Across the ruins of communism, a clear breeze blows from the West. Like the winds that had been hailed from the East across the ruins of war more than four decades earlier, it promises prosperity through sacrifice. And, like the old vision, with its road maps to the promised land, this vision comes with packaged formulas for applying economic science to the grand project of institutional reconstruction. 1992, no less than in 1948, devastation is seen as mandating boldness of action: the collapse of the old order issues the imperative for ambitious experiments while offering the occasion to build anew, this time, with a fresh start to create capitalism by design. Free to choose, the societies of Russia and Eastern Europe are free at last to be guided by the science of choice (e.g., Sachs 1989; Peck and Richardson 1992). For political science the metaphor of collapse is similarly all-pervasive. Whether the edifice crumbled from structural fatigue, was toppled from within, or was battered from without, there is widespread agreement that the central problem is how to build a economy and a polity on a society in ruins. But whereas mainstream economists see institutional collapse as the setting for the bold initiatives of designer capitalism, many political scientists perceive institutional vacuum as leading to paralysis or even chaos. For the latter, the collapse of the party-state leaves these societies institutions and without a system. . . . What we find in Eastern Europe today is an institutional vacuum. The logic of state socialism was to render the party the central nervous system. It was the institution, giving life, logic and functions to all other subsidiary institutions. When communist party hegemony died, institutions died and, with that, roles and rules (Bunce and Csanadi 1992, p. 14). To be sure, fragments of the old socialist order survive alongside elements obeying another logic. But because the elements taken from two stable systems are mutually contradictory, postcommunism is a nonsystem. an irrational environment patterns the category of interests becomes meaningless. Similarly, Ken Jowitt, another political scientist who has been a long-time observer of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, foresees in the aftermath of the collapse of Leninism a new world disorder (Jowitt 1991). Although they are not exactly form, and void, Jowitt labels the geopolitical setting and the post-Leninist societies as Genesis environments, whose characteristics are dislocation, trauma, and uncertainty; old rigid boundaries give way and political vocabularies name entities and delineate new ways of life (Jowitt 1991; and see Michael Kennedy's review of Chirot in this issue). In this world, writes Jowitt, leaders will matter more than institutions, charisma more than political economy. Liberal outcomes are not excluded and apocalypse is not inevitable, but we should be alert to the obstacles to democratic consolidations and the likelihood of wars and movements of rage. For Jowitt, the exodus from Leninism leads not to the promised land but to much wandering in the wilderness.
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David Stark (1992) studied this question.