Eastern European

The outcome of Sunday's election in Albania, where the rural majority gave the Communist Party victory in a multiparty election, was one more bizarre episode in a bizarre year of mass demonstrations and mass flights from that country.It demonstrates again a fundamental problem throughout the Eastern bloc. The region grievously lacks a civic culture, with popular understanding of how people cooperate as well as compete to make a free society work.Parliamentary traditions exist, notably in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but the generations which have matured during the past 45 years lacked any direct acquaintance with how a free society worked until the liberating events leading up to 1989.

Brussels, Belgium--At the height of the Cold War, people used to hear: "The Russians are coming!" In the postwar era, things haven't changed much. The Russians and their former Warsaw Pact allies may still be coming. But this time it's with suitcases rather than tanks.Unrest in the Soviet Union and its six former Eastern European satellites -- Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- could send millions of economic refugees rushing across the former front lines of the Cold War in search of food, shelter and jobs.