I wonder why post communist countries lagged behind so much in this regard? Seems like this awareness only really hit the US in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s, well after the iron curtain came down. I guess mass media must have been still siloed by language and there might not have been much english language media presence by that point sharing these ideas.
You are right in the language silo, many of those countries have also small populations, which means fewer content to consume, and a certain intellectual insularity.
