Twenty Years After: Reasons to be Cheerful

Commemoration of the Revolution of 1989 in Hungary tends to be a lower key affair than the annual celebrations that mark the 1956 Uprising or even the distant Revolution of 1848. This is perhaps even more noticeable this year than previously, even though 2009 marks the symbolically important twentieth anniversary since the overthrow of the communist system in Eastern Europe; thanks to the unfortunate economic situation and its unpredictable political consequences, nobody feels like celebrating. It might seem like a gloomy moment to look back at the euphoria of 1989, though perhaps there’s more than nostalgia to remembering this generation’s glorious revolution.

The reluctance to celebrate 1989 owes in part to the idea that what happened was only a rendszerváltás or system change, rather than a true revolution. Hungary saw none of the drama of the rattling of keys on Wenceslas Square in Prague, the bloodshed of the Romanian Revolution, or the symbolic pathos of the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, here the Communist Party simply agreed to give up its monopoly of political power by consenting to multi-party elections. As a consequence of this smooth transition, the waters of revolutionary justice were muddied, and many in the party nomenclature made a comfortable transfer to private business. Symptomatically, Hungary’s recent Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany is also reportedly one of the ten richest men in the country, who once conceded that he earned his fortune by ‘being in the right place at the right time.’   

The high road to economic convergence that Hungary has boldly travelled since the early ‘90s seemed for a while to be bearing fruit, in terms of an expansion of earnings power and a super-abundance of consumer goods, but now looks likely to run aground on a mountain of state and personal debt. Much of this debt is denominated in Euro, Yen and Swiss Francs, which may lead to a vicious circle of increased indebtedness feeding a devaluation of the Forint, which in turn increases the foreign currency debt. At the time of writing, the replacement Prime Minister was promising ‘pain’ for every Hungarian family in the effort to reduce the budget spending by half a billion Forints, and a shift from propping up the ‘inactive’ rump of society to empowering its ‘active’ members. The question is, after twenty years of liberal capitalist progress in Eastern Europe, how did we get in such a mess?

More widely, there are signs of discontent about the whole economic model on which the dream of post-communist transition was built. A few years back, there were few people who saw the downside in the arrival of international supermarket chains and the improvement of the city’s infrastructure by, for example, modernising the old network of outdoor markets. Today the tightening ring of hypermarkets on the outskirts of the city, with the British Tesco, French Auchan and Austrian Interspar competing to build bigger and brasher shopping malls, is visibly squeezing life out of the city centre. People are also slowly realising that knocking down the old markets and replacing them with air-conditioned retail spaces with subterranean parking does not actually constitute progress, and there are growing popular campaigns to save the few remaining traditional markets, such as the ones at Hunyadi ter and Bosnyak ter.

The juggernaut of commercial expansion over the last two decades has also led to the destructive renovation of many historical sights in the city, with those associated with the communist era the least likely to be protected from the appetites of real estate developers. Among the sorriest examples is the conversion of the Hungarian Trade Union’s Congress building on Dozsa György út into the headquarters of the K&H Bank. The building was a gem of late 40s modernist public architecture in Hungary, but after its post-modernist make-over, now looks like a bland international office block. The congress hall of the TUC at the back of the building was protected and survives intact, though it has been closed to the public ever since as the only usable entrance is through the vaults of the bank, though you can still admire the sculptural relief on the exterior.   

Looking at the situation from a more positive perspective, Hungary actually has some rather good reasons for remembering the eventful year of 1989, and should be proud of its role in the bringing down the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. The fall of the Iron Curtain began not with the photogenic dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but with Hungary’s quiet decision to relax its border regime with Austria in May 1989. The following month the Hungarian and Austrian Prime Ministers took part in a ceremony in which the barbed wire on the border was cut, while on 19 August a ‘Pan European Picnic’ was organised in the same spot, which was the start signal for the mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary to their compatriots in the West that spelled the beginning of the end of the Eastern Bloc.      

Part of the strength of the changes of 1989 was the sense in which the transformation emerged from a process of facing up to the ghosts of history and confronting national traumas, from the legacy of the Holocaust and complicity in Nazi crimes, to the terrors of the Soviet liberation in 1945, through the tragedy of the failed revolution of 1956, and the soul-destroying decades of self-censorship and repression that followed. The Revolution of 1989 in many ways began with a powerful moment of collective emotional catharsis, symbolised by the public reburial of Imre Nagy, the executed leader of the 1956 Uprising on 16 June 1989. This marked the end of the taboo about discussing the 1956 Uprising, which had for decades been passed over in silence even between family members.    

The impulse to face up to the past, rather than deny it, was also visible in the way in which the symbols of the Communist regime were treated after the system change. Budapest was full of discredited socialist public monuments, but unlike in many other former East Bloc countries, only a few were destroyed by acts of violence. Instead, the unwelcome statues were submitted to an orderly process of public discussion to decide which socialist heroes could stay, and who had to go, with the fate of each memorial decided through a vote in the city council. The evicted monuments were not destroyed, or hidden in a museum cellar, but re-erected in a purpose built Statue Park on the outskirts of the city. In a way this was a conscious choice not to repeat the clichés of revolutionary iconoclasm, in which the crowd pulls down and defaces the statues of the old regime, and to opt instead a more civilised and democratic solution.

1989 was a moment of openness after decades of isolation. Budapest emerged as a truly international city, attracting young people from all over Europe and the World. It was the site of a great cultural synergy between East and West that happened on the level of individuals rather than high politics. The films of the era preserve a taste of this heady atmosphere, including Bolshe Vita, which tells the story of two Russian musicians who get stranded in Hungary on their way to a gig in Yugoslavia, and end up discovering the chaotic world of post-89 Budapest, its underground bars, semi-legal markets, and networks of friends. It’s easy to forget that not that long ago thousands of people used to hitchhike across Europe without fear, surveillance, or suspicion of terroristic intentions, long before Schengen’s half-fulfilled promise of freedom of movement.

1989 symbolises the sudden experience of freedom, a joyful sense of liberty that temporarily overwhelmed the rigid institutions of the state, leaving the forces of order in a state of shock. This is the only way to explain stories such as that of a German artist who on arrival in Budapest soon after the changes took what seemed to him to be the logical step of heading to the police station to register as a foreigner, only to be told by the duty sergeant that if no crime had been committed, there was no reason to come to the police, so he should just head straight back out and enjoy life. Freedom was contagious and intoxicating while it lasted.

The story of 1989 in Hungary told from the top down, with the orderly handover of power from one faction of the political elite to another, is not very glamorous or inspiring. However, looked at from the perspective of the grassroots, it was a live social movement that ultimately drove the engine of political change. The strong popular dimension of 1989 grew from the experience of the cultural underground, which had partied along quietly during the last decade of communism and could now burst out into the open. The last day of 1989 was also the first night of Tilos az A, Budapest’s legendary early 90s nightspot which, as everyone who was lucky enough to be there will agree, combined all that was best about the end of the Iron Curtain. This stream of independent cultural experiment was eventually forced underground again, but shows signs of reappearing twenty years on as a source of innovative thinking and relief from the monotony of the mainstream. Hopefully we’re about to see a return to the ideals of 1989, with its respect for the social achievements of the past, participatory politics, and no-nonsense freedom-loving spirit.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes