ABSTRACT
The starting point for post-Communist societies was not a modern society. MarxistLeninist analysis had ‘proven’ that capitalist societies were not modern but decadent; the more they developed, the closer they approached the imminent collapse of capitalism. Nor had Communist systems modernized in the manner of a third-world society. In a developing country, modernization starts with the population divided into three sectors – a relatively small modern sector, a sector of first-generation residents of urban shanty towns wanting themselves or their children to become modern and a backward rural population living as their ancestors had. In such circumstances, modernization is a gradual process of people progressing from one to another sector until the modern sector becomes dominant.
