The West - naive, provincial and parochial - firmly believed that the rot was confined to the upper echelons of communist and socialist societies. Beneath the festering elites - the theory went - there are wholesome masses waiting to be liberated from the shackles of corruption, cronyism, double-talk and manipulation. Given half a decent chance, these good people will revert to mature capitalism, replete with functioning institutions. It was up to the West to provide these long deprived people with this eagerly awaited chance. What the West failed to realize was that communism was a collaborative effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the rulers and the ruled, a mutual undertaking and an all-pervasive pathology. It was not confined to certain socio-economic strata, nor was it the imposed-from-above product of a rapacious nomenclature. It was a wink and nod social contract, a co-ordinated robbery, and an orgy of degeneration, decadence and corruption attended by all the citizenry to varying degrees. It was a decades long incestuous relationship between all the social and economic players. To believe that all this can be erased virtually overnight was worse than naive - it was idiotic. Perhaps what fooled the West was the appearance of law and order. Most communist countries inherited an infrastructure of laws and institutions from their historical predecessors. Consider the Czech Republic, East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and even Russia. These countries had courts and police and media and banks long prior to the calamitous onset of communism. What the latter did - ingeniously - was to preserve the ossified skeletons of these institutions while draining them from any real power. Decisions were made elsewhere, clandestinely, the outcome of brutal internecine power struggles. But they were legitimised by rubber stamp institutions: "parliaments", "judicial system", "police", "banks", and the "media". The West knew that these institutions were dysfunctional - but not to which breathtaking extent. It assumed that nothing more than technical assistance was needed in order to breathe life into the institutional infrastructure. It assumed that market forces, egged on by a class of new and increasingly wealthy shareholders, will force these institutions to shape up and begin to cater to the needs of their constituencies. Above all, it assumed that the will to have better and functioning institutions was there - and that the only thing missing was the knowledge.