The Year that Changed the World (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precisely what Grosz and other hard-liners intended is not clear, even now, but it appears to have involved the threat of force—perhaps by strong-arm miners, traditional government allies, coupled with Hungary's riot police and workers' militias. Nemeth, at least, did not mistake the message. “From that point on, we knew,” he told me. “It was them or us.” By early January, these concerns had grown to the point that the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors each paid highly publicized visits to Grosz and senior Hungarian security officials to warn them against the “likely consequences” of violence, according to Rudolf Tokes in his definitive history,
Hungary's Negotiated Revolution.
These plots came to naught, Tokes believes, because the interior minister of the time, Istvan Horvath, threatened to expose them. Yet it was a clear sign of the risks that Nemeth and his fledgling government were running, and a measure of the schism that split the Hungarian leadership. As Tokes puts it, the party's “fundamentalist hard core” was composed of “desperate and dangerous people who, if given the chance, might have turned the clock back.”

What stayed their hand? In a word, uncertainty. At this delicate moment, no one had an answer to the ultimate question: what would
Moscow do? In late December, Gorbachev delivered a speech to the United Nations, announcing that by the end of the following year the Soviet Union would unilaterally withdraw a quarter million men and some ten thousand tanks, artillery and aircraft from Eastern Europe. He aimed to spark a breakthrough on stalled talks with the United States on reducing conventional forces in Europe and in doing so dropped this nugget: “It is obvious that the use or threat of force cannot be an instrument of foreign policy.”

Many in the West, particularly, saw this as an implicit renunciation of the infamous Brezhnev doctrine justifying Soviet intervention in such cases as the 1968 Prague Spring. The problem was that, in typical Soviet fashion, Gorbachev did not say it directly. The leaders of Eastern Europe were left to interpret his remarks, to figure it out on their own. On the one hand, these communist regimes possessed ample power to crack down, if they chose. On the other, they expected Gorbachev to change his tune and come riding to the rescue if faced with a bona fide anticommunist revolution, as Charles Gati notes in
The Bloc That Failed.
Amid the confusion and uncertainty, they waited.