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Already, walls in the city center that last month were scrawled with FRONT=DEMOCRACY bear such slogans as STALINISM, NAZISM, FRONT-ISM. Aside from tainting virtually all possible national leaders with participation in his totalitarian machine, Ceausescu ravaged Rumania's broader political culture. "Everyone hates communism as he hates the devil," says Sorin Botez, the executive secretary of the newly re-established Liberal Party. "But little by little Ceausescu's people dripped lies into the population, destroying democratic thinking."
In that climate, freedom has unleashed a hurricane of wild rumors and fear. Its eye is the brasserie of the Hotel Intercontinental, where prostitutes and black-market currency dealers whispering "Change, change" have been augmented by political rabble rousers. In one hour I learn: that the Securitate has bugged the offices of the National Front; that the Front has bugged the Peasant Party; that the television is controlled by the Soviets; that the Liberals give a bottle of French champagne and a $150 bill to anyone who signs on. "All these rumors! All these parties! Who can tell what to believe and who to vote for?" says Dana, 55, a housewife sipping a midmorning beer. "We still don't know if we can trust our own neighbors."
Ceausescu's legacy of grass-roots corruption and account fiddling augurs ill for a regulated economy. With the arrival of more than 1,000 journalists to cover the revolution and now hundreds of West European businessmen to cut deals, the main result so far appears to be an immense black-market boom. Waiters at the major hotels sell pilfered hotel caviar for $20 a tin. Prostitutes' rates have soared from $100 to $200, and Rumanians who used to bribe salesclerks with half a kilo of coveted coffee beans to get their hands on a TV now have to produce hard currency.
Ironically, that boom, coupled with Rumanians' freedom to travel to the West, may help lever Rumania's consumer economy out of its reliance on the barter of goods and services in return for Kent cigarettes, long the only real tender in the country. Explains Silviu, 21, a tour guide: "Now we can travel, and for that we need dollars, not Kents." If only Rumania's more vexing ills had such simple solutions.