That possible country exists now. To travel through the satellite states of the former Soviet Union is to travel through a huge, variously stunted and overgrown garden, one that for decades was fed a slow poison. Some plantings are dead, some barely survived, some are blooming wildly. Belgrade's convulsive good-bye to communism in the mid-1990s, in the form of ultra-nationalistic mass murder, did not occur in Vilnius or Sofia or East Berlin, each of which is still living out its own response to the absence of the old order.

Prague is in the elite troika of the most thoroughly "recovered" post-Communist capitals. Warsaw and Budapest are the other two. Their admission to NATO in 1999 and to the European Union in 2004 is the gold standard to which the other capitals—save Moscow—aspire. But even in that company, Prague holds pride of place because Havel was such an enduring and principled politician. He is that rarest of revolutionaries—one who can run a country—and he had the gravitas to become its moral compass as it rocked and banged through the early, rough phases of post-totalitarian life. But Havel shepherded what was left of the country into the European Union and into NATO, stabilized the financial sector, and coaxed his people into political involvement.

Today, Prague—dark, burnished, quirky, medieval—has become a twenty-first-century player within the European Union, a partner, not a wannabe. The city's social, academic, and artistic gardens are in full riot, and everybody knows it: The number of tourists overnighting in the Czech Republic in 2005—some 6.4 million—represented a six percent jump over the 2004 number. The number of tourists in 2004 was a thirty percent increase over 2003. Ruzynx airport has been given a new $365 million terminal to handle up to twenty million passengers a year, a capacity that the Czech airport and tourism authorities expect to reach in a dozen years. That's an 850 percent jump over passenger traffic in 1993.

Many aspects of such a social and economic flowering are fun—restaurants, fashion, and new hotels, for instance—but the Slavs inhabit a patchwork, glorious, and tragic part of the world. Whatever Western outsiders think they see when they look at it—whether it is St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt, the little cafés along Warsaw's Nowy Świat, or the ultrachic Sjöouml; restaurants nestled in among the boutiques along Prague's Papřížská Street—what they are seeing is a commercial veneer that is at most seventeen years old.

Some of it will last, and some of it will be gone the next time you walk down a particular street. One great reason to go to Prague now—a good reason to visit any emerging Central or Eastern European capital, in fact—is to witness this struggle toward a viable future, toward some kind of dependable reality. Prague encourages us to ask of it the most challenging post-totalitarian question: What have you chosen to do with your freedom?