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Quality is also a hit-or-miss proposition. Rumanian "Carpati" cigarettes are so thinly packed that a smoker must slit the pack down the side in order to avoid spilling tobacco from a vertically lifted cigarette. The well-turned-out lady of Budapest buys her clothes at the shop of Klára Rothschild on winding Váci Utca, but equally handsome working-class wives do their shopping at the Great Market Hall—a vast, unheated, barnlike building where sausages and onions dangle from the beams, dung-smeared chicken eggs sell for a dollar a dozen, and delectable fish called fogas goggle stupidly from their tanks at the customers, then disappear, still wriggling, into net shopping bags.
Tourists rarely see either the intellectual ferment or the burgeoning industry of the East—the steam-wreathed polyethylene plant at Rumanian Ploesti; the scorching debate over Camus at Budapest's Hungaria Restaurant; the clanking Skoda automobile factory outside Prague; the student jazz joint in Warsaw where frugging and free verse give the lie to socialist realism. This is also the domain of the Western businessman, of the 500 Western firms which are engaged in cooperative ventures worth $800 million in Eastern Europe, and which will do many times that amount of business in the years ahead.
A Modicum of Courage. Eastern Europe's breakaway from Russian rule began in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Soviet 20th Party Congress in his seven-hour "secret speech." By cracking the icon of invincibility that had held Russia in thrall, Khrushchev also unlocked—unwittingly—the forces of Eastern European nationalism. Says one Washington observer: "Nationalism is the strongest force in Eastern Europe today, stronger than ideology, stronger than the Communist parties themselves." Columbia's Kremlinologist Zbigniew Brzezinski puts it flatly: "East Europe is where the dream of Communist internationalism lies buried."
Khrushchev's speech was coincidental with popular anti-Communist risings in Poland and Hungary. Nations that had been captured and coerced by the Red Army after World War II suddenly found a modicum of courage—though Khrushchev's tanks in Budapest and America's unwillingness to aid the Hungarian revolt with action made caution mandatory. But Moscow finally realized that it could no longer hope to retain loyalties in Eastern Europe by mere dictation. Russian forces began withdrawing from the satellites; by 1958, the 55,000 Red Army troops that had arrived in Rumania 14 years earlier under General Rodion Malinovsky were finally pulled out. By 1961, when the ideological debate between Moscow and Peking had escalated to raucous polemics, Rumania and the rest of Eastern Europe were ready to move. Rumania took the first step by stubbornly refusing to play the role assigned to it in COMECON—the Red Common Market. Moscow wanted Rumania to continue its traditional function of gas station and breadbasket to the Communist world. Rumania refused.
Dacia Revisited. Rumania has always been Eastern Europe's odd man out. Cupped impregnably within the broad U of the Carpathians, it long ago became a repository for recalcitrance and resistance to outside influence. Its original inhabitants, the Daci, fought as archers from horseback against the