In this book, I have conceptualized remains not as a fixed set of objects or sites, but as a logic that seeks to master the challenges of the present by locating them in a pathologized past. The battles to define specific remains and determine their fate thus also represent opportunities to imagine dreaded or desired futures—and in so doing, to address the anxieties produced by encounters with a Western hierarchy that has tended to view those on its political peripheries as burdened by dangerous historical legacies. Over the first two decades of postsocialism, this logic of remains shifted significantly. Initially, remains took the form of concrete and intrusive embodiments of the past regime’s ideology (whether statues, official historical narratives, or the material culture of everyday life) that enabled Hungarians to fantasize quickly overcoming the experience of political, economic, and structural inferiority, through acts of mastery that ranged from banishment to replacement to ironic recuperation via nostalgia. But with the growing disillusionments of postsocialism, the discourse on the past in both public life and everyday conversation changed from triumph to victimization. Now remains represented hidden acts of persecution, betrayal, dishonesty, and corruption that continued to endanger the present and frustrate any attempt to move forward. By the twentieth anniversary of 1989 and 1990, many people regarded the memory of transition not as the beginning of a desired future but as a missed opportunity, as we saw poignantly illustrated in the case of Marxim in the opening pages of this book. The restaurant, which opened in 1991, once represented the optimism of triumphing over—and capitalizing on—the recent past. Twenty years after 1989, however, Marxim’s faded, dusty furnishings merely evoked the similarly outdated fantasy of a clean break, in which everything changes but nothing is lost because all can be redeemed through commodification.
But although the memory work of sites like Marxim is no longer effective, this does not mean that everyday life in Hungary is now empty of the objects and iconography of the communist past. To the contrary, as Hungary finishes its third decade of postsocialism, products and shops that declare themselves to be “retro” or that are drawn from or reference Hungary’s decades of state socialism continue to be popular. Even new communist-themed pubs can be found in some of Budapest’s most touristy thoroughfares. However, neither consumers nor local commentators interpret such practices as linked to the personal or cultural memory of the socialist past, whether transition’s triumphalism or the bittersweet recollection of nostalgia.
As Krisztina Fehérváry has argued, many of these practices represent a new form of “retro” that does not seek to redeem the socialist past but rather renarrates its objects as embedded in an alternative national history “that was never cut off by an ‘iron curtain’ from the regimes of value in the modern world” (2015, 1). That is, the revival of brands such as Tisza sneakers—Hungary’s socialist answer to Adidas—is not about recuperating the material culture of what the earlier wave of nostalgia viewed as the backward and limited but cozy world of late socialism. Instead, Fehérváry demonstrates, the popularity of Tisza sneakers makes visible an argument for coeval modernity, in which Hungary never needed to catch up with the West in the first place because its own consumer culture evolved alongside that of capitalist countries (2015, 7). Unlike nostalgia in its myriad forms, this logic of “retro” thus enables a pride in national achievement that does not need to justify or reject its relationship to the political regime that produced these products. No defensive disavowal of ideological content is now necessary because these practices dismiss the historical context of state socialism as irrelevant. The narrative of retro is thus not premised on the notion of temporal break that defines the logic of remains—rather it posits a seamless line of continuity that extends from the past into the present day.
It thus might seem that the logic of “remains” is no longer relevant in Hungary, at a time when even the adjective “postsocialist” may be outdated. And if the socialist past no longer appears to provide a relevant point of orientation, the fate of the future seems equally fraught in the global “postcrisis” moment, in which neoliberalism’s narratives of progress increasingly appear empty of possibility. Yet alongside these laments for a lost future and what Fehérváry calls the “material nationalism” of retro (2015, 7), other discourses continue to insist that the socialist past is still with us. They have primarily separated along a right/left social and political divide, insofar as such polarization has only increased over the past decade. A summary of this broader context is thus necessary to put the continued salience of remains into perspective.
In the 2010 elections, Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected the MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) government out of disgust with its scandals and the state of Hungary’s postcrisis economy. The now populist right-wing party Fidesz, in coalition with the KDNP (Christian Democratic People’s Party), returned to power with a super-majority under the promise that it would finally accomplish the work of transition. Under the banner of a “revolution in the ballot boxes,” Fidesz soon enacted sweeping legal and constitutional changes that many critics argued have threatened the democratic achievements of the first two decades of postsocialism. These changes have included a new constitution that removed many checks on the government’s political power; the centralization (and corruption) of government bureaucracy; the weakening of the judiciary; the nationalization of education; the creation of new research institutions to help canonize Fidesz’s narrative of twentieth-century history; and tight control of the media and the staffing of head positions in culture and the arts with Fidesz loyalists. In addition, new electoral laws, along with the creation of a reliable voting bloc by extending citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, have made it very difficult to remove Fidesz from office.1 As a result of both its own efforts and the fragmentation (and, in some cases, disintegration) of its political opposition,2 Fidesz was reelected in both 2014 and 2018 in coalition with KDNP. Fidesz has used this opportunity to further centralize its power and, among other initiatives, it has brought more and more institutions under control (from mass media to academia to arts and literature) to curtail independent criticism and dissent.
In its first years back in power, the government launched new efforts to eliminate remains of socialism and bring the postsocialist period to a close. In keeping with the argument that only Fidesz’s reelection in 2010 finally accomplished Hungary’s transition from communism twenty years earlier, the city government changed the name of one of Buda’s central transportation hubs from “Moscow Square” to its pre-1951 name of “Kálmán Széll Square.”3 And as part of its rehabilitation of the controversial memory of Hungary’s interwar period, the government removed every statue erected since 1944 in the area surrounding Parliament. By thus restoring (or re-creating) the monumental landscape of that period, Fidesz thus attempted to draw a direct line of continuity to the interwar era and thus excise the memory of all that elapsed in the intervening years: as if the experiences of fascism, state socialism, and twenty years of postsocialist transition were irrelevant.
But although Fidesz’s fierce antipathy to communism drove its rhetoric during its years out of power, the decline of the MSZP and the fragmentation of the political opposition more generally has opened a symbolic vacuum to be filled by a new enemy: the European Union and the danger it purportedly presents to Hungary’s national sovereignty. That is, if once the Nazis and Soviets attempted to push Hungary off its “proper” course of history, now the EU is preventing Hungary’s return to national authenticity (Hann 2015b, 905). Taking inspiration from Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdoğan, Orbán now argues that Western liberal values such as religious and ethnic tolerance and openness to immigration have doomed Europe’s future. His government thus made Western headlines in 2015 for its harsh treatment of asylum seekers from the Middle East, culminating in the creation of a border fence to limit these refugees’ ability to transit Hungary on their way to Western Europe. For Orbán, such battles with “Brussels” are part of an ongoing populist struggle to preserve Hungary’s self-determination against an interlinked web of hostile others that include both “illegal immigrants” and the EU policies that allegedly support them.4 During the migration crisis, he justified his antirefugee stance on the international stage by presenting Hungary as a Christian bulwark against the “Muslim invasion” of Europe, and he defended himself against criticism of his domestic policies by portraying his government as the sole party capable of protecting the nation from falling into either communism (his left-wing opponents) or fascism (Jobbik, which in recent years has moved more towards the center).
In line with this logic, Orbán now also regards institutions of civil society as a national threat, arguing that since the representatives of such organizations attempt to interfere in politics and public life without having been elected to office, their activism represents an assault on popular sovereignty. A key target of Orbán’s rhetoric has been the financier and philanthropist George Soros, who has promoted open society in Hungary by opening an institution of higher education in Budapest (Central European University; CEU) and funding numerous civil organizations and initiatives that have been some of Hungary’s most vigorous defenders of refugee rights and proponents of independent political criticism.5 In 2017 the government passed laws that ultimately prevented CEU from operating U.S.-accredited programs in Hungary,6 and it also enacted legislation to require nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive funding from international sources to register as “foreign-funded” organizations. With the success of these efforts, Fidesz then turned its attention to eliminating or bringing under the government’s direct control other realms of independent thought and potential criticism. A “culture war” in summer 2018 ultimately replaced the leadership of the country’s main literary museum in order to ensure that the museum’s exhibitions and activities serve the government’s interests. And in the spring and summer of 2019, the Fidesz government built on earlier efforts to restrict academic autonomy (such as introducing government-appointed chancellors into university administration) by effectively shutting down the 1956 Institute and taking over the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ network of research institutes in order to eliminate independent academic oversight of the Academy’s work and funding.7
Orbán’s attacks on both the values and institutions of the EU have increasingly strained Hungary’s position within it, as well as Fidesz’s membership in the center-right European People’s Party organization, which suspended Fidesz’s membership in March 2019. (Due to Hungary’s anti-NGO legislation, the European Commission is currently pursuing infringement proceedings against Hungary at the Court of Justice of the European Union.) But much like the similar PiS (Law and Justice) party in Poland, Orbán’s claim to be acting in the Christian interests of all of Europe have also won him support among other anti-migrant populist constituencies in the EU and have made him one of the continent’s most prominent politicians. Rather than try to “catch up” or be recognized by the West, Orbán is now positioning himself as Europe’s new vanguard: rescuing democracy in a new illiberal form, by abandoning “political correctness” and reflecting what he claims to be the true will of the people.
Many of Fidesz’s critics insist that the transformations enacted by Fidesz have revived the communist past under the guise of eliminating it. The perceived similarities between the Fidesz regime and the communist past (whether the harsh oppression under Mátyás Rákosi [Hungary’s Stalin] in the 1950s or the soft dictatorship of Kádárism) have inspired comparisons that I have heard repeatedly from interlocutors on both the left and oppositional right wing (Jobbik) during my trips since 2010. They decry Orbán’s seemingly authoritarian ambitions, the suppression of oppositional media, and the blatant corruption of Fidesz and its cronies. They also mourn the ways these transformations have affected their own professional lives, as they tell me they now feel cautious about expressing political opinions and must curry favor with the Fidesz loyalists who staff many prominent positions. “I can say whatever I want and I won’t go to jail,” one friend told me, lowering her voice so that others would not overhear. “But I could get fired the next day.” A colleague who works in the arts similarly observed that his interactions with some of his colleagues had become much more guarded, and that in his work at institutions that have increasingly come under the direct control of the state, he sometimes felt forced to give preference to those whose friends or partners were currently in favor with the regime.
What is crucial about these complaints that “we have returned to Kádárism” is that they do not merely critique Fidesz’s policies, but they also reflect transformations that my interlocutors perceive the government to have wrought in everyday life and in my subjects themselves. Over the years, there have been several significant waves of protest against the Fidesz government, including demonstrations in 2011 and 2012 organized by the Milla social movement; the 2017 and 2018 large-scale protests against the closing of CEU; demonstrations in the days following the 2018 election that called on Orbán to resign;8 and, most recently, rallies in December 2018 and January 2019 to protest a “slave law” that would enable employers to require overtime work of up to four hundred hours a year and delay payment for up to three years. Each time, these protests appeared to invigorate Fidesz’s popular opposition. (“People are rediscovering that they have to fight for democracy,” one former dissident told me in 2011, excited by the large crowds that attended Milla protests.) But thus far, the hopes that these protests might accomplish political change were dashed, and the opposition parties failed to effectively collaborate or otherwise capitalize on voter dissatisfaction to push Fidesz out of power during the 2014 and 2018 elections. (As this book goes to press in fall 2019, however, coordination among these opposition parties resulted in non-Fidesz candidates winning key positions in recent local elections, including that of the mayor of Budapest. This has inspired optimism among Fidesz’s opposition and its supporters that future collaboration among these parties can tap into voters’ growing dissatisfaction with Fidesz in the 2022 national election.)
During my summer research trips over the past several years, many of those I spoke with who oppose the Fidesz regime described themselves as disillusioned and increasingly apathetic, resigned to the impossibility of a strong political opposition or personally being able to effect political change. Some with marketable skills were seeking work abroad, as part of a general labor drain that has created a significant shortage within Hungary. Others self-consciously chose a form of internal exile, telling me that they had retreated into their domestic, private concerns, just as Hungarians did as subjects of state socialism a generation ago. Some did so with a shrug—such as Miklós, the early member of Fidesz who no longer agrees with some of its policies but has not found a compelling alternative among the new parties that emerged in the wake of the MSZP’s 2010 electoral failure. “But as long as I can go where I like and do the kind of work I want to do,” he told me, “I’m not too worried about Hungary—this is still a democracy, after all.” Others, however, viewed the situation much more catastrophically; in the words of one colleague, “This is a return to the old regime [rendszervisszaváltás]. Kádár broke our spines, and I didn’t think that we would return this quickly to the old ways of thinking.”
But although over the years since its return to power, Fidesz’s popular support has fluctuated, its policies and rhetoric have nonetheless found significant support among Hungary’s voting electorate. A poll after the 2018 elections revealed that the main reason voters supported Fidesz was its stance on the refugee issue. (Other key factors included party loyalty and an improvement in living conditions [Dull 2018]). This result helps remind us that economic hardship is far from the only thing driving people to right-wing populism. Hungary is economically stable and relatively prosperous, thanks in part to the significant funding that it receives as an EU member.9 And although wealth inequality in Hungary continues to grow (G. Kovács, “How Much Are They Really Worth?” 2019)—the upper-middle-class population in Budapest benefits while villages in the countryside are increasingly impoverished—many of those who do continue to be hard-hit economically do not blame the Fidesz government for their predicament. With local media now largely limited to progovernment publications,10 and with Fidesz enacting populist measures such as introducing employment in public works and giving food vouchers to pensioners before the elections, these Fidesz supporters target their anger at migrants, Roma, and the purported threat to national self-determination posed by the EU.11 Much as in Poland, the ruling elite has thus been able to pacify potential class resentment by transforming anger about economic issues into a problem of identity politics (Ost 2005, 179), in which nationalist rhetoric is both the response and the solution to the perception of structural inferiority vis-à-vis Western Europe.12 In addition, Fidesz supporters also praise what they consider to be the party’s commitment to protecting Hungarian families, whether that be the defense of conservative Christian values (such as the condemnation of gay marriage) or the enactment of government policies that include housing subsidies for families with three or more children. (Such social welfare measures may seem socialist in intention, but since they primarily benefit the upwardly mobile middle class, they ultimately have the effect of increasing rather than ameliorating social inequality [Szikra 2014].)
In my conversations with Fidesz supporters both in Budapest and the countryside, they tend to regard criticism warning of Fidesz’s danger to democracy as hyperbolic and ill-intentioned. Although they do not defend every one of Fidesz’s measures, they are inclined to agree with Fidesz’s equating of the nation with its governing party, whereby criticism of Fidesz is criticism of Hungary as a whole, and thus only voiced by those who seek to divide and weaken the national polity. “I don’t need to pay attention to every little thing,” a lawyer in his early fifties told me in 2017. “I know I can trust them to do what’s right.” He criticized the ongoing demonstrations and media coverage in support of CEU at the time as unnecessary politicizing of what was simply a legal matter: CEU failed to comply with the law, and now it needed to do so. The fact that Fidesz had written that law to force CEU out of Hungary was thus, to him, less relevant than the fact that Fidesz has almost always remained within the realm of law and procedural correctness. Moreover, he and other supporters had only to point to the corruption and mismanagement by the previous MSZP coalition to justify their assertion that the alternative would be much worse: in their eyes, the parties on the left were hopelessly incompetent and morally corrupt.
This narrative of left-wing perfidy was echoed by Béla Aba, the graphic artist who produced the 1990 “National spring cleaning!” Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) campaign poster whose image opens this book. In a conversation in summer 2018, he explained that the inspiration for this and the MDF’s other posters that he designed were the product of brainstorming within the campaign rather than his own invention. (He was also hired by Fidesz, he told me, to create its famous orange logo.) Although he was proud of the image, he now regarded its hopes of sweeping away the remains of socialism to be overly optimistic, and he blamed his disappointments on a left wing that endangered the nation economically and morally. Aba explained that he was loyal to the former MDF13 and did not vote for Fidesz because he considered himself to be more traditionally conservative. Nonetheless, he argued that having Fidesz in power to protect Hungary’s national sovereignty served as a bulwark against the threat of left-wing parties as well as the misrepresentations of a Western media that condemn any expression of Hungarian national pride as dangerous and antisemitic. “I’m not a Fidesz supporter,” he concluded, “but I am satisfied with them.”
Fidesz’s 2018 reelection campaign was the first in which the rhetoric of anticommunism did not play a prominent role. But although its political discourse no longer emphasizes the danger of communist return, it continues to engage or rework the various remains of socialism in the paradoxical ways similar to those discussed in this book: whether the government’s ongoing financial support of the House of Terror, whose narrative of continuous foreign occupation from the Nazis through the Soviets is now enshrined in the preamble of Hungary’s new constitution; its obstruction of legislation that would enable greater access to the state security files; or even Orbán’s public celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Fidesz’s founding with a bottle of the socialist-era soda, Bambi (HVG.hu 2013). Orbán presumably chose the orange soda to match the party’s official color, but his public consumption of Bambi nonetheless reflected the current political decontextualization of the past regime’s products as “retro,” rather than either socialist nostalgia or—as the House of Terror’s permanent exhibition argues—dangerous propaganda from the communist regime.
Fidesz and its representatives also continue the battle to determine the legacy of 1956 and claim it as their own. The party has discarded the polgári narrative discussed in chapter 2, in which the 1956 revolution was a civic uprising of Hungary’s emerging middle class. Now it focuses on the young men who fought in street battles (pesti srácok), narrating the revolution as a battle for national sovereignty against an encroaching foreign power, much like Hungary’s current struggle against the EU. To support this historical interpretation, official commemorations have increasingly marginalized the role of Imre Nagy in the revolution. As part of the government’s ongoing renovation of the squares near Parliament, in 2019 it removed and relocated the statue of Imre Nagy erected in Martyrs’ Square by the MSZP in 1996. (In its place, the government has reinstated a pre-1945 monument commemorating another set of “national martyrs”: the victims of the 1919 red terror.) In so doing, Fidesz thus eliminated the Nagy statue not merely as a remain of socialism, but a remain of a now-discredited moment in Hungary’s postsocialist transition as well.
The ironies of this attempt to banish the Nagy statue as a “remain of transition” became vivid on the thirtieth anniversary of Nagy’s reburial on June 16, 1989, which represented perhaps the most major event of Hungary’s system change. The Fidesz government marked this anniversary with a rock concert dedicated to “thirty years of freedom,” and it displaced the memory of Nagy himself with a celebration of Orbán’s role during the reburial, during which he, like some of the other speakers, called on Soviet troops to leave Hungary. The memory of 1956 and its political rehabilitation, which had been so crucial in 1989, now receded from view; and, in keeping with Fidesz’s claim that the transition in 1989 and 1990 was corrupted and incomplete, so too did the understanding of Nagy’s reburial as the beginning of a new thirty-year era in Hungary’s history that decisively broke with an unjust past.
As a result, it was thus irrelevant that in the months and weeks before the event, the government had removed Nagy’s statue from its original location, effectively shut down the 1956 Institute, and decided to include among the concert’s lineup of performers a musician (Gyula Vikadál) who had been publicly exposed as an informer a decade before. Instead, Fidesz celebrated 1989 in terms of Orbán’s heroism: the moment that Fidesz entered the national stage to fight for a freedom that would only fully be achieved in 2010. That is, rather than represent the end of communism, 1989 ultimately was important because it symbolically represented the beginning of Fidesz. (A group led by some former dissidents and children of 1956 participants held a silent protest against the falsification of 1989 at the concert.)
Over the years, many opposition parties have struggled to capture the political imagination of Hungary’s electorate, but apart from their anti-Fidesz stances, each has found difficulty in articulating a clear and compelling vision of Hungary’s future to rival Orbán’s narrative of a nation fighting invaders from both East and West. As both Zsuzsa Gille and David Ost have argued, during the 1980s, Eastern European oppositional political movements and civic initiatives were actively engaged in reimagining progressive politics and democratic theory (Gille 2010, 21; Ost 2005, 191–192). But when the regimes ended, the cost of “entering Europe” was submission to established Western values, institutional practices, and politics of recognition: whether that meant embracing neoliberalism as the only way to build democracy and civil society (Ost 2005, 192) or abandoning attachments to ethnonational identities in favor of becoming multicultural and postnational (Gille 2010, 24). This lack of opportunity to build and participate in an indigenous public sphere has led to an impoverished political discourse in Hungary (Gille 2010, 29), in which the left’s vision of a European future is one that many regard as already disenchanted or discredited. (Moreover, few of these parties have directly challenged Fidesz’s anti-migrant position, which is now broadly held across much of society.)
In contrast, what has perhaps made Fidesz’s politics so persuasive to its supporters is that it has declared war not only on the socialist past, but on “transition” itself. As we saw in the chapters of this book, the argument that Hungary’s postsocialist transformation was handled incorrectly and failed to achieve its promises is a familiar one. But Orbán’s rejection of European liberalism as both a political and economic project has taken this critique a significant step further. Instead of mourning transition’s lost future, Orbán has cast it aside in order to present a new vision in which Hungary no longer needs to catch up to Europe but instead leads the way. In his eyes, Hungary is now more European than an ailing West weakened by liberalism, political correctness, and migration—and Fidesz’s policies provide a model for the rest of Europe on how to protect national sovereignty from foreign invasion and to resist bureaucratic threats to national autonomy from the EU.
For Fidesz’s left-wing critics, however, neither the past of communism nor the first two decades of transition are fully past. They continue to defend liberal values of tolerance, openness, and freedom of expression. And their comparison of their current predicament to the experience of Kádárism has helped to make their warnings of encroaching authoritarianism more urgent, as well as to breed new forms of nostalgia as political critique, in which some complain that, ironically, it was easier to live a “normal,” honest life under late socialism than it is now.
Of course, there are both political and historical limitations to interpreting the present-day experience of Fidesz’s “illiberal democracy” through the lens of Kádárism. While my interviewees worry about Fidesz’s tendencies towards authoritarianism, few evince concern that it will return in its twentieth-century form. Instead, their anxieties concern living in a country where the formal existence of democracy is used to cloak the centralization of power and muffling of organized dissent. I nonetheless want to take this complaint of Kádárism’s return seriously as a form of historical argumentation, in which the absence of a desired future—and the challenge of formulating an alternative one—means that the disavowed past is providing one of the few useful remaining points of navigation.
In the final pages of this book, I have focused on the ways in which party and political alignments have overdetermined how remains of the socialist past are currently conceptualized. But there are also memories of the past that cross party boundaries in significant ways. In 2019, for example, a public opinion poll revealed that of those who expressed a preference, a relative majority of Hungarians perceive the Kádár era more positively than 1990–2010 or the period since Fidesz returned to power in 2010 (Szurovecz 2019).14 Without overstating the significance of one set of polling data, such results appear to be in keeping with general trends in both Hungary and the former Soviet bloc (Pap 2017; R. Tóth 2016). As we have seen, disavowing attachments to the stigmatized past has been the very condition for entering Europe, as both a political and administrative unit and a modernist fantasy of progress and future prosperity. And the threat of socialism’s return—what Chelcea and Druta term “zombie socialism”—has proven to be remarkably effective in the service of postsocialist neoliberal policies that include reduced wages and social spending (2016, 537). As a result, since the end of state socialism, there have not been sustained opportunities in political or public discourse to address positive evaluations of the previous era in ways that avoid either depoliticized nostalgia or outraged condemnation. Instead, each attempt to locate the socialist past in an unpalatable remain to be expelled has also represented an attempt to wrestle with the challenge of remembering the Kádár era, torn between memories of material security and the system’s political oppression. These contradictions and incommensurabilities of the Kádárist experience have continually renewed the generativity of remains, at once “too much” and “not enough” for the cultural work demanded of them.
Now, at a moment when the frustrations of the East/West hierarchy have become visible in different ways on both the political right and left in Hungary, there may be an opportunity to address and reevaluate the ambivalent legacies of what had to be discarded in order for Hungary to belong to Europe. Otherwise, even three decades after the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe, remains may continue as both an enduring problem and the site of cultural productivity: demanding as well as frustrating the desire for historical mastery.