FOR most of the 1980s, avant-garde artist Laszlo Rajk deployed his creative talents towards irritating Hungary’s communist regime. From 1981-83, he ran a samizdat (underground literature) bookshop out of his apartment. “There was an open house on Tuesday evenings, announced on Radio Free Europe, which meant everybody knew,” he says. In 1985, Mr Rajk tested the boundaries of totalitarianism by running for parliament. Both bookshop and campaign were shut down, but by the time communism collapsed in 1989, Mr Rajk had become a key leader of the democratic opposition—as was a young man named Viktor Orban. “Back then, he was the same kind of selfish asshole he is nowadays,” Mr Rajk says. Many Hungarians would disagree with that assessment of their prime minister: Mr Orban's Fidesz party is by far the most popular in the country, though its support has slipped lately. But Mr Rajk, now 65, is not the only former Soviet-bloc dissident to be disappointed in his country's current direction. Interviews over the past several months with a few of those who helped lead the 1989 revolutions in central and eastern Europe (such as Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution", pictured above) illustrate how, a quarter-century later, unity and enthusiasm have given way to divisions and scepticism.

Mr Rajk, whose father, a minister in Hungary's first communist government, was executed on charges of "Titoism" in an infamous 1949 show trial, has had perhaps the most unusual journey. A successful architect in Budapest, he also designs sets for Hollywood films, most recently "The Martian", a sci-fi epic (directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon) which is scheduled to begin shooting in Hungary this month. Like many other members of Hungary's intelligentsia, he agrees with European Union critiques of Mr Orban's increasingly authoritarian methods of governance: politicising the judiciary, writing self-serving election rules, and taxing or restricting independent media and foreign-backed civic organisations. Indeed, he sees the seeds of these policies in the very tactics he and Mr Orban employed during their days as dissidents, when they used manipulation of the media to kick-start a revolution. “It’s the same recipe, take over the institutions and make new rules,” Mr Rajk says.

For other veterans of 1989, adjusting to the ambiguity of democratic society has been difficult; they are more comfortable with the certainties of opposition. The current regime in Russia provides a familiar enemy. “Putin has to fail and he will,” says Lech Walesa, the former shipyard electrician who, as head of the Solidarity trade union, drove the revolution that made Poland the first Soviet-bloc country to stage a largely free election in 1989. Mr Walesa served as president from 1990-95, but proved unable to adapt to the complexities of multi-party politics and policy-making, and faded into irrelevance. He seems more at home in the nationalist politics of resistance to Mr Putin's intervention in Ukraine. “It will cost him a lot of blood, but he will lose. We can use our solidarity to put him out of the situation for the sake of Ukraine, for Russia and its people.”

Actor Milan Knazko, who was the face of the Slovak half of Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution", is closer to Mr Rajk's perspective. The average salary in Slovakia has risen 500% in real terms since 1989, but perceptions of corruption are among the highest in Europe (according to Transparency International), and progress on metrics of democracy since joining the EU in 2004 has been intermittent. “We do have democratic institutions, but they do not work, since those who run them are not democrats,” Mr Knazko says. “Economically, change takes a dozen or so years, but mentally we are all still affected [by communism's legacy].” Mr Knazko himself is now running for mayor of Bratislava, and if opinion polls are correct is primed to win the elections, which fall on November 15th—two days before the 25th anniversary of the police crackdown on students that sparked Czechoslovakia's revolution.

For Mr Knazko, the anniversary brings back times that seem simpler and ethically clearer, when he and his old friend from the theatre world, Vaclav Havel, could plot a movement that would bring down a regime. “On the night of November 18th I met Havel, and we spoke about what to do,” Mr Knazko recalls. They made plans for a demonstration in early December, hoping to draw 40,000 people. Within days, there were 750,000 protestors in Prague's Letna Park. “I realised I was on a train that would be hard to get off.”

Mr Havel was one of the few members of the dissident generation who made the transition to a democratic era without losing either his idealism or his relevance. He served as president for the better part of 13 years, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the independent Czech Republic. Mr Rajk calls him “another type”: “He was poetic, but could also be very hard, that is what made it possible.” Yet before his death in December 2011, Mr Havel too expressed distaste for what he saw as the direction of contemporary Czech society. Things had not gone the way he had hoped; cowboy capitalism, corruption and blunt-force politics had tainted his vision of the country's future. As in much of post-communist Europe, while the democratic revolution had succeeded, the evolution of a democratic society was still in doubt.

“We all believed that democratic institutions would guarantee democracy. It’s not true,” says Mr Rajk. “We still haven’t built up a kind of resistance or immune system for fighting back lies.”