ABSTRACT
The debts were accumulated as an unintended consequence of programs which could be funded only by foreign loans. History is littered with examples of unintended consequences of policies gone awry. Moreover, even policies that accomplish what they are designed to do can have unintended consequences and, as the record of communist rule in East Central Europe demonstrates, unintended consequences, whether latent functions or side effects, can have greater weight than even the most successfully realized results of policies. The communist systems of East Central Europe had a number of typical features. It is easy to find literature pointing at negative features of communism. But communism, as practised in East Central Europe between the late 1940s and the end of the 1980s, was not without some benefits for citizens. Yet communism could be grey – in the most literal sense of the word.
