ABSTRACT
It was almost a truism of the period 1989-90 that Communismwas discredited for at least a generation, and that the Communist successor parties, however reformed or renamed, could only look forward to a marginal existence. Like some of the other presumptions of the time, however, it proved to be a half truth at best. By the autumn of 1993, parties rooted in the Communist past had returned to power in Poland of all places in free and open elections. The reformed Hungarian Party, now the Socialist Party, soon similarly returned to government. These democratic renewals were to be paralleled by the ability of the renamed Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian Parties to retain much of their earlier influence and to alternate in government through somewhat less open means.
