BUDAPEST LETTER
453
their means. Food and transport, restaurants, books, theaters, cinemas
and nightlife cost little by Western standards. Adult education, in which
an unbelievable number of people take part, is free, and for degrees
they get paid study leaves that can be as much as seventy-two days a
'Year. It
is
on the industrial goods that they lose out-on a pair of
shoes that may take a week to earn, on shirts and TV sets and furni–
ture and cars. And though rents are low, new accommodation is so
scarce that unless they buy something at the mortgages quoted (and
this is supposing they're lucky enough
to
h:ave found something to
buy), they're reduced to sharing a three-room flat with as many
people or families, and at times to living in disused shops and cellars
in the city.
Yet to make a straight comparison between this and life in the
West, especially the U.S., would be unfair and stupid. The country,
which has been ravaged by wars and foreign occupation for centuries,
is much poorer in resources and much less developed, and as tech–
nology breeds technology, it is even likely to be falling further behind
the States, together with the rest of Europe.
Neither is there any doubt that the average Hungarian today
lives better than he did before the war. The reason there's a shortage
of meat, for instance, is, apart from agricultural mismanagement, that
many more people want it. Not least the peasantry itself, whose
~r
in the thirties---'a third of the nation
then~ived
almost entirely
on bread, onions, cucumbers and bean and cabbage soups, even at
harvest time, and saw no meat from one wedding to the next.
Thus the relevant question to ask is whether the country would
have achieved more through democracy and free enterprise than it
has under a one-party State economy. And this is what the regime
itself is asking now, though not quite in this form.
The one-party system is to remain. Of this there's not a question
voiced anywhere in public. Right-wingers themselves seem almost un–
concerned about the subject. Part ,of the reason being that there's
no real tradition of democracy in the country-in 1910 only 8 per cent
of the people were franchised to vote and under Horthy (1919-1945)
elections were practically arranged by the administration, whose pro–
motees were popularly known as candidates of "the Government Party."
On the other hand, though there's much more discussion, and people
seem much better informed politically and culturally about the West
than they were in the fifties, the paradox
is
that Communists no
longer double-think or even claim, as they used to, that there's true
democracy in Hungary. They obviously feel that the one-party system
