Remembering his father's murder during the Nazi occupation, the young Kolakowski accepted communism as an alternative both to Nazi militarism and to the failures of Poland's pre-war system of semi-authoritarian capitalism.

ECONOMIST: Leszek Kolakowski

The favoured political model, authoritarian state capitalism, has not worked and the efforts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to exploit hydrocarbons have been slowed by corruption.

ECONOMIST: Central Asia's five stans

The invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible, and often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism.

ECONOMIST: The visible hand