On a cold, blustery, winter day - November 27, 1956 - 200,000 Hungarians left everything behind them: family friends, job, school, career, the graves of dear ones. They fled the broken city of Budapest, where burned-out buildings still testified to the vicious and brutal fighting between the invading Red Army and the ragtag and bobtail Hungarians who dared to seek freedom. Shop windows were broken; shops stood empty. Tanks patrolled the country; militiamen, Red Army troops, police asked for the identification books; fear gripped the cities. The factories stood ideal. At night, the cities were dark, threatening, the streets empty. The sullen and dispirited people stared dully in the distance, grateful that at least the horror of the fighting was over but knowing that their dream of independence and democracy was never to materialize.
The contrast between the Budapest of 1956 and the city of today cannot be readily depicted in words alone. It is in the smells of the city, its feel, and its noises, and not just in the visual element of the change. The Pearl of the Danube and the Paris of the East is today a city without parallel in Eastern Europe. As the largest capital of the region, it boasts glittering galas, privately owned Mercedes and BMWs, a casino in the Hilton, Western built hotels, a Pierre Cardin salon, and nightclubs galore. The shops - in glaring contrast to those of any of the neighboring states - are well stocked, providing both basic necessities for the population and luxuries for the extremely rich who live in their private villas, complete with swimming pools and two-car garages. While there are many areas of obvious failures, the signs of success are all the results of the accomplishments of Hungary's reform era under the rule of Janos Kadar. Although there are no giant billboards at every street corner emblazoned with the face of the Almighty Leader as there are in most neighboring states, for the last thirty years, this modest, colorless man had directed the fate of the Hungarian nation.
The Kadar Era
There can be no doubt about it; the period of Hungarian history since the revolution of 1956 can only be called the Kadar era. With its failures and its problems, its successes and its harmonies, the nearly three decades of communist rule in Hungary has been marked by the policies and style of Kadar. Ruling for a period longer than any Magyar leader during the last four centuries, he has presided over the longest historical transformation of Hungarian life. In the process, he managed to transform himself in the eyes of his subjects from a quisling and traitor to the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet and Soviet-type rule to a respected and often admired national leader whose death or departure from the helm is feared by most Hungarian citizens.
It was a remarkable transformation, accomplished largely without force and without the manifestations of the ever present personality cult that characterizes the neighboring states. Moreover, Hungary's life was transformed from one dominated by fear and poverty to one that provides a measure of freedom and the highest standard of living in Eastern Europe. As his officially approved "court biographer," Laszlo Gyurko, maintains, through the accomplishment of that task, Kadar himself has emerged as the statesman most admired by the citizens of Hungary.
Kadar's task was certainly difficult. He came into power with the help of a Soviet invasion force that
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