In_Focus_2020_03_A Regime Change(d)_Sample by Antall József Tudásközpont

I N F O C US

2020. 3rd Issue ISSN 2677-111X

Global context

National narratives

Commentaries and assessments

A Regime Change(d), 1987â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1993

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Welcoming Words

2 Introduction 6 Turning Points 8 The Long Preparation for Day X— In Conversation with Péter Antall, Director of The Antall József Knowledge Centre 12 Interview with Gergely Gulyás, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office 32 Interview with Frank Spengler, the Resident Representative of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Hungary 35

3 A Wide-Angle Landscape The Third Wave—The End of Communism and Anti-communism in the 1980s The End of Communism and the Political Transformation of the Visegrad Four (V4) Countries Portugal: The Beginning of the 20th Century’s Last Wave of Democratisation An Important Point in the Third Wave of Global Democratisation: Athens, 1974 The Croatian and Slovenian Way of Independence and Regime Change Between Regime Change and Democratic Consolidation: Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

38 40

150 156

6 József Antall The Goals and Steps of József Antall’s Foreign Policy József Antall’s Christian Democratic Political Thoughts Expectations about the Rule of Law around the Regime Change—Formal and Material Constitutional State and Questions Preceding the Law

164 166 173

184

7 Antall József Knowledge Centre

190

8 Authors Guest of Authors Authors of AJKC

Narratives 84 Regime Change and Revolution 86 Regime Change or Revolution? 93 Well, You Should Have Directed It—Hungarian Film and the Regime Change 98 A Conversation with Károly Grósz in Gödöllő 104

192 192 194

9 References of Pictures and Used Data

TABLE OF CONTENTS

126 128 131 144

A Change of Direction Perestroika and Regime Change in Hungary Constitutionality and Legal Transition The Newborn Multiparty System Freedom—Freiheit—Szabadság: The Effect of the Regime Change on Everyday Life The Short History of the Economic Regime Change

196

10 Next Issue

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WELCOMING WORDS

Dear Readers, Thirty years have passed since the countries of Central and Eastern Europe could ﬁnally turn their backs on the communist regimes that had been forced on them after World War II and separated them from the rest of Europe with an Iron Curtain. The fall of the regime and the return of democracy after forty years of oppression surprised many in Hungary, since it did not come after years of brutally disbanded strikes and workers’ demonstrations, as in Poland, or after overwhelming mass movements, as in Czechoslovakia. Behind the everyday mask of János Kádár’s communist state “with a human face,” most people did not perceive the signs showing the decline of the system, among them the probing negotiations between the opposition groups that were turning into new parties and the state party’s reformers who were busy trying to cling to some power. The high point of these negotiations, as it seems now in the public eye, was the emergence of the National Round Table. It was in its talks that the whole country got to know József Antall, one of the delegates from the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the ﬁrst prime minister of Hungary after the regime.

Maybe because of the high expectations of society, judgement on the first years has been ambiguous: most people probably trusted and believed that their newly independent Central European states were only a stone’s throw from the West. Despite the occasional bitter experience, thirty years on, we now have enough of a historical distance to claim that the overall account of the changes has been positive. To commemorate the anniversary, this year we put together the Hungarian issue of Fókuszban and also one of the English issues of In Focus to evaluate the changes and to highlight the most important lessons they had for the present and the future. While our publication would like to help those who witnessed the changes to remember and those who were not there to understand them, we would also like to honour József Antall and his work. Péter Dobrowiecki Head of Research József Antall Knowledge Centre

WELCOMING WORDS

THE LONG PREPARATION FOR DAY X IN CONVERSATION WITH PÉTER ANTALL, DIRECTOR OF THE ANTALL JÓZSEF KNOWLEDGE CENTRE Kálmán Soós, spring 2020, Budapest

Let us travel back in time to 1989 for a single image. Soon before becoming the ﬁrst freely elected prime minister of Hungary, József Antall is having a debate with the communists in the Parliament’s famous Hunters’ Hall during the National Round Table while his younger son—an aspiring photojournalist—keeps snapping pictures of him with his trusty Nikon camera for the images to be published in a news magazine run by the state party the next day. Things like this happened quite often during the period of the regime change. The entirety of Hungary’s regime change may be condensed into József Antall’s fateful personal tragedy, including the forty years leading up to it and the three decades that came after, consolidating his legacy. 12

INTRODUCTION

He spent most of his life waiting for a proper election just like the one after World War II, an election where free citizens could vote freely. When the time finally came, he could even formulate the rules of the election, but, once in office, he found a ransacked treasury and an enormous amount of debt. What is more, medical science ultimately failed to save his life despite the decades he involuntarily spent with researching its history instead of pursuing his true calling to politics—a fatal outcome partly due to Antall’s decision to place serving his country rather than getting proper medical treatment. At 56, József Antall’s younger son, Péter Antall, is now director of the Knowledge Centre named after his father. This interview is a rare opportunity to examine the regime change through the stories and thoughts of a young man born into the Antall family of politicians. You grew up in a family of politicians despite the fact that your father was barred from politics in those years. How did you connect to a world focussing primarily on the fatherland and on serving one’s nation? When did you first feel that the atmosphere in your home was different from other homes? Politics was a permanent topic in the Antall family. I often say there are two things coded right into our genes: cancer and politics. My grandparents—all four of them—died of cancer, just like my father. I was very little when I first noticed my folks all regularly watching the news on TV, but I could not figure out why it was so

interesting to them. There were eleven of us at the time living in a central flat at Ferenciek’s Square. The Vietnam War was a constant topic on the news at the time and the repeated Hungarian phrase for “fighting is going on near Saigon” really stuck in my head. I kept asking what fighting meant, what Saigon stood for, and where Vietnam was. I also have another early and rather mysterious memory concerning my grandfather.1 I was told he had been a minister, which I knew meant something important. He also had Polish people visiting him a lot, to whom he talked quite excitedly sometimes—I never understood what they were doing in our home. Then a Polish TV crew showed up one day to film in our flat. I wanted to find out what might have made my grandfather so interesting to them. He was a gloomy man sitting in an armchair reading a lot and teaching languages. They said they would tell me when I got a little older. Of course, they could not explain to a six-year-old that he had been Government Commissioner for Refugees. At home, the family was constantly berating the socialist system, which I thought quite funny for a while. I was already going to school when we moved to Sas-hegy around 1971–1972. A classmate of mine once exclaimed, “How cute comrade Kádár was!”, while I was quite used to him being called an “old idiot” and a “bastard” at home. So which one was he? It was not easy. At first, they did not want to admit me to the pioneer movement as a young drummer because of my bad grades. I felt left out and separated from my peers, but, ultimately, I, too, became a pioneer. This kind of double speech at home and at school was a general experience for a lot of children during socialism. Questions were mostly unanswered. These seemingly obscure and cautious adult conversations must have been more common in the Antall family. Your father was banned from teaching in secondary schools back in 1959, which pains his former students who are still alive. As a true teacher, when did he explain this political duality to you?

At home, the radio was always switched to Radio Free Europe,2 the BBC,3 or the Voice of America.4 Only my mother listened to Hungarian stations. In those days, Radio Free Europe played an essential part in spreading information about the events of the world, which we tend to forget today. The ﬁrst thing that really shocked us was the outbreak of the strikes in Poland. I have a very vivid memory of a family vacation at Lake Balaton, which we spent listening to news from Gdańsk and Warsaw on Radio Free Europe instead of taking a dip in the lake. My father asked us not to speak at school about what we heard on Radio Free Europe. By that time, I had become a student at Szilágyi Erzsébet Secondary School, and sometimes there was a policeman in the classroom chatting with the kids, asking us what we listened to. Of course, we did not say anything. The policeman then spoke of hostile, agitating Westerners and of political news items interrupting the music programmes on Radio Free Europe. A classmate of mine stood up and said no, the news came on every full hour, with the music starting ten minutes later... Be careful, said my father, and do not fall into the trap of such provocateurs. Once in 1981, a classmate of mine left a flower at the Petőfi Statue with her boyfriend, a student at the Budapest University of Technology. They were immediately taken away. On the 25th anniversary of the Revolution of 1956, the city was simply swarming with detectives. They even attempted to rope the boy in by having him sign some documents—it was the Youth Protection Agency, the one that was supposed to protect the youth from itself. They went after my classmate quite aggressively, as well. Once we graduated from secondary school, our headmistress admitted to us that she had to beg the Agency to leave her alone, as she had thoughts of suicide. She had tried it before, finished school in 1984, but did commit suicide later. Today we know that, at the time of the introduction of martial law in Poland (1981), the state security service placed your father INTRODUCTION

under strict surveillance. Did he talk to you about that? As teenagers, my brother and I used to take it with irony when he told us about being followed or even pointed people out in the street. We said it must have been some sort of delusion of grandeur or paranoia. After 1990, we, of course, found out that he was absolutely right. Actually, he even understated the situation. He told us a lot of stories about 1956, but, as a teenager, I used to doubt them. I thought he injected too much importance into his own role in the revolution. I still feel the same way. In 1989, Tivadar Pátray5 said they had been sitting at my grandfather’s place in October when Jóska’s ofﬁcious son had walked in. Because my grandfather served as a minister of the Independent Smallholders’ Party, my father had the opportunity to sit and talk with his peers like Béla Kovács6 and others, compared to whom he was obviously much better educated. My father was a young teacher at that time, which is how they regarded him. As a history teacher, he was a natural master of creating family legends, too, always with a speciﬁc moral. In politics, creating your own legend and mythology is also quite important. My grandfather often tried to calm my father down and talk him out of being so radical. He was very cautious, since he had experienced Gestapo’s7 prisons. He once told my father that, as a Government Commissioner, he had been absolutely sure about the Gestapo spying on him through somebody. It turned out to be his secretary, so my grandfather always made sure to leave something on his desk he could report about. In fact, my father was very cautious about this matter. We were living a modest life and he only started earning more in the mid-1970s, when he became deputy director at the Museum. We owe a lot to Emil Schultheisz,8 a friend who was minister of health back then. He warned us at the time of the Polish strikes9 that we were being surveilled, something he heard from Szilveszter Harangozó.10 He asked us not to give in to provocation and to watch a Bud Spencer movie on 15 March instead of celebrating the national 14

INTRODUCTION

HE TOLD US TO BE ALWAYS PREPARING FOR DAY X, FOR WHEN IT FINALLY COMES, THE SYSTEM WILL CHANGE AND WE SHOULD BE READY FOR HIS ROLE IN IT. holiday. Had we given in to provocation, he would have had to suffer the retribution. He did not want to become easy to manipulate, and he did not want anybody to get him through his children. He explained all this to us when I was 15-16 years old. When we later travelled to the West, we read the works of Hungarian writers in emigration, but we did not try to smuggle them back to Hungary because of this. In 1980, one of my father’s friends was immediately retired from the university for the attempt to bring copies of the Nemzetőr11 magazine into the country. When did you ﬁrst encounter samizdat literature? We could get them at home. My father did not keep contact with the so-called democratic opposition,12 with Demszky13 and his peers. He asked us not to frequent such circles either. My older brother once visited the infamous Rajk Boutique14 in Galamb Street, but I never went there. My father said if we were interested in anything, Orwell or others, even Hungarians, he could get them all via his contacts. He did not want to get in personal contact with a group whose members—as Maoists15—had criticized the Kádár regime from the left. An antiquities trader visited my father in the museum quite often, and he used to buy something from this man sometimes just to help him, but, at the same

time, he suspected that the man was a spy. He later turned out to be a III/III16 operative, who became a Member of Parliament of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) after 1990. For the most of his life, József Antall had been preparing for his time on the political stage, but, mostly, he had only been allowed to work in the museum and within academic circles. My father was in a rather rotten mood during the 1980s. He feared he was running out of time and that he would never have the opportunity to be an active politician. He was in his sixties. He was always saying that working at the museum was only his hobby. From morning to dusk, he was all about politics. During these years, he occupied himself by determining who he would have chosen for his government in the place of the German chancellor. A couple of years later, he actually met Kohl,17 and they discussed German politics. The chancellor was surprised that Antall knew so much about German domestic politics and its main “players.” To be honest, we all considered this fantasy politics to be a compensation for my father, which, in fact, it was. He told us to be always preparing for day X, for when it finally comes, the system will change and we should be ready for his role in it. He was rather sceptical about Gorbachev’s reforms, as well; he said the military would overthrow him like it did to Khruschev. Interestingly, János Kádár had the same opinion. Do you remember an event or a moment when you felt day X was approaching? In the early 1980s, a new Soviet General Secretary was buried each year, and we had the impression—definitely at home, but in my secondary school, class as well—that nothing was working anymore. As to how long this crumbling phase or morass would last, nobody had any idea. I was 18 years old when I first felt I would live to see the day when Hungary would not be a communist country any more. My father cautiously started to dip his toe into politics. The museum served as a meeting place, many foreigners visited him, as well, and he was

discovered by the embassies. He received a lot of invitations. He worked less and less at the museum. He thought the Soviet Union would be brought down by a huge Muslim influx which would be impossible to control. In other words, he thought the communist experiment would fail due to demographic reasons. At school, you obviously did not receive a Christian or national education. What did you pick up from home? My father’s way of giving us a patriotic education was interesting. He took us to Upper Hungary (Felvidék), but not to Transylvania. He had a firm character, and he was afraid of getting emotional if he ever visited Transylvania—he did not want us to see that. But, later, he did encourage me to go over there to take photos, and he was glad I went quite often. Our family was rather on the patriotic than on the Christian side in a religious sense. My grandfather went to church and so did my mother in most of the cases, as well. My older brother had been an altar boy, but I had not. My father did not force it, he asked me if I wanted to go. I said no, and he accepted it. Getting to know the world of the Bible would have been interesting and useful, too, but I rather spent my Sunday mornings playing football. That was how I felt at that age. I have never really fitted into my family well, my critics always said I was a vagabond. Whatever that may mean, there was some truth in it. With a great deal of effort, I finally took my school-leaving exam, but I was not accepted to the faculty of humanities. I could not complete the grammar test as quickly as I should have. This kind of dysgraphia had been with me throughout my school years, although, most of the time, it was only considered naughtiness. My teacher complained to my father that I could not write properly, to which he simply replied, “No problem, he will dictate then.” I had to go and work: I worked at a library, I had a job as a bellboy at a hotel for a short while, and, then, I ended up at the National Museum, where I worked at excavations during the summer and in file storage during the winter. Later, I became a photojournalist. INTRODUCTION

This profession falls really far from the family’s civic, highly intellectual atmosphere. Was it exactly this difference that attracted you to it? It falls quite far from the world of lawyers, that is true. In the early days, my father once asked me, “So are they really paying you for just running around with a camera bag?” Although I was interested in politics, I failed to get into the faculty of humanities. The prospect of being a photojournalist just came along naturally. I was going over to Transylvania a lot to take pictures. At home, we were constantly reading magazines, ÉS,18 Új Tükör,19 Valóság,20 Tiszatáj,21 and Mozgó Világ.22 Afterwards, we had conversations about them, which my father called our rural reading club. Once, I took my photos shot in Transylvania to show to Éva Keleti.23 Without a single question, she looked at the photos, said they were good and they would be published six weeks later. Without any formal training, I became a photojournalist then and there. I have never had any regrets about this. By the time the general atmosphere of the regime change hit in 1987, I was already a photographer. Wherever there was something happening in those years, I was there. During the restructuring period of the social system, both you and your father found yourselves in the thick of politics. Photojournalists are always in a strange situation as they are never fully inside but never fully outside either. When I majored in photo-reportage, Ferenc Rédei, the editor of the photo section at Népszabadság, said that one’s attitude should be to be present at the event he or she was photographing, but, at the same time, one also needed to view it as an outsider. I had been taking photos for five years at that point, but I needed an official qualification. Rédei said my report on the reunification of Germany was the best he had seen in the Hungarian press. Then, at my exam, he told me I would not make a living out of photography after my father’s term as prime minister ended. He turned out to be right: the press cut ties with me but not due to 16

INTRODUCTION

professional reasons. I had a meeting with Péter Németh in 1997 in order to get some work. At the time, he was the head of the Posta Bank Média Holding. During our conversation, I offered to show him a few photos, but he cut me off very quickly, “There is no need to do that. Everyone knows you are a good photographer, you know, too, that it is not about that.” At the Hungarian Telegraphic Office (MTI), it was an essential rule for photographers to capture the essence of any given event in one picture. This approach has its clichés. I ended up there due to one of my father’s former students, Géza Szebellédy, who, in those days, was working as chief photo editor at MTI. At first, they took me on as a contributor, then I got to be a contracted photographer. I was not very happy with the job at the Telegraphic Office, although I learnt so much about the craft itself— I would have preferred to work for a newspaper. Ferenc Németh, deputy editor-in-chief at Élet és Tudomány mentioned this new magazine called Reform24 to me in the autumn of 1988. They were looking for a young photographer who did not mind working hard all day. I was 24, so I said I would be happy to do that. I did not even have a salary in the first couple of weeks—I was just sitting around in the editorial office waiting for a journalist to say, “Come along now, Péter.” I then ran with them, and I worked. Those days were quite pleasant for the press and especially for the photographers. Today we might say they were having a good life . . . The press was very progressive and respected around the time of the regime change. The media thought it was actually dictating the regime change when, in reality, it was only one of the major players. I think the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) was the main engine of change in Central Europe. The true extent of the economic and political crisis of the communist bloc was seen most clearly by the KGB. It is no wonder we talk very little today about Andropov,25 the man responsible for initiating certain reforms and for recruiting new people from the Komsomol26—this is how

Péter Antall in action as a photographer during a Hungarian Formula 1 race

Gorbachev got into the picture.27 They had the most comprehensive information about the crisis of the Soviet empire. There were three main power groups within the Soviet Union: the KGB, the party, and the military. At certain times, one of them was more powerful than the other two. It is no wonder that only the KGB survived the dissolution of the Soviet Union in an institutional sense, although not in its full glory. As an empire, it had and still has access to worldwide, global intelligence. During my MTI days, I once went to the Jurta Theatre28 and took a bunch of photos at the event, which were never got published. I later learnt they went straight to counterintelligence, of course, not just mine but everybody’s. Department III/III even recruited once from among the photographers—my colleagues told me about the cutting-edge technology they were offering; however, they never approached me. They obviously knew who I was. Reform was an innovative magazine where editor-in-chief Péter Tőke let people get on with their job. He also had a good eye for news items. They did not know my father at all until the round

table talks, then they realised who I was. Tőke and his circle bet on the reform communists, not expecting the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) to do so well at all. They had already wanted to ﬁre me from the magazine during the summer, but the journalists saved me. In the autumn, I decided to leave on my own accord before the unfair photo editor could sack me. At that point, Tőke got attacked, “How could you let Antall’s son go? His father is going to be prime minister pretty soon,” the critics said. I ran into Péter after the election; he offered to take me back as a full-time colleague. I said, “No thanks, maybe in four years’ time . . .” Four years later, I did go back, but Tőke was not there any more. I got hired by Ferenc L. Gazsó,29 who was a fair employer throughout our entire working relationship. I stayed until István Veres, a “businessman” with a rather shady past, purchased Reform. It was clear neither of us wanted to work with the other. You were a successful photographer bringing home well-received portfolios from your international assignments, as well. Did INTRODUCTION

that change your father’s judgement of your profession at all? Taking photos at the Opposition Round Table was a weird feeling for me: I saw my father sitting there at the table, then, later, the same evening, he was sitting at home by the kitchen table. I think by that time he felt I had found my calling. During my father’s term as prime minister, I compiled a photo album of Egypt. When I came home, I told him about the exhibition I was about to have in the Buda Castle, hoping he would come to the opening. “I am not going to come,” he replied, “it should be about you.” Then I asked whether he would really skip his own son’s exhibition. “It is supposed to be your day. If I am there, people will focus on me instead of you. I will come out and see it early on Saturday,” he said. Eventually, he did see my exhibition with great interest. I was 29 at that time, and my father did not want to steal the show from me. Our African expedition with László Almásy30 was a similar situation... His book series was basically my bible. After we had returned, I was petriﬁed to ﬁnd out during a family breakfast how much my father knew about Almásy. During his illness, he could no longer sleep without sleeping pills. Sometimes even the pills could not help; on those nights, he lay awake and read Almásy’s book called The Unknown Sahara. He was quite interested in his son’s work... He once came into my room after walking down the corridor in the house on Művész Street, which was packed with the items I had brought back from Egypt (water bowls, granges, various swords and daggers from nomadic tribes, etc.). “You really made your childhood dream come true with this Sahara expedition,” he told me. “That is about right,” I replied. Apparently, he used to take some of my Transylvanian photos to cabinet meetings sometimes to show them to people, which I only found out about after his death. He never mentioned it to me. It is well known that your father and mostly his entire government failed to form a real 18

INTRODUCTION

connection with the press. They were not very successful in creating their own media outlets either. Did you have any “domestic” conflicts about this at home? My father liked to overmysticise his early writings. I remember him once telling me excitedly about an old paper of his finally being published (he had written it at 16). “If I was an opposition journalist, I would write we will probably soon see Mr. Prime Minister’s old colouring book as well,” I warned him. He accused me of attacking him, but I explained I was only thinking with a journalist’s brain, “It is time to understand the media is not your friend. There is no way you could win them over with anything.” They once organised a meeting with liberal leftist journalists. They listened to his explications with open mouths then they smeared him big time in their articles. Kurír,31 for example, wrote that Antall was in such a bad state that he could not even concentrate any more. I tried to tell him that, once these journalists set foot in the pagoda (meaning the Hungarian Radio) or their editorial offices, they simply have to write and speak against him to avoid the accusation that they had joined his ranks. Maybe his experiences made your father distrustful. During a recess at an MDF assembly, he told someone to be careful with liberal leftist reporters; he said those people can flip a single lie over twice in one sentence. This is true, and a catchy way of putting it. Has my father written all over it. However, the media war32 is raging on to this day and the adversaries are irreconcilable. During Gyula Horn’s administration, I also went through a rough period. The magazines I worked for started to disappear. I had to move back to my mother’s place. I thought it was time to study. With a scholarship I went to America, after that I started a media and then a political science major at the university. Along came the first Orbán administration; I worked for the Duna TV channel, then for the Ministry of Justice. Ibolya Dávid33 hired me, so I worked at the minister’s cabinet. How different everything was back then

compared to our present days! I told the minister that I needed a laptop, but they were only giving those automatically to deputy undersecretaries and above. “Péter, here is mine, I do not use it anyway,” replied the minister. I thanked her but could not accept; imagine how everybody would have hated me on the corridor if they found out! Later, I bought one for myself. We came up with the idea of party foundations (following the German blueprint) in Zoltán Márki’s office one evening. We thought, if the bill goes through, the MDF’s party foundation could be called the József Antall Foundation.34 This could be a good place to educate the new generation of politicians. We came to this conclusion after one of the main lessons of the first term: the process of political recruitment was not working well in Hungary. In those days, there were news about you having political ambitions, as well. I was loyal to Ibolya Dávid for a long time. She was basically put in charge of the MDF by Péter Boross,35 who found her a talented politician. Back in 2001, Ibolya asked me whether I was truly interested in becoming a member of parliament. I told her I had studied the subject, that I was interested in it, and that I would have been the fourth generation of my family in the Hungarian Parliament. By January, her offer did not stand any more. She claimed László Kövér had told her the surname Antall no longer had any political significance in Hungary. I knew she was lying about that, I even verified it with people who had actually been present at the negotiations between the two parties. All of them confirmed independently that my name had not come up at all. I ran for office in 2005, but, since we could not reach a consensus with Fidesz, I stood down. You cannot start a political career by getting only 6% of the votes. Not because of me personally, but because you cannot afford to play like an amateur with a name like Antall. Due to my personal connections, I could finance my own campaign for the most part. Later, when Lajos Bokros36 came more and more to the spotlight, I no longer wanted anything to do with those people. Szabolcs

Kerék-Bárczy37 came to me later; I told him they had been doing for years the exact opposite of what I think of the world, they had better reap what they had sown. Before that I would have liked MDF to remain an independent party, but by 2005 I would have made a pact with Fidesz. Once they even considered me for the party board. Ibolya Dávid dictated the requirements herself, then she supported others instead of me. But where are they now? They succeeded in relegating MDF to the history books... In your opinion, what led to the breakup of the MDF? I think it was very wrong for the Hungarian Democratic People’s Party (MDNP)38 to leave the MDF. Iván Szabó39 and György Szabad40 once sat at my mother’s kitchen table at lunchtime. I told them they would not reach 5% at the election. They howled me down, then they got 1.5%. My brother took part in the preparations for the split, he even met them a couple of times at the Aranymókus Restaurant. My father was of the opinion that the already existing infrastructure should always be utilised, and it should not be let go for any reason. He was not one of the “founding fathers” of the MDF but basically a newcomer; yet he saw potential to transform it into a modern party. If Iván Szabó and his peers had been good tacticians, they would have let Sándor Lezsák41 make a mistake as the head of the party. In my opinion, he would have made a serious mistake on his own in six months or a year. But Sándor Lezsák was right in thinking that the party had no chance at the upcoming election with the rather weathered members of my father’s government. However, getting rid of the “Antall inﬂuence” within the MDF went even further: my father and his statue was—in a physical and a metaphorical sense, too—taken down to the basement. What I really blame the MDF for is how they neglected the international relationships that my father had secured. I mentioned to Ibolya Dávid on multiple occasions that, while we were in opposition, we had time to build up the party’s infrastructure and to revive its international connections. Sadly, she did not follow up on these. INTRODUCTION

According to Political Capital’s42 advice, the MDF was a “media party,” so it did not need to worry about memberships and about building up the party. The MDF did not have a single national paper, television, or radio. You cannot really make it like that... Fidesz had a reverse trajectory with Gábor Kubatov, upgrading the party to a nationwide organisation. They simply realised that nobody could last very long in politics without decent party infrastructure. Ultimately, Viktor Orbán had the winning force to integrate the Hungarian right wing and mould the voters of the Hungarian Justice and Life party (MIÉP), the MDF, the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP), and the Independent Smallholders’ Party (FKGP) into one, with the exception of hardliner intellectuals in the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ). With this, he basically achieved what my father had been aiming for in 1991. I would like to ask about a couple of names directly. What memories do you have of the relationship between your father and Sándor Lezsák? He was a political opponent, but my father never confronted him. He was the brains behind most anti-Antall rebellions. Naturally, it was pretty rough for my father to deal with internal attacks while trying to save the country from a crisis. On the other hand, it is a natural part of politics to have rivals within a party. But time was not on my father’s side. Sándor never told him, but he actually wanted to be the minister overseeing the secret service (referred to as “secret minister” in colloquial Hungarian); however, my father did not want someone who really desired that position, and he wanted maniacs there even less. He was looking for a pragmatic person for that job. Since it was a very sensitive task, he wanted to give it to a suitable, trustworthy person. There has been a lot thought and said about Péter Boross. Was he similar to a person you have just described? My father wanted to make him a minister from the start, but, due to inner negotiations within the MDF, the job was given to the very civil Balázs 20

INTRODUCTION

Horváth43 instead of him. Balázs was loved by everybody; our last conversation at Balatonfüred ailed me very much. “I am very sick, Péter,” he told me. I never saw him again . . . Whenever an external or internal problem arose, Péter Boross would ring us up: “Boross here. Is your father at home?” He was ready to make decisions, he was determined, and he had a lot of leadership experience at the South Pest Catering Company. That was the place he retired from. He had a serious role in conducting the party’s defeat in 1994. Later, in the MDF, Ibolya Dávid listened to his advice for quite a long time. He was a stranger to party politics, he did not know the MDF, and he evaluated people incorrectly. He was rather annoyed by party politics. Even on the party board he advised self-moderation to other members with a more nervous nature. Sometimes, they would come running out of a session; he would just be standing there with a cigarette and say, “Calm down, son, go back in, it’s not as bad as it looks!” Boross still represents civic, national values. Géza Jeszenszky, on the other hand, is now on a completely different trajectory, although he even got to be Foreign Minister, as he is a relative of yours, of a sort. Yes, he is married to my older cousin. I respect him for a lot of things including his commitment to Atlantic relations and his professional knowledge. He played a very important and difﬁcult part. He had to put up with a lot of unworthy attacks as Foreign Minister,44 and he took a lot of hits for Antall. I cannot really comprehend his current work. Sometimes, I still get angry over politics and rant about the general ignorance of politicians. György Nógrádi once directed my attention to the fact that I was basically living in an information vortex at home, something they did not teach at the university, neither at the media nor at the political science major. In fact, I consider myself more an analyst than a front line person, and the mentioned information vortex comes in handy in leading the Knowledge Centre.

MY FATHER HAD A STRONG BOND TO THE NATION AND HE THOUGHT IT IMPORTANT TO ORIENT HUNGARY TOWARDS THE WEST. HE FAVOURED A FAIR RELATIONSHIP WITH RUSSIA BUT ALSO WANTED TO KEEP THEM AT ARM’S LENGTH. Circling back to the ﬁrst period of the Eastern European transition, which major power’s role would you highlight? I think Reagan,45 Pope John Paul II,46 and Gorbachev had immense merit in all that. Reagan realised that the Soviet Union was no longer able to keep up with the arms race America had forced it into. Gorbachev was not a great politician in my opinion, in many respects reminiscent of Imre Pozsgay47 (always taking a step with the worst timing), but, at least, he did not hinder the process. It is interesting that, in Russia, he is disliked to this day and is considered a traitor for breaking up the Soviet Union. My father had a strong bond to the nation, and he thought it important to orient Hungary towards the West. He favoured a fair relationship with Russia but also wanted to keep them at arm’s length with a stable Ukraine as a buffer state between us. I think the West acted pretty lazily on this last point and, ultimately, failed to keep

Ukraine on its feet. They lacked the political and economic will to do it. The Americans felt too comfortable about winning the Cold War, and so they reacted late. A note on the USA: what they win in the theatre of war, they lose on the political ground. It was the same with Vietnam, too. You have met a lot of politicians. Who had the biggest effect on you? The awakening of my political consciousness was linked to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Lech Wałęsa.48 Sadly, I never met Reagan. John Paul II will always remain the Pope to me. I had the pleasure of meeting the Holy Father on multiple occasions. The time we met him in his personal study in 1994 probably had the most profound effect on me. We were escorted through immense halls by an entourage, the Swiss Guard were standing at the door. We had to wait outside a small room. My mother and my brother went in, and the Pope lauded my father’s achievements. His body was broken, but his spirit was still going strong. The political and social transition in Hungary has been called many things throughout the years. Which description do you ﬁnd the most suitable thirty years after? To refer to the regime change, my father used to use rendszerváltoztatás, a word implying active agency, which differs slightly in meaning from the more commonly used and more neutral rendszerváltás. It was a negotiated revolution with revolutionary changes taking place at a desk peacefully, preventing a very real revolution. The left is still sticking with the word rendszerváltozás, which hints at an organic process. They would prefer the narrative to go like this: once there was a party state, then suddenly— thanks to them—democracy took over. They had seen the signs of a crumbling system back in the mid-1980s. When the Lybians took their money out of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB), the state almost went bankrupt. János Fekete,49 deputy president and, coincidentally, the Hungarian head of the International Monetary Fund, had already stated at a closed meeting in 1984 that we were heading towards huge INTRODUCTION

changes in Hungary, too. This was obvious to the MNB and to the country’s leadership. They took out loans, the secret service created a bunch of Western style companies, so Western capital could come ﬂooding in. When the restrictions on buying foreign currencies were lifted, and Hungarians started going over to Austria to buy things, they were buying their Gorenje fridges and tape decks from shops belonging to the interest group of the Hungarian state security services. Of course, at this point, only the state party’s elite knew about this. They were interested in a peaceful transition. Two billion dollars’ worth of money (50 billion Austrian schillings) were sucked out of the country thanks to the so-called “Gorenje tourism.”50 This in itself is enough to ﬁnish off a country. People liked to say that Antall had been “sent in from the outside,” especially Zoltán Bíró51 and company, who liked to state that he had been sent into MDF by György Aczél.52 In fact, he did not even know Aczél. Schultheisz kept people about to compromise my father away. He did not know much more about the inner dealings than what was leaked, but he had an enormous social network, and he evaluated every single event isolated and in context, as well. We only received Western magazines irregularly, Der Spiegel being a prominent one my father could usually get. It is immensely interesting to read the secret service’s reports on him that support the fact that he evaluated every single international event through his unique personal viewpoint. When he became president of the MDF, things started to change; he got along well with prime minister Miklós Németh.53 He became more well-informed and they started to listen to his opinion before major decisions. I remember when news of resistance within the Workers’ Militia started circulating. Németh called my father at home after 10 p.m., saying that, although the military had occupied the barracks of the Workers’ Militia, there was nothing to worry about. It is important to the story that the Workers’ Militia54 counted 60,000 people and, in fact, possessed tens of thousands of carbines (exactly 68,000). During the Romanian revolution, György Jenei, 22

INTRODUCTION

a colleague of Miklós Németh, came over to the MDF headquarters in Ó Street. Interesting story: at the time of Ceaușescu’s55 capture, I was at home when the phone rang in the morning. It was a woman (I forget her name now), an antique shop owner in Szentendre. She warned us that his son was about to smuggle weapons over to Romania with his friends. She was worried about him and asked whether we could help in any way. He had been a well-known ﬁgure working for the intelligence agency, so we could not decide whether the call was a provocation or real information. Anyway, we forwarded the information to the relevant authority. Did József Antall actually have anything to fear? The situation was not without risk, many things were not decided in advance. The Romanian transition was an armed revolution with truly dangerous situations. I personally experienced some of these with György Csóti56 and Gyula Zacsek57 when we were delivering MDF’s aid to Transylvania after Christmas. We saw some light signals up ahead at night and asked ourselves whether we should stop or not. Csóti ﬁnally stopped—he made the right call, as there were two machine guns staring right at us from near the bridge. It was the military; they wanted us to identify ourselves. In the autumn of 1989, Genscher58 told my father the regime change was going too fast and it should probably be slowed down a bit with regards to Moscow’s potential reaction. In January 1990, Mitterrand59 said the same thing. The Soviets did not want to pull out their troops from Hungary. Seeing the predictions for the election, they swiftly pulled out their non-existent nuclear weapons between the two election rounds. They expected something similar to the Polish results, where the communist party could actually stay in power. Then they saw that Antall did not want to cooperate with the post-communists. When the Németh government left, one of the ministers actually bade farewell to his colleagues by saying they would meet back there in six months. That is how long they thought the Antall government would last. Passing the

budgetary law required a qualified majority, that is why it was necessary to make a pact60 with SZDSZ. I personally do not like the word pact as it was a legitimate agreement between two parties, signed by their respective leaders in order to maintain governability. The six-month prediction actually sounds about right if we think of the taxi drivers’ blockade, which was organised by the so-called “redundant legion” with serious military knowledge. A thing like that could not be pulled off without such experience. SZDSZ simply sat on this wave, hoping it would destabilise the Antall government, forcing a “grand coalition.” But my father did not want to govern with the free democrats. “Putting together a government where the ministers are throwing ink bottles at each other is probably not a good idea,” he once told me. He believed an effective government should come from a similar political background. Do you think there really was a so-called “Rózsadomb plan,” where prominent state party figures agreed in advance on what the regime change could alter and what it could not? That was made up by American far right groups. In hindsight, quite a number of their predictions turned out to be right. Of course, we do not know who was holding the hand of these “arrow cross” people when they wrote such things. We cannot avoid the issue of state security operatives, as it is still a debated subject of the regime change. What stopped your father from completing the lustration? My father’s opinion was that Hungary should regain its independence that was taken from it on 19 March 1944. There should be no excuse left for the Russians to stay. Even the troops pulled out of Hungary were living in barracks and railway carriages with their families, and the Hungarian reparation was calculated into the Russian budget for the upcoming year. A real lustration61 would have left almost no journalists, foreign traders, bankers, and so many other professionals—the list goes on.

Pozsgay once held a lecture about the opening of the Hungarian border. He told the audience what he had told Antall. According to Pozsgay’s interpretation, he was the one encouraging lustration. Then he quoted József Antall, who apparently said the time and place was not suitable for that. Of course, in my humble opinion, after a lustration Pozsgay would not have been allowed to teach at the University of Debrecen. The price for a democratic and peaceful transition was the communist nomenclature bailing itself out into economic life. It was a realistic price but a severe one, as well, from the point of view of the country’s social development. Many cases of corruption could be traced through late secret personnel. Graduates of the MGIMO62 became the biggest “capitalists.” We know that the MGIMO trained intelligence professionals, as well, let us talk now about the question of operatives. I am not avoiding the question of operatives. The contents of the American–Soviet Malta Summit are still not known or were made secret. My father’s theory was—maybe he even knew it to be true—that lawsuits about state party crimes were not to take place according to the agreement. And that the dictatorship in Romania should be brought down rapidly. Do not be naive, the Romanian revolution was a coup. Once in office, my father was well-informed partly thanks to Miklós Németh and partly due to the fact that, as prime minister, the different agencies had no choice but to provide him with whatever data he wanted. He was deeply hurt by learning that—among others—one of his childhood friends had been recruited to report on him. My father took him along to the parliament, and, when his involvement was brought to light, he made sure he faced no existential problems, transferring him to another ministry. He was most hurt by the fact that his friend had not spoken to him about the whole situation. He could have told my father on Margaret Island and come clear of the conspiracy. Instead, he reported very zealously, even asking for extra assignments according to the documentation. INTRODUCTION

He had an intellectual minority complex beside my father, and, for the first time in his life, he felt himself an important person. The security agency was making use of this. Personally, I liked him. He was kind and entertaining. Antall had both moral and practical reasons not to go through with solving the problem of operatives. He summarised the moral reason like this: “When Gyula Horn63 and Zoltán Gál64 can sit opposite to me in the parliament, I am not going to drag beaten-down, tortured, and humiliated people to the pillory. If Gábor Péter,65 head of the State Protection Authority (ÁVH), is left alone to die peacefully in his bed, we should not pester people on the lowest levels of state security. Not if the ones giving the commands and the responsible political figures are left to escape unharmed.” Of course, there were pragmatic reasons too. Antall knew that the thread would ultimately lead back to Moscow and he did not want this to distract him from more important government issues. “Please understand, I either deal with this or I govern,” he said to me once. He chose the latter. On top of all this, due to the funny business around the Smallholders’ fraction, even a flu epidemic would have been enough for the government coalition to lose their majority in the parliament. Various, politically motivated operative lists were compiled by state security partly to just create confusion. The list that my father received from Miklós Németh had been compiled by Lajos Nagy66 and company. Having to figure out what to do with the contributors of the now dissolved Department III/III was a serious dilemma. I personally agree with the model that leaned more towards integrating people into the new system rather than letting them all go. Even with a model like that, many of them ended up in organised crime just like a lot of KGB people after the fall of the Soviet Union. There were a number of organised crime groups with roots in the KGB; just think of Semion Mogilevich, better known in Hungary as Uncle Szeva. A reporter once contacted me about his project to write a book on the KGB’s activities in Hungary. I asked whether he had any children. When he 24

INTRODUCTION

THE ANTALL FAMILY REMAINS ATLANTIST, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT. HUNGARY IS ON THE RIGHT TRACK. DESPITE OUR FREQUENT CRITICISM, OUR EU MEMBERSHIP IS VERY IMPORTANT. THE STABILITY OF THE COUNTRY DEPENDS ON IT. said yes, I advised him to ﬁnd a different topic. He asked me what I meant by that. “You can take it literally,” I replied. You simply cannot write down the truth, but distorting it is not worth it either. Who suggested me to the guy is also an interesting question. It was a guy working for a Ukrainian–Hungarian company smuggling weapons to Asia and Africa with a Hungarian communist party background. The Soviet Union was an empire, 22 million square kilometres, 260 million people. Every post-communist country carries the signs of these years on itself. The Russians have always had their independent information networks. Freedom movements in Hungary could check their wish lists: Hungary became a constitutional country. Culture, education, and travel were liberated. International recognition followed very soon, but the swift success of privatisation was accompanied by a huge spike in unemployment numbers. The life of the majority of the population did

not improve, so they started berating the new era. Then they voted to bring back the past. The Hungarian democratic transition, in my opinion, is a success story and something to be valued. My father did not want to accept the Polish model (providing an automatic quota for the state party with regards to parliamentary seats), instead, he wanted to follow the German example just like Péter Tölgyessy.67 Naturally, they were not happy at all about the nomenclature transferring itself into the economic sphere, but that had already been done by Tamás Sárközy and company68 by means of the 1988 law. Privatisation was necessary to remedy the acute shortage of capital and the lack of technology. Of course, the West bought markets for itself this way, and investors found it easier to negotiate with the once powerful state party official, as he had been the head of the company even before the wave of privatisation. They had a social network the new guys simply did not have. In 1994, former party state people felt like order was restored and the pragmatic elite had shed its old ideology as a serpent sheds its skin and became capitalist. SZDSZ reached an agreement with the socialists because the big shots who had been financing them did not want to finance an intellectual club for four more years. My father only realised how bad the economic state of the country was after he had put together the government in 1990. It was way worse than he had thought. State assets were worth less than they had thought, and the Soviets were still here. My father could not find suitable people, especially for the economy. There was no political recruitment, while people on the state party’s side had an enormous advantage due to their professionals. My father always said that Hungary needed a Ludwig Erhard.69 He left home at 8:30 in the morning and came back at around 11 p.m. if he had no medical treatment scheduled. He used to hold a meeting with the core of the cabinet at 9:30 p.m., but that was really to teach them what politics meant... The Antall government went down a road that was completely unprecedented: they were

converting a completely state-owned country into a market economy. Today, it is easy to say that they should have done it differently. Maybe there is even some truth in it. There were strong conﬂicts of interest within the agricultural sphere, and the government had to make a choice. Should there be a lot of smallholders or a few people with a lot of land? They were forced to make decisions. Should they follow the Czech example with coupon privatisation or the Romanian one with partial reprivatisation? Today, people often confuse the privatisation dealings of the Antall and the Horn governments, although the two operated according to hugely different economic policies, philosophies, and interests. Margaret Thatcher70 told my father he should not rush too hastily into privatisation. Some people were putting their trust into the Polish “shock therapy” method, but my father feared it would have caused an immediate, unsustainable, and unmanageable wave of unemployment, which would have endangered the democratic state. George Soros and the economic lobby behind him suggested a “debt takeover”—they would have paid the national debt of the country in exchange for a chance to handpick the marketable companies prior to the process of privatisation. Viktor Orbán took these conclusions to heart and made political trainings continuous. He also made alliances instead of forced coalitions. In one of his speeches, he referred to the legacy of Antall as a starting point. My father had a great respect for Orbán, he was the one recommending him to Helmut Kohl. When we were scolding Orbán at home in front of the TV about the nasty things he was saying about the government in Parliament in the early 1990s, my father would always say it was ﬁne. He tried to calm us saying this was all opposition logic and that we should not expect anything else from him. I have mixed feelings about my brother György’s (within the family: András’s) recent INTRODUCTION

interview published on the válasz.hu website. In it, he mentions that he once overheard a telephone conversation between our father and Orbán. He mentioned that Orbán should look after his party, as the so-called Charter intellectuals had already tried to conquer them before.71 This was the Trojan horse of the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and a precursor to the planned coalition with the Free Democrats (SZDSZ). János Kis72 had already said things to this effect earlier. My brother was interested in privatisation and economic policy, so the conversation moved on to legal matters. It is a fact that my father was greatly interested in his sons’ opinions, he asked me about the media on numerous occasions, but I would not say I was in any way his “counsellor.” I was mostly interested in communication, cabinet work, logistics, the selection of new colleagues, and the way background workers provided information for the leader in a variety of situations where a decision is supposed to be made. It is rather an unhistorical question, but what if József Antall were still alive in 1994? In 1992, he said, “The country has to make a decision about this pragmatic elite, they must decide whether they want them back or not. I am not saying they want a dictatorship, but they deﬁnitely want to rule.” There were so many negative images circulating about the “Kamikaze government” that the Left would have won in 1994 no matter what. The Hungarian Democratic Forum might have remained a uniﬁed party with a different strategy on my father’s part. In a healthy state, he would have led a tough, savage and, witty opposition. In a sickly state, we would have buried him quietly after a barrage of unworthy attacks. When Ferenc Mádl was elected president of Hungary in 2000, many people congratulated him in the Parliament. “Had my father survived, he would be president now,” I thought to myself. In my head, I contemplated the list of people I could share this thought with: only my mother. I stood behind her and told her. “How funny,” she replied, “you would not believe it, but about two minutes ago Feri [Ferenc Mádl] told me the same thing. He said he knew it 26

INTRODUCTION

should not be him standing in his position right now.” Do we have any idea how intelligent a person has to be to say something like that? I had always respected him, but, from that point on, my admiration reached a new level. Let us close the conversation with your opinion on the current state of the world. The Antall family remains Atlantist, no question. Hungary is on the right track. Despite our frequent criticism, our EU membership is very important. The stability of the country depends on it. Many people believe and say that our recent prosperity is due to EU sources. This is nothing but a legend, only 4% of our yearly GDP comes from EU sources. In a political sense, it is very hard to calculate for long-term future events in such a swiftly changing world. Here is an example: in 2008, I went to a number of conferences where people from the government made claims about a 4% increase in the GDP, provided the agricultural sector performed well. They ended up with a 6% decrease. The error margin was a solid 10%, but the economic crisis simply overwrote everything. Just like the coronavirus situation and the related emergency state will overwrite all the numbers this year and next year, as well. We are living in the age of uncertainty. Every doctrine we have had before, every worldview is becoming relative. However, it is still important to transfer our 20th-century values into the 21st century. In our lifetime, America will cling on to its position as the number-one power in the world; therefore, we have to remain allies with it (as our NATO membership determines). Having said that, I deeply agree with the notion that the 21st century is going to be Asia’s time to shine. China, India, even Africa are developing rapidly. We are preparing for such a future with a consistency inspired by József Antall and we are constantly researching these countries. My 45 colleagues are working on excellent analyses and books, they are organising events. Young, freshly graduated people can gain political and practical experience at our institution, and they also get a chance to realise their ideas. Although we do have an ofﬁce in Brussels, we are not

lobbyists (of which they have 22,000 over there) but rather a think tank. Through the work we do at the Knowledge Centre, we are trying to be loyal to the intellectual legacy of József Antall, the legacy that carries the essence of the regime change to this day.

7 The secret political police of Nazi Germany shortened from the original German Geheime Staatspolizei. 8 Emil Schultheisz (1923–2014): doctor, politician, science historian. He was head director of the Semmelweis Museum for Medical History between 1968 and 1974, Minister of Health between 1974 and 1984, and director of the State Hospital in Kútvölgyi Street from 1970. We owed a lot to him as a family, since he had helped secure four passports for us

ENDNOTES

in 1976, when he personally vouched for our return to György

1 József Antall Sr (1896–1974): lawyer, politician, government

Aczél.

commissioner for refugees between 1939 and 1944. He was

9 Solidarity emerged from the wave of discontent and related

arrested by the Gestapo. After World War II, he was a member

protests in 1979–1980. The strikes started in the Lenin

of parliament representing the Independent Smallholders’

Shipyard in Gdańsk. For more information, see our other

Party from 1945 to 1953 and Minister for Reconstruction in

article titled “The End of Communism and the Political

1945–1946.

Transformation of the V4 Countries”.

2 Founded in 1949, Radio Free Europe was a radio station

10 Szilveszter Harangozó (1929–2011): an associate of the

run by the US government during the Cold War in order to

State Security Agency with a classic career in internal affairs.

oppose Soviet expansion and to soften socialism in the

A Dzerzhinsky Academy graduate, he was secretary to Gábor

Eastern Bloc. Radio Liberty was the name of the station

Péter from 1951. He was made a colonel of Department III/III

broadcasting to the Soviet Union. Radio Free Europe stopped

in 1968, from which point, he cultivated a close relationship

broadcasting in 1993.

with György Aczél. Between 1977 and 1985, he worked as

3 The BBC’s Hungarian department with a Hungarian

deputy division leader at Department III/III before becoming

editorial staff broadcast news in Hungarian from 1939 to

Deputy Minister of State Protection in 1985. He retired on 30

2005. It was often hard to hear due to constant radio jamming.

April 1989.

4 The Voice of America station broadcast news in forty

11 Nemzetőr (Militiaman) was a periodical published in

different languages in the direction of Eastern Europe and the

Munich, founded by a couple of Hungarian emigrants after

Soviet Union after World War II. The Hungarian broadcast was

1956. Its most notable personality was editor-in-chief Tibor

ended in 2004.

Tollas. It was a patriotic, popular magazine in its time.

5 Tivadar Pártay (1908–1999): politician, member of

12 The term “democratic opposition” was a self-definition of

parliament representing the Independent Smallholders’ Party

a portion of the intellectual opposition in the 1980s. It later

from 1945 to 1948. He was interned at Kistarcsa and Recsk

became the Network of Free Initiatives, which, in turn,

and, later, worked for state-owned companies. Under the

transformed into a political party called the Alliance of Free

alias Buday, he was a State Security informant.

Democrats.

6 Béla Kovács (1908–1959): Independent Smallholders’

13 Gábor Demszky (1952–): social scientist, politician. He was

Party politician. He joined the party in 1933 to become its

a member of the democratic opposition and the Alliance of

National Deputy Secretary General by 1939. After World War

Free Democrats before the regime change. He was mayor of

II, he became Political Undersecretary in the Ministry of Home

Budapest between 1990 and 2010.

Affairs. His Party secured 57% of the votes at the 1945

14 The Rajk Boutique was architect László Rajk’s (1949–2019)

election. On 25 February 1947, Kovács (working as the Party’s

flat under 3 Galamb Street, where illegal magazines,

General Secretary since 1945) was arrested in Budapest on

opposition literature, and books were being distributed. Such

false charges by the Soviet authorities. He was taken to the

items were all called samizdat, a word derived from a Russian

Soviet Union and sentenced to twenty years. From 1955, he

portmanteau.

was held by the State Security Agency in Hungary. In 1956,

15 Maoism is a branch of Marxism, founded by Chinese

he ﬁ rst became Minister for Agriculture, then State Minister in

communist politician and leader Mao Zedong.

Imre Nagy’s government. He worked as a member of

16 Department III/III was a subagency of the State Security

Parliament between 1958 and 1959. In 2000, the day of his

Agency within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, specialising in

original arrest, 25 February, became the ofﬁ cial memorial day

domestic counterintelligence. Its task was to map hostile

for the victims of communist dictatorships in Hungary.

opposition forces on a domestic scale, which basically made

INTRODUCTION

it a political police coordinated by the Hungarian Socialist

his death. Before becoming general secretary, he had been

Workers’ Party (MSZMP). The previously mentioned Szilveszter

the head of the Soviet Committee for State Security from

Harangozó was one of its division leaders.

1967. He was the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Budapest at

17 Helmut Kohl (1930–2017): German politician, member of

the time of the 1956 revolution.

the Christian Democratic Union. He was the chancellor of

26 Komsomol was a youth organisation founded by the Soviet

Germany between 1982 and 1998.

Communist Party in 1918. Its membership reached 36 million

18 Founded in 1957, Élet és Irodalom (Life and literature) is a

people by 1977. With the fall of the Soviet Union, it dissolved,

Hungarian magazine dealing with public issues and featuring

as well.

literary works.

27 Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931–): Soviet politician,

19 Existing between 1964 and 1989, Új Tükör (New mirror)

the last general secretary of the Soviet Union in office from

was a political and social weekly magazine with editors-in-

1985 to 1990, then its first president until 1991.

chief Imre Csanádi and Sándor Fekete. It was a publication

28 The Jurta Theater was run as a business venture in

platform for numerous respected writers and poets.

Népliget between 1985 and 1987 by László Romhányi (1944–

20 Launched in 1958, Valóság (Reality) was a sociological

2005). It housed theatrical productions and alternative political

periodical, the magazine of the Society for Dissemination of

events with ties to the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF),

Scientific Knowledge. During the 1970s and 1980s, it provided

the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), and the Alliance of

a platform for more free-spirited intellectual debate, as well.

Young Democrats (Fidesz). Romhányi became radicalised

21 Tiszatáj magazine (The Tisza region) started in 1947 in

after the regime change and spent years in prison for criminal

Szeged. As a periodical, it fell into the category of barely

charges. Romhányi’s magazine was the highly radical Szent

tolerated publications. Arguably, the greatest Hungarian poets

Korona (Holy crown).

of the time, Gyula Illyés, Sándor Csoóri, and Gáspár Nagy all

29 Ferenc L. Gazsó (1953–): writer awarded the Táncsics

published works on its pages. It was banned for six months in

Mihály Prize, lawyer, honorary associate professor. Chief

1986 because of a Gáspár Nagy poem titled A fiú naplójából

contributor, then editor-in-chief of Magyar Hírlap. He was CEO

(From the diary of a boy). The ban was initiated by János

of Mai Nap publishing company, and editor-in-chief of the

Kádár himself.

paper Mai Nap (Today). He was CEO of the Hungarian

22 Mozgó Világ (Moving world) was a monthly literary and

Telegraphic Office until his retirement.

public education periodical from 1975. Throughout its

30 László Almásy (1895–1951): explorer, Africa expert. He was

existence, it fell into all three categories of the ”promote–

the descendant of the gentry side of the family and not of the

tolerate–ban” policy. Numerous well-known writers, poets,

one holding the countship. His father was one of the founders

and publicists worked for the magazine. After the dismissal of

of the Hungarian Geographical Society in 1872. He fought in

its editor-in-chief, Ferenc Kulin, the entire editorial staff

World War I as a pilot. Africa had interested him since his

resigned in 1983. The reason: György Aczél did not allow

younger days, so, later, he led numerous expeditions to Egypt

István Bibó’s article, a piece criticising Marxism titled “The

and Sudan. He even visited a previously uncharted part of the

development of European society”, to be published.

Libyan Desert. He was drafted into the German army during

23 Éva Keleti (1931–): photo artist, editor, recipient of the

World War II, where his task was to deploy German intelligence

Balázs Béla and the Kossuth Prizes as a photographer. She

agents behind English lines.

worked for the Hungarian Telegraphic Office (MTI) and Új

31 A part of the Posta Bank Média Portfolio, Kurír, was a

Tükör, among others. She has contributed immensely to the

nationwide tabloid between 1990 and 1998 under editor-in

international recognition of Hungarian photography in part as

chief Gábor Szűcs.

a member of the Word Press Photo’s judging panel.

32 In 1990, the press mostly expected the Alliance of Free

24 Reform was an illustrated weekly magazine that run from

Democrats to win the election instead of the Hungarian

1988 to 1998, with Péter Tőkés as its founder and first editor-

Democratic Forum. The latter had very little media presence,

in-chief. It was hugely popular around the time of the regime

they were working in a rather hostile media environment.

change, which warranted an enormous number of copies

There had been attempts to balance the situation out in the

(370,000) to be published weekly, a number quite

form of magazines like Új Magyarország (New Hungary) or

unimaginable today.

Pesti Hírlap (Newspaper of Pest). Regardless, all the main

25 Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (1914–1984): Soviet politician,

opinion forming media platforms were in the hands of the

general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1982 to

political left.

INTRODUCTION

33 Ibolya Dávid (1954–): lawyer, politician, member of

Tourism in 1991, to later replace Mihály Kupa as Finance

parliament between 1990 and 2010. She was head of the

Minister, a position he held until the change of government in

Hungarian Democratic Forum between 1990 and 2010 and

1994. He secured a mandate from the Budapest party list and

Minister for Justice between 1998 and 2002.

became ﬂoor leader of the MDF. In 1996, he lost the presidency

34 The József Antall Foundation was the party foundation of

of the party to Sándor Lezsák and subsequently left the MDF

the MDF between 2003 and 2010. The Antall family eventually

with other MDNP politicians loyal to József Antall’s legacy.

cut ties with it and entered into legal debate with the MDF’s

40 György Szabad (1924–2015): historian, the first Speaker of

successor party, JESZ (Democratic Community of Welfare and

the democratically elected National Assembly of Hungary. He

Freedom), where the State Audit Office uncovered some illegal

later became the founder of the MDNP. His application to

dealings.

university in 1942 was rejected due to the law numerus

35 Péter Boross (1928–): lawyer, politician, prime minister of

clausus that limited number of minority students studying at

Hungary between 1993 and 1994. During the 1956 revolution,

university. He went to labour service and even served in a

he contributed to the activities of the Revolution Committee of

Russian labour camp for a short while. He was admitted to the

Budapest and the Revolution Council of Hungarian

Budapest University as a history major in 1945, where he

Intellectuals, for which he was later arrested and sent to

earned his degree as a teacher and archivist. He became a

internment. From 1971, he became director of the South-Pest

candidate in 1955, then wrote his academic dissertation in

Catering Company. As a minister without portfolio, he directed

1969. He was a corresponding member of the Hungarian

the secret service under the Antall administration, then

Academy of Sciences from 1982 then became a full member

became minister of interior in 1990.

in 1998. He taught my father at the university’s history major—

36 Lajos Bokros (1954–): banker, politician. He was elected

my father liked his special, colourful personality very much. My

member of parliament of the Hungarian Socialist Party but,

father once quoted Lajos Kossuth inaccurately in the

later, resigned. He was president and chief executive of

parliament in the presence of György Szabad, who actually

Budapest Bank between 1991 and 1995, then Finance

walked up and corrected him. I had absolute respect for him.

Minister in Horn Gyula’s government between 1995 and 1996.

41 Sándor Lezsák (1949–): literary man, teacher, politician. He

He is known for his famous “Bokros Package,” a set of

was one of the MDF’s founders, with the political movement

financial measures still debated with regards to their necessity

originating in 1987 from the garden of his house in Lakitelek.

and lasting effects. He later became a professor at CEU, then

He was elected president of the MDF in 1996, which led to the

secured a mandate for the European Parliament in 2009 as a

secession of MDNP.

candidate of the Hungarian Democratic Forum. He went on to

42 The research and analyst company Political Capital was

become the party’s candidate for prime minister at the 2010

founded by Krisztián Szabados and Zoltán Somogyi. They

elections but ended up not securing a seat in parliament due

conducted analyses and research for the MDF and SZDSZ,

to his party’s low popular support (2.6%).

but they received assignments from the Office for National

37 Szabolcs Kerék-Bárczy (1971–): as a young man, he

Security, as well. On orders from Ibolya Dávid, they were to be

worked in the prime minister’s cabinet during the Antall

employed for assignments originating from the József Antall

administration, and, then, at the prime minister’s office and at

Foundation. Their intention was to unite the MDF and SZDSZ

the Foreign Ministry during the first Orbán government. He

into a single party, which might have seemed a good idea in

was later appointed Hungarian consul to Los Angeles, before

theory, but, in practice, proved to be impossible due to the

becoming the spokesman for the MDF and the leader of the

extreme differences between the two parties.

foreign cabinet. He was a member of the national board

43 Balázs Horváth (1942–2006): lawyer, politician. He got his

between 2008 and 2010. He became advisor to Bokros Lajos,

mandate in 1990 as an individual candidate, then went on to

then entered the Democratic Coalition in 2013, a party he left

become minister of interior from May and minister without

in the autumn of 2016.

portfolio from December. He was the deputy floor leader of the

38 The Hungarian Democratic People’s Party seceded from

MDF between 1998 and 2004, before his expulsion from the

the MDF in 1996.

party due to his opposition to Ibolya Dávid’s policies. He

39 Iván Szabó (1934–2005): member of parliament (1990–

secured a mandate again in 2006 as a member of Fidesz.

1998), member of the Antall government, minister. He was the

44 Géza Jeszenszky (1941–): historian, university professor,

founding president of MDNP, securing an individual mandate in

diplomat and Foreign Minister of the Antall government

1990. He was appointed Minister of Industry, Trade, and

between 1990 and 1994.

INTRODUCTION

45 Ronald Reagan (1911–2004): actor, politician, and

52 György Aczél (1917–1991): one of the most indispensable

president of the USA from 1981 to 1989. He played a huge

politicians of the Kádár era. As a young man, he was a

role in bringing the Cold War to an end.

member of the Zionist movement and also worked as an actor.

46 John Paul II (born Karol Wojtyła, 1920–2005): head of the

He was a member of the MSZMP’s Central Committee from

Catholic church from 1978 until his death. As a Polish national,

1956, then also a member of its Political Committee from

he paid extra attention to the Soviet satellite states of Eastern

1970. He was vice chair of the Council of Ministers from 1974,

Europe.

and chief director of the Social Sciences Institute between

47 Imre Pozsgay (1933–2016): an iconic figure of the Kádár

1985 and 1989. During the Kádár era, he was responsible for

era. He was minister of culture and education (1976–1982)

ideological, educational, and cultural policies. He had strong

and minister of state (1988–1989). He was a member of the

connections to the state security service (mostly in an informal

Political Committee of the MSZMP and also of the national

manner), and he had a good relationship with Szilveszter

board of the Patriotic People’s Front, of which he was

Harangozó from Department III/III. He blackmailed a lot of

secretary general between 1982 and 1988. In 1990, he

writers and artists with classified information.

became a member of parliament for the Hungarian Socialist

53 Miklós Németh (1948–): economist, politician. He was the

Party, then created the National Democratic Alliance with

last prime minister before the regime change, between 1988

Zoltán Bíró in 1991. The party did not reach the 5% threshold

and 1989. He was temporary prime minister of the Republic

at the 1994 election, then dissolved itself in 1996. Pozsgay

of Hungary between 1989 and 1990.

continued as a university professor. He played a historical role

54 The Workers’ Militia was a paramilitary organisation existing

supporting the intellectual Left. On 28 January 1989, he was

under state party control between 1957 and 1989, with up to

the first to publicly declare 1956 a popular uprising as

60,000 members.

opposed to a counterrevolution. His statement caused

55 Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989): Romanian communist

immense confusion within the MSZMP and foreshadowed the

politician, leader of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965

upcoming political disunion of the Kádár system.

until his execution.

48 Lech Wałęsa (1943–): Polish workers’ union leader,

56 György Csóti (1940–): electrical engineer, politician. He was

politician, and president of the Polish Republic between 1990

member of parliament between 1990 and 1998 (MDF), then

and 1995. A leader of the workers of the Gdańsk shipyard, he

between 2011 and 2014 (Fidesz). He served as the Hungarian

later contributed to the Polish transition at the end of the

ambassador to Zagreb between 1999 and 2003 and as head

1980s. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

secretary of MDF’s presidential office until József Antall’s

49 János Fekete (1918–2009): vice president of the Hungarian

election as prime minister.

National Bank. From a young age, he worked in various

57 Gyula Zacsek (1947–): member of parliament in MDF

positions at the bank until 1988. He was first its vice president

colours. He organised the so-called “MDF marketplaces”

from 1980, then, from 1982, a Hungarian delegate to the

between 1990 and 1994. He was expelled from the party in

International Monetary Fund. Generations of bankers were

the summer of 1993, then founded the Hungarian Market

trained under his guidance.

Party, which failed to achieve 5% at the 1994 election.

50 “Gorenje tourism” started with the introduction of the

58 Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927--2016): German politician.

“world passport” in January 1988, a document that made it

He became a member of the Nazi party not long before the

easier to travel to Western Europe. Everyone in possession of

end of World War II, during which he served at the German Air

such a document could buy American dollars. With the

Force (the Luftwaffe). He spent time both in American and

document and the money in hand, Hungarians spent

British captivity. He was a member of the Bundestag from

approximately USD 2 billion (HUF 50 billion) worth of money

1965 delegated by the Free Democratic Party (FDP), served

in Austria, buying (among other things) an immense amount

as interior minister under Willy Brandt, as foreign minister

of Gorenje fridges (a fridge manufactured in Yugoslavia).

under Helmut Schmidt, then as vice chancellor (1974–1982).

51 Zoltán Bíró (1941–): writer, literary historian, politician. He

Under Helmut Kohl, he became foreign minister, then vice

was the first managing president of the Hungarian Democratic

chancellor again (1982–1992). He played an important role in

Forum between 1987 and 1989. He quit the party in 1991 to

the reunification of Germany and in the democratic transition

found the National Democratic Alliance with Imre Pozsgay. He

in Central Europe.

was director of the Research Institute and Archives for the

59 François Mitterrand (1916–1996): French politician who

History of Regime Change between 2013 and 2020.

was president of France between 1981 and 1995.

INTRODUCTION

60 According to the framework of the MDF–SZDSZ Pact,

moved to the private sector and worked as a private detective

signed in April 1990, József Antall made a strategic agreement

and director at various security companies where he could

with the Free Democrats that guaranteed a stable government

utilise his previous experiences.

after the first free election. Up until this point, even passing the

67 Péter Tölgyessy (1957–): lawyer, political scientist,

national budget required a qualified majority. The pact was

politician. As a member of SZDSZ at the time of the regime

signed by the head of the two parties. According to Antall’s

change, he was one of the negotiators at the National Round

wishes, the pact was not a secret, behind-the-scenes one but

Table talks.

rather a fully legal and detailed agreement serving the

68 Tamás Sárközy (1940–2020): lawyer, university professor.

governability of the country.

He was deputy Justice Minister at the time of the regime

61 Lustration would have meant the investigation and potential

change, between 1988 and 1990, then he became

prosecution of former communist party and state security

deregulational commissioner in 1989–1990. Due to his

officials.

positions, he played a role in creating the frameworks of a

62 The MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International

market economy in Hungary.

Relations) provided high level university training to the best

69 Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard (1897–1977): German politician,

part of Russian and Soviet diplomats. The KGB was

economist. As minister for economics under Konrad Adenauer

intertwined with Soviet diplomacy. The institution provides

(1949–1963), he had a great role in getting the German

high level training to this day.

economy back on its feet after World War II. He moved on to

63 Gyula Horn (1932–2013): economist, politician, Foreign

become chancellor of Germany between 1963 and 1966.

Minister of Hungary in 1989–1990, and prime minister

70 Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013): British conservative

between 1994 and 1998. In 1956–1957, he was member of

politician, the prime minister of the United Kingdom between

the armed authorities responsible for putting down the

1979 and 1990.

revolution (called “quilted coats”). In 1989, he was the one to

71 Charter 77 was a declaration published by the

symbolically open the Iron Curtain in the presence of the press

Czechoslovakian opposition in 1977. Its signatories were

with Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock at the border of

mostly intellectuals protesting against human rights violations.

Hungary and Austria.

Two years later, the leaders of the movement were prosecuted

64 Zoltán Gál (1940–): member of parliament, politician. He

and sentenced to prison. Due to the court sentence, many

had taught at the MSZMP’s political college from 1970. He

Hungarians also signed the Charter (now quite well-known

was deputy interior minister, then was appointed interior

internationally as well), asking other socialist countries not to

minister in Miklós Németh’s government. He was Speaker of

push for new politically motivated legal proceedings. A group

the National Assembly between 1994 and 1998.

of the signatories played an important part in the political

65 Gábor Péter (1906–1993): high-ranking state security

debates of the 1980s.

official. Coming from a poor Jewish family, he joined the

72 János Kis (1943–): liberal philosopher, founding member

workers’ movement at an early age. He was a tailor’s

and first chair of SZDSZ. As a pupil of Marxist philosopher

apprentice (which is even referred to in the Hungarian movie

György Lukács, he was first committed to Marxism before

Tanú or The Witness). He worked in the leadership of the so-

turning to more liberal views. He then started criticising

called Red Support, an organisation working to help

Marxism from a philosophical standpoint. In the 1980s he took

persecuted communists. He was a board member of the Party

part in organising a number of opposition events.

of Hungarian Communists (KMP), then head of several incarnations of the political police (mostly known by their acronyms and initialisms, PRO, ÁVO, and ÁVH). He was arrested in 1953. As a leader of the political police, he took part in setting up the show trials of people like László Rajk and József Mindszenty. Gábor Péter considered the ÁVH the communist party’s fist and wanted to impress the Soviet Union and Stalin more than Mátyás Rákosi. 66 Lajos Nagy (1938–2006): major general, first director of the Office for National Security in 1990. Previously, he worked as an intelligence officer in multiple countries. After retirement, he

INTRODUCTION

G RS UE

AUTHORS

G RS UE O

AUTH ST

AUTHO ST

The Third Wave—The End of Communism and Anti-communism in the 1980s Baranyi, Tamás Péter Deputy Director for Strategy, Institute of Foreign Affairs and Trade

The End of Communism and the Political Transformation of the Visegrad Four (V4) Countries Perestroika and Regime Change in Hungary

Erdődy, Gábor Historian, professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

József Antall’s Christian Democratic Political Thoughts

Kéri, László Political analyst, former researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Centre for Social

The Newborn Multiparty System

Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Krausz, Tamás Historian, Doctor of History, professor emeritus,

Regime Change or Revolution?

Eötvös Loránd University

Lukács B., György Researcher at the Institute of Central European Studies, National University of Public Services,

The Croatian and Slovenian Way of Independence and Regime Change

Eötvös József Research Centre

Máthé, Áron Historian, Sociologist, Vice-Chair of the Hungarian Committee of National Remembrance

192

AUTHORS

Regime Change and Revolution

G RS UE

G RS UE O

AUTH ST

AUTHO ST

Sáringer, János Head of the Institute of Social Sciences at the Budapest Business School University, Head of the Central European Regional Research Group at the

The Goals and Steps of József Antall’s Foreign Policy

University’s Faculty of International Management and Business, associate professor

Stumpf, István Professor at Deák Ferenc Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the University of Győr, senior research fellow at the Institute of Political Science of the

Constitutionality and Legal Transition

Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, former judge of the Constitutional Court, and former Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office

Szánthó, Miklós Lawyer, Director of Centre for Fundamental Rights, President of Central European Press

Expectations About the Rule of Law around the Regime Change

and Media Foundation

Tóth, Eszter Zsófia Historian, senior research fellow at Veritas Research Institute

Freedom—Freiheit—Szabadság: The Effect of the Regime Change on Everyday Life

Zsiros, Egon Student at Corvinus University of Budapest, member of Széchenyi István College

The Short History of the Economic Regime Change

for Advanced Studies

AUTHORS

193

T H O S

F A J

Braun, András Research fellow

Csepregi, Zsolt Deputy Director for International Affairs

Dobrowiecki, Péter Historian, Head of Research

Gorácz, Anikó Head of Press and Media Relations, Head of Publishing

Between Regime Change and Democratic Consolidation: Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

An Important Point in the Third Wave of Global Democratisaton: Athens, 1974

The End of Communism and the Political Transformation of the Visegrad Four (V4) Countries

Well, You Should Have Directed It—Hungarian Film and the Regime Change

Interview with Gergely Gulyás Pál, Zsombor Szabolcs

Interview with Frank Spengler

Historian, senior researcher

Portugal: The Beginning of the 20th Century’s Last Wave of Democratisation

194

AUTHORS