European Document/No More Hungarian Comrades

...As an organization the Forum is very new, its supporters are found mainly in the smaller towns and countryside, and its rhetoric borders on the mildly nationalistic...

...And can they in turn count on the Rumanians and Ukrainians, not to mention the Albanians and Lithuanians...

...Bon Voyage...

...A free republic has just been born: shouldn't that be enough...

...There was, to begin, a commemorative celebration on the Buda side of the Danube at the statue of Joseph Bem, the Polish hero of the 1848 Hungarian revolution...

...Then, on Wednesday night, just as everyone was getting accustomed to the earliest government concessions, we received totally unexpected news: parliament had voted constitutional amendments to eliminate all references to the Communist party and was to declare a new Hungarian republic the following Monday, the anniversary of the 1956 uprising...

...And God-1-7 speed...

...The question is: Can the Hungarians count on the Slovaks and Croats...

...The Free Democrats, who lack a strong candidate, want to do all they can to stop this Mephistopheles, and some are even willing to support the peasant parties who plan to nominate the Austrian pretender Otto von Hapsburg, currently a member of the European Parliament...

...Let Pozsgay be Jaruzelski, they said...

...I'm careful not to talk about history...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 29 Whatever Gorbachev's fate, I am told here, something irreversible has happened...

...The subways were dangerously packed, and it took several long, rather frightening minutes to make our way from the platform to the escalator and out into the Indian-summer sun illuminating Kossuth Square...

...rrt he Hungarian case is different, .1 both historically and today...

...Mark Li11a, a former editor of the Public Interest, lives in Paris...

...I have just seen hundreds of thousands celebrating the suicide of a Communist regime, the end of a mercifully bloodless "refolution...

...But the real problem with Hungarian nationalism is not internal...

...It can wash away a thousand sins, as when Third World tyrants are called "nationalist leaders" rather than thugs...

...But 1848 also fanned the flames of a modern passion —nationalism—which undid republicanism in Central Europe at the time, and could very well do it again...

...There were, by all accounts, already 150,000 people there...

...It is 1848 all over again...

...We've won—or at least we're winning...

...A third was held at Heroes' Square (née Stalin Square), where the '56 demonstrators had taken tractor, truck, and blowtorch to the 25-foot statue of the Great Liberator, finally breaking Uncle Joe at the knees...

...We have seen the triumph of an idea that no one, not even Rumania's Ceausescu, can resist forever...

...As this article goes to press, the Wall has opened in East Germany, and there are stirrings in Czechoslovakia and even Bulgaria...

...Understandable as these declarations are, one can only wonder how the Rumanians, Slovaks, and Croatians interpret them...

...The "radicals," as the Western press insists on calling them, seem to have defeated the "moderates," and the Hungarians will be able to choose the form of their transition to democracy...

...Every time the Hungarian national anthem was sung during last week's ceremonies, for instance, it was immediately followed by an anthem for Transylvania...

...Yet Pozsgay is a very equivocal figure here, and no one really trusts him...

...But it was also the end of a two-week long whirlwind that had left every Hungarian I met gasping for breath...

...it is external, geographic...

...It certainly fits nicely into the Euro-kitsch rhetoric of "1992," which seems to be arriving a few years earlier than planned and with a number of uninvited guests...

...We wondered how many of those around us understood the gravity of what was about to take place...

...By mid-week the Free Democrats' petition had 200,000 signatures and parliament was forced to move preemptively...

...I was surprised to discover this split 1 within the opposition and the new demands, chiefly because Western reporters have treated recent Hungarian events exclusively as a "revolution from within" led by the reform Communist Imre Pozsgay...

...A fourth took place in Corvin Alley, outside a theater and troop garrison where some of the worst hand-to-hand combat had taken place...

...Now, as I write a week later, I learn that parliament has capitulated on this final point as well, and that a referendum will soon be held op the order of the new presidential and parliamentary elections...

...And finally, that evening, there was another solemn memorial service in front of parliament in Kossuth Square...

...But they are not alone...

...It can also sanction indifference, as it often has in Western policy toward Soviet-dominated Eastern Europenwhich at one time was deemed too unstable to merit freedom, because of its "extreme nationalism...

...And this was sufficient," the prayer goes...

...The Free Democrats and their partners split with the Democratic Forum over several points, including the dissolution of the hated paramilitary workers' militia, the redistribution of Communist party property, and the banning of all party organizations by Mark Lilla from the workplace...

...Fine: welcome to the Free World...

...But in the main the ceremony was fittingly somber...

...It is a history drenched balcony, the spot where Imre Nagy made his ill-starred attempt to calm the 1956 uprising, and the place where, the next day, horrified members of parliament watched hundreds of innocents butchered in the crossfire between Russian troops who had joined the revolt and their Hungarian Stalinist adversaries...

...Still, something must be done for their oppressed Hungarian brothers in Slovakia, Croatia, and especially in Ceausescu-controlled Transylvania...

...The Forum agreed with the Communists to run presidential elections before the parliamentary ones, thus favoring the currently popular Pozsgay and giving both sides a president they can live with...

...It can finally be said that there are no comrades left in Hungary today, and hardly anywhere else in this region...

...Szuros then recites a modest speech declaring the end of the People's Republic of Hungary and the founding of the new (i.e., Third) Republic of Hungary...

...The romantic national anthem rises over loudspeakers and the crowd begins to sing along, hopelessly out of tune...

...He then makes the mistake of calling for continued cooperation with the Soviet Union and is engulfed by hoots and whistles...

...Q o why, I wondered as I followed the ki crowd out on that unseasonably warm October night, has this whole experience left me so uneasy...

...But on arriving in Budapest I learned that no one here found this nearly sufficient, and that much more significant and durable changes were being demanded...

...Make no mistake about it: the revolutions of 1989 are as nationalistic as they are liberal, and it is difficult to know which impulse will finally out...

...meant that the Hungarians could determine their own fate I am sure they could be counted on to build a free, democratic republic...

...The assembly stopped short of making October 23 a national holiday, preferring instead to call it a "day of national reconciliation...

...The parliament facade was flooded with klieg lights for the television cameras, and the crowd held high the lit candles it had been asked to bring...

...The anti-Communist and anti-Soviet slogans were taken up again, and a few demonstrators paraded with large cardboard arrows reading "Moscow, 1,535 Km...

...Separating themselves somewhat from the Forum are a number of smaller groups, led by the Alliance of Free Democrats...

...they also know that under that same foreign pressure it drove them to crimes, particularly against the Jews and Ukrainians...

...My Hungarian friends think I worry too much, and perhaps I do...

...already under way across Budapest...

...Then the chants began: "No more Communism...

...I am told that when Imre Nagy made his 1956 balcony speech he began, instinctively enough, "Comrades...

...The laughably obvious undercover agents were everywhere, of course, in their unmistakable Naugahyde jackets and factory-faded jeans...

...I have just come from Poland, where my friends are emerging from the samizdat shadows to run government press conferences or found newspapers...

...It lacks, as one friend put it, any moral claim to the legacy of '56, which perhaps explains its willingness to sign a quick accord with the Communists...

...When one visits each country one sees democratic forms springing up, for the will to nourish them is strong...

...Someone in the square below shot back, "There are no more comrades...

...Perhaps it is this parallel with 1848 that underlies my discomfort...

...If "we are all Hungarians...

...There were video cameras throughout the crowd, but they were in private hands this time, those of young parents hoping to preserve these moments for their children...

...For this was just the beginning of what proved to be a very long day devoted to commemorating the uprising of October 23, 1956...

...While lecturing in Poland the week before, I had learned of the Communists' hari-kari, their decision to renounce the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and to rename themselves the Hungarian Socialist party...

...In fact, the day I arrived Pozsgay's butterball smile was seen all over Budapest newsstands, thanks to Newsweek, which also published an Andropov-style portrait of his recent achievements...

...Banners were being unfolded, young men were selling commemorative literature and lapel buttons, and the Hungarian flag—red, white, and green—was being waved assertively throughout the crowd...

...They are "cosmopolitan" (that is, more Jewish, less nationalistic) and distrust deeply Pozsgay and his marionettes...

...Individual Hungarians one meets are quick to boast that they are not like the Poles, that Budapest has the largest Jewish community in Central Europe, that everyone belongs to the Wallenberg committee, and that the gypsy problem is now under compassionate study...

...Deafening cheers ricochet off the facades of the square...

...One reason is that the largest opposition group, the Democratic Forum, is really his brainchild...

...In conversation it will be dropped, quite casually, that Hungary is a mutilated country which lost two-thirds of its original territory in the unjust Trianon Treaty of 1920...

...Each of those ceremonies also included a message to Hungarians "still living under foreign domination," a reminder that their brothers in the homeland had not forgotten them, and that Hungary would not really be free until all Hungarians are free...

...No matter: the republic was now to be a reality, and all across the countryside cranes were 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 dismantling the rusting red stars that stood on most government buildings...

...And can they count on the Poles and the Serbs...

...As those very same Hungarians are also quick to remind us, there are still two or three million ethnic Hungarians living across the borders in Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia...

...The well-orchestrated reburial of Imre Nagy last spring had already set a precedent for such sanctioned demonstrations, but there was nonetheless an unreal air about marching freely, en masse, down Budapest's wide—and now republican—avenues...

...It acted on several of their demands, dissolving the workers' militia and barring political parties from the shop floor, but still left open the question of presidential elections...

...And after two hours of speeches and singing, the lights were finally turned off, plunging the square once again into darkness...

...A free republic without these two faces of nationalism would be something new under the Polish sun—and would in fact be difficult to maintain in the face of the sotto voce German revanchism now rising on the west and the newly unleashed Ukrainian national movement on the east...

...t was, then, with a certain sense of numb disbelief that Hungarians made the tour of the commemorations, which may explain the moderate calm that ruled the city on this historic day...

...Only a single spotlight remained, focused on that famous balcony where someone had thoughtfully hung an oversized portrait of this day's improbable Communist hero, Imre Nagy...

...Exactly one year ago the police had used truncheons to disperse the crowds hoping to celebrate the uprising's anniversary, and now there was not a uniform to be seen...

...At the beginning of the week it was reported that thepetitioners had more than 100,000 signatures, enough to force a referendum and throw into doubt the so-called triangle talks with the then governing party...

...There was another ceremony outside the offices of the Hungarian radio station, where the students had later marched to have their demands broadcast—and where they were cut down by security guards in the narrow streets below...

...But when an entire region discovers that spirit simultaneously, as seems to be happening in Central and Eastern Europe today, the character of each country's revived national spirit will depend heavily on its neighbors': one troublemaker, and there goes the neighborhood...

...Russians go home...

...Let Otto be Otto, they say, before we accept Pozsgay...

...It was here that the 1956 uprising first took form, as tens of thousands of students gathered to read out their demands to the Communist government...

...Several weeks ago this was unthinkable, and even one week ago the battle seemed only half won...

...I don't mention the unintended consequences that seem to follow upon the dissolution of empires...

...The speakers were all resistance fighters who had been condemned to death in 1956 but had managed to survive—some by goingabroad, others by spending years on death row, awaiting their call...

...It is not every day that one witnesses 150,000 people shouting down Communism and cheering every mention of the United States...

...Indeed, the very existence of the Warsaw Pact is being thrown into question...

...They know that Polish nationalism has given them hope and strength over centuries of Russian, German, and Austrian occupation...

...The national anthem was struck up now and again, sometimes with recorded music, sometimes spontaneously...

...But neither is there a liberal democratic tradition to be revived here, a set of political habits and customs that can be counted on to support the moderate toleration demanded by republican life...

...I smile and tell myself it is, and try to enjoy the party...

...But his balance is finally restored when he calls for closer ties with the U.S., and the crowd lets one last moderate hurrah escape before filing out calmly to the other ceremonies 'The term is Timothy Garton Ash's, for the combination of reform and revolution taking place in Eastern Europe...

...This last ceremony was the most moving, perhaps because it was held at night...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990...

...During the previous weeks a number of opposition groups had refused to sign an agreement with the Communists 'and had drawn up a petition asking for further concessions from the government...

...The Poles seem most conscious of this problem and of its importance in their future...

...The hot October sun is beating down on a Hungary that soon expects to see itself free, affluent, at peace, and part of something called "Europe...

...I try not to think about the dark side of 1848...

...This theme was sounded again and again in private conversations and in the official celebrations...

...The borders are not in question, they then reassure us, especially since the original borders of the Empire included other Slavic peoples...

...But the main sticking point between the two groups seemed to be Pozsgay himself...

...Considered simply as national spirit within a single country, nationalism can either serve freedom or snuff it, depending on the form that spirit takes...

...he was present at its founding convention and even offered a close aide as its president...

...Nationalism" is a loaded word, I know...

...The Free Democrats, although recently formed as well, represent the real opposition tradition in Hungary, and are made up of long-suffering urban intellectuals who have been trying to publish and organize ever since the uprising thirty-three years ago...

...This is not to say that peaceful republican life is unimaginable here, but it must be admitted frankly that for the whole region to be simultaneously free and at peace would be unprecedented...

...and, indeed, in Poland it was treated as an important achievement...

...For there is a great deal to the comparison, and it is being made everywhere on the con-tinent today...

...But when Matyas Szuros, acting head of state, emerged from the balcony of Hungary's neo-gothic parliament the crowd fell silent...

...We are all Hungarians...