The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page A

the potential for “multiparty rule.” Anything but the classic dictatorship of the proletariat, meaning him and his Socialist Party henchmen, he said, was “an historic impossibility.” He declined even hypothetically to discuss sharing power or offering a role in government to opposing political parties. Yet that was precisely what Hungary’s new government, appointed and duly installed by Grosz and his communists, was working to do.
    Eager to stamp their more human face on the old order, they had just taken a step that no other East European regime dared—to create a real opposition to their own rule. This came in the form of a new law, enacted soon after the reformers took office, allowing the country’s first independent political parties to organize. They could not officially recognize these groups as bona fide “parties,” at least not yet. That would violate the ironclad principle of Marxist Leninism: that there could be only one party—the socialist or communist party—whose destiny it was to guide the nation in all important matters. So they played games with names. They called them “clubs,” “movements” or “alternative organizations.” At a time when signs of a thawing in the Cold War were yet faint, this was a remarkable, even radical development.
    Suddenly, the entire country was in ferment. Budapest’s cafés buzzed with the D-word,
democracy.
You could virtually see the internal rift emerging—the young reformers on one side, the old guard on the other, each girding for a struggle that would unfold with astonishing speed. In September, a populist group called the HungarianDemocratic Forum (which within the year would go on to form Hungary’s first postcommunist government) set itself up as a “democratic spiritual-political movement.” Other groups soon followed, among them the League of Young Democrats (a student association better known as Fidesz) and the Alliance for Free Democrats, an organization of trade unions. All would go on, in future years, to dominate Hungary’s political scene. Meanwhile, censorship was eased. A robustly free press began to emerge. Underground samizdat publications came into the open. The few dissidents who deserved the name either went mainstream by joining one of the parties or were ignored, both by people in the street and the authorities who once persecuted them. Dissent against what, you might ask, or whom?
    How do you dissent, really, from someone like Miklos Nemeth, the man who put so much of this in motion. He was no Lech Walesa, Poland’s archetypal charismatic leader, the hero of Solidarity, who in 1980 became famous in America and the world for leaping over the fence in the Gdansk shipyard and brandishing a fist in the face of Soviet authorities. No, Nemeth was the quiet man, a technocrat, a trained economist who spent a year at Harvard Business School and played tennis with the U.S. ambassador. He was only forty years old when the communist party appointed him prime minister on November 24, 1988. Sober-suited and bankerly, his mild manner masked inner toughness. His was a life-or-death situation. Hungary’s economy was a shambles. The country’s finances were in crisis. Everything was falling apart. His job was to step in and save the day—and his own career. To do so, he knew that mere “reform” would not be enough. He would have to dismantle the entire communist system.
    He did not say as much when I first met him, less than a month after taking office. Perhaps he was too mindful of the dangers and all that could go wrong. Sitting at a long, dark oak conference table in his offices in the Gothic-style parliament building, flanked by half a dozen aides, he did not look like a man who would change the world. In our three-hour meeting, he dabbed perspiration from his brow with a white handkerchief and lapsed often into the opaque, excessively careful