Eastern Europe: Toward Market Economics

For all its egalitarian vision and brutal controls, Communism is still basically an economic philosophy. Because of that fact, Eastern Europe today is caught up in a brutal but visionary economic revolution. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, reforms — in various degrees and diverging directions — are rippling through all East European countries. If the reforms succeed, they will not only break the glacial grip of Stalin ist "command economics" but reshape the societies and political structures of the Continent's entire Communist world.

Red Realism. The need for drastic economic change became painfully evident in the...