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552 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1997)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0552 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE

In the past seven years, the world has seen a rare sight: the peaceful
transformation of an empire's authoritarian political order and ideology into
democratic ideologies and democratically elected and controlled nation-
states. The control exercised throughout the former Soviet system was
comprehensive, subsuming the economic, social, and institutional sectors
under the political apparatus of the state. While the Soviet republics were
more tightly controlled than the countries within the Eastern bloc, the
dynamics of central planning, centralization of decision making, one-party
rule, and avoidance of conflict through control, repression, and suppression
were common throughout the Soviet empire.
The combination of all these factors created a set of universal conditions
that are now only beginning to be understood by citizens of these countries
and by the West. In many respects these conditions are best seen juxtaposed
with the changes that have taken place. The conditions include an exchange
of freedom for material security (employment, health benefits, physical
security, and so on); the channeling of individual initiative into politically
acceptable activity (for example, working with the party structure; promoting
economic collectivism; teaching within defined doctrines; publishing in state-
approved media; and associating within state-approved organizations); and
sustaining an emotional mask of passivity to avoid exposure to or confronta-
tion with authoritarian agencies when experiencing disagreement with state
decisions.
The great movement of dissidents, from Imre Nagy in Hungary in 1956 to
Lech Wafesa in Poland in 1981 and from Andrey Sakharov in Russia to Vaclav
Havel in Czechoslovakia, speaks to the political and social yearnings within
these societies and to the moral antecedents of the great changes of 1989.
Seven years is a short time to complete the transition. Everyone is still
living through this transition. Nonetheless, the broad contours of the post-
1989 changes can now be seen and with them the concomitant impact on the
social, political, and economic well-being of the state and the lives of citizens
in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These contours
are both encouraging and disturbing. In the rush to build upon what the
dissidents had initiated, the West linked democratic institutional change
with market-based economic systems. The marriage of politics and economics
in the post-1989 period turned upside down the former regime's orientation:
under the old regime, politics ruled the economy, and it was critical to know
the policies and orientation of the political leaders as they were the economic
decision makers; in the new regime, economics rule politics. We see the result
of this in Central and Eastern Europe, where citizens have universally
returned former Communists to elected office (with the one exception of the

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