Introduction

The great transformation taking place in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and what used to be the Soviet Union appears as a shift from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. All economic reforms reflect the political and economic circumstances—domestic as well as international—facing the countries that enact them. The history of reform presented focuses on changes in the economic systems and institutions as well as the development of reformist ideas. The reader should thus place it in the larger political, economic, and social context of each period and each country. In Hungary economists pushed for more radical reforms of the economic mechanism. Mikhail Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985 initiated a reformist comeback, which intensified in the following years, bringing with it criticism of Leonid Brezhnev's legacy. The self-proclaimed objective of most governments of the formerly socialist countries became the establishment of a market economy.