ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explain the diverse responses of rural Hungarians and the possible effects these responses will have on the future of rural Hungarian life. Compared to Poland and the rest of East Europe, socialism in Hungary was lived differently. Perhaps the transformation of Hungary and Eastern Europe at large is not so much a dash to the riches of agriculture in a market economy but rather its troubled waters, which might be closer than expected. If the change of regime was to have any credibility at all, the new government had to minimally reject the principles by which agriculture had operated in socialism. In socialist Poland, for example, pre-war class relations, traditional peasant ethos and even feudal social remnants were continually reproduced. To compensate for material and non-material damages in the socialist anti-peasant agenda, family and community life in villages was adjusted or even, in some respects, distorted in various ways.
