The staff in this department had secretly become capitalists through reading the works of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman and other defenders of the free market. It is not going to be easy for citizens in the new republics to rebuild their decimated economies or to learn the ways of entrepreneurial capitalism after decades of suppression. But they have three things going for them that give them great hope. First, they have their churches back - churches that were, in fact, highly instrumental in the downfall of communist rule, by their teaching and moral leadership. Third, in large measure, they have their freedom back.
Freedom is what makes everything work.
Something else I've noticed that hasn't been mentioned anywhere is how direct and blunt the new leaders in Eastern Europe and Russia are. And they tell us incredible things. All this time, they say, they were cheated. Communism was a hoax. It wasted their hard labor.