The Case for Populism Hungary’s history under communism illustrates why it has chosen a nonliberal path
We
Hungarians have rarely had easy lives. As was the case with other nations that came under the direct domination of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, we had to struggle to retain our national culture and way of life. Yet our trials have prepared us well for the challenges of the 21st century. After World War II, the Soviet Union foisted a social experiment on Hungary, forcing us to live in a Communist society for almost half a century. In 1956 we rebelled against the Soviet-backed regime in an effort to regain our national independence. Our revolution failed, however, and we paid a heavy price. Liberation would come decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the totalitarian regime imposed on Hungary by Communist Moscow, politics was practiced in impenetrable, smoke-filled back rooms. There was a total absence of information on the streets, so the public relied on gossip to find out what was happening. At the same time, people couldn’t care less about who had and who hadn’t fallen out of grace with the Communist leadership. Society was split between Them (party
38
members and careerists within the ramparts of power) and Us (those whose principal aim was to lead independent lives on the periphery).
MARIA SCHMIDT An author and historian whose research focuses on 20th-century dictatorships in Europe, the director general of the House of Terror museum in Budapest, a former adviser to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban
Under Communism, it would have been unimaginable for me to go out with a party official or share a friendly word with an army or police officer. Such people existed in a different world than the rest of us. Anyone valued or decorated by officialdom was a nonperson in our eyes. We had our own heroes to look up to. We had the freedom fighters from ’56. We had our poets, like Gyorgy Petri; our writers, like Imre Kertesz; our painters, like Gabor Karatson (one of the most important forerunners of the Hungarian Green movement); we had our singers and historians. The stifling atmosphere under Communism prevailed through the 1970s. But then, in the 1980s, things started to change. The old guard of Communist officials retired, and their successors didn’t care much for the regime’s official ideology; they were as obsessed as the old guard had become with accumulating money and influence. As a result, the regime became increasingly insecure, while we became more liberated and self-assured.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, we sensed that it was only a matter of time before the Hungarian regime unraveled. The veteran party leader Janos Kadar knew that Mr. Gorbachev’s reforms would be lethal, and he told the Soviet leader so. He was right. The young officials who took power in the late ’80s soon accepted the inevitable and gave in to change. In June 1989, they permitted the reburial of Imre Nagy, the reform-minded former prime minister who was executed after the 1956 revolution. At this momentous occasion, the young Viktor Orban publicly called for free elections and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. In September 1989, the regime opened the HungaryAustria border, allowing tens of thousands of East German refugees who had flooded into Hungary passage to West Germany. This destabilized the East German regime and unleashed a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and of Europe. “It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin
