The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  You mean free elections, I asked, incredulous.

  “Absolutely.”

  How long would this take—for real democracy?

  “Oh,” he said breezily. “One to three years.”

  And if the communists lose?

  He didn’t even hesitate. “We step down.”

  At this, I laughed. Across Eastern Europe, so many “reformers” were spouting such talk of “openness” and “change,” echoing their patron in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, chanting his mantra of glasnost and perestroika. But if Gorbachev seemed to mean it, the leaders of his Warsaw Pact satellite nations did not. These Hungarians appeared more sincere than most but this, I felt, was going too far.

  Kalman Kulcsar frowned at my evident skepticism. “You don’t believe me, Mr. Meyer?” He leaned over in his leather swivel chair and slid open a drawer of his carved wooden desk, pulled out a small booklet and waved it over his head. “What do you think this is?” It was a copy of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. “Mark my words,” the minister said, emphasizing each word with unsettling force. “Within nine months, this will be ours.”

  He was wrong. It would be all of ten months. Still, it was a dramatic moment. Here in Budapest, unnoticed by the outside world, communists had become… anticommunists. My god, I thought. This is for real. And that was when I discovered that something I’d always taken as a figure of speech was, in fact, a physical phenomenon. Quite literally, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  By night, it would be easy to mistake the Hungarian parliament for the symbol of democracy it was meant to be. Bright with lights reflecting on the waters of the Danube, it’s an unabashed imitation of the British Houses of Parliament, except for one significant detail. By design, it’s precisely one meter longer and one meter wider than its inspiration. The architectural allusion was apt in late 1988. It was at once an ironic symbol of Hungary’s historic aspirations and a reminder of its lesser attainments.

  Not for long, though.

  I had come to Budapest to investigate reports that after four decades under communism the first tender shoots of democracy were pushing up along the Danube. The city was in the grip of a December blizzard. But beneath the deep freeze, a political spring was indeed germinating.

  Just a month before, in November, a small group of communist reformers had come to power. Kalman Kulcsar was but one of a number of Hungarian leaders who were saying (and doing) the most uncommunist things. Within the last few months, they had opened a stock market—a temple to the antipodal capitalist faith. They passed new laws encouraging private enterprise, slashed subsidies for state-owned enterprises, abandoned communist-style price-fixing in favor of a free market. The cost of food, fuel and housing would henceforth be determined by supply and demand, they told the people, well aware of how painful that transition could be. Hello, Keynes. Goodbye, Marx?

  It quickly became apparent that this revolution—for that was what it had already become—went far beyond the marketplace. Six months earlier, just before his first state visit to the United States in July, the thuggish chief of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, a former printing engineer named Karoly Grosz, sat down with Newsweek. Contemptuously he dismissed all talk of democracy and what, within opposition circles, was being discussed as the potential for “multiparty rule.” Anything but the classic dictatorship of the proletariat, meaning him and his Socialist Party henchmen, he said, was “an historic impossibility.” He declined even hypothetically to discuss sharing power or offering a role in government to opposing political parties. Yet that was precisely what Hungary’s new government, appointed and duly installed by Grosz and his communists, was working to do.

  Eager to stamp their more human face on the old order, they had just taken a step that no other East European regime dared—to create a real opposition to their own rule. This came in the form of a new law, enacted soon after the reformers took office, allowing the country’s first independent political parties to organize. They could not officially recognize these groups as bona fide “parties,” at least not yet. That would violate the ironclad principle of Marxist Leninism: that there could be only one party—the socialist or communist party—whose destiny it was to guide the nation in all important matters. So they played games with names. They called them “clubs,” “movements” or “alternative organizations.” At a time when signs of a thawing in the Cold War were yet faint, this was a remarkable, even radical development.

  Suddenly, the entire country was in ferment. Budapest’s cafés buzzed with the D-word, democracy. You could virtually see the internal rift emerging—the young reformers on one side, the old guard on the other, each girding for a struggle that would unfold with astonishing speed. In September, a populist group called the Hungarian Democratic Forum (which within the year would go on to form Hungary’s first postcommunist government) set itself up as a “democratic spiritual-political movement.” Other groups soon followed, among them the League of Young Democrats (a student association better known as Fidesz) and the Alliance for Free Democrats, an organization of trade unions. All would go on, in future years, to dominate Hungary’s political scene. Meanwhile, censorship was eased. A robustly free press began to emerge. Underground samizdat publications came into the open. The few dissidents who deserved the name either went mainstream by joining one of the parties or were ignored, both by people in the street and the authorities who once persecuted them. Dissent against what, you might ask, or whom?

  How do you dissent, really, from someone like Miklos Nemeth, the man who put so much of this in motion. He was no Lech Walesa, Poland’s archetypal charismatic leader, the hero of Solidarity, who in 1980 became famous in America and the world for leaping over the fence in the Gdansk shipyard and brandishing a fist in the face of Soviet authorities. No, Nemeth was the quiet man, a technocrat, a trained economist who spent a year at Harvard Business School and played tennis with the U.S. ambassador. He was only forty years old when the communist party appointed him prime minister on November 24, 1988. Sober-suited and bankerly, his mild manner masked inner toughness. His was a life-or-death situation. Hungary’s economy was a shambles. The country’s finances were in crisis. Everything was falling apart. His job was to step in and save the day—and his own career. To do so, he knew that mere “reform” would not be enough. He would have to dismantle the entire communist system.

  He did not say as much when I first met him, less than a month after taking office. Perhaps he was too mindful of the dangers and all that could go wrong. Sitting at a long, dark oak conference table in his offices in the Gothic-style parliament building, flanked by half a dozen aides, he did not look like a man who would change the world. In our three-hour meeting, he dabbed perspiration from his brow with a white handkerchief and lapsed often into the opaque, excessively careful language of the high communist official. There was nothing communist about his message, however. When he said something that he especially wanted to be heard, he delivered it crisply with a quick, direct look that meant Listen up.

  These clubs, these new political groups, I asked, could they eventually become bona fide American- or European-style political parties? “That is one of our greatest ambitions,” Nemeth replied.

  For as long as it had existed, the communist party had insisted on its so-called “leading role” in society—meaning unchallenged power. Would he be prepared to give it up, as Kalman Kulcsar claimed?

  “In two years I could imagine a situation where the head of government would not necessarily be a member of the Politburo,” Nemeth said, carefully but with unmistakable meaning.

  This talk about creating capitalism on the Danube. Economists say that would mean putting one hundred thousand people out of work, perhaps three times as many. Wouldn’t that be a big blow in a “workers’ paradise” such as Hungary?

  Nemeth offered a tight smile. “We are going to live through some painful years, yes. But in five years I would hope that Hungary will have become a market economy,
with room for entrepreneurs and where people can have more hope for the future.”

  Moscow might have something to say about that, I noted. Would a setback for Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia overturn the applecart of reforms here in Hungary? Might the Russians even intervene, as in 1956?

  “Gorbachev has taken the lid off a boiling pot,” replied the young prime minister. “No doubt the steam is painful, but change is irreversible.”

  Thanks to Radio Free Europe, that quote would echo throughout the Soviet bloc. It also earned Nemeth a stern dressing-down from his titular boss, Karoly Grosz. But if Nemeth in his modest way provoked Grosz’s ire, imagine the emotions inspired by another, brasher and even more outspoken member of his new government.

  Imre Pozsgay was Nemeth’s alter ego and most important ally, as outgoing as Nemeth was restrained. Popularly known as “Hungary’s Gorbachev,” he had spent much of the past decade in the political wilderness, a sort of in-house dissident with a gift for threading the minefield between those who sought radical reform and those who would go slower. When he was on the outs, Pozsgay taught political sociology at the University of Budapest and hosted a popular TV show on foreign affairs. When he was in, he was the perfect official interlocutor for Hungary’s intelligentsia, able to segue flawlessly from Marx and Engels to Milton Friedman. In late 1988, Pozsgay was very much in—a minister of state, a senior member of the all-powerful ruling Politburo and a beacon for anyone within the regime who wanted change.

  Of all the Hungarians I met that December, he was the most boldly free-speaking, often breathtakingly so. “Communism does not work,” he told me bluntly on our first meeting, as soon as we had sat down. “It has come to the end of its days. It is an obstacle to progress in all fields—political, social and economic. We must start again, from zero.” Rumpled and roly-poly, with the deceptively distracted air of a university professor, he had an instinct for the jugular—in his case, history.

  In Hungary, as everywhere, the communists had rewritten it. In the winter of 1988 and early 1989, the country was haunted by the ghost of 1956. That’s when Hungarian freedom fighters rose up against their Stalinist masters in a revolt that transfixed the world. For weeks they battled in the streets of Budapest against Soviet tanks dispatched by Moscow to crush them. An estimated twenty-five hundred people died and two hundred thousand fled into exile. Waves of arrests followed, and public discussion of the events was banned for the next three decades. Then along came Imre Pozsgay. For months, he had used the considerable authority of his office to push for a review of the official record. The party line was that the revolt had been a foreign conspiracy, plotted and provoked by Western counterrevolutionary traitors. The premier of the time, Imre Nagy, had been arrested and executed in Moscow, along with others of his ilk.

  With single-minded obsession, Pozsgay pushed for a revision of this twisted account. “We must come to terms with our history,” he told me, relating how he was setting up a commission to study the matter. Every Hungarian knew the truth, he said. The tension was between truth and power. Was 1956 a counterrevolution, as Hungary’s communist party would have it—that is, was it something to be crushed? Or was it what Pozsgay described as a “popular uprising”? The first implies justification. The second connotes treason against the people, a debt yet to be paid. J’accuse, in other words.

  As Pozsgay saw it, Hungary’s communist rulers were guilty of mass murder. They had unlawfully suppressed a popular nationalist rebellion against the tyranny of foreign occupation and Soviet dictatorship. Therefore they had no right to continued rule. Pozsgay said all this so calmly, so dispassionately, that it was possible to imagine that he was discussing some academic matter, a point of obscure historical interpretation. In fact, it was a threat, a virtual declaration of war: Pozsgay against his party, the vision of an independent Hungary versus the vassal state of Moscow. His insistence on the historical truth challenged, to its face, the current regime’s very right to exist.

  Bidding good-bye, he suggested I buy a copy of a new magazine that had recently begun to publish. It had an interview with him concerning 1956. It’s important, he said, but added that was probably not why I would like it. Every newsstand should have it… unless it was sold out.

  He said all this with a cryptic smile, belying his deadly purpose, and I soon learned why. The magazine was called Reform, fittingly, an “independent democratic newsmagazine.” In a country where most publications were still gray, text-heavy homages to communist party doctrine and the doings of its nomenklatura elite, Reform was an eye-catcher. This particular issue featured a coy pictorial, “The Best Breasts of Budapest.” There they were, in unbrassiered Technicolor splendor, a declaration of Hungarian liberty. Socialism with a human face, indeed. But guess what? “It’s not the breasts that sell,” the magazine’s publisher insisted. “It’s the politics.” Along with hip offerings on pop culture and shopping sprees to Vienna, the issue also included, as Pozsgay promised, a startlingly provocative article on 1956, denouncing the Soviet invasion and pointing a finger directly at the ruling communist party for colluding in it.

  How remarkable: in Hungary, at that moment, political truth could outsell sex.

  Poland usually gets credit for leading Eastern Europe’s revolutions. Solidarity, Lech Walesa, the communist regime’s declaration of martial law in 1981—the saga of 1989 would not have happened without Poland’s decades-long push for change. Yet in the winter of late 1988, Hungary emerged as the chief catalyst for change in the East.

  Looking back, two decades later, three facts stand out. First, outside the bloc few people noticed how fast and fundamentally Hungary was changing, or asked what that might portend, both for Hungary and (more important) for the future of communism itself. Perhaps the country was simply too small, too marginal, to count in the grand scheme of the Cold War. More likely, the rest of the world was locked in its own way of seeing. To most of us, the Iron Curtain had stood for so long, obdurate and forbidding, that it had become part of the geopolitical landscape, an accepted feature of Cold War life.

  Second, these changes did not happen the way we expected. Policy types tended to think in terms of the Polish “model,” with its code words for resistance and suppression. Change, if and when, was supposed to come as a sustained “push” from “below.” It would be organized by a popularly based “opposition” such as Solidarity. That’s what was familiar to us in the West. Communism was about oppression, keeping the masses down. A few tragic heroes resisted, asserting their human right to speak out and live freely against the overwhelming power of the state. We honored them as “dissidents”—Andrei Sakharov in Russia, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Yet the reality in Budapest, at least, was very different. Hungary was remarkable for the absence of a major “push” from below. You could count its classic dissidents on one hand. Its impetus, instead, was a strong “pull” from “above” and “within.” The puller-in-chief, if you will, was Nemeth, allied closely with Pozsgay, Kulcsar and a very few others.

  These people did not emerge from nowhere. Through the 1980s, a cadre of “reform socialists” had been working their way up through the communist party and government bureaucracy. They were young—mostly in their thirties and forties—and tended to be well-educated, highly trained professionals in law, economics and the social sciences. They also shared a strong commitment to change. Though all were communist party members in good standing, they agreed that the system no longer worked. State mismanagement was slowly destroying the famous “goulash” economy that, a decade or so ago, had been the envy of the East bloc. Political life had atrophied. Progress seemed paralyzed. Not only did the party’s old guard resist needed reforms, so did ordinary people. The question for this new generation of leaders was how to break the impasse. By 1984, before Gorbachev had arrived on the scene or anyone had heard of glasnost and perestroika, this group of internal critics had come to virtually dominate public debate over Hungary’s future.

  And what a debate it w
as. Hemmed in by resistance to change, they leaned increasingly toward drastic solutions. The famous “big bangs” of an abrupt embrace of capitalism—enacted in Poland and other places after 1989—were first bruited in Hungary by these regime reformers. They talked about creating a new political culture, used phrases such as deep democracy or socialist pluralism, and posed challenging questions: how to create genuine participatory government, such that ordinary people had a say and (therefore) a stake in changes to come. Why should parliament only meet eight days a year? they asked. Why shouldn’t Hungary have free elections, supervised by international observers? They spoke about restoring the rule of law, rather than the fiat of the communist party. Above all, they speculated about how to make government both effective and accountable. As they saw it, a regime’s legitimacy should rest on performance, how well it did its job. An incompetent government that couldn’t deliver on its promises—that flouted the implicit social contract between a state and its people, that impoverished its citizens—should be tossed out. The only issue was how.

  Nemeth and his government emerged from this dynamic. Indeed, he and his allies were in its vanguard. Yet it’s important to recognize a remarkable feature about Hungary’s reform debate: not only was it largely internal, without much involvement from more conventional dissidents, but it was marked by an extraordinary unanimity between the younger liberals and more old-guard conservatives. All saw the need for change. Only after Nemeth became prime minister did the two sides irreconcilably part ways, and we shall soon see why.

  A third point. At the time, it was easy to be awed by Hungary’s daring, particularly for a young correspondent new to the region. I didn’t learn until years later how hard the work was, or how dangerous. That summer, before Nemeth and his corps took power, sharp disagreements had broken out within the party about where Hungary was going, and how. If some in the regime wanted sweeping change, like Nemeth and Pozsgay, others wanted it confined to economics, keeping a tight check on politics—the Chinese model, if you will. Chief among them was party boss Karoly Grosz. Around the time I met Nemeth, in late November, the general secretary delivered a speech to the communist rank and file warning of the prospect of “White terror.” The new prime minister had scarcely been in office a week, yet conservatives were already alarmed. From their point of view, these young Turks were moving too far, too fast. They were out of control. They were breaking all the rules. An end to censorship, letting newspapers report whatever they wanted? The talk of free markets and an end to state industry? The very idea that elections could be held and the results honored—that the communist party could be thrust from power? It was unthinkable, a recipe for social disorder. They must be stopped. We must resist “counterrevolutionary enemies,” Grosz told the cheering faithful. “Anarchy and chaos” threatened. The next day, another Politburo hard-liner, Janos Berecz, told a conference of coal miners that Hungary was in the grip of a “revolutionary crisis.”