Eastern Europe: The Third Communism

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gradual mutation that may ultimately change its form. Even among the non-Communist masses, few "captive citizens" are so distraught that they want to defect: of half a million Eastern Europeans who traveled in the West last year, only one in a hundred failed to come home. "I'm not a party member," said a young Hungarian recently. He was standing on the Fisherman's Bastion of hilly Buda, looking out across the seven bridges that soar over the Danube to Pest, where "Parliament" is adorned with a huge red star. "But I am most definitely a Hungarian. I love this country; I love its naiveté and its vigor. The system has not irreparably damaged these qualities, and as long as it refrains from doing so I will live here. I cannot live in the West. All systems have failings, but similarly all systems evolve." A waiter in a Rumanian coffeehouse, surrounded by the belching chimneys of Ploesti, speaking in crude but understandable Italian, put it more simply. "Yes, it will be lovely one day. We were a very backward country, and now look what we have. And it is Rumanian, not Russian or Western. It is Rumanian."

* Uttered in 1914, when Rumania's Prince Carol refused to marry a Romanov daughter. No great wit himself, Nicholas borrowed the epigram from Otto von Bismarck.