Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers Jan. 1 he would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Luckily, psychiatrists have not yet classified “rugged individualism” as a mental illness. But Mamdani’s vision of cozy collectivism is tricky to reconcile with what I saw in Communist Romania in November 1987.

I arrived in Bucharest after taking the Orient Express from Budapest, Hungary. In pre-Communist times, that train epitomized capitalist decadence. In the Soviet era, the lavish cuisine was replaced by far more attentive service — more or less. Armed guards in Transylvania repeatedly searched my cabin and then locked me inside it so my Western ideas would not contaminate any devout Commies.

The train arrived in Bucharest four or five hours behind schedule. Let’s hope Mamdani is not relying on Romanian refugee planners to fulfill his promise to “make buses fast and free.”

When I checked into the only hotel permitted to offer rooms to Westerners, I was practically tackled by a beefy prostitute who was likely also a government spy. She kept nudging me to “go upstairs.” She cooed gutturally: “Why are you here in Bucharest?”

“I’m a tourist,” I said. Actually, I was working as a journalist, but I hadn’t disclosed that on my visa application. OK, technically, I was in Romania........

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