Word: budapester
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Hungary is a small country, not often in the world news ("Is the capital Budapest or Bucharest?" people ask without embarrassment). But 40 years ago today, and for a few dramatic weeks thereafter, it occupied center stage in world affairs. On the night of October 23, 1956, a crowd led by students and workers, soon to be known as freedom fighters, toppled the colossal statue of Stalin that had dominated the main boulevard of Budapest for close to a decade. That act became the symbol of the 1956 uprising, a quasi spontaneous revolt against Soviet occupation (the Red Army...
...days, hopes ran high: A new reformist government, headed by the "moderate" communist Imre Nagy, held out the hope of a more democratic, independent Hungary--"socialism with a human face," as the leaders of the Prague spring of 1968 were to proclaim. But in Budapest as later in Prague, that hope ended in disaster. On November 4, a huge fleet of Soviet tanks entered the Hungarian capital and over the next few days destroyed large portions of it. Imre Nagy and several members of his cabinet were tried for treason and eventually executed. Thousands more were imprisoned or killed during...
...name to "Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party"), things changed: A government functionary announced that "new research in the archives" showed 1956 had been a popular uprising, not a counterrevolution. In June 1989, months before the official end of communism in Eastern Europe, Imre Nagy was given a state funeral in Budapest...
...times have changed again since then, more than once. In the spring of 1993, I spent six months as a research fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. After many hours of talking with Hungarian friends about their country's recent history, I began to understand just how complicated--and at times heartbreaking--was their relation to the past, including the heroic days of October 1956. In the years preceding and immediately following "the Change" (as Hungarians refer to 1989), October 1956 functioned as a single unifying symbol to all those who opposed the communist regime...
Less than a year after Horthy's reburial, the parliamentary elections swept the conservatives out of office and brought back the "moderate" wing of the former communists, now called Socialists, who promised economic reforms. But on a visit to Budapest this past summer, all I heard were complaints: the gap between rich and poor was widening, and most people felt closer to the latter than the former. One woman in her forties, who works for a new "capitalist" enterprise, told me: "I come from a working-class family. Before 1989, my parents and I could count on several weeks' vacation...