The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer

already he was elbow-deep in paperwork, he said, authoring a new national constitution. “We must guarantee the rights of the individual against the state,” he declared with forceful energy. Free speech, free association and free property are “inalienable rights.” And that wasn’t all from this card-carrying commie. “Our goal is to create a parliamentary democracy,” he went on, identical to those in Western Europe.
    You mean free elections, I asked, incredulous.
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    How long would this take—for real democracy?
    â€œOh,” he said breezily. “One to three years.”
    And if the communists lose?
    He didn’t even hesitate. “We step down.”
    At this, I laughed. Across Eastern Europe, so many “reformers” were spouting such talk of “openness” and “change,” echoing theirpatron in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, chanting his mantra of glasnost and perestroika. But if Gorbachev seemed to mean it, the leaders of his Warsaw Pact satellite nations did not. These Hungarians appeared more sincere than most but this, I felt, was going too far.
    Kalman Kulcsar frowned at my evident skepticism. “You don’t believe me, Mr. Meyer?” He leaned over in his leather swivel chair and slid open a drawer of his carved wooden desk, pulled out a small booklet and waved it over his head. “What do you think this is?” It was a copy of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. “Mark my words,” the minister said, emphasizing each word with unsettling force. “Within nine months, this will be ours.”
    He was wrong. It would be all of ten months. Still, it was a dramatic moment. Here in Budapest, unnoticed by the outside world, communists had become… anticommunists. My god, I thought. This is for real. And that was when I discovered that something I’d always taken as a figure of speech was, in fact, a physical phenomenon. Quite literally, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
    By night, it would be easy to mistake the Hungarian parliament for the symbol of democracy it was meant to be. Bright with lights reflecting on the waters of the Danube, it’s an unabashed imitation of the British Houses of Parliament, except for one significant detail. By design, it’s precisely one meter longer and one meter wider than its inspiration. The architectural allusion was apt in late 1988. It was at once an ironic symbol of Hungary’s historic aspirations and a reminder of its lesser attainments.
    Not for long, though.
    I had come to Budapest to investigate reports that after four decades under communism the first tender shoots of democracy were pushing up along the Danube. The city was in the grip of a December blizzard. But beneath the deep freeze, a political spring was indeed germinating.
    Just a month before, in November, a small group of communist reformers had come to power. Kalman Kulcsar was but one of a number of Hungarian leaders who were saying (and doing) the most uncommunist things. Within the last few months, they had opened a stock market—a temple to the antipodal capitalist faith. They passednew laws encouraging private enterprise, slashed subsidies for state-owned enterprises, abandoned communist-style price-fixing in favor of a free market. The cost of food, fuel and housing would henceforth be determined by supply and demand, they told the people, well aware of how painful that transition could be. Hello, Keynes. Goodbye, Marx?
    It quickly became apparent that this revolution—for that was what it had already become—went far beyond the marketplace. Six months earlier, just before his first state visit to the United States in July, the thuggish chief of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, a former printing engineer named Karoly Grosz, sat down with
Newsweek.
Contemptuously he dismissed all talk of democracy and what, within opposition circles, was being discussed as