The implosion of communism in Eastern Europe has offered a quite exceptional laboratory for the political scientist in which to study a process of democratization in progress. The green wave in Eastern Europe was part and parcel of the revolutionary movement, and it subsided with the fall of communist power. Socialist democracy is the term that has been used for the various and numerous channels of participation that ruling communist parties made available to the masses. In Czechoslovakia, where the communist party held on to power until popular pressures drove it to step down, there were no round-table talks and it was the holding of the first free elections in June 1990 that forced the Civic Forum. From 1977 a process of aggregation of political preferences was in process in Czechoslovakia. In the political sphere, the importance of law in creating the necessary framework for democracy has been equally evident.