Résumé
This paper examines the dismantling of communism as represented in late socialistcinema through three films produced on the eve of systemic collapse in Eastern Europe:Margarit i Margarita [Margarit and Margarita Nikolay Volev, Bulgaria, 1989), Przypadek[Blind Chance, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland, 1987], and Krzyk [The Cry, Barbara Sass,Poland, 1982]. Read together, these works expose the moral exhaustion, socialdeterminism, and ideological bankruptcy of communist regimes shortly before theirdissolution. In all three films, individual trajectories—whether rebellious, conformist, ormarginal—are shaped by a socio-political order that systematically neutralises agencyand transforms human relations into transactions governed by power.In Margarit i Margarita, youthful rebellion and romantic idealism clash with a society inwhich social advancement depends on submission, networking, and sexual barter. Thisdegeneration of socialist ideals into cynicism finds an echo in Krzyk, where socialreintegration is revealed as an illusion: despite Marianna’s resilience, the systemreproduces inequality by protecting former communist elites while confining themarginalised to closed, carceral spaces disguised as care institutions. In both films,communism operates less as an ideology than as a mechanism of moral erosion, inwhich dignity, intimacy, and justice are sacrificed to survival. Przypadek extends thiscritique by introducing contingency as a narrative device that exposes the inescapabilityof the system. Whether Witek aligns himself with the Party, the Catholic opposition, orattempts political neutrality, his fate remains structurally predetermined. This fatalismresonates with the trajectories of Margarit, Margarita, and Marianna, whose livesdemonstrate that neither resistance nor compliance offers genuine emancipation. Acrossthe three films, the promise of mobility—social, moral, or existential—is consistentlyundermined.Together, these films articulate dismantling communism not as a sudden political rupture,but as a prolonged moral and social disintegration, revealed through youth, genderedvulnerability, and the erosion of belief in socialist ideals.