ABSTRACT
I Take my Title from a witticism that made the rounds in Eastern Europe some years ago: “Communism is the longest road from feudalism to capitalism.” In all the regions considered in this volume, the notion of transition connotes a change from one type of political-economic system to a different one. In the former European communist world, however, transition also conveys a sense of finally coming home again. That is particularly the case in the westernmost of them. Czechoslovakia was a pearl of democratic capitalism before 1948, and Hungary and Poland were essentially capitalist, although politically authoritarian. The Russian Empire had been a “developing” country, to use the language of a later generation, but by 1914 virtually all of its industry, trade, commerce, finance, and much of its agriculture, were vigorously capitalist (Nove 1969, ch. 1).
