Résumé (EN)

The period 1989-1991 - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the dismantling of the Soviet Union - is an historical turn towards capitalism in Eastern Europe and SU. But what have been the elements of continuity and of break with the past? We shall analyse different phases in the history of those societies, helping to understand the capitalist turn. We shall then focus on the opacity of the capitalist transformation linked with the forms and content taken by the “privatisation” of the state and of ownership without “capital”. This permitted also to avoid direct and immediate confrontation with big factories. The integration in the European Union has broadly hidden the whole social disastrous balance sheet. But it also opens conditions for new questioning and struggles for other possible choices.