escu ran his country like a police state, Hungary allowed monitored meetings between dissidents and Western reporters and had no known political prisoners.Hungary has always been unlucky.
In the approximately eleven hundred years since the handlebarmustachioed Chief Árpád rode into the Carpathian basin in 896 and founded Hungary, the country has been plundered so relentlessly that defeat could be considered the national pastime. In 1241 the Mongolian Tatars swept in, killing a third of the population; the Turks arrived in 1526 on a 150-year bender in which they pounded Hungary into their Ottoman Empire; at the end of the seventeenth century, the Hapsburgs of Austria cut in and swallowed Hungary whole.
The only heyday in Hungary’s modern history arrived in 1867 after a compromise was struck with Hapsburg emperor Franz Josef. Though Hungary was not put in charge of anything but its own land, the agreement granted it title credit in the Central European geopolitical blockbuster of the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Landlocked Hungary became co-chair of a global power that stretched all the way west to present-day Switzerland, north to the contemporary German and Polish borders, and east and south through parts of what is now Ukraine, Romania, and Serbia. Six years later, in 1873, the formerly rival twin cities of Buda and Pest, separated only by the serpentine Danube River and at least two social classes, swept their differences aside and married to form a new Hungarian capital, Budapest.
United for the first time, the new city raced into the European spotlight, unveiling the continent’s first subway system and setting in motion a renaissance in business, architecture, and culture that would enable it to compete with the Romanian capital, Bucharest, for the title “Paris of the East.” In the parlor levels of Budapest’s brand-new balustrated five- and six-story Belle Epoque residences, more than six hundred coffeehouses overflowed with some of Europe’s finest artists and intellectuals. Hungarian Ferenc Liszt (later known by the German, Franz) was composing symphonies, the expansive new Budapest Commodity and Stock Exchange opened for business, and on old Pest’s Danube bank, a massive neo-Gothic structure that would become the second-largest government building in Europe (after Britain’s House of Commons) was under construction.
It was a heady time, and in short order it would come to a fantastic end. After fighting on the wrong side in World War I, Hungary was so royally fleeced by the postwar treaties that some Hungarians challenge the assertion that Germany was the Great War’s big loser. Indeed, no other country was stripped of as much territory as Hungary, nor had Hungary ever been so humiliated in its whole humiliating history than it was at Versailles, where the infamous peace accords were cooked up. In one round of fountain pens, on June 4, 1920, Hungary went from being part of the most dominant kingdom of Central Europe to a smudge on the map, crammed between seven bordering countries. Two-thirds of Hungary’s territory—including its beloved Transylvania—was lost, along with the hope of its people and, seemingly, its planetary relevance. Later that year when international war-relief organizations doled out food and clothing, Austria received 288,000 tons; comparably sized Hungary got 635. Needless to say, involuntarily gaining independence from the Hapsburgs did not lead to Hungarians dancing in the utcas. In fact, an alarming number of the country’s remaining 10 million citizens began diving into the Danube River, securing perennial world-class status for Hungary’s hari-kari rates, alcohol consumption, and swimming teams.
But the pleasures of twentieth-century life were only beginning for Hungary. After twenty-five manic-depressive years that included a brief communist takeover followed by the bloody right-wing reign of Admiral Miklós Horthy (who made Hungary a kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral without a fleet), the Germans came calling with an offer that Hungary was desperate enough to accept. In exchange for Hungary’s support of the Nazis in what would soon become World War II, Germany promised to restore to Hungary much of Transylvania, the hunk of rugged land containing the fecund Carpathian basin that would eventually, thanks to Attila Ambrus, be called “a nest of Robin Hoods” and that Hungary had forcibly ceded to Romania after the First World War. But Transylvania would not be returned. Hitler decided instead that while he was mopping up the rest of Europe, he might as well occupy his two-bit ally Hungary. In 1944 Hungary frantically tried to switch sides, but it was too late. Within a year the Nazis, with shell-shocked Hungary’s complicity, had killed 440,000 of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews, destroyed all six of Budapest’s bridges, obliterated much of its famous architecture, and absconded with the thousand-year-old bejeweled holy crown of Hungary’s first king, Stephen.
The Soviets rescued Hungary from the Nazis the following year in an operation that by its own trigger-happy ending left Budapest with just 30 percent of its majestic prewar buildings intact. Then, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin calculated Hungary’s tab for services rendered by the Red Army: everything. Russian troops were installed and communist rule from Moscow imposed. Hungary became part of the western hem in the Iron Curtain. Transylvania remained inside Romania, which also capitulated to Soviet communist rule.
During communism, Hungary’s factories produced much of the Soviet bloc’s lightbulbs, televisions, and those ubiquitous Eastern Europe roadside decorations, the Ikarus bus. The cost of a one-room apartment in Budapest was approximately eight years of average wages, an unachievable savings. Families fortunate enough to live in multiroom dwellings were forced to take in strangers as roommates. The price of getting a phone line was extraordinary patience: the waiting list was twenty years long. The countryside remained a predominantly green, if discouragingly impoverished, agricultural land. But in Budapest, where one-fifth of Hungary’s population lived, as well as in the smaller cities, the air was filthy from cheaply manufactured, blue-exhaust-belching Soviet- and Czech-produced cars, and the rivers were poisoned by unregulated industry.
There was a brief flicker of hope in 1956, when a group of young Hungarians managed to stage the historic first, and largest, uprising against Soviet communist rule. For twelve days Budapest was transformed into a shooting gallery as sniper-fired machine guns pointing out of apartment- and cinema-house windows picked off Red Army soldiers. Molotov cocktails delivered in jug-shaped liquor bottles set Soviet tanks ablaze like cake candles. It was, briefly, euphoria. Hungarians relayed the urgent word to America and the West that they had seized control of their capital and needed reinforcements to hold the city. Time was of the essence. But Western Europe and America, which had encouraged the uprising via radio broadcasts, were too busy to take a call from Hungary. They were fighting off an impending conniption over a Soviet-financed dam in the Suez Canal, which, a few people could tell you, was located in Egypt. The SOS from Budapest was answered not by American aid but by a line of Soviet tanks that rolled into the city like a funeral procession. Twenty-seven hundred Hungarians lost their lives, two hundred thousand more fled the country, and within a few short months Hungary once again felt as if it had been pronounced dead.
For those who remained, however, the failed uprising was not wholly without benefit. It was such an embarrassment to the Kremlin that rather than risk another rebellion, the Russians opted to give more latitude to János Kádár—the Hungarian leader Moscow had installed—than to any other leader in its eastern orbit. As a result, Hungary was the least oppressive place to live in its communist neighborhood. The media remained hopelessly state-owned and -controlled, but Hungary was the only Eastern bloc country that allowed people to listen to shortwave foreign radio broadcasts about what flourished beyond the Curtain. Unlike in Romania, where President Nicolae Ceauescu ran his country like a police state, Hungary allowed monitored meetings between dissidents and Western reporters and had no known political prisoners.
This isn’t to say insouciance reigned in Hungary’s sixteenth-century Turkish bathhouses. Even if people weren’t being hauled off regularly, there were enough incidents of the Political Investigation Department haranguing intellectuals to remind the populace that harboring aspirations of anything but a gray, unsatisfying life was useless, and possibly even hazardous to one’s health. As it is with such subsistence, Hungarians mollified themselves with theories of relativity—in their case, the pronouncement that their country was, as they put it, “the happiest barracks on the (Soviet) bloc.” And as time went on, Hungary began to edge toward free market capitalism, albeit painfully, without interference from the Kremlin. In order to shrink the spiraling $13 billion budget deficit it had accrued over years of corrupted fiscal policies, the Hungarian government began shaving social services such as health care. To curb inflation, it caused an outcry by raising prices for bread, flour, electricity, and other staples. Slowly, Hungary’s leadership broke with Soviet practice, signing worldwide trade agreements and conforming to enough human rights conventions to qualify for International Monetary Fund aid. In the early 1980s, citizens were even permitted to open their own businesses.
By the time Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s progressive policies of perestroika and glasnost, or “economic restructuring” and “openness,” arrived to the USSR in the mid-1980s, Hungary was setting the pace for Eastern Europe’s march toward Westernization. While Attila Ambrus was warding off knife-wielding Romanian bunkmates in a desolate Transylvanian juvenile detention facility, Budapest was welcoming an Adidas sports store and Eastern Europe’s first McDonald’s.
As the end of the 1980s neared, it was clear that even bigger changes were coming, and so—for the first time in most people’s lifetime—was the unknown prospect of true Western-style opportunity. This is where our story begins.