ABSTRACT
When Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997, eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world turned its attention to a new center in the contest between socialism and capitalism. The voluntary march to capitalism in Russia, and in the key satellite countries of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, had irretrievably run its course. Only the tragic after-effects of the shock treatment remained. Economic corruption on a grand scale replaced Party corruption. A large poverty class, mainly the elderly and the unprepared, hung over the scene, victims of inflation and displacement, like similar casualties of revolutions and depressions destined to be forgotten by new generations. Ethnic and political factionalism, unleashed by democracy, flared up. Mourners for lost values, some principled, some trouble-makers, made their appearance. A cynical observer might declare these legacies of instant-democratic capitalism the least of the century’s horrors, and remediable as well, given time and good fortune.
