ABSTRACT
The period of disintegration of state socialism lasted in Eastern Europe until 1989 and until 1991 in the USSR. From those years began the transformation of the state socialist societies and a transition to something else. ‘Post-communism’ sig-nifies an intention to overcome the communist era as well as ‘the whole logic of revolutionary thinking that had haunted the European imagination for some two centuries’. 1 Transition and transformation are very general and ambiguous terms applying to very different forms of institutional change.
