The Curtain Rises on a New Hungary - personal account of a visit to Hungary after the fall of communism

At last free of the iron grip of communism, the years of democracy are illuminated in Hungary, a country once again free to make its own mistakes and enjoy its successes.

Thirty years ago, I spent much of 1969 and 1970 in Hungary, most of it in Budapest, the capital city. I was a graduate student doing research and I came to love the place and particularly the people, who were surprised and pleased to find a non-Magyar who was bothering to learn their language.

I didn't get back again until the spring of 2000. The Iron Curtain by now was gone, fallen in 1989 when Hungarians opened their border to Austria. So, too, was the Communist dictatorship of Janos Kadar that had controlled the country during my student days in Hungary.

There were many other changes. For the last 10 years, Hungary has moved in an entirely new direction. Political parties left and right compete in free elections. Newspapers no longer are state-owned. Hungarian currency is convertible. More than 70 percent of the nation's businesses have been privatized and, remarkable for a country whose economic connection to the Soviet Union was very close for more than four decades, in the country's free economy only 4 percent of Hungary's business today is tied to Russia.

Last year, Hungary became a member of NATO. Once part of the Warsaw bloc, communist-ruled and a puppet of Moscow, the country now is part of the West, a fact noted by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on May 1 when she declared, "A few short years ago, Hungary could be seen as a student in the school of democracy. Today it has graduated with high honors to become a valued partner for the United States and NATO and a source of security and economic stability throughout central Europe."

Not surprisingly, the contrast between the Hungary I knew 30 years ago and the country I visited this spring was enormous, the difference between a country trying to make do within the narrow framework provided by a government constrained by ideology (and fear of incurring Soviet displeasure) and one that's now free and independent to forge its own policies, make its own mistakes and enjoy its own successes.

Not everything I saw in the new Hungary was good, but most was, and it certainly was a far more exciting place than the country in which I lived three decades ago, simply because far more is happening. Three decades ago, cynical friends told me that the communist government continually boasted that important changes were taking place, but that nothing ever changed.

Not so now. Change has come to Hungary -- and what I heard from Hungarians, who for the most part spoke with approval and often with eyes glowing with pride, was how fast change occurs now and how nothing stays the same. Among Hungarian intellectuals, one hears the observation (and complaint) that change is so rapid that it's impossible to get an overview of what's happening in the country.

The number of cars and trucks that crowd the streets of Budapest is the most immediately visible change. There were fewer of them 30 years ago. Gabor Molnar, who drove me into town from Ferihegy Airport, said 2 million people are living in Budapest these days, and half have cars. That was an exaggeration, of course, but one that underlined the enormous parking problem the capital city now has (double parking is commonplace, and triple parking not unusual). Gone are the communist bureaucracy's restrictions on automobiles, my favorite of which was a law prohibiting sales of cars less than 3 years old to anyone but the state, which bought them at outrageously low rates (when they then, no doubt, became the "property" of a party hack).

The result was that automobiles more than 3 years old were worth a great deal more money than, say, cars 6 months or even a week old. Gone, too, are restrictions that allowed only high-ranking party officials to make right turns at certain spots in the city, especially near party and government headquarters.

If cars are everywhere, cellular phones are nearly so. Not so long ago there was a scarcity of phone lines, and phones famously didn't work well. If you wanted to have one installed in your home, you signed up -- and waited, often for 10 years or more. In the early 1980s, a member of parliament (all members at that time were Communists) proposed that applications for telephone installation be made inheritable, so children eventually might have what their parents didn't. It was a funny thought, but what it illustrated above all was that by that time even communists were capable of making public fun of the system the communist government had spawned.

Consumer goods proliferate. Thirty years ago, they didn't. You could buy good things if you had dollars or access to one of the shops that sold only to ranking party members. I recall needing a bath towel, but when I went to what was advertised as Budapest's best-stocked department store, I found nothing but table after table stacked with threadbare washcloths -- all beige. Now Hungarians can buy luxury cars in downtown Budapest at Jaguar Hungary, just off Nador Square, and almost anything else they want -- and in great variety. On Vaci Street, the city's traditional commercial avenue, there are classy boutiques, unseen 30 years ago before capitalism returned.