The lid on the Budapest pressure cooker is unlatched at last, and Hungary is steaming. Those who have known Hungary in recent decades cannot believe what they see on Hungarian television and read in the newspapers as Hungary's glasnost challenges the Soviet Union's.
In 1988, no one could have imagined that former leader Imre Nagy and the late Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty would be retried or Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the throne--who married while kneeling on a sack of Hungarian earth--speak to cheers at the Karl Marx University in Budapest. Political parties thought long dead have been reborn and are preparing for real elections.
Almost as if to signify the end of this era, Kadar died. On July 5, at age 77, Janos Kadar passed on to another world, nearly as quietly as he had passed on politically. The ruler of Hungary for more than 31 years after Soviet troops and tanks brought him to power in November 1956, Kadar had been relieved of all posts by 1989. At first hated for his treachery, he was later perceived as indecisive, bumbling, ineffectual, but perhaps well-meaning; in essence, forced by the Soviets to rule.
Kadar presented himself as a reluctant ruler. In April 1958, for example, he complained of his politburo: "Why do they always come to me with their questions? Let them decide it themselves." Actually, Kadar made the decisions the Soviets did not make for him. He had his politburo abort the first program for reforms attempted by economist Rezso Nyers in the late 1960s. Instead, Kadar bought popularity with pyramid borrowing, until Hungary's per capita external debt became the world's largest. The country owed the West more than $12 billion in 1986.
Former Secretary of State George Shultz is one high-level Westerner who actually met and talked with Kadar. Shultz emerged from a 1985 meeting in Budapest saying, "I felt he had a great deal of wisdom. I'm in a position to say to everyone in Washington that Mr. Kadar is a very interesting interlocutor and well worth listening to."
Kadar won his long-sought U.S. government endorsement just as the ground began to crumble beneath him. In May 1988, Kadar was eased out as general secretary of his Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. Replacing Kadar was Karoly Grosz, a reported favorite of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In May 1989, Kadar lost the ceremonial presidency of the party and his seat in the party Central Committee.
On May Day this year, Grosz delivered a scathing attack on Kadar and his role in 1956. Grosz used the attack to instigate a purge of Kadar's remaining cabinet ministers, saying that since 1956 Hungary's leaders have "inflicted unimaginable moral, political, and material damage on our people. Our inheritance is almost unmanageable--a huge foreign debt, an empty state treasury, broad social discontent, and disillusion." A few days later Premier Miklos Nemeth replaced five cabinet members with younger men to better cope with "impending economic collapse."
A Haunting History
The government daily Magyar Hirlap editorialized that Kadar's era was over. On May 6, Magyar Hirlap also published a full page of excerpts from a document written by
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