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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

I find this extremely true. Hungary has a neutral/good memory of Soviet times.

Despite oppression, people felt more safe, because there were clear guidelines to life in general. If you adhered to them, you had a boring and regulated life. Everyone had a job (it was mandatory to work), and most people could afford to own a holiday home in the countryside.

The "state" provided a life where you played along the rules and with minimum input you reaped maximum rewards. That's difficult to duplicate in a capitalistic scenario.

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As someone from the UK with a Hungarian partner - you pretty much nailed it.

The older members of her family look back with fondness on that period in time which sounds strange to someone from a western country but I can sort of understand it - some of it is just the nostalgia of youth but some of it is I think caused because the freedom to make choices comes with the requirement to live with your choices.

When the state keeps the safety rail up in where you live, where you work and how you spend your leisure time you have a clear path towards how to live your life - which is a comfortable if stifled existence.

That said, the younger diaspora have a different way of looking at the world - many left to move to other EU countries because they wanted to avoid that nostalgia.

That said I truly love visiting Hungary, the history, art and food is amazing, the people are warm and friendly and the countryside is staggeringly beautiful (as is the Balaton).

It's certainly on my list of places to suggest people visit.

Hungary was also way more liberal, than east germany for example, which practiced Stalinism till the very end (but still we have people nostalgic for that).

Wasn't there a bloody rebellion against the Soviets in 1956 in Hungary?

The nostalgia is for the period after 1956. While the USSR and Warsaw Pact helpers succeeded in putting down the Hungarian uprising, they had to manage the discontent in the country so that it wouldn’t happen again. (Moreover, the Hungarian uprising was fed by frustration at specifically the Stalinist regime forced on Hungary, but Stalin’s death was eventually followed by a thaw even in the USSR.)

So, for the remaining thirty years of socialism, Hungarians found it easier to travel abroad, publish literature or present art and music that was previously forbidden, and there was even some limited private enterprise. In rankings of which countries had it best in the Eastern Bloc, Hungary is usually at or near the top.

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