ABSTRACT
One of the bigger surprises of the communist collapse in East Central Europe in 1989 was the persistence of the former ruling political parties on the political scene. In all but Estonia and Latvia, these parties survived, competed in democratic elections, and in some cases reinvented themselves as moderate democratic parties that went on to win elections, govern, and successfully oversee both economic and political reform. The forces behind the transformations of the communist parties have been widely examined, and several analyses have focused on the internal transformations and adaptations that made their initial democratic success possible (Zubek 1994; Ishiyama 1995; Kovacs 1995; Waller 1995; Szelenyi et al. 1997; Grzymala-Busse 2002).
