State of the Bloc : The ex-satellites, ten years later.

Liberty, a shy creature, showed her face in 1989. Colonized for 40 years by the Soviet Union, the populations of Central and Eastern Europe took to the streets in peaceful protests against oppression. They had had enough of Communism. Traitors and quislings to a man, the Communist bosses of the Soviet bloc now had to escape the fear and hatred they had inspired in their people. They visualized themselves hanging on lampposts in retribution, and so they struck a deal with the new democratic leaders in the bargaining process known as a Round Table, conducted in each of the countries. They would agree to share power in return for immunity for whatever crimes they had committed. Non-Communist governments then succeeded them. "The world's great age begins anew," as the ever- optimistic Shelley had once written about the downfall of other tyrants. Here was a mass staging of the uplifting scene in Fidelio when prisoners emerge from the dungeons into freedom and hope.

A decade on, celebrations are few and far between. The Communists have survived and prospered. In the swings of the pendulum between themselves and the democrats, they have already won-but then lost again-elections in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Now, if opinion polls are right, all former Soviet satellites are likely to be once more under Communist control after the next round of elections. In the Czech Republic, the Communist Party has not changed its name or its program, and still advocates state ownership of property. A recent poll shows that it is the country's most popular party. Communists already in power include such personalities as Aleksander Kwasniewski, president of Poland. At reunions in Berlin and Prague to promote what should have been their historic achievement of putting an end to Communism, former presidents Bush and Gorbachev, Chancellor Kohl, and Lady Thatcher looked thoroughly forlorn. Liberty's face is back in the shadows.

To the incoming democrats, politics was an unknown quantity, and government an absolute novelty. Their task was immense, nothing less than the rebuilding from scratch of what had once been viable nation-states. Privatization and the rule of law were prerequisites. In general those who had to do the work were, and still are, a collection of well-meaning professors and dissidents in baggy trousers and sweaters with holes, and accustomed to sitting into the night for hours of unresolved argument. Inexperience and personal ambition were hardly a promising mix.

Here and there, technicians have emerged, like the economist Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland, the Thatcherite Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic, and Viktor Orban, present prime minister of Hungary. The countries of the old Soviet bloc do now have the outlines of the necessary institutions of statehood, for example a presidency and a parliament, political parties and a more or less free press. But there is a Potemkin air of make-believe about it all. The majority of people are no better off. Pensioners and the poor, and farmers and workers too, are mostly more wretched than they were before. Opportunities, justice, the rule of law, remain so many fine abstractions, without application to daily life. In the absence of anything that can yet be described as an effective social fabric, it is everyone for himself.

In 1989's Round Table bartering, the Communists knew what they were doing. The deal they then cut has given them personal advantage as well as a stranglehold on progress. In the first place, there could be only a token house-cleaning, affecting no more than a few figureheads. This fundamental failure to define right and wrong has made a mockery of the concept of the rule of law. More damaging still, the Communists contrived by these means to keep the levers of power in their own hands, retaining the enormous hidden funds that the Party had amassed by hook or crook, as well as keeping in place national networks of patronage. Sole and exclusive managers of state assets hitherto, they were able to exploit their position to become outright owners or plunderers of everything within reach. Asset-strippers and profiteers of the new democracy, they have also made a mockery of the concept of privatization. Far from ending on lampposts or even in courtrooms, these men continue to prove that crime pays. The few thrive at the expense of the many. State-formation is merely wishful when government is too weak to prevent such gross abuse. President Stoyanov of Bulgaria spoke for the whole former Soviet bloc when he recently declared that corruption "is the major failure of the democratic process."

Deprived of the old and reliable apparatus of state terror to implement their purposes, the Communists have had to remake themselves as Socialists and even Social Democrats. Crime? Stolen funds? Fraud? They have no knowledge of such things. Impeccably dressed in double-breasted suits, usually beneficiaries of scholarships in America and therefore fluent in English, they present themselves as well-connected internationalists, practical politicians who can get things done, masters of the media, powerbrokers speeding through the capital in BMWs driven by muscular bodyguards. Under this camouflage, they are the ruthless and disciplined cabal they always were.

Leszek Miller is the socialist leader who looks poised to win elections in two years' time in Poland. He spent the final years of Communism persecuting the democratic movement Solidarity, a minister and a member of the Politburo under the Soviet hit-man General Jaruzelski. Beton, his nickname, means concrete. The present prime minister, Jerzy Buzek, and his government colleagues are the heirs of Solidarity, and if Beton were to oust them, he would only be completing his former Party duties.

Similarly in Hungary, the likeliest Socialist contender in elections due in 2002 is Miklos Nemeth. Smooth and swift-talking, he has spent recent years making fruitful contacts in London at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but before that he had risen to leadership through the Young Communists. In Romania, long ago, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu handpicked General Ion Iliescu as his successor. Ceausescu was the one and only Communist ruler to be executed, in a spasm of vengeance. Iliescu duly took over, then lost power to the democrats, but seems certain to regain it as Romania slides into general distress.

The tenth anniversary of the collapse of Communism was specially melancholic in East Germany. A bitter little joke was making the rounds: "Everything the Communists told us about Communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true." Few East Germans found a good word to say for their new status. Ostalgie is a wordplay combining the idea of nostalgia with Ost (German for East), and in great spouts of this emotion former East Germans like to claim that job security, health, education, and much else really had been better under Communism. Some $900 billion has so far been spent on them by West Germans, and it is not enough. The Communists have regrouped into the Party of Democratic Socialism. By far the largest party in East Germany, with 100,000 members, it has obtained more than a fifth of the vote in Saxony and Thuringia, and it is a potential member of a coalition government in Berlin. Typically, the PDS leader, Gregor Gysi, has evolved from being a privileged member of the old nomenklatura into everyone's rather hip and wisecracking friend.

A mistaken foreign policy is completing the moral and political confusion of these former Soviet satellites. From 1989, the democrats had to be sure that they were truly rid of the Russians. This was an objective that needed no justification. In the hopes of guaranteed Western protection, they have unanimously, even desperately, applied for membership in the European Union and NATO. With the possible exceptions of Romania and Bulgaria, they are getting their way, and the last stages should occur at about the same time that the Communists prepare to win the coming elections. NATO will hardly welcome a member with an elected Communist government, even if notionally reconstructed-but let that pass. Once in the EU, countries whose populations longed for decades to be free from one foreign-run federation will merely have submitted to another. The restrictions on independence may be self-imposed this time, but restrictions they undoubtedly will prove to be. And could that really have been the purpose of struggling so hard for national identity and statehood?

This paradox is a real gift to the Communists. In the EU, they are operating in a familiar structure, where favors and lobbying garner fortunes, and command has priority over consent. One of the wonders of the day is to observe Soviet-trained apparatchiks, professionals in the corridors of power, at embassies and conferences, in more cynical divvyings-up in the Round Table style with congenial counterparts from Brussels, and supported by America too. In the manner George Orwell so famously depicted in Animal Farm, one bureaucracy is marrying another, in a cozy monopoly of power and wealth that has little to do with democracy. The Communists lost a battle in 1989, but they have successfully transferred the war to another plane-and they may yet win it.