ABSTRACT
The new elites perceived traditional culture and religion as "remnants" of the prerevolutionary past that merited full elimination. The vested interests of local power elites and their dependence on the Soviet superpower prevented the reforms from becoming coherent and irreversible. The rules and institutions at stake will define which new collective actors are permitted to enter the political arena and what means of influence can legitimately be used by competing political coalitions. The most important institutional devices that contributed to democratic evolution in Poland were based on an innovative mixture of mass mobilization and wisely controlled demobilization. Person-driven trust becomes a substitute for the trust in institutional frameworks and in the new democratic rules of the game. In the Soviet Union the monopoly system was humanized mostly by reforms, but in many countries democratic revolution contributed a great deal to that limited success.
