i am so thrilled to have him here to kick off this conference. @@@@@@@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @) words. distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the invitation to come to washington and kato once again and for giving me the opportunity to address today's

important gathering which is taking place at the moment of the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism. i do believe that 1989 deserves to be commemorated and deserves to be commemorated not only in the countries of central and eastern europe, but all over the world. thank you for organizing this conference. i have been in this room before and i am always very pleased to be here. it is not by chance that this conference is organized by the cato institute. on the side of the alaska, cato has been one of the most important institutions devoted

to depending and promoting individual liberty, limited government and free markets. i learned a lot from qaeda. when communism collapsed and we were finally free to travel to the western world, we found many friends here. i remember my first meeting and many of their collaborators not long after the revolution. as i mentioned, i was pleased that kato published a book, the rebirth of liberty more than 10 years ago as a side remark, i saw that the book is sold their. it is irrelevant. i discovered that it sold

elsewhere. it really demonstrates that. it is good to know. it may be surprising for some of you, but the fall of communism remains to be a rather controversial topic, at least in our part of the world. there are several competing interpretations. both the fall of communism and of the following radical restructuring of our society. we have to live with the fact that there does not exist, any generally accepted theory on the subject. another point is that i am personally not happy with many of the interpretations i see a round. most of them are based on a misleading and very biased story

a lot. it does not take into account the global picture and does not use the available instruments, concepts and series. historically, it exaggerated the role of individuals, especially those individuals who are presenting history and see themselves as the real heroes of that era. that is something that bothers me any serious debate much start with the dominant features of the communist system and of the reasons that have led to rapid termination. since the very beginning, i have been advocating the rather a popular concept that communism

was not defeated. that is simply melted down. looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, i do not feel i have to change this position of mine. communism was already weak, a soft, old, and emptied of all meaning to exist much longer. those who did not see it in that way, at that time, proved to be wrong. some people are not happy with this interpretation because it greatly diminishes the role in this process. the transformation from communism to a free society was

a very fragile mixture of an imperfect and fragmentary rule an institution there were organized, and planned outcomes of the activities. this is something that we have to insist on and only on this basis, should we have the process. some of us are satisfied with what had it -- what happened. we knew that it would have been a tragic mistake.

many of our contemporaries wanted that. it can be constructed. the can be left to themselves. the same is true about the local markets. i'm convinced this is fully in the spirit of the cato institute. in the first years after the fall of communism, we had to go through the highly posadas' dispute between those who wanted more constructivism and less spontaneity and those who knew that this ambition was nothing else but an attack to

legitimize a slightly reformed [unintelligible] this was misinterpreted and mislabeled as a dispute between the schools. this was the case not only in the post-communist countries, but in the u.s. as well. these terms have been almost fully discredited, but i am repeatedly frustrated when i see them reemerging again and again. i hope they will not be thrown to the floor, here today. some people still do not know how complicated and how unpleasant and painful the

transformation process really was for many of our fellow citizens. it was not a painless laboratory exercise in applied economics. it was very real and the citizens of our country's had to bear the costs. mentioneing collaboration, we were not allowed to do so. i did not intend to do so either. we already live in a highly democratic political setting. there were not rulers of vidicon.