Hungary: People’s Revolt Three Decades Later

BETHESDA, MD. — In many ways, Hungary’s future may well be set by what happens next Friday, the 30th anniversary of the Soviet execution of Premier Imre Nagy and three of his collaborators. On that day, June 16, their remains will be exhumed from unmarked graves and solemnly eulogized on Heroes’ Square.

It will be Hungary’s strongest reminder of how a taste of freedom was snuffed out three decades ago. Emotions will be palpable, and perhaps uncontainable. “We don’t want another national tragedy”--meaning a new revolt--one of the regime’s staunchest opponents told me.

Though the ceremony itself is planned to be solemn, there will be all the ingredients of unrest. Several hundred-thousand Hungarians from the countryside will travel by special trains to witness the event. They don’t need to be reminded that a similar ceremony--the Oct. 6, 1956, reburial of Laszlo Rajk, executed in 1949 as a Titoist agent--was the dress rehearsal for a revolution unleashed only three weeks later.

That history ran through my mind this spring when I made my first visit home to Hungary since January, 1957. Thirty-two years ago, accompanied by my wife and two daughters, I left behind all that was familiar and mine. The crushed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, whose heady beginnings and bloody epitaph I recorded as a reporter, had made Hungary a chilling and dangerous place to live. This year I decided to revisit my old country, perhaps for the last time.

It was not an easy decision to make. I had firmly resisted the idea of going back for even a short visit. But today’s Hungary, like some siren, played upon my conscience by singing a different song--one of revolutionary change.

As soon as I arrived in Budapest I was wrapped, like the famous Russian doll, in one small irony fitted neatly into another. In May, 1956, my wife and I were “guests” of Hungary’s Stalinist government in the dreaded Foe Utca prison of the AVO, the secret police. Now once again I was the government’s “guest,” this time in considerably more comfortable quarters at Hungary’s Academy of Science, overlooking the Danube.

The academy guest house, a lovely old mansion, was directly above my former cellblock. And then, to complete the circle, we had our first dinner at a restaurant called Kacsa (“duck” in English) also on Foe Utca. From our table we looked directly on the darkened fortress of my former prison.

My status as I arrived in Budapest was purposely cloudy. I went in as a tourist, wanting to re-experience the ineffable feelings of being in a city where I was born and bred, where I stumbled into newspaper work by accident and where I survived--a miracle indeed--the twin terrors of Nazism and Stalinist communism. As a reporter I was in Hungary to see and listen, as incognito as possible, with no desire to meet any of the country’s political leaders.

My best sources for unvarnished impressions of how Hungary is faring were, unsurprisingly, Budapest cab drivers. The two dozen cabbies I rode with were wonderful, letting off steam with all the license that glasnost permitted. Unprompted and unwary, they garrulously vented spleen at everyone, from the communists to the anti-communist opposition. They carped about inflation, now at 18%, and were completely uninterested in “cultural freedom,” perestroika or any of the other buzzwords.

One driver gave me a glimpse of the harsh economic reality in Hungary. Having trouble one day finding a taxi, I asked a nearby man, who seemed to be loitering near a cab stand, where the other drivers were. He guessed they were probably in a local pub. Then he offered to take me in his car for 50 forints--less than $1. I couldn’t resist.

This was a different conversation from my previous cab chats. The driver was eloquent, free of acrimony, but cynical nonetheless. As it turned out, he was a city engineer who worked on roads and bridges. That was his job for eight hours a day; at night he prowled Budapest streets looking for foreigners needing a cab: “It’s the only way to make ends meet.” For all his toil, this engineer- cum -cabbie could afford only a one-room apartment. This encounter told me more about the appalling economic situation in Hungary than all the statistics I could pull from the papers.

But how to square this with the evidence of prosperity that Budapest displays? Food-store shelves display all the produce a housewife could desire; restaurant menus offer long lists of famous Hungarian cuisine--and nobody cares about cholesterol. The Downtown boutiques wouldn’t be out of place in Paris and the mind-numbing lines of Moscow only appear in front of two establishments: Adidas and McDonald’s.

Intellectual freedom is approaching the richness of the surface economic prosperity. There are an amazing number of bookshops, packed with customers. Stores are running short of such controversial bestsellers as three books on Imre Nagy, the martyred prime minister of the 1956 Revolution. Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” sold out--10,000 copies--as quickly as they were stocked. George Orwell’s “1984” and Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” are in heavy demand. Hungary’s most internationally acclaimed writer, George Konrad, previously shunned inside Hungary, can now see his “Caseworker” and “The Loser” sold in Budapest shops.

The nagging question remained: How could Hungarians afford such things, with a foreign debt at $18 billion--a per capita debt of $2,000? “Nobody gives a damn,” was the cavalier explanation offered by one cab driver. I tested this response with a government economist at Budapest’s famous Gerbeaud coffeehouse. “Look around,” he gestured. “Not all of the people here are tourists. Others are just goofing off, as I am. I’ve got a third boss in as many months and I don’t have the foggiest idea what his ‘line’ is. So why bother to work?”

The truth, I have concluded, is more sobering. The Hungarians, though loath to admit it, are skating on thin ice, hoping to extract a miracle from a morass of debt. The economic facts are stark: $3 billion per year is needed to service both debt and interest, or 80% of the hard-currency value of all exports. The money won’t come from America since, as the U.S. ambassador confided, it would be a “disaster,” like pouring money into a bottomless barrel. Still, visions of a fat, debt-ridden and destitute country don’t fit either. Not even during the darkest Stalinist times did Hungary lose its ability to muddle through. As a friend put it, “This is not Moscow, never was and never will be.”

There is something equally chimerical about the supposed awakening of political pluralism. Although there is a multiparty system, at least on paper, the opposition, along with the Communists, is hopelessly split. A reform group within the Communist Party may be the most brazen, in rejecting the notion that Moscow may have drawn a line past which it will not permit the party to cross. Rather than cling to the “popular uprising” euphemism about 1956 events, the reformers openly talk of that year’s “revolution.” They go further by publicly demanding neutrality for Hungary and genuine pluralism--meaning a true multiparty system. Mikhail S. Gorbachev has dismissed advocates of such a system as “demagogues and irresponsible elements.” Unfazed, one reformer told me, “Gorbachev has enough problems at home. He shouldn’t really care what we are doing and better leave us alone.”

Personality, rather than the cult of personality, has come back to Hungarian politics and no one knows that better than Imre Pozsgay, the charismatic leader of Communist reformers. Such is Pozsgay’s political appeal among Communists and non-Communists alike that he has positioned himself to challenge the unpopular party general secretary, Karoly Grosz.

Grosz certainly hasn’t shown any gift for keeping party members happy: 100,000 of them have turned in their party cards this year. Yet even Grosz predicts it could take at least six to eight years for the Communists to be voted out of power.

Opposition leaders are old and quarrel bitterly among themselves. They have no agenda, no money, no offices--and no members. This suits the Communists splendidly. They know that the opposition represents no real danger now and Grosz, if he survives--an open question--may call for new elections next fall or in spring, 1990.

Today’s Hungary is proving the truth of a musty old adage: When a dictatorship loosens control, it loses control. In the Hungary of today, the Communist “priviligentsia” is on the run, yet no one is ready to fill the void. The genie of change and reform may have broken the bottle; Hungary could be the hole that rends the Iron Curtain.

When the Red Army attacked Budapest at dawn on Nov. 4, 1956, a reporter radioed frantic appeals to the West. “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe,” he screamed. And die they did, some 13,000 of them.

The Magyars of today are in no mood to die. Unlike the terrible scenes we have witnessed from Tian An Men Square, I hope change can be wrought without paying the ultimate price.