ABSTRACT
However, the expected changes did not occur that suddenly. After Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed the principles of glasnost and perestroika, an ‘antiauthoritarian climate’ (McLeish and Phillips , 1998) affected the countries of the Soviet Bloc . These countries had developed a set of common features as a result of a social order chosen (or more precisely, imposed) by and modelled after the Soviet Union. Following the dissolution of the Communist state, together these countries entered the ‘valley of tears’ (Dahrendorf , 1991): a period of political, economic, social, and cultural uncertainty accompanied by the search for a new identity. However, the gulf between these former ‘allies’ quickly broadened. Hungary , the Czech Republic, and Poland were in a position to pick up the threads of political and economic structures created in the post-war period (Bîrzea , 1994). As well, they were able to draw on a sense of national identity which had not been as severely impaired as that of certain other Communist states such as the GDR . Still other former Soviet republics ‘left the track’ by returning to some form of an authoritarian state.
