Word: communisme
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Eastern Europe remains a risky, often maddening place to do business. One of the first tasks of Western companies is to retrain local labor forces that grew slack under communism and lack disciplined work habits. Simple bookkeeping can be a major problem: East European companies have been taught to follow central plans, and know little about Western-style profit-and-loss statements. At the same time, Eastern Europe's infrastructure is woefully inadequate for modern industry and commerce. A recent study by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank estimated that the region would require 274,000 miles of new roads...
While most East Europeans welcome the torrent of Western investment, they often have mixed feelings about the changes that it brings. Some fear that the capitalist invasion may replace communism with a new and more subtle form of economic domination. Says Richard Gordon, a director of the Massachusetts- based Polish American Business Education Foundation: "There are still doubts in many people's minds about selling off parts of their national patrimony to foreigners...
...getting to such Bruegelesque views, whether in Poland or Romania or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, can be a challenge. If communism created an attraction by making time stand still, it also left the region without an adequate tourism infrastructure. Country inns and small hotels are not unknown: in one little town in eastern Hungary, for instance, a hostelry offers a clean bed (toilet and bathroom down the corridor) for $6 a night. In the dining room, a Gypsy violinist helps compensate for the heavy meal. But such places are rare...
Unless, that is, the visitors are young or adventurous. Qualifying on either of those counts -- better still on both -- opens up other possibilities. Staying in private homes is now not only legal -- it was prohibited under communism for ideological reasons -- but also encouraged by the state. ROOM TO LET signs are springing up all over Hungary; private landlords sometimes even + approach foreigners at Budapest railway stations, offering rooms. While prices are generally low in Western terms -- from $10 to $30 a night -- standards vary. A visitor may end up in a turn-of-the-century house with high ceilings...
...Memorial in Warsaw, the Old Town Square in Prague and the neo-Gothic parliament building on the banks of the Danube in Budapest, the cities have some surprising things to offer. Even the region's grim industrial agglomerations are worth seeing, if only to judge for yourself how badly communism failed...