Hungary honors reburial of anti-Soviet 1956 revolutionaries, milestone on road to democracy

Hungary recalls key 1989 date on road to democracy

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Twenty years ago, Hungarians were finally allowed to honor the executed leaders of their 1956 anti-Soviet revolution. On Tuesday, they commemorated that turning point on the road to freedom.

President Laszlo Solyom and Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai joined veterans of the 1956 protests and relatives of those killed in laying wreaths in Budapest amid daylong celebrations included also concerts and exhibitions.

On June 16, 1989, at least 250,000 people attended the ceremonial reburial of Prime Minister Imre Nagy and four others hanged 31 years earlier and buried face down in unmarked graves. The reburial — broadcast live on TV from Budapest’s Heroes’ Square — came as Hungary’s communist leadership and the democratic opposition were beginning to negotiate the country’s transition to democracy.

“It was not only the funeral for Imre Nagy but it was also the burial of an era and a political system,” said historian Janos Rainer M., director of the 1956 Institute. “What no one could imagine was that it would turn out to be such a cathartic day, a psychological turning point.”

While Hungary had begun dismantling the Iron Curtain on the border with Austria a few weeks earlier, for regular Hungarians the end of communism was still an uncertain prospect.

On that day in 1989, Sandor Racz, a 1956 veteran, called on the world to “help the Soviet Union” withdraw its troops from Hungary. Viktor Orban, then 26 and later to become prime minister, also urged the Russians to withdraw but blasted the country’s communist leadership for making the 1956 revolution a taboo subject.

Sound engineer Benedek Tamas, then 23, said he could not fully grasp the significance of what Racz and Orban were demanding in 1989.

“I grew up in a ’soft dictatorship,’ but the older people in the crowd were shocked,” Tamas said. “My mother was listening to the speeches on the radio and when she heard the calls for the Soviets’ withdrawal, she quickly shut the windows so no one else could hear — an old reflex from the times when she listened to Radio Free Europe.”

Janos Kadar helped restore Soviet domination and led Hungary for over 30 years before being replaced in May 1988. He died just three weeks after the reburial ceremony, on July 6, the same day that Hungary’s Supreme Court finally rehabilitated the 1956 revolutionaries.

“The message of June 16 was that Hungarian society was recovering its past and the right to its memories,” Rainer M. concluded. “To make this experience complete, it was also necessary to bury Janos Kadar.”

On the Net:

1956 Institute: www.rev.hu/portal/page/portal/rev/aktualitasok