Right, left, right in Poland; right, left, right in Hungary; right, left, right in Estonia; right, left, right in Lithuania. Army drill sergeants could bark out election results in many countries since communism’s fall and not miss a beat. Even where the cadence slips – the left, left, right of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, and Slovenia; or the right, right, left of Albania and the Czech Republic – it is clear that in many countries the march to multiparty democracy has settled into something like the pendulum of alternating Left and Right governments.

When Moscow State University was moved to one of the city’s Stalinist Gothic skyscrapers in 1953, the physics department lorded it over other faculties. Today, MSU’s physics dean still presides from a huge office furnished in ponderous Communist Party style, but the corridors outside are dead quiet. The number of student applicants barely exceeds the number of places in his department. Ministers never propose grandiose new research projects.

"Behind every great fortune," said Balzac, "is a crime." Examine many of today’s postcommunist elites and you might think that great French writer more prophet than novelist. Systemic corruption, say friends and foes of reforms alike, perverts the postcommunist transition from within as it undermines its legitimacy from without. So potent are charges of corruption as a political weapon, whether justified or not, and so linked is the reform process to the idea of corruption in the minds of so many of the public, that even Vaclav Klaus and Anatoli Chubais, perhaps the most successful postcommunist reformers, were both nearly undone by them last year.

In the waning days of communist rule, dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik defended the rights of local associations, parochial cultures and religions, local economic initiatives, all sorts of small protest movements organized "from below." "Civil society," they said, rather than the centralized state, is where people become empowered and are mobilized; it is where the political skills needed for democratic government are learned.

To postcommunist reformers, privatization was always a necessary step in the East European transition, a move away from the domination of the economy by the state and from the economic evils traceable to the lack of "real owners," capable of monitoring the behavior of enterprise managers. For much of the population, these goals were never entirely clear; what was clear to them was that privatization would inevitably make some people rich. And the public feared, indeed expected, that the people made rich by privatization would to be the very same people who had been oppressing them for decades: the communist nomenklatura.

"The art of taxation," quipped Jean-Baptiste Colbert, treasurer to Louis XIV, "consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing." Colbert’s Gallic wisdom seems nowadays to be the motto of the postcommunist governments, one seconded by the IMF and a bevy of international advisers.

Consumers in the countries emerging from decades of communist isolation are embracing today's telecommunications revolution even more emphatically than most embraced the democratic one. Despite this enthusiasm, telecommunications remain in a state of arrested development in the postcommunist world. Those countries that enact the changes necessary to free their telecoms industries from state ownership and control and thus spur investment are likely to move from their current insecure halfway houses to something that will bring them the full economic and democratizing benefits of the information age.

Many of the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are increasingly blessed with entrepreneurs who inspire rates of growth that now approach those found in the booming economies of Southeast Asia. But the transition countries are also cursed with infrastructure that works against this budding private sector dynamism. Weakness in such vital fields as roads, rails, ports, and air transport mean that economies are subject to crude shocks when, not if, overburdened systems of infrastructure fail. Businessmen throughout the region are caught in this web of sagging infrastructure, sapping their resources. Big and small firms, governments too, are struggling to escape.

When the world's energy brokers ponder events in the postcommunist world, many "experience a worrying sense of deja vu," says a British Petroleum representative in the region. Two decades ago, the world's energy industry woke up to loud rumblings as the oil producing nations -- mostly of the Middle East -- overnight quadrupled prices they charged for oil. Every type of energy, and every link in its chain of supply and usage, shivered from this shock to one sector of the market. It took more than a decade, a second vast oil price rise six years later, and raging inflation accompanied by global recession before the industrialized economies were able to adjust themselves to the new world energy order.

Financial systems in Eastern Europe and the NIS are changing before our eyes, as stock and bond markets spring up in the ex-socialist world. This headlong rush indicates that the old socialist contempt for finance is becoming a thing of the past. Increasingly, transition countries discover that domestic savings are mobilized, and foreign capital attracted, only by modernizing and unleashing their capital markets.

Five years after privatization began in the ex-communist world it is easy to misunderstand and mis-characterize its impact. Some appearances deceive, others are revealing. Some jibes ("it breeds corruption") are partly accurate, others instantly dated by the region's often exploding rates of growth. For any assessment, look hard and evidence for opposite conclusions can be found. The privatization process is one of external success and internal contradictions.

ZAGREB: When Croats discuss the future an odd grammatical tense intrudes. Call it the ‘concealed assumptive’: a future conditional embroidered with such murmured phrases as "if it is not already too late", or "security permitting" or the ever popular "if appropriately dealt with". After the Bosnia peace accords were signed last year, with unstated caveats, far-reaching reforms were nonetheless anticipated in Croatia. President Franjo Tudjman’s signature on the 21 conditions insisted upon by the Council of Europe in Croatia’s membership application, seemed to point in the direction of democracy, free markets, and the European Union.

As communism fell apart between 1989 and 1991 its closed trading system, COMECON, collapsed with spectacular speed. Dozens of countries scrambled for new markets even as their economies went into early free fall. Economic slump and trade protection, however, usually feed on each other, as governments look inward not out for economic salvation. The surprise for many transition countries has been their ability to reorient international trading relations. Today the trade winds are blowing briskly from Central Europe to Central Asia. No country -- no matter how hard it tries --has shown itself able to withstand their force.

"Why can’t they," wailed Professor Henry Higgins about women in G.B.Shaw’s Pygmalion, "be more like us?" With more tact but equal impatience, businessmen in Slovakia tend to reel back, asking: "Why can’t the Slovaks be more like the Czechs?"

Today, East European and N.I.S. finance ministers think that restraining public spending, as they reform their economies, is a tough job. Their successors will envy them if a budgetary time bomb is not defused. Governments are barely managing to meet pension obligations imposed by the deposed communist regimes. Soon the cost of these benefits will be too much to bear. Keeping these promises will turn pensioners' children grey.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

These are not good times for trade unions. Recession always changes the balance of power between employers and trade unions. This is a fact-of-life both in advanced free market economies, and in the newly liberated economies of Eastern Europe. Today from the Baltic states to the Black Sea the shop floor is more worried about jobs than pay packets. Even correcting for scarce and unreliable statistics, the trend in Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic and elsewhere is for workers voluntarily to leave the unionized state sector to find better paying jobs in the growing and largely non-union private sector, and unions are being forced to retreat on many fronts.