Thank you very much. MCQUAY And thank you for the invitation.
I start my watch in order to keep the timeframe.
I would try to do that. So basically I will talk about the Hungarian transition, the almost mirabilis of 1989.
But I think in in on in this conference, in this context in this context,
it's fair to start with the policy impact on the Hungarian dissident opposition movement,
which goes back to the, uh, uh, at least to the mid seventies.
Uh, I don't. Who was the founder of this periodical best seller of governance in Donetsk is the Hungarian philosopher
and who was the spiritual leader of the democratic opposition in Hungary in the late seventies.
And while the this he wrote several times that the Hungarian opposition received the most important inspirations from that Polish counterpart.
After the moment of the great disappointment of 1968,
those Hungarians who decided to turn against the regime and give up hopes of uh, uh, the possibility to meaningful reforms of the,
of the party state, uh, still believe that the resistance potential in Hungary is very weak, the society is completely indifferent and apathetic.
So their choice is rather a kind of moral, intellectual choice, a kind of private business, a personal one that they could not expect.
And they did not expect that a mass social movement, uh, lined up behind them.
These attitudes have been significantly changed after the consequences of the revolt or the uprising,
and also centralism and the foundation of the Workers Defence Committee.
The committee set up on the draft board, uh and uh, and also by the ices of domestic and sexual violence.
We heard a lot of sex in the last two days.
Other meetings, new evolution is a new evolution, as this has seen was really according to the relative,
uh, account of the potential ways of dissidents, political dissidents or also in Hungary.
He said that the basic lesson in both mistake and cry for them was that although a revolution from
below is unfeasible and unexpected and it was worthless to apply for important reforms from above.
But still there is a room, a latitude for meaningful dissident politics.
We do not bargain. We do not negotiate on concessions with the, uh, with the power holders,
but try to impose a pressure on the power from outside the essence of this third wave of statutory laws.
I mean,
the dissidents damn self limiting social movements that do not challenge directly the political regime do not provoke Soviet military intervention.
But the strategy game of it is to create a civil society that is capable to organise and
maintain itself outside the framework of the regime and can push back step by step,
the control of the party state.
Uh, it is not accidental that in the late seventies Garnett speech and some of his Twitter followers, George Benson and others, started to run Polish.
And it is quite strange that in Budapest, the Polish Solidarnosc literature,
at least until the martial law was available in the Polish cultural history to its SO
event seven votes and subscribe to magazines and the texts and and the periodicals.
It is also not accidental that at the moment of the last martial law he sent, his colleagues started this,
his bestseller, which became the most influential samizdat periodical throughout the eighties in its third volume.
And in January 1982, the final speech wrote about the Polish situation.
It seems that history repeating itself after 1956 and 1968, again, the democratic movement was oppressed brutally by military force.
However, he continued, this case was completely different.
That was the first time in the history of communist regimes when a resistance movement could not be.
Completely eliminated by force.
What happened in Poland was not another example of an of an aborted revolt against communist regime in the region, but the start of a new phase.
And this was the and this was the idea that gave them encouragement for the for the rest of the decade.
And it's led to the peaceful transition in Hungary.
Just another example of today's Polish impact.
When Bestseller published its political program in 1987, which was a radical program on the one side in in in the Hungarian context at that moment,
because it exactly declared that God must leave power, he must go, and the whole political system had to be rearranged.
This proclamation, which had applied to a social contract, still remained within the framework of this strategy.
Of what new abolitionism and the late sixties, early and late seventies, early eighties, uh, uh, uh, Hungarian dissident movement, uh, had in mind.
It is quite strange that within two years this political program, the social contract, had become suddenly completely obsolete.
Now, let me turn to the to the events of 1989.
And let me introduce very briefly the main participants of the game.
Of course, we must start with the ruling party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party.
This party went through a rapid change from May 1988 when the court that the former chief
secretary of the party who ruled the party since 1956 had been replaced by the party in 1989,
still had more than 700,000 members.
Of course, those members was not all and chooses the communist activist, but more or less people who joined the party for various reasons.
But also, despite of this high number, this number decreased more and more rapidly and in the previous years,
as many people did not renew their expired membership.
The main reason of this erosion of the party was was the uncovering of the original sin of the Cabal regime and indeed the issue of 56,
which came to the surface and came to the centre of the political discourse in 1988,
after contact left power by still the party was very strong and although on the other hand they were
also aware of the fact that they are facing tool they were facing to avoid an economic bankruptcy.
They knew that in case of an economic collapse, all the consequences would fall on them,
which the party would not be able to survive the threat of their strength.
Their strategy at that moment was three fold by the half of tomorrow's political reforms.
We are still talking about 1988, uh,
by the help of some political reforms that give space for a kind of limited pluralism they may import lawyer, non-communist, political groups,
circles or personalities that make the rule more acceptable, gives them more legitimacy,
and may makes it more presentable for the Hungarian and for the Western public.
This enables them to share responsibility for the upcoming difficulties parallel to this with economic reforms,
changes in the legal system, reforming the Constitution, and so on.
They create a legal and political environment that might be attractive for further capital and technological investments from the West.
At that moment, the Hungarian economy was very much depended on on the loans of Western states and Western private banks,
and the survival of the of the country was depended depended on it.
And they also knew that a modest evaluation of the recent past, namely that we.
The ships. The 56 revolution, most importantly, was also inevitable that for in 1988,
they sent out various committees in order to prepare for the next party Congress to work on the concept of the new constitution,
the new electoral law. And they also sent out a committee, a subcommittee of historians, to come up with a new narrative of the post 1945 era.
But for us, for the other side, all this was indicated that at this moment,
the party wanted to speed up the development and create a fait accompli situation before the conference slips through the fingers.
The main strategic purpose, in my view,
was that this this program for not addressing but to moderate change was the following by giving up the hegemony of the total hegemony of the party.
The party still preserves dominance in politics and remains in control of the resource of the resources of the economy and their hopes for the future.
Prosperity,
prosperity and economy by the system becomes more adaptive and flexible and more acceptable for the best and populist governments and investors.
I think this is the strategy of what the Chinese Communist Party leadership successfully accomplished.
Indeed, in the previous two decades.
And forgive me to this analogy, but I see a parallel tendencies in and indeed in the aims of the recent Orban Orban government,
which tries to create a centrifugal force to control all matters of political,
economic and other and other issues in Hungary with some limited control and opposition from the other side.
This strategy failed, but I think it had good perspectives at the moment of January 1989.
Let's see the other other participants.
Politically, the most important one was the Hungarian Democratic Forum,
which originated from the from the tradition of the thirties of the populist nationalist Hungarian writers and intellectual circles.
Politically, it was the most important because quite rapidly it was the only movement which was able to,
uh, which was able to recruit thousands and thousands of supporters after their formation in 1987.
So this was the most, in a social sense, the most influential non-Communist political movement in the country at the moment in 1989.
The problem was that they defined themselves not as an opposition party, not as a dissident movement,
but a kind of intellectual forum in between the power and the opposition.
It is quite interesting that when it was founded in a small village in La Quinta in Hungary in 1985,
what the most prominent Hungarian party leaders even that fortunately was president,
who the a who who brought with him some of the greetings of the prime minister, the communist prime minister.
GROSS Uh, uh, the power at that moment in 1987,
1988 and in early 1989 regarded the Hungarian Democratic Forum as one of the potential royal satellite in their purposes and in their strategy.
And this idea was not alien to many prominent leaders of the Hungarian Democratic Forum as well.
Let me call your attention that the president of the movement was a very close
associate of him in a possibly for decades in the cultural ministry in the seventies.
And they had very close ties, personal and political ties to all the eighties and throughout the political transition.
His name is old time Beatle novelist Norman. As the director of the New Historical Institute for doing research on regime change in Hungary.
The best candidate for that purpose.
Of course, the this this character of the Hungarian Democratic Forum changed fundamentally as the times as times speeds up.
It is not accidental that you would have possibly could count on them in his president's presidential ambitions until late 1989.
So this was the the biggest opposition movement in Hungary,
and that was the areas of free Democrats came from the tradition of the Democratic opposition.
This was the this was the political movement that had the most experience in anti-regime political strategy and tactics,
and they had the most analytical skills as they seriously analysed throughout the eighties.
The the mechanism of the Communist Party state, they trained themselves through, to some extent, literature.
And by these activities they also accumulated a great, great kind of moral credit for themselves.
But this was still this movement, although it was very efficient in a political sense,
in the analytical sense, it has just a tiny influence on Hungarian society.
A couple of hundred people believed or thought that they were they had ties to this democratic opposition.
In 1988, when the areas of free Democrats in November was established.
The membership was not more than a couple of hundred people, and it did not increase to more than 5000 until the end of 1989.
And the third, I think, a very important participant of the game was the areas of young Democrats.
I'm talking about the party of the recent ideas of young Democrats, the threat assessor of it, which was an alternative youth movement.
And since they were younger, they came from the special colleges of Budapest universities,
from the university, far from the economic university, and from the legal faculty of the Budapest University.
And so they were very much involved in social sciences, economic sciences and and legal studies.
And for their age, they were not touched ever in their life by Marxist ideas.
So this was one of the small but also very effective group that uh, uh,
had more or less clear visions of the upcoming nature of liberal democracy and free market capitalism.
So by this very short, not short time for change, uh,
I think it was not superfluous because this really illustrates the initial difficulties of this transition here in Hungary.
We have a pretty strong party with all the control of,
of power and the army and the police and the economy and the resources of the state and so on and so on.
And on the other side, we have a divided camp of political movements full of mutual distrust and previous injuries against each other.
We looked very different political and cultural background and contradictory visions of the political community.
They had a very weak legitimacy. There was no mass movement behind them.
None of them could refer to a massive public support that had been manifested by street demonstrations or strikes or whatever they happened in,
in, in, in in Poland. And the largest of them with the greatest is publicly for us had close ties to the the ruling party and had been continuous.
This discussion we have on all of this that involved that prominent leader and there were others,
some smaller, I would say, parties and corporate parties.
Partly it had some historical origins like the.
Christian Democrats tend to smallholders. Some of them were planted by the security forces.
And so this was the camp from which a kind of opposition rooted or had to be shaped that could stand up against the regime.
Despite all of these difficulties, the roundtable negotiations started and came up with the results,
and I think there were four or five factors that played a role in this, and I would like to run through these factors very shortly.
The first is that in the final moment,
these are very different political parties on the opposition's side could come up with an agreement that they stand up and together.
Of course, the strategy of the Communist Party at the beginning was to divide one by one first versus then the parties separately.
The Communist Party wanted to maintain the discretion to define who he was willing to negotiate.
And it was a real danger because in January, the Hungarian Democratic Forum leadership decided that in case of an invitation, they would accept it.
And they changed their mind. And there was two things which which led them to to this conclusion.
The first that even first, they proclaimed on radio in late January that 1956 was not a counter-revolution, but a popular uprising.
And then came some weak messages from Moscow that A in if it's inevitable, the Moscow leadership can accept Hungary as a natural multi-party state.
So then came the March 15 demonstration, when that was the first occasion where a real crowd appeared on the streets of Budapest 1000, 100,000 people.
And these factors led to that led the Democratic Forum to accept the idea that the
opposition forces had to go to negotiate with the party together after two days of March 15,
where the leaders of the forum declared that we either we go together or we do not go alone.
So this was a major breakthrough which made possible the cooperation of the opposition forces and to create an opposition roundtable.
The second factor was the memory of 1956, which I said came to the surface in 1988 by the foundation of the Historical Justice,
making a committee which really governs the rehabilitation of the victims of communist terror and the soap drivers and tortures of the past 56 era.
This really raised the issue of the original crime of the regime,
and they demanded that every barrier of imminent night at the 56 issue was not important.
Only for this was one of the most effective ways to mobilise the Hungarian people most directly to to
call their attention that there is a moral symbol behind this regime which cannot be maintained anymore.
But it was also a kind of test case for both the Hungarians and both the outside observers and Western governments.
It was unable to maintain from the side of the Communist Party that they are
and they are really honest supporters of democratic changes in the country.
While they also maintained that the policy of human at large was was high treason and counterrevolutionary policy.
So these two things could not be maintained.
And the communist leadership time to time received questions from from inside and from outside as well that what to do with the memory of.
In a nod with the memory of 1956.
So in this for this reason, the Hungarian communist leaders had had to continuously retreat from their standpoint in 1988.
The chief secretary of the party said that the legal and political rehabilitation of human rights is impossible.
The family can be bearing the victims for humanitarian reasons.
From that point, they arrived within one year to the great location of the poverty barrier of knowledge and the rehabilitation in front of the court.
Let me just very briefly say two other things.
The one is the Soviet factor, and we discussed about that a lot yesterday.
And I agree that perhaps the Polish policymakers, either on our side or on the opposition side, was not.
They didn't have the sure knowledge, certain knowledge about the Soviet intentions.
But it was not the case with the Hungarian communists. In February, a former model who was one of the chief advisers of Gorbachev, uh, as I said,
proclaimed that in principle, the Soviet leadership cannot accept Hungary as a noble state.
And this statement was reinforced for the Hungarian communist politicians when they visited Moscow in March, and they had negotiations with Gorbachev.
And Gorbachev clearly told them that the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Hungary is a final
decision and they cannot rely upon any military and political support from the Soviet side.
The problem was that the Hungarian communist leaders knew it, but nobody else had a clear knowledge about that.
So it was it was a factor. On on the communist side.
But it but the kind of uncertainty about this issue remained for for the for the rest of the year.
And and the major breakthrough and in the Hungarian attitudes which finally led to the,
uh, to the success of, uh, of the most important act of regime change in Hungary.
The referendum in November 1989 was due to the rapid changes in, in the region.
Most importantly, what happened in Czechoslovakia, what happened in Poland, the outcome of the Polish elections,
and the inability of making a Polish government on the basis of the initial arrangement,
and then the uprise and then the formation of the Mazowiecki government and also the events in eastern Germany.
These were the three, four major events that convinced the Hungarian public that the horizon is much wider than they than they previously believed.
And I'm afraid I have to stop here.
So that was all I wanted to say to a much.