Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
foreign debt in the region. Kádár and the 'old guard' refused to hear talk about party re-
forms. In June 1987 Károly Grósz took over as premier and Kádár retired less than a year
later.
In 2007 the grave of the late Communist leader János Kádár in the New Municipal Ce-
metery was broken into and his skull and assorted bones removed. The only clue was a
note that read: 'Murderers and traitors may not rest in holy ground 1956-2006'. The re-
mains have yet to be recovered despite a substantial reward for information as to their
whereabouts.
Renewal & Change
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1988, new political parties formed and old ones
were resurrected. In January 1989 Hungary, second-guessing what was to come as Mikhail
Gorbachev launched sweeping reforms in the Soviet Union, announced that the events of
1956 had been a 'popular insurrection' and not the 'counter-revolution' that the regime had
always dubbed it. In June 1989 some 250,000 people attended ceremonies marking the re-
burial of Imre Nagy and other victims of 1956 in Budapest's New Municipal Cemetery.
The next month, Hungary began to demolish the electrified wire fence separating it from
Austria. The move released a wave of East Germans holidaying in Hungary into the West
and the opening attracted thousands more. The collapse of the communist regimes around
the region was now unstoppable.
The Republic of Hungary Reborn
At its party congress in February 1989, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party
changed its name to the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and later in the year agreed to
surrender its monopoly on power, paving the way for free elections in the spring of 1990.
On 23 October 1989, the 33rd anniversary of the 1956 Uprising, the nation once again be-
came the Republic of Hungary.
The 1990 election was won by the centrist Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), which
advocated a gradual transition to capitalism and was led by softly spoken former museum
curator József Antall. The social-democratic Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which
had called for much faster change, came in a distant second. Hungary had changed political
systems with scarcely a murmur. The last Soviet troops left Hungarian soil in June 1991,
streets and squares like Lenin körút and Marx tér were renamed and monuments to 'glorious
workers' and 'esteemed leaders' were packed off to a socialist-realist theme park called Me-
mento Park.
