Post-communism
period of economic transmission in post-communist states
Post-communism is the period of political and economic transformation or transition in post-Soviet states and other formerly communist states located in Central Europe, Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies. From 1989 until 1992, communist party governance collapsed in most communist party-governed states. After severe hardships, communist parties retained control in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. SFR Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, which plunged the country into a long complex series of wars between ethnic groups and nation-states. Soviet-oriented communist movements collapsed in countries where they were not in control.
Politics
The policies of most communist parties in both the Eastern and Western Blocs had been governed by the example of the Soviet Union. In most countries in the Eastern Bloc, following the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of communist-led governments that marked the end of the Cold War, the communist parties split in two factions: a reformist social democratic party and a new less reformist-oriented communist party. The newly created social democratic parties were generally larger and more powerful than the remaining communist parties—only in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Tajikistan did the communist parties remain a significant force.
In the Western Bloc, many of the self-styled communist parties reacted by changing their policies to a social democratic and democratic socialist course. In countries such as Japan, Italy and reunited Germany, post-communism is marked by the increased influence of their existing social democrats.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q969021. The Library of Congress control number is sh91003938. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Post-communism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.