This age’s “Balkanization” of the Balkans is laid in this era, at great human and material cost.

At the era’s beginning, there are five Balkan states: Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

“Ethnic cleansing,” a phrase that will enter public consciousness during this era, begins with the violent Bulgarization campaign directed against ethnic Turks in Bulgaria, while Turkey hovers near the brink of war with Greece and Bulgaria, engendering cooperation between these two former enemies.

When the Soviet Union finally collapses in 1991, the Moldavian S.S.R becomes the independent state of Moldova and the second, postwar Yugoslavia begins to break apart as four of its constituent republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia & Herzegovina—fight for independence from the dominant Serbian republic.

When the dust has settled and the blood has dried, only Montenegro remains in the Yugoslav federation.

At the same time, Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria shed their socialist governments—the latter two imprison or execute their former leaders—and even Albania, having increasingly walled itself off over its several decades of independence, begins to retreat from its peculiarly isolationist brand of Stalinism and let in the light of the outside world.