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The Long Road to Democracy and Free Markets

August 8, 1990 Christopher Manion

The central theme of the “Peaceful Road to Democracy” conference, sponsored in Prague by Resistance International and the American Foreign Policy Council, addressed the difficult task of transition: How do we build a free-market economy and a democratic society “from under the rubble” (in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase)?  “Mr. Gorbachev is turning the Soviet Union into one giant Beirut,” said Vladimir Bukovsky in his opening remarks at the conference.  “State structures remain the greatest obstacle to human freedom, and…socialism cannot be restructured or reformed: it can only be eliminated.”