The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page B

language of the high communist official. There was nothing communist about his message, however. When he said somethingthat he especially wanted to be heard, he delivered it crisply with a quick, direct look that meant
Listen up.
    These clubs, these new political groups, I asked, could they eventually become bona fide American- or European-style political parties? “That is one of our greatest ambitions,” Nemeth replied.
    For as long as it had existed, the communist party had insisted on its so-called “leading role” in society—meaning unchallenged power. Would he be prepared to give it up, as Kalman Kulcsar claimed?
    â€œIn two years I could imagine a situation where the head of government would not necessarily be a member of the Politburo,” Nemeth said, carefully but with unmistakable meaning.
    This talk about creating capitalism on the Danube. Economists say that would mean putting one hundred thousand people out of work, perhaps three times as many. Wouldn’t that be a big blow in a “workers’ paradise” such as Hungary?
    Nemeth offered a tight smile. “We are going to live through some painful years, yes. But in five years I would hope that Hungary will have become a market economy, with room for entrepreneurs and where people can have more hope for the future.”
    Moscow might have something to say about that, I noted. Would a setback for Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia overturn the applecart of reforms here in Hungary? Might the Russians even intervene, as in 1956?
    â€œGorbachev has taken the lid off a boiling pot,” replied the young prime minister. “No doubt the steam is painful, but change is irreversible.”
    Thanks to Radio Free Europe, that quote would echo throughout the Soviet bloc. It also earned Nemeth a stern dressing-down from his titular boss, Karoly Grosz. But if Nemeth in his modest way provoked Grosz’s ire, imagine the emotions inspired by another, brasher and even more outspoken member of his new government.
    Imre Pozsgay was Nemeth’s alter ego and most important ally, as outgoing as Nemeth was restrained. Popularly known as “Hungary’s Gorbachev,” he had spent much of the past decade in the political wilderness, a sort of in-house dissident with a gift for threading the minefield between those who sought radical reform and those whowould go slower. When he was on the outs, Pozsgay taught political sociology at the University of Budapest and hosted a popular TV show on foreign affairs. When he was in, he was the perfect official interlocutor for Hungary’s intelligentsia, able to segue flawlessly from Marx and Engels to Milton Friedman. In late 1988, Pozsgay was very much in—a minister of state, a senior member of the all-powerful ruling Politburo and a beacon for anyone within the regime who wanted change.
    Of all the Hungarians I met that December, he was the most boldly free-speaking, often breathtakingly so. “Communism does not work,” he told me bluntly on our first meeting, as soon as we had sat down. “It has come to the end of its days. It is an obstacle to progress in all fields—political, social and economic. We must start again, from zero.” Rumpled and roly-poly, with the deceptively distracted air of a university professor, he had an instinct for the jugular—in his case, history.
    In Hungary, as everywhere, the communists had rewritten it. In the winter of 1988 and early 1989, the country was haunted by the ghost of 1956. That’s when Hungarian freedom fighters rose up against their Stalinist masters in a revolt that transfixed the world. For weeks they battled in the streets of Budapest against Soviet tanks dispatched by Moscow to crush them. An estimated twenty-five hundred people died and two hundred thousand fled into exile. Waves of arrests followed, and public discussion of the events was banned for the next three decades. Then along came Imre Pozsgay. For