtail dissent and maintain party control.

The events of The Magic Lantern depict the fall of these regimes in 1989, with special attention to the GDR, Hungary, and Poland, as well as events inside the USSR that prompted a shift in foreign policy.

Marxism-Leninism was the term established in the Soviet Union for the dominant ideological framework within that country and in Eastern European communist regimes. Marxism-Leninism reflects the ideology of Karl Marx, that is, that the establishment of capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Eventually, exploited workers would overthrow the existing state and establish new regimes. The bourgeois capitalist phase of history would give way to socialism and then communism, the full establishment of a utopia free of class exploitation.