Unsung heroes

By Andy Walton
CNN Interactive

For many people, the last days of the Cold War are summed up by images of East and West Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall, assaulting the hated divide with sledge hammers and chisels. But the events leading up to those images began much more quietly, in Hungary. And they began with leaders seldom remembered in the West.

Long before the miracles of 1989, Hungary was an atypical Soviet bloc nation. Its experiment with limited free-market reforms, called "goulash socialism" by some observers, began in the late 1960s.

The Hungarian government, fearing that the reforms had gone too far, applied the brakes in the late 1970s; as a result, market reform did not help productivity, and borrowing from Western banks left Hungary with a crippling burden of debt.

In May 1988, the Hungarian communist party, impatient with the economic crisis, replaced longtime secretary general Janos Kadar with reformer Karoly Grosz; Miklos Nemeth took over Grosz' old job as prime minister in November.

"In a nutshell, everything had gone wrong. Everything," Nemeth said in a 1997 interview for COLD WAR. "All the key players in the country realized that there is no way to get a better life by reforming the socialist model."

Remembering 1956, fearfully

Hungary's reforms were not without risk: In 1956, street demonstrations demanding reform escalated into outright revolt, which was soon crushed by Soviet tanks, putting Kadar in power. Hungary's leader at the time of the uprising, Imre Nagy, was arrested and executed.

Despite the wounds of 1956, Hungary's leadership in 1989 moved quickly toward reforms.

In January 1989, Hungary's parliament voted to allow freedom of association and independent political parties. One month later, the Hungarian Central Committee approved a new constitution that omitted mention of the leading role of the communist party.

With Mikhail Gorbachev now in charge of the Soviet Union, Hungary hoped the Soviet reaction would be different from 1956. But there was still cause for concern. Hard-line communist rulers, such as Erich Honecker in East Germany and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, demanded that the Soviets crack down, as they had done before.

"What happened in [the uprising in East] Berlin in '53, in Hungary in '56, and Prague and Afghanistan were facts, and Gorbachev was just a promise," former Hungarian Politburo member Imre Pozsgay said in a COLD WAR interview. The Hungarians, though hopeful, needed assurances that the Soviets would not intervene.

Nemeth pressed the point. Gorbachev told him in March that "if I am not toppled or kicked out of power, and I am sitting here ... there will be no instruction or order from us to crush it down," Nemeth said.

The first Soviet troops left Hungary, where they had been stationed for more than 40 years, in April 1989.

In early May, Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock made a symbolic first cut in the barbed-wire fence between their countries. Hungarian troops then continued dismantling the fence. It was the first tangible, physical break in the line that had divided Europe for nearly half a century.

"The government wanted to fulfill the expectations of the West and the expectations of its own people and get rid of this shameful construction," Pozsgay said.

Remembering 1956, hopefully

In another symbolic move, opposition leaders -- with the government's approval -- reburied Nagy in June after a ceremony to honor him and others killed in the 1956 uprising. Nagy's efforts at reform, which had been called "counterrevolutionary" -- a strong epithet in Marxist terms -- were now termed a popular uprising. The shift was a potent symbol.

"If we managed to make the communist party realize that their rule was based on a lie, then their members would turn against them and they would start to dissolve," Pozsgay said. "I still think my calculations were correct ... the majority of the members left the party at this stage, and the younger, more dynamic, reformist part of the membership turned against the regime."

"It was a day for renewal," Nemeth said of the funeral. "It was a joy for nearly all of us."

But not all. "On the special party telephone network, I got quite interesting phone calls," Nemeth said. "Some of them were quite harsh: 'If you go there, we will kill you.'" Nemeth went, and the day passed without incident.

A few days after the memorial service, the Hungarian Central Committee reorganized the communist party around a four-member presidium: Grosz, Pozsgay, Nemeth, and Reszo Nyers, a minister of state. On July 6, the same day former premier Janos Kadar died, the Supreme Court made the "rehabilitation" of Nagy and his associates official.

Release valve

The changes in Hungary had a ripple effect throughout the Eastern bloc. Early in 1989, refugees from Romania flooded into Hungary seeking passage to the West. The Romanian government demanded that the refugees be returned. The Hungarian government refused, fearing a backlash from its own citizens -- many of the refugees were ethnic Hungarians, from the northern Romanian province of Transylvania.

When Hungary's border with the West opened, East Germans -- allowed to vacation in Hungary -- extended their visits. They flooded Budapest's West German Embassy to ask for visas. Hungary had an agreement, which East Germany pressed, to return the refugees. Hungary refused.

Nemeth recalled being near the West German Embassy as the number of refugees mounted.

"I had to step over [refugees who were] ... waiting for the next morning's opening, trying to get a West German visa into their passports," he said.

"We decided to have a clear cut solution on this ... to open the border."

"There was a sort of picnic organized on the 19th of August next to Soporon on the Hungarian border," Pozsgay remembered. "Several hundred Germans were actually able to leave the country." Those several hundred became 30,000 by September. The Iron Curtain was leaking like a sieve.

In October, the Hungarian communist party was no more -- it officially disbanded and was reconstituted as the Hungarian Socialist Party, with a democratic socialist agenda. The constitution was rewritten in November to allow for multiple parties, and free elections were called for 1990.

The revamped Socialists remain a political factor. Soundly defeated in 1990, they won control of the government in 1994, and Gyula Horn -- the man who made the first cut in the Iron Curtain -- became prime minister. Horn's Socialists lost in 1998 but remain the largest opposition party.

In many ways, Hungary was the first Eastern bloc domino to fall, the first to test the bounds of Gorbachev's openness. It provided an example for other Soviet satellites to follow -- or, for those countries that resisted change, a refuge for their citizens. Hungary's shift away from communism was the first wave, and in the end, even the U.S.S.R. itself got caught in the undertow.