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1:01

He was terrified at how quickly it was moving. He

1:03

feels he's let the genie out of the bottle. He

1:06

had wanted a much slower, more measured

1:08

reform, but now it was spiraling under

1:11

control. This

1:14

is Cold War Conversations. If

1:17

you're new here, you've come to the

1:19

right place for first-hand Cold War history

1:21

accounts. And thanks to

1:23

financial supporter Jack Veselak for providing

1:25

today's intro. And

1:28

make sure you hit that follow button in your

1:30

podcast app so you don't miss out on future

1:32

episodes. In

1:35

August 1989, a group of

1:37

Hungarian activists did the unthinkable.

1:39

They entered the forbidden militarised

1:41

zone of the Iron Curtain

1:43

and held a picnic. Word

1:45

had spread of what was going to happen. Wisps

1:48

of rumour. Thousands of East Germans

1:51

had made their way to the

1:53

border between Hungary and Austria, awaiting

1:56

an opportunity, fearing prison and surveilled

1:58

by lurking Stasi agents. The

2:01

stage was set for the greatest border

2:03

breach in Cold War history. The

2:05

fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of

2:07

the Soviet Union, the so called end of

2:09

history. All would flow

2:11

from those dramatic hours. Drawing

2:14

on dozens of original interviews with

2:16

those involved Matthew Longo's book The

2:19

Picnic and Escape to Freedom and

2:21

the collapse of the Iron Curtain

2:23

reconstructs this world shaping event and

2:26

its tumultuous aftermath. You

2:28

can buy the book through the links in the episode

2:30

notes and help support the podcast or if you

2:32

listen in the first week of publication

2:34

do check out our book giveaway also

2:36

in the episode notes. I

2:39

am delighted to welcome Matthew Longo

2:41

to our Cold War conversation. Prolog

2:47

Laszlo gives me a tour of what is nowhere. How

2:50

did the East Germans even find this place

2:52

he wonders aloud? It is

2:54

Anas Mundi he says, the asshole

2:56

of the world. No

2:59

one knew about this part of

3:02

the borderlands. On maps only the

3:04

line was represented but not the

3:06

vast stretch of no-go zones that

3:08

comprised the Iron Curtain, the militarised

3:10

frontier that emerged after World War

3:13

II dividing Europe between East, Soviet

3:15

influence and the West American influence.

3:18

If the full boundary system wasn't shown the

3:20

logic went people wouldn't find it. Thus

3:23

the reality of the border was

3:25

itself divided. For the military the

3:28

border regime was precise. For

3:30

the average person it was mysterious

3:32

and threatening. Laszlo

3:35

takes me to the edge of the woods. We

3:37

follow the tree line down the slope through

3:39

tall grass. When we round

3:42

a bend a clearing opens up. This

3:44

is where the picnic is parked he says. The

3:47

field on which Laszlo and I are

3:49

standing was the site of the pan-European

3:51

picnic held on August 19 1989 on

3:54

the Austrian-Hungarian border a giant open-air party,

4:01

celebrating European togetherness and

4:03

freedom which furnished the stage

4:05

for the greatest breach of the border

4:07

in Cold War history. Hundreds

4:10

of East German refugees dashing

4:12

towards freedom, the initial tug

4:14

by which the entire Iron

4:16

Curtain would unspool. Or

4:19

as Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of the

4:22

newly reunified Germany would later put

4:24

it, where the first stone

4:26

was removed from the Berlin Wall.

4:29

That's an excerpt from the prologue

4:31

of Matthew Longo's book The Picnic,

4:33

An Escape to Freedom and the

4:35

Collapse of the Iron Curtain. I

4:39

came at this as an oral history project.

4:42

In fact, when I first heard about the picnic,

4:44

it's interesting. I don't come at this from a

4:47

Cold War background. I'm not a Cold War historian.

4:49

I actually come at this from an interest in

4:52

borders. I'm a political scientist and

4:54

I've studied borders now for most of my

4:56

career. When you're in

4:58

this slender border world, in

5:01

a way you think you've heard all the great stories.

5:03

In fact, you think you've heard these amazing stories

5:05

of escape and capture

5:07

and of heroism. It's

5:10

a high drama field, borders,

5:12

as anyone who follows contemporary

5:14

politics recognizes. When

5:17

I heard this story, I was blown away

5:19

that I hadn't heard it before. The reason

5:21

I pursued it is in part

5:24

because I knew the actors involved

5:26

were mostly living. Therefore, the kind of book

5:28

I could write wouldn't be

5:30

a history just in

5:32

the blow-by-blow sense, but

5:35

something quite different, born of these unique

5:39

personal histories. In a

5:41

way, that was the origin story of everything. I don't

5:43

think I would have pursued it had I not thought

5:45

I could do that kind of oral project. Those

5:48

are just the sort of stories

5:50

we love on Cold War conversations.

5:53

You've got the right audience here. Where

5:56

I'd like to start is if you could

5:58

give me a brief brief description of the

6:01

political situation in Hungary in 1988 and

6:03

1989. So,

6:06

it's a little bit difficult, certainly for

6:08

lay audiences, maybe people who have read

6:10

about the Cold War, even lived through parts of the Cold War,

6:12

to understand Hungary, because

6:14

Hungary was quite exceptional in

6:17

the sense that it didn't fit the

6:19

normal or natural binary between

6:21

a free liberal West, a

6:24

somewhat clamped down, unfree

6:27

Soviet bloc or communist bloc, because

6:29

Hungary was by 88 certainly, but had

6:31

been for a while a bit of

6:34

a hybrid in

6:36

the sense that there were already economic reforms,

6:38

there were already political reforms, and

6:41

it was seen certainly in the East as

6:44

something of a socialist paradise,

6:48

where there was good food, there was wine, the

6:50

weather was nice, which is nothing about the economy,

6:52

but health and tourism. But

6:56

people felt as though they could be

6:58

themselves, who were already speaking in this

7:00

way in the mid 80s, early 80s, that

7:03

Hungary was a place you could go to be yourself, and

7:06

then you'd go back to the GDR, you'd

7:08

go back to Bulgaria or somewhere, and

7:10

you'd feel more clamped down. And

7:12

so Hungary to start, for those

7:14

who don't know Hungary in particular, you

7:17

have to sort of get out of the classic Cold

7:19

War mindset. And so

7:21

what Hungary looked like in the late 80s,

7:23

it was a place of reform. And

7:26

specifically with the rise of Miklosz Nemeth, which

7:28

is the prime minister whose life

7:30

story I largely track in book, he

7:33

was the last communist prime minister of

7:35

Hungary. He came into

7:37

power in the very fall, November, December of

7:39

88, and had

7:42

a very clear reform

7:45

project, which is that

7:47

he wanted Hungary to pursue

7:49

a multi-party democratic path. Now

7:53

for as much as Hungary was already a socialist

7:55

pastor, it was already in this place that

7:57

was a beautiful place To live, that was really incredible.

8:00

Credibly radical. Kind of

8:02

reform. And it was a kind of reform

8:04

that as you would later. Say

8:06

directly to convert show which a recount of

8:08

the book. Or would require

8:10

the communists to except. That. There

8:13

could be elections that they could lose and they lost.

8:15

It Have to be. right? This is

8:17

really he really had a very strong

8:19

democratic vision. And so this is

8:21

the person at the top as it is

8:23

not quite true right? because the the. The.

8:26

Fact that your private sources nothing about your power in

8:28

the party and so forth in there are there many

8:30

different versions of power which we can get into, but

8:32

the very least says something. That

8:34

are there is such a strong mover,

8:36

the Reform or within the Halls of

8:39

Power Also. I'm yeah we

8:41

should also mention and will push guy who

8:43

was nice. A minister state alongside

8:45

them as another reformer is a to

8:47

very very influential figures of his era.

8:50

Hill Eighty Eight Eighty Nine Ah of

8:52

those who were I Whereas. I'd

8:55

never thought of doing things. In. The formal

8:57

legal sense. The biggest thing that pushed I

8:59

did of the most important in the pushed

9:01

I did. He actually didn't informal

9:03

sense mostly through the radio channels

9:06

and to to talking about nineteen

9:08

Fifty six. And forcing the

9:10

Hungarian public to rethink. What?

9:12

Fifty six meant fifty six.

9:14

Or nineteen. Fifty six was

9:17

when the Hungarians rose up

9:19

against Soviet occupation. And

9:21

were defeated by subsequent Soviet

9:23

invasion. In particular, that

9:25

a mean we now often think of

9:27

to six into roic terms. right?

9:30

Into movies were freedom fighters, street fighters,

9:33

I'm who were fighting against what

9:35

was a pretty draconian kind of

9:37

rule. I'm. From me

9:39

into the Soviet puppets in charge in

9:41

Budapest. And but

9:44

at the time that was not spoken about, right? because

9:46

across the people. In. Our were

9:48

those people practical with the ones

9:50

suppressing the students? And

9:52

popular but mostly student in this in the or

9:54

in the outset. Revolt. And.

9:58

Ah, so you've limited. Die at

10:00

the top. And then you also

10:02

have already in a d All of these

10:04

movements do not parties they can on for

10:07

office. There is no multiparty democracy so obviously

10:09

can't run for office. But

10:11

they're already acting like parties are mobilizing.

10:13

Large quantities of people. And.

10:16

In the book I I I follow most

10:18

of the Mdf the hearing democratic form. But.

10:21

There were lots mean I guess. Most

10:23

famously, we now. Know because

10:25

of the rise of or been a fetus. Etti

10:28

western so to to is that it's a

10:30

courses but stayed setting that's where would I

10:32

would capture with felt like. It's

10:34

not like there was some uncertainty about the power at

10:37

the top. Were. Some reform was possible.

10:39

No one knew exactly what that meant. It

10:41

wasn't like it was communicated. This

10:43

was in fact true of around the east. Since

10:45

Gorbachev's rise that was express the true. In.

10:47

Hungary. And you

10:49

have already Popular mobilization. And.

10:52

Even if not, Totally. Formal

10:54

when smith that half way between from one

10:56

formula thing. And that. Came.

10:58

To head in March. Eighty nine

11:00

months of the that the the address.

11:03

Of push guy was the winters and

11:05

referred to it and in March you

11:07

had big popular rallies in Budapest. And

11:10

so a both levels both the street

11:12

level and governmental level. Yours

11:14

Feeling real change? But.

11:17

Of course, always the story with change in

11:19

any kind of autocratic state of any sort.

11:22

Even. Relatively liberal one. Is

11:24

always a question of how far as to for where's

11:26

the line when you find that of his crofton. And

11:29

so that's that's the feeling. Of

11:32

those. Me: Eighty Eight or the

11:34

Eighty Nine months. of other

11:36

opposition groups trying to figure out where that

11:38

line as. I have heard hungary

11:40

described as the happiest barracks in the

11:42

block. It was. Probably

11:46

the most relaxed of the Eastern

11:48

Bloc. Countries. But

11:50

but with ah, Nemesis, he's

11:53

got this rivalry with the

11:55

salty leader. I'm gross

11:57

and he's He's a nice been

11:59

settled. The File. Here,

12:01

he's always been set up to be a full

12:04

guy. Because they're in a. Quite.

12:07

It's bad financial straights as

12:09

these. Most. Of the

12:12

Eastern Bloc as well. And I

12:14

think it's also worth mentioning that

12:16

this poland going on in the

12:18

background where. Solidarity.

12:21

Has been legalized again and

12:23

is about to enter into.

12:27

Semi free elections? Where's the communist

12:29

government as well? So that there's

12:31

it is that a number of

12:33

while these these two countries almost

12:35

in flux symbol tiny Sli. Yeah

12:39

exactly. And I will say one thing about Poland

12:41

which is that. I I took

12:43

for a little about Poland in the book comes

12:45

out here and there may you to with the

12:47

other reform states. A lot of

12:49

the challenges that Congress facing Poland was facing not

12:51

as these of the Gorbachev and for the Union,

12:53

but also. In particular, different scenes

12:56

with Ceausescu and Romanian so forth. But

12:59

I took my little but Poland part because

13:01

I didn't mean to be a corrective book.

13:03

I read one of the story a Picnic.

13:06

And. This incredible moment. In.

13:08

The seals of had shop them. But

13:11

it felt like when I started to do all

13:13

this reading about eighty nine of in the so

13:15

much work of a polish and. I

13:18

felt that when I look for work and hungry that was real

13:20

little. And seven away.

13:23

This is it became something of a

13:25

of a mission of mine. To.

13:27

Correct that narrative to say that is actually.

13:30

The. Were these two pictures

13:32

of perform. The. One gets

13:34

so much press and one to three little press.

13:37

And but no of course it on. We did

13:39

miss anything about the importance of of Poland and

13:41

found. The Polish Round Table in

13:43

the Police elections. All these were were

13:45

motivating factors. Anything there was a there

13:47

was a feedback. Loop right. Between.

13:51

The reform movements and hunger in the form

13:53

of Poland both could be aware of what

13:55

the others were doing and feeding off their

13:57

games. Would. ease

14:00

Gorbachev's view of what's going on

14:02

in Hungary. How

14:05

does he feel about reforms

14:08

and changes there?

14:11

So Gorbachev is, and this is a

14:14

general statement about Gorbachev, but Gorbachev is

14:17

certainly with the advantage of hindsight

14:21

walking a very precarious line. It's

14:23

a very liminal position, Gorbachev's position,

14:26

in the sense that he wants reform,

14:28

but he wants reform off

14:31

of the norm as it was

14:33

set and understood in the Soviet Union. He

14:36

actually doesn't want reform in the sense that Nemeth

14:38

wanted it, right? There was quite a difference in

14:40

their vision in the sense that Nemeth

14:43

really wanted a post-communist future, and

14:47

this is something Gorbachev didn't want. He wanted

14:49

a reformed communist future. He wanted to go

14:51

back to communism of Lenin

14:53

and the idea of a functioning communist

14:56

state in which one can have

14:58

development and degrees of political freedom

15:00

without having the

15:02

liberalism of the West or democratic elections in

15:04

the free sense. And

15:08

he's the cleave with Nemeth and

15:10

is quite considerable in

15:13

the sense that Gorbachev

15:15

was worried. In fact, in hindsight,

15:17

Gorbachev was correct to be worried

15:19

that all the things that Nemeth had in mind would

15:22

end up being a death spiral for the whole

15:24

communist system, but it couldn't sustain that

15:26

reform in the Nemeth

15:28

sense would be revolutionary.

15:32

That was not at all what Gorbachev

15:34

wanted. What I found part

15:36

of the interesting bit of the research of the book,

15:38

aside from obviously learning more about Gorbachev than I'd ever

15:41

known, was

15:43

specifically in threading the

15:45

difference of these visions. In general,

15:48

until you get into the details, political visions often

15:50

sound very similar. It's very easy

15:53

to put Nemeth and Gorbachev in the same camp,

15:55

and I think that's true in any kind of

15:57

political context with which one is on the

15:59

left. As I said, I have

16:01

to stress on a podcast like this, I'm not a

16:03

cold-horror historian, right? This is not, I

16:05

came at this as someone with a

16:07

different interest, but of course I've since, you

16:09

know, now spent years obsessively reading on this

16:12

particular subject. I now care deeply.

16:14

But on the outside, Nemeth and Gorbachev look

16:16

the same to me, right? They didn't have a

16:18

way of differentiating them. And

16:20

one of the interesting things is, of course, when you

16:23

start to talk to these people, of course, they didn't

16:25

get stuck to Gorbachev. I should stress. But Dr. Nemeth,

16:28

for him it was crystal clear the difference in their visions. And

16:31

I find that interesting as a

16:34

person learned about this story,

16:36

because once that became clear and

16:38

once 89 happened and communism fell

16:40

apart, you start to commiserate

16:43

more with some of the forecasts Gorbachev

16:45

had put out. In a

16:47

way, Gorbachev was really correct

16:49

in his concerns about Nemeth,

16:52

just as Nemeth was correct in his hope

16:54

for Hungary, so to speak. We can talk about that

16:57

later. But yeah,

16:59

there's obviously a difference of vision. So

17:03

Nemeth is sort of

17:05

grappling with the financial

17:08

situation that Hungary's in.

17:12

And he is obviously

17:14

looking down the budgets and

17:17

he comes across some presumably

17:19

some line items regarding the

17:21

cost of maintaining the

17:24

border between Hungary and Austria, the

17:26

Iron Curtain. Yeah, precisely. So

17:31

there's a couple of things to say about

17:34

that. So Nemeth was a trained economist, right?

17:36

So his training in Hungary was at Karl

17:39

Marx University. This was a, he rose to

17:41

the top flights of the Hungarian

17:43

state entirely on his record as an

17:46

economist. This

17:48

was not the, in a way

17:50

it was, you think

17:52

about the worst versions of the apodeticic story and the

17:54

way bureaucracy works. This is the best way

17:57

bureaucracy could work, that the brightest minds

17:59

of an academic institution economics end

18:01

up trying to reform the economy of the state. But

18:03

consequently, he had at this

18:06

point years and years of experience looking

18:09

not just at the problems of the

18:11

economy in Hungary, in particular issues of

18:13

debt, but also

18:15

the way that the state was cooking the books. I mean,

18:18

there was explicit illegality and

18:20

dishonesty from the state. And

18:23

he settled on the idea that

18:26

the way forward would be to have

18:28

sovereign borders. And there

18:30

are two sides of that story. The

18:33

one side is a simple trade story. You

18:35

can't sustain an economy if you

18:37

can't control the value of the things you're either

18:39

trading in a trading. You have no control

18:41

over that, which they didn't. But

18:44

the other side, and this is what you're hitting on, is

18:47

about the actual border, not the border

18:49

in the abstract sense where one sovereignty

18:51

ends and another begins. But

18:53

in the physical sense, the Iron Curtain was

18:56

this incredibly expensive terrain.

18:59

We're talking about kilometers wide, heavily

19:02

armed zone. In

19:06

the 50s, it included land mines. At this

19:08

point in the present, it was mostly electrical

19:10

wire and soldiers and

19:13

dogs and watchtowers and so forth. But

19:15

in particular, maintaining the electricity was

19:17

so expensive that Nemeth

19:21

had a brilliant insight, which

19:23

is that the first aim about

19:26

sovereignty would be

19:28

really hard to try to convince

19:30

anyone of. I mean, Unger wasn't just going to

19:32

declare sovereignty against Soviet wishes. But

19:35

the second claim, this comparatively

19:38

seemingly small claim about

19:40

the funding of a border wire, this seems

19:42

like a manageable issue, was

19:45

something he felt Gorbachev

19:48

would understand and that he could communicate. And

19:51

so when he met Gorbachev in March of 89,

19:54

he took this secondary proposal,

19:57

but he saw that the

19:59

The second proposal was the ticket towards

20:02

the first one. You couldn't say the first

20:04

one, right? But that was the

20:06

strategy. Start with the second, start with the

20:08

seeming issue that frankly anybody could understand. The

20:11

electric wire was too expensive. Hungary

20:13

was in debt. They said a Nemeth

20:16

position was rather simple, wasn't even get rid

20:18

of it. It was if you want it, you pay

20:20

for it. To which Gorbachev said, look,

20:22

your board is your problem. And

20:25

that was that. Within a month, they started

20:27

rolling up the wiring because the wires, even

20:31

if it seems again, it seems like a small issue, were

20:34

costly. Why were they costly?

20:36

Because they had become so frayed, they went

20:38

off all the time. They no longer effectively

20:40

predicted human passage into the

20:42

borderlands. And you had

20:45

essentially a borderlands with

20:47

border guards constantly going out to check

20:50

what the wires were, all the different

20:52

alarms and alerts produced by the electrical

20:55

wiring systems. They were mostly dead

20:57

animals. And it

20:59

was too costly and also dangerous for border guards to

21:01

be doing this. And

21:03

so he takes us to Gorbachev and Gorbachev says,

21:05

okay, you do it yourself. He immediately starts unrolling

21:07

it. But the reason

21:09

it was a brilliant strategy is that Nemeth

21:11

understood in an incredibly clear-minded way, once

21:14

you start dismantling the iron curtain, the

21:17

pathway towards the sovereign end he

21:19

sought in a

21:22

way becomes visible, let's

21:24

say, even if it's still distant. Hey

21:27

there. Did you know Kroger always

21:29

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details. And

21:57

when I think back at Nemeth, Nemeth was a or

21:59

is a... a living. A

22:02

brilliant political strategist, Nemeth saw

22:04

something that I

22:07

feel very privileged

22:09

to have learned because I really feel edified

22:12

by it. Yeah, I love

22:15

the fact that he decides

22:17

to turn off the electric fence

22:19

the day after May Day. So

22:21

I'm presuming he's expecting all good

22:23

communists to be nursing massive hangovers

22:27

at that point. And

22:30

he has a press conference to

22:35

announce this. And he's still

22:37

somewhat concerned because he's worried

22:40

that Gorbachev may be overthrown

22:43

by hardliners at some

22:46

point as well, isn't he? He's concerned

22:48

about other Soviet reactions to

22:50

this. Yeah, Nemeth is

22:52

terrified. He's done something shocking. I

22:55

mean, starting to unroll the electric fencing of

22:58

the Iron Curtain is a shocking use

23:00

of political power for a prime minister in 1989, Soviet

23:04

bloc. And he's

23:06

scared from both ends. He's

23:08

scared internally that there will

23:10

be an attempted coup or an attempted assassination,

23:13

that the party will say this is Miss Man is

23:15

a liability, let's get him out. That

23:18

would come from Gross or someone else when amongst

23:20

the party hardliners. That's

23:23

the one side, that's the internal fear. And

23:25

the external fear is that all that

23:28

goodwill he had with Gorbachev, all this

23:30

kind of tolerance that Gorbachev showed towards

23:32

this incredible, provocative end

23:35

would end up leading to

23:38

Gorbachev's ouster. What happens

23:40

if Gorbachev gets removed by someone stronger,

23:44

some more hardline behind him? The

23:46

first thing that would happen, Nemeth felt,

23:48

I think totally reasonably,

23:50

is they would make a show of the

23:53

kind of person like a Nemeth in Hungary. And

23:57

Nemeth was terrified. This was...

24:00

In fact, when you talk to him now, he

24:02

talks about all the different things that happened in 1989. There

24:05

was a lot of moments like this. But

24:07

that feeling of uncertainty

24:10

between those two poles was

24:14

crushing to him. It was a crushing fear.

24:18

These moves towards further reform

24:21

are sort of pushed further

24:23

forward with a

24:26

ceremony on June 16, 1989

24:28

when Imrein Nagy

24:31

is reburied, who was the leader of the

24:34

Hungarian government during the 1956 uprising. And

24:41

what is the reaction

24:43

of the hardliners in

24:46

the Hungarian Communist Party to the

24:48

fact that he's being exonerated

24:52

for what happened in 1956?

24:57

Yeah, so this is this parallel track. On

25:00

the formal track, you have Nemeth talking to

25:02

Gorbachev dealing with Gross. And

25:04

then there's this informal track where there's

25:06

a connector between the regime,

25:09

the government which is led by

25:11

Nemeth, and the opposition groups. The

25:13

bridge between them was this man named Imrei Poshkaj.

25:16

Now Poshkaj was the one who was very

25:20

active in changing the narrative around 1956. This

25:24

whole possibility, this was something

25:26

that was impossible to talk about from

25:29

1956 up until 1988. So

25:32

much so that in fact, 1988, when

25:35

they tried to do the exact thing they would do in 1989, they

25:38

tried to have a reburial of Natchez, Natchez's body, everyone

25:42

was dispersed by police with batons beating

25:44

them. The

25:47

turnaround really is whiplash inducing. 56

25:54

to 88 in a way, all those years are the same on

25:57

this story. There is no discussion.

26:00

in Hungary. It is explicitly

26:02

disallowed to talk about

26:04

what 56 meant and the

26:07

legacy of the violence against Hungarian citizens

26:09

meted out by the government. And

26:12

then starting in 1989 already with Porgyga's

26:15

radio address and

26:17

then carrying through in March in

26:20

the protest when very provocatively

26:22

a quite

26:24

famous poem from the 1950s

26:27

and in 1956

26:29

was read aloud by a student in a march in

26:31

Budapest. And now up to June,

26:33

this is the aspect of

26:36

the account that is blow by blow, it is

26:38

a month by month story. On

26:40

June 16th, you have

26:42

the culmination of that line, not the

26:45

formal line that Nemeth and Gorbachev are

26:47

dealing with. This informal line we're talking

26:49

about radio addresses and poetry and

26:52

opposition and so forth with

26:54

the reburial in Menacis' body. And

26:57

we're talking about a reburial in the false sense

26:59

his body was exhumed and

27:01

celebrated in being buried not an

27:03

unmarked grave but in a marked

27:05

one that was allowed to have

27:07

would be recognized as such. And

27:10

it is at this day that aside from

27:12

all the of the symbolism and the power

27:14

symbolically of what's happening, that

27:17

we also have the introduction to the political

27:19

scene of the person who would now become the

27:22

most important person in Hungarian politics and certainly the

27:24

most recognizable name to

27:27

most of your listeners which is Viktor Orban. Viktor

27:30

Orban gave a speech in

27:32

which he said something that again

27:34

at the time was unimaginable, even two

27:36

months earlier was unimaginable. Certainly

27:39

pre-March was unimaginable in 1989 which is to

27:42

the explicitly state Soviets get out.

27:45

But it was an incredibly powerful moment in

27:47

Hungary. We're talking hundreds

27:49

of thousands of people and we're

27:51

talking a new leadership forming and becoming

27:54

present and in particular

27:56

people being able to say things out

27:58

loud that for know, the

28:00

30 plus years since the massacre of 56 would

28:03

never ever, ever, ever have been said out

28:06

loud. The

28:08

momentum sort of continues because in 27th of

28:10

June, there's a meeting with the Austrian

28:15

Foreign Minister and his Hungarian

28:17

counterpart who symbolically cut the

28:20

border fence, highlighting

28:22

the decision to dismantle border

28:25

surveillance. Yeah,

28:28

it's a great moment. So we

28:30

talk now, if we zoom to the present,

28:32

the work of obsessed with data

28:35

or big data and the world of

28:37

technology and how everything

28:39

is fake now because everything is all

28:41

about the visual, the optics. And

28:45

certainly with AI, there's this fear that everything

28:47

becomes fake, photographs and video, etc.

28:50

One of the nicest things in history is you realize

28:52

that this was, of course, always true. It was always

28:55

true that politics was about optics and

28:57

imagery and a lot of the

28:59

things we think of as real or

29:01

solid were always politically

29:03

manipulated. June 27th is a

29:05

brilliant example of this because you have these two

29:08

foreign ministers, a horn, who will

29:10

become very important later in Hungary and mock in

29:12

Austria, holding a

29:14

comically sized pair of scissors

29:17

in front of the electric wiring. It's a

29:19

big moment as they bilaterally cut

29:22

the electric fencing. Even

29:24

the assumption behind the image is preposterous because,

29:26

of course, it wasn't a bilateral decision at

29:28

all. Austria had no role in this. But

29:32

the optics, of course, are great. It looks bilateral. There's the

29:34

east and the west, sure. But the

29:37

part that's phenomenal about it on a purely, a pure

29:41

cynical view of politics sense is

29:43

that they actually had to, because so much wiring

29:45

had been already taken down,

29:48

they had to put wiring back up for the

29:50

photograph. So what you're seeing

29:53

is two men purporting to cut a

29:55

wire bilaterally when, in fact, the

29:57

wire had already been cut. It was rebuilt.

30:00

for them to cut it ceremonially in a decision

30:02

that was never bilateral. The whole

30:04

thing is farcical, but such

30:06

as politics. And it was an

30:09

incredibly effective, powerful

30:12

image of the Gens. This gets

30:14

back to what I

30:16

consider to be the brilliant of Nemeth's insight, which

30:19

is once you start dismantling the current,

30:21

you're going to set in motion something

30:23

that's going to be very difficult to stop. And

30:26

that image on June 27th is

30:28

an exemplar of that feeling. The

30:32

other nations of the Warsaw Pact

30:35

can see that as well. They

30:37

can see that this is dangerous.

30:40

And by coincidence, there's a

30:43

Warsaw Pact meeting on July the

30:45

6th, where they

30:47

all get together in Bucharest.

30:51

And one of the many

30:54

surprising details, which I didn't know

30:56

in the book, was the detail

31:00

that Nemeth and

31:03

the Hungarian government's delegation

31:06

ended up sleeping outside in the garden

31:08

of their residence. Can you just tell

31:10

us about that? Yeah,

31:12

so it's already set the scene. I mean,

31:15

I think we've said it already in this

31:17

conversation. It's obviously a tense moment. The

31:20

part that I want to highlight here is it

31:23

really brings up how radical what

31:25

Nemeth was doing, because whereas any

31:28

country can itself reform, but

31:30

most of the time the reform that's happening within

31:32

a country is limited within that

31:34

country's borders. But when you

31:36

start to attack what is essentially

31:38

a shared border, the iron curtain is something

31:41

all the states of the east in a

31:43

way depended on, the closeness created by

31:45

it, you're not affecting

31:48

only your own country, you're affecting everyone. And

31:52

the feeling that what Nemeth was doing

31:54

in this case was threatening the very

31:57

ground on which all these states essentially...

32:00

all these leaders walked was

32:03

prevalent in the room. Now, to set

32:05

the stage, Ceausescu, who throughout

32:08

the book is a bit of the anti-hero,

32:10

the aggressor, that's not

32:14

a crazy common general friend when there was

32:16

anything about the Cold War. I

32:18

mean, Ceausescu was also, frankly, a manian.

32:21

But in this particular story, because

32:23

the particular relationship between Romania and

32:26

Hungary, and of course all the

32:28

Hungarians living in Transylvania, Ceausescu has

32:30

a particular villainous role. So

32:33

the fact that it's the last Warsaw Pact is serendipitous.

32:35

The fact that it's in Romania is,

32:38

in a way, if you'd seen

32:40

it in a Hollywood movie, you wouldn't believe it. Like,

32:42

it's too perfect. It could have been anywhere, right? It

32:45

had to be here, in the place

32:47

where there's already been a year of

32:49

antagonism between Romania and

32:52

Hungary, where the Romanian-Hungarian border

32:54

is already being remilitarized by

32:57

Ceausescu in June. There's

33:00

rumors of a war between the two states. There

33:02

have been assassination attempts, or at least rumors

33:05

of assassination incidents, by

33:07

the Romanian government against people

33:10

like Nemeth. So

33:12

the tension is already intense. And

33:15

then you have this moment where the Warsaw

33:17

Pact, which as we now know is literally

33:20

dying, this would be their last meeting, comes

33:24

to Ceausescu's house, so to

33:26

speak. And Nemeth

33:28

is persona

33:31

non grata in a way, and shows up at

33:33

a bevilla given to

33:35

his delegation, and

33:37

finds that, because of course he doesn't go

33:39

in first, to correct his, the

33:42

prime minister he sends in a team of

33:44

people to check the room, obviously

33:46

for things like bugs, something quite banal in

33:48

the Soviet era, but in particular

33:51

they have a machine to determine radioactivity.

33:54

We're not talking about radioactivity in the sense there'd be a

33:56

bomb, like something would blow up. It's actually

33:58

just that there's a level of exposure that

34:01

sustained time in

34:03

such a place would be ultimately fatal.

34:07

And they find out that the amount

34:10

of radioactivity is so high that

34:12

Nimath isn't even allowed into the

34:14

premises. So fortunately, it's

34:16

July. It's a balmy summer night. And

34:19

he and the whole team sleep outside. But

34:22

that gives you a sense of what we're talking

34:24

about. This is not a

34:26

meeting of people who are a little

34:28

bit upset with the course of reform. This

34:30

is not a genteel difference about vision. This

34:33

is a murderous difference

34:36

of opinion. And

34:39

it really shows the true colors of the

34:42

regime in Romania. Absolutely.

34:45

Absolutely. And unsurprisingly, this

34:48

meeting, Nimath is verbally

34:51

beaten up by the whole cabal,

34:55

really, aside from Gorbachev.

34:58

Gorbachev appears to be just sitting

35:00

there watching. And

35:02

at one point, you describe

35:04

Nimath looking for support from

35:06

Gorbachev. And he glances over.

35:10

And Gorbachev just gives him a wink,

35:12

which I just thought was a lovely,

35:15

lovely image. Yeah, it's

35:18

such a beautiful way of understanding

35:20

how politics works. That

35:22

in a room, given the climate

35:25

of essential, murderous

35:27

intent, where Ceausescu

35:30

is hectoring, he's yelling, he's

35:32

stamping, he's banging the table.

35:35

There's all this big ticket violence,

35:37

this kind of high drama. And

35:40

yet the real power is something so

35:43

incredibly subtle, this little powerful

35:45

gesture, where Nimath is concerned he's not

35:47

going to come out of the room

35:49

alive. And that's not overstatement.

35:54

He might not have made it out of

35:56

the hotel room alive. This is not some

35:59

kind of writerly feeling. flourish to make it seem more

36:01

dramatic than it was. This is clearly

36:03

a scary

36:05

situation. I mean, also, we should add that

36:07

Nemeth is the youngest person in the room.

36:10

He's really green in political sense. A lot

36:13

of these people knew each other for decades.

36:15

He's really, you

36:19

know, honestly terrified. And he's not

36:21

sure where he stands except that

36:24

he believes, right? He believes, he

36:27

has no evidence, but he believes that

36:29

if things really got worse, Gorbachev

36:31

would protect him. And

36:34

so he looks to Gorbachev for any

36:36

sign knowing there isn't going to be some

36:38

grand declaration of support or anything like that. And

36:41

Gorbachev just gives him this tiny

36:43

little subtle flick of the eye as

36:45

a gesture to say, look, I

36:48

hear you. I understand what you're going

36:50

through. You'll be okay. And

36:52

it's a profoundly moving moment

36:55

in what's otherwise a really terrifying, you know,

36:57

profoundly unmoving scene.

37:00

I will say one more thing about it.

37:02

My favorite anecdote from all

37:04

of this is not just the

37:06

hectoring and the yelling. Of course, we know what Chychevsky

37:08

is saying, but there's one

37:10

little bit about how he says it, which

37:13

is he refuses

37:16

to call Nemeth Comrade and

37:18

refers to him as Mr. Mr.

37:20

Nemeth in this,

37:22

in that sense, incredibly patronizing

37:25

way. But

37:27

it also cleaves clearly

37:29

the difference between what was

37:31

happening in Hungary and Poland, as

37:34

someone like Chychevsky would have thought. Because

37:37

in Poland,

37:41

the kinds of reforms happening in Poland could

37:44

have galvanized an opposition in Romania,

37:47

but they themselves would not have changed the state

37:49

of power in Romania, the state of the economy in

37:52

Romania. And the

37:54

Polish delegation referred to as comrades.

37:57

What Nemeth was doing was so different, right? It's

37:59

really really a different thing when

38:02

you start to open what is essentially

38:04

a shared border in one territory. It

38:07

gives you a sense of how much, I

38:09

can say easily that it's so powerful

38:12

and important, but it really

38:14

distills how much Ceausescu saw, that

38:17

this was an existential threat. It

38:19

was a reform that was different than other kinds

38:21

of reforms, and I think that's

38:23

really clarifying. Probably

38:27

one of the countries that's got

38:29

the most to lose if the

38:31

borders opened is East Germany, because

38:33

Hungary is an immensely popular holiday

38:35

destination for East Germans.

38:38

With Lake Balaton, it's an opportunity

38:40

for them to meet their West

38:42

German relatives in a relatively relaxed

38:45

country from a security point of view, although

38:48

the Stasi does have its own office

38:51

in Hungary and is monitoring this

38:54

closely. So this

38:56

opening of the border could and

38:59

will destabilize East Germany.

39:02

So the situation at

39:05

this point, there's loads of East

39:07

Germans on holiday in Hungary,

39:11

and they start to hear

39:13

about plans

39:15

for a picnic

39:18

on the border. Now, how

39:21

does this idea of this

39:23

pan-European picnic originate? June

39:27

20th is the start date. We're

39:29

talking in Debenetzen now. Debenetzen is

39:31

all the way east in Hungary.

39:34

That's an important detail, because the Iron Curtain,

39:37

of course, by definition, is the far west

39:39

of Hungary. But

39:42

this is also one of those place-setting,

39:45

time-setting moments in the conversation. You

39:48

have to understand that we're a

39:51

short drive away at this point from

39:53

what is now Ukraine, but then

39:55

was literally the Soviet Union. It

39:58

was the site of the largest Soviet base in the world. in

40:00

the whole country, right? This was the hub.

40:04

I think I at one point knew the exact drive

40:06

time to the Soviet Union, but it's an hour, under

40:08

an hour, whatever it is, it's on the border. And

40:13

Debitatyn is, it's also

40:15

on the Romanian border, I should add. And

40:19

Debitatyn is not anywhere near the capital,

40:21

it's also not anywhere near where any

40:24

of the historical power or money ever

40:26

was in Hungary. In Hungary, the country

40:28

really is bifurcated with Budapest in the

40:30

center. Well, everything west of

40:32

Budapest was showered

40:35

with the wealth of the ages of the

40:37

Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Habsburgs and so forth.

40:40

And the moment you go east of Budapest, you

40:43

essentially go east. You really

40:45

are outside of even central Europe.

40:47

You're in a place that feels

40:50

more discreetly connected to Ukraine

40:52

and Romania and so forth. And

40:54

it's outside of the wealth and power, it's also outside of

40:57

then information. Because

41:00

whereas now anybody anywhere has access

41:02

to information everywhere, you

41:04

really have to imagine if you're trying to understand the

41:06

story, especially when we're no longer talking

41:09

in the big geopolitical sense, the

41:11

big power sense, that everyone

41:13

we're talking out in Debitatyn didn't

41:15

know anything. They had no information

41:17

about change, no information about all these different things.

41:20

The only information they had came from the fact that if

41:22

you were a young person and were

41:24

interested all in politics, you might have joined

41:26

one of these party,

41:28

not parties, right? These non-political

41:31

party organizations that

41:33

would of course soon become parties. So

41:36

there was this kind of information desert.

41:39

The reason that's important is it's

41:41

so powerful when events

41:43

happen in such a context

41:45

because events become information sources.

41:49

And in this case on June 20th, what happened is

41:52

a politician, important European politician in

41:54

his own right, Audubon Habsburg, but

41:57

specifically in the Hungarian

41:59

sense, because this is what would have been the air

42:02

of the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian

42:04

Empire, had it not folded. Importantly,

42:08

Habsburg spoke Hungarian, which

42:11

for a European politician is unheard of. This

42:14

is a man that grew up in

42:16

an old Europe in which Austro-Hungary

42:18

were already linked. And

42:21

he comes all the way to Debitatzen in

42:24

a way that most European politicians wouldn't speak

42:27

to Hungarians about his

42:30

vision of a relatively

42:32

borderless Europe, of

42:34

European togetherness. And

42:37

he finds, first of all, a packed room of

42:39

students desperate to hear these things. I

42:42

mean, you can imagine how a hungry

42:45

student would be desperate to

42:47

hear this kind of in a way

42:49

that we don't have equivalents these days. There's no

42:51

equivalent of the amount of power a

42:54

person giving a speech in a place

42:56

like Debitatzen would have had. A

42:59

select group of people, amongst

43:01

them, this is a people that came

43:03

from the people who organized it,

43:06

who perhaps would come, particularly

43:08

Lucretz Sabo, and organized a

43:10

small gathering in the evening where

43:13

the people got together. One of them was Ferdas

43:15

Misaros, who's the main, in a way, the main

43:17

character of the story. That's

43:19

not quite true. I don't think there is a

43:21

main character, so to speak, but in a way,

43:23

because he's the originator of the idea of the

43:25

picnic, he's something like the

43:27

main character of the story. Misaros is

43:29

there, listening to all these people

43:32

talk about freedom and free expression and these

43:34

exciting ideas, which in Hungary are

43:36

already shocking, but in Debitatzen are

43:39

doubly shocking. And

43:42

at one point they start talking about reforms of the

43:44

Iron Curtain and the border, and

43:47

Misaros has this idea that says, you know, it's

43:50

fine to be doing this in a room with this

43:53

fancy heir to a once-great empire

43:57

over, you know, a fancy dinner. that

44:01

doesn't do anything. If we're serious, we have to go to the

44:03

border. If you want to change the border, you go to the

44:05

border. And he had this idea, which

44:09

even now sounds slightly

44:11

wine-soaked. I'm sure everyone is having

44:13

a good time at this part of the evening. Why

44:16

don't we throw a party? Let's throw a party at

44:18

the border. Even saying it, and I've said it now,

44:21

for the five years I've been researching this book, even

44:23

saying it again five years in, for the

44:25

five thousandth time, it still sounds

44:28

ridiculous. That you would think,

44:31

I know how I'm going to bring down the Iron Curtain. Let's

44:34

get beer and, you know, sausage

44:36

and throw a party. But this

44:38

was his idea, and it was

44:41

in fact completely brilliant. It

44:43

was completely brilliant in much the same way as

44:46

Nimitz Insight was brilliant. Which

44:48

is sure, the party's not going to change

44:50

the world, but the party might

44:52

normalize the idea that the Iron Curtain

44:54

was no longer a beast as

44:57

it had been imagined. It would change the image

44:59

of this institution in a way

45:01

that could change the world. And, you

45:04

know, so it's easy to dismiss it because in

45:06

a way it's dismissible. It's absurd. It's completely absurd.

45:09

In fact, Feddence had come out of the theater, and

45:12

his love was absurd as theater. The whole idea for

45:14

him was absurd. His point

45:16

was to be absurd. Anyways, he

45:18

gets basically laughed out of the room. And

45:21

a week later, there's a meeting

45:23

of the MDF in what

45:25

I think is still maybe

45:27

one of the most moving moments in

45:30

the story. When

45:32

he comes up, at this point he's kind of,

45:34

he can't let go of the idea. He

45:37

brings it to this party, and

45:39

it takes a lot of confidence to

45:41

bring it to the party. Soberly,

45:43

in the light of day, this idea.

45:47

And he basically gets laughed out again. And

45:50

it would have died. It would have died then and

45:52

there because it was over. It was absurd. He tried,

45:54

and it was laughed at. The

45:57

party basically told him, look, we're a real party.

45:59

We're trying to get out of here. to be a real thing. Don't

46:02

waste our time with your juvenile ideas."

46:05

And yet he

46:08

found a partner, which

46:10

is this woman named Maria Philipp, and

46:13

she says, look, I'll

46:15

help you plan it. Let's do this. And it's

46:17

really quite a wonderful thing that they had the two

46:19

of them together, not

46:21

just against all odds and against lack of

46:23

information and money and all the danger inherent

46:26

in the border, but also against

46:28

the mockery of your peers, which to me

46:30

is the more moving part of the story, which

46:34

is that it's not just that it was

46:36

an impossible dream and in some ways an

46:38

idiotic dream. They had no

46:40

money. What were they going to do? How are they

46:42

going to organize a party

46:44

400 kilometers away? You couldn't do that easily

46:46

now. If you

46:48

had no money in the middle of the

46:50

UK, you're not throwing a party 400 kilometers

46:53

away. That's insane. But

46:56

I find the point about ridicule the

46:58

more profound one, which

47:00

is that it takes a certain kind of person to

47:03

not just face the odds

47:05

of a state that might kill you or imprison

47:07

you or something, but

47:10

face down your peers, your

47:12

putative revolutionary friends

47:17

and go basically alone. And I find that

47:19

really moving even still. This

47:22

sort of highlights the amazing cast

47:24

of characters you have in this

47:26

story. And this is what

47:28

brings it alive because you go into a

47:30

lot of detail about their

47:33

experiences and you talk about

47:37

how Maria manages to get through

47:39

on the phone to people who

47:41

she would not have no right

47:44

to normally speak to. She's

47:46

this phenomenal character

47:48

who manages to

47:51

organize this and get

47:53

it all together. And

47:56

amongst those other characters, I just want to highlight

47:58

a couple of characters that that you've got in

48:00

there. I think you talked about

48:03

that being really moving. I think one of

48:05

the stories that I found really moving was

48:07

the story of Katia and Oscar, who

48:10

had met, I think they were 17,

48:13

and they met on separate school trips

48:15

to the Soviet Union. Katia's

48:18

from East Germany, Oscar's from

48:20

West Germany, and

48:22

the only way that they can get

48:25

together is to

48:27

meet in Hungary. That's

48:31

an amazing story. You've got the

48:34

various different East German families who

48:36

are involved their stories about

48:38

how they get across the border, how

48:40

they arrive there, and there's a lot

48:42

of twists and turns in

48:44

those stories as

48:46

well. You've also got one of

48:48

our guests involved in

48:51

this as well, Laszlo

48:53

Názs from episode 52,

48:55

where we described his

48:57

life in Hungary, which reminded me

48:59

that I do have a further

49:01

section of his interview which I

49:04

haven't yet published, so do watch

49:06

out for that. But if we

49:08

move towards the actual picnic itself

49:10

and how that unfolds? Yeah,

49:13

of course. The truth is that

49:15

once the idea is hatched, it's only

49:17

about six weeks of planning before you

49:19

start to get to the picnic. You

49:22

have at this point already, because

49:24

of Nemeth's reforms that aren't occurring. Remember,

49:26

the way we're talking, these two strains

49:29

of narrative are

49:31

actually contemporaneous. The

49:34

border cutting of Mach and

49:37

Horn is roughly contemporaneous with the

49:40

idea from Messarosz. The meeting

49:42

in Ceausescu's Romania of Nemeth

49:45

is roughly contemporaneous with Maria opting

49:47

in. I mean, they're all hopping at the same time. It then

49:50

starts to move very quickly after everything moving

49:52

very slowly in July and August

49:54

in the planning, especially once they team

49:57

up with Laszlo Magash and go through the planning

49:59

process. to Chopra, because

50:01

then you're literally at the border. But

50:03

the reason it's important to highlight the contemporaneousness

50:06

of these events is it

50:08

means that already after the beginning of

50:10

the rolling up of the electrical wire,

50:12

people in East Germany start to understand

50:15

what's happening, which is that,

50:17

again, these optics, these ideas

50:20

that are unimaginable until roughly

50:23

May 1989, start

50:26

to spark ideas

50:28

around, not just East Germany,

50:30

around the whole Eastern Bloc, but especially East

50:32

Germany. As you said, East Germany certainly

50:35

had the most to lose by

50:37

opening up the Iron Curtain.

50:41

The most obvious example of this comes from the

50:43

Berlin Wall, right? What was the Berlin Wall designed

50:45

to do? It was designed to keep East Germans

50:47

in, and

50:49

they were relatively effective. We

50:52

love to say that walls don't work, but of

50:55

course walls can work, and in Berlin it really did.

50:58

The fact that it took a whole stave

51:00

apparatus to make it work, I mean, there's the

51:02

reasons we can talk about the comparison, but

51:04

the point being that the

51:06

Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, in

51:08

this sense, the inter-German border,

51:11

were an effective tool for

51:13

their purpose in this period

51:16

from 1961 until 88, and

51:19

the pressure valve off that system

51:22

was that while these Germans could

51:24

not go to West Germany, and they could not go

51:26

to the West, they could at

51:28

least go to places within the socialist East

51:30

that were still desirable, places like Hungary, like

51:32

Lake Balaton, and so forth. But

51:36

of course the only reason that works is because there's an

51:38

Iron Curtain, and so the whole

51:40

Berlin Wall structure is essentially

51:42

built on the foundation of the Iron Curtain,

51:45

the foundation being that East Germans could go

51:47

to a place like Hungary where they

51:49

also could not leave. The

51:51

moment this starts to become shaky

51:54

as a foundation in May, you

51:57

have basically East Germans around East Germany

51:59

looking at each other and saying, maybe this

52:01

is our chance. Applying for

52:03

visas to Hungary, planning trips to Hungary,

52:06

which was anyways normal, nothing was going to raise

52:08

flags. Hundreds and

52:10

hundreds of thousands of these Germans anyways traveled

52:12

to Hungary as tourists every summer, and

52:15

hey, it was summer. It was June and July,

52:18

and obviously the narrative, because this isn't

52:20

mostly a narrative history, is

52:22

following a set of families,

52:25

mostly families, also solo

52:27

travelers, but mostly families, from

52:30

the hearing of the news in Hungary from May, through

52:32

the hiding of the plans in June, and

52:35

ultimately through getting in the car in July and August,

52:38

going down to Lake Balaton or Budapest

52:40

or wherever, and then within

52:42

Hungary, started to make their way to the border.

52:45

Because importantly, as of August 1st, the

52:50

tent areas, the campsite areas outside

52:52

of the

52:54

capital and towards the borderlands were also opened

52:56

to East Germans. They'd always been closed. The

53:00

actual action of the

53:02

story doesn't take place near Lake Balaton at all,

53:05

but instead near a place called Sertrakos, which

53:07

is this little Hungarian town on the

53:10

new side of the Zay, which is this other kind

53:12

of lake that dips between Hungary and

53:14

Austria. The

53:17

campsites there, which are now opened to East

53:19

Germans and suddenly filled with

53:21

East Germans, because while the picnicers

53:23

are planning their party, which

53:25

still, even though specifications have

53:28

changed, involves setting

53:30

up a bandstand, having

53:33

sausage and goulash and beer,

53:37

contemporaneous with this moment where they're organizing

53:39

a party in the defunct lands that

53:42

just rolled up the electrified lands

53:45

of the Iron Curtain. Now you

53:47

have kilometers away, really, really close,

53:50

thousands and thousands and thousands of East Germans

53:52

waiting for the opportunity to get to freedom.

53:55

And as part of this picnic, there's

53:57

going to be a symbolic opening. of

54:01

a border gate that's been closed

54:03

for 30, 40 years. Right.

54:08

So to go back to the incredibly charming,

54:10

I still find, vision of the picnic from

54:12

Misarosh in June. The

54:15

original idea of the picnic was there would be a border that's

54:17

like a comic book version of a border

54:19

where there's like a line in a fence and you can just wave

54:22

to Austrians on the other side of the fence and you can

54:24

kind of pass some sausages and that's the party. It

54:26

was literally going to be Hungarians on one

54:28

side and Austrians on the other. Obviously

54:31

that can't work. But of course,

54:33

you know, the iron curtain is kilometers wide. It's

54:35

insane to think that. That would be a person who

54:37

of course didn't have information, which of course makes

54:39

sense of what we've been saying. But

54:42

through Maria's phone calls and her

54:45

essentially manipulating the border guards

54:47

to her whim, is

54:50

able to work it out, they get a permit, not just

54:52

for the place of the party, but

54:55

also for a one time only border

54:57

crossing of this little road that literally

54:59

had been closed. It's for four decades

55:02

since the iron curtain became this is an

55:04

unused road. It's actually not even a road.

55:07

It's kind of like a dirt, but

55:10

it had a fence and it was guarded and

55:12

it had a fence that would never been opened. They

55:14

decided they would allow because remember Austrians, people

55:17

from the West could come to

55:19

East. It's just that East couldn't go West. So

55:22

Austrians could easily come to Hungary, provided

55:25

there were visas and paperwork and this is all

55:27

the stuff Maria is organizing for

55:30

this insane window of time. Lots

55:32

of calls, lots of letters, basically paperwork.

55:35

So that a delegation, that was the word they

55:38

used, of Austrians would come

55:40

across this border, open

55:42

this border for the

55:44

picnic. But what that required

55:47

was it required breaking this enormous

55:49

powerful lock, which had closed the

55:51

gate for four decades and

55:53

replacing it with a tiny little one that was there

55:55

for show. This little gold thing that they were going

55:58

to open ceremoniously. It was going to be this. be,

56:00

look, it was going to be the same photo optic in a

56:02

way as what happened in June 27th. Another

56:04

one of these examples of, look, Hungarians

56:07

and Austrians coming together, look, we're just going to

56:09

open this gate. But of course,

56:11

what happened is this, again, in the profound

56:13

ironies and flips and turns of the book

56:15

of the story, the

56:18

gate would end up becoming challenged

56:21

to begin to becoming the source

56:24

of the escape. And part of

56:26

the reason it was so easy to push through was because of

56:28

the tiny little lock they had found. So the

56:30

old lock, which might have actually been able to

56:32

stop people from crossing, that had been gotten rid

56:35

of for the sake of Austrians going east,

56:38

suddenly became the tool

56:40

that enabled hundreds and hundreds

56:42

and hundreds of East Germans heading west. So

56:48

600 or so

56:50

East Germans managed to hustle

56:53

their way through that gate and

56:56

cross over the border

56:58

that day. But in

57:01

following days, the border is closed

57:03

again. This isn't the short opening.

57:07

It is a symbolic moment and

57:10

the border is closed. Yeah,

57:14

exactly. So the interesting

57:16

moral decision that

57:18

the border guards make to basically not put

57:20

up any resistance to these Germans to let

57:22

them pass is part of

57:25

the drama of the story, right? The fact that you

57:27

have... It's fine to say there's a party

57:30

and there's going to be 20,000 people celebrating

57:32

nearby. It's fine to say

57:34

there's all these thousands of refugees and families

57:36

in these campsites. But ultimately,

57:38

whether they get through and whether they

57:40

get through bloodlessly comes

57:43

down to some decisions and the decisions

57:45

of border guards to

57:47

not even try, not to shoot in the air and not to

57:49

tell them to stop, to basically step aside and let

57:52

them through. And that's kind of

57:54

an exciting euphoric moment, but it really is

57:56

a one-off. I mean, it happened. So

57:59

we're talking about... about 600 to 700 people

58:02

crossing at that instant, about

58:04

three o'clock on August 19th through this

58:06

particular gate. But then

58:09

the gate was closed, but throughout the night, all

58:12

around the borderlands, people already had been trying and

58:14

getting through. But then

58:17

after the 19th, specifically the 20th and

58:19

21st and 22nd of August, the

58:22

evenings are filled with just hundreds and

58:24

hundreds and hundreds of these Germans pushing

58:27

their way through, trying to

58:29

cross, stepping through different

58:32

layers of barbed wire, trying

58:34

to avoid capture and so forth. And

58:37

this proceeds more

58:39

or less unabated for weeks. You

58:41

have this movement of people going

58:44

into the borderlands. It

58:46

comes to a head on the 21st and

58:48

the evening when a refugee is

58:51

killed. It is taken to be

58:53

an accident. I have no insight into whether or not

58:55

it was an accident. I can't comment on that. We

58:57

generally accept it to be an accident. It sounded

59:00

like there was unclarity and a bit of

59:02

a skirmish and a gun went off and

59:04

the shot was fatal. This is two Werner

59:06

Schulz on the 21st. And this

59:09

particular event is important because whereas

59:11

there had not been bloodshed prior to that and

59:13

all these hundreds of people getting through is actually

59:15

something, as we know, as we've talked about, people

59:17

like Nemeth and Poshka were very excited

59:20

about. It was great that the Ukraine was dealing

59:22

with these breaches. They were encouraging

59:24

them. But the

59:26

idea that either border

59:29

guards could go rogue or that accidents

59:31

could happen and lead to international incidents

59:34

or activating the Soviet presence in the region and

59:36

so forth was exactly

59:38

what Nemeth was scared of. And

59:41

so you have this

59:43

basically unsustainable position where

59:45

they're telling the world

59:48

there's a law while

59:50

the law enforcers are quite actively not

59:52

enforcing the law. You know, these

59:54

are people who are actually helping the refugees in certain contexts.

59:57

That's just not heard in them. My

59:59

favorite version of the this is when the

1:00:01

Hungarians would hold in their pockets little

1:00:03

folded pieces of paper with an

1:00:06

arrow on it because they felt

1:00:08

they couldn't say things to these Germans without

1:00:10

getting in trouble from their superiors. But

1:00:12

they can kind of show them where the border was,

1:00:15

like show them where to head. Again, it's all these

1:00:17

levels of informality. It's informality

1:00:19

upon informality. We're talking about law

1:00:21

enforcement. This is law enforcement. I'm

1:00:25

not even certain it's there anymore. I'm

1:00:27

not even certain what law they're enforcing, which

1:00:30

leads to huge issues within the ranks.

1:00:33

You have lots of stories of people fearing their commanders.

1:00:35

The commander might be more hardline than

1:00:37

they were or so forth. And

1:00:39

so they're all making these little tiny moral

1:00:41

judgments all the time. Should I

1:00:43

help the refugees? Should I help them

1:00:45

explicitly or implicitly? If I want to help them, how do

1:00:48

I help them? How do I help them in a way

1:00:50

that avoids my own capture? So little

1:00:52

things like not saying anything but pointing them in

1:00:54

a direction that comes commonplace, this is

1:00:56

exactly what Nemeth is worried about. And

1:01:00

so it's within a few

1:01:02

weeks of the picnic that

1:01:04

on September 11th, at the crack

1:01:06

of midnight, Nemeth issues an order to open

1:01:09

the border. And then we really

1:01:11

do have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of

1:01:14

East Germans leaving freely across the border.

1:01:17

And then as we well know, within

1:01:19

two months, the Berlin Wall falls and

1:01:21

everything's over. And everything in terms

1:01:23

of travel restriction changes

1:01:26

because one of the profound

1:01:29

lessons in the book is

1:01:32

that once you open up the Iron Curtain,

1:01:34

the whole idea of the Berlin Wall falls

1:01:36

apart. And this

1:01:39

gets back to that initial insight of Nemeth

1:01:41

and also gets back to what, even

1:01:44

though it was absurd, was so powerful about the ideas

1:01:46

of Ferens and Maria, which

1:01:48

is that you really can

1:01:51

see, you really can trace a through line from

1:01:53

how an institution like the Berlin Wall, which we're

1:01:56

not talking at all about East Germany in this discussion, we haven't

1:01:59

really talked about it in a little lots of reasons these Germany

1:02:01

was falling apart. But the simple

1:02:03

institution of what the wall was, they

1:02:05

completely lost its foundation in

1:02:07

a matter of weeks. Hello,

1:02:10

I'm Craig Donalds from Aberdeen and

1:02:12

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1:02:59

the link in the episode

1:03:01

information. I

1:03:04

mean when you spoke to Nemeth

1:03:06

was he expecting

1:03:09

things to move this quickly

1:03:12

or did he think this was going to be over

1:03:14

a longer time period? No, and

1:03:16

in fact Nemeth was terrified of how quickly it

1:03:18

was moving because Nemeth

1:03:21

realised very quickly, in fact he again throughout

1:03:23

this he's very aware of what he's doing,

1:03:25

he knows how radical this stuff is, but

1:03:28

he feels he's let the genie out of the bottle and

1:03:31

he had

1:03:33

wanted a much slower more measured

1:03:36

reform. No,

1:03:39

it was spiraling under control and

1:03:41

this becomes clear less

1:03:43

in the events surrounding the September

1:03:45

11th opening and more as we

1:03:47

get towards October, November and December of that year when

1:03:49

the Berlin Wall falls and so forth and

1:03:52

Hungary very rapidly starts to move towards

1:03:55

a democratic future when

1:03:57

Nemeth in fact really strongly wants to

1:03:59

stay. on the brakes and

1:04:01

say, this is not sustainable. We

1:04:03

want multi-parties progressing. We want liberal

1:04:06

reform. We want all these things,

1:04:08

but they can't happen in two months. By

1:04:11

the time he tries to step on the brakes,

1:04:14

it's too late. Within three months, by March, there's

1:04:17

already elections. Nemeth is out of power.

1:04:19

The Democrats are in power, and everything that

1:04:21

Nemeth was scared of comes to pass,

1:04:24

which is that they don't have a newly reformulated

1:04:27

economy. You're going to have

1:04:30

all the problems that I think probably a lot

1:04:32

of your listeners know about the 90s. It's

1:04:34

not just transition. It's privatization and

1:04:37

the ways in which state firms were sold

1:04:39

off. This is getting a little bit out

1:04:41

of the limit of the book. I talk about it a little bit

1:04:43

at the end, but all of it

1:04:45

is something Nemeth saw. All of it is

1:04:47

something that Nemeth would

1:04:49

have done whatever he could to have

1:04:51

slowed. But at this

1:04:54

point, the picure

1:04:57

metaphor, the cat was out of the bag or whatever,

1:04:59

the horse was out of the farm. And

1:05:02

he's still got the taint of being

1:05:04

part of the party. Yeah,

1:05:07

exactly. And so Nemeth becomes this sort

1:05:10

of tragic figure to me, which

1:05:12

is part of why it's so profound to talk to

1:05:15

him and part of why he is the

1:05:17

kind of person that makes sense of oil history.

1:05:22

It's easy to say it's great to talk about the

1:05:24

East German refugees that in a way are nameless. No

1:05:26

one knows these people. They're unfameless. They're just average people.

1:05:29

Part of what oil history does

1:05:31

is it reclaims stories you'd otherwise lose.

1:05:33

But the other thing it does is

1:05:36

it takes people who are

1:05:38

familiar names, at least in some sense, gives

1:05:41

a depth to their positionality that is

1:05:44

outside of the strict factuality

1:05:47

of history, the dates and names

1:05:49

and so forth. And

1:05:51

Nemeth represents that because Nemeth, in a way,

1:05:55

is the hero of a story that's not of

1:05:57

his making. He doesn't want to be. the

1:06:00

person he becomes and is put in a

1:06:02

position he's deeply uncomfortable with and

1:06:05

ultimately gets vilified, right? He's

1:06:07

the Communist. The last Communist, Prime

1:06:10

Minister of Hungary is ultimately a Communist. And

1:06:13

as they move towards a democratic future, what

1:06:15

can he be but the bad guy in

1:06:18

that very simple Manichaean telling, which

1:06:20

again, it's not like we in the

1:06:22

West are famous for these tellings. We know, I grew

1:06:25

up in 1980s USA where the good

1:06:30

and the bad, the liberal and the

1:06:32

Communist, the free and the unfree, I mean, it was

1:06:34

all binaries. And

1:06:37

Hungary never made sense of any of this.

1:06:39

The whole way we began this conversation, Hungary

1:06:41

never fit this model. And Nemeth

1:06:43

in particular, doesn't fit the model.

1:06:45

So he becomes a tragic figure. He

1:06:48

becomes the one for whom the change

1:06:50

ultimately, he's the one left behind by

1:06:53

this change. And he gets

1:06:55

vilified and ultimately the systems that

1:06:57

he predicted, crash in the way

1:06:59

he predicted. And that's

1:07:02

kind of sad because, you know, in

1:07:04

the way you'd hope, there'd be some

1:07:06

kind of redemption. And I

1:07:09

certainly hope that one

1:07:11

of the positive aspects of the book is people will see a bit

1:07:14

of who he was as a person, right? That's part

1:07:16

of what you can do in this kind of

1:07:18

book. Because you really as a reader,

1:07:20

I hope meet him, right? And

1:07:23

you get a sense of how difficult his

1:07:25

positionality is, because ultimately he ends up in

1:07:27

the same minimal place as Gorbachev. He's toeing

1:07:29

this incredibly fine line between

1:07:32

wanting a reform and realizing the reform

1:07:34

that he wants will ultimately... You

1:07:36

spend a lot of time with

1:07:39

him, you do get a really good

1:07:41

insight into or as good

1:07:43

an insight as you can get into

1:07:45

the man himself. How

1:07:48

is the picnic viewed in

1:07:51

Hungary today? Is

1:07:53

it celebrated? Yeah, hugely,

1:07:56

but politically. So

1:07:58

you have in Hungary... like in a lot

1:08:00

of states, but I mean certainly in quite extreme, form

1:08:03

in Hungary, a very polarized political system where

1:08:06

you have the old left who grow out of

1:08:09

the communist tradition, notably through the

1:08:12

man Horn, who was the

1:08:15

foreign minister who cut the wire in

1:08:17

June 1989. There's a lineage

1:08:19

of the left that maintains and has become

1:08:21

in a way center left or

1:08:24

socialist or social democratic or so forth.

1:08:28

And then you have the right that every year becomes

1:08:30

more nationalistic and more in

1:08:32

line with a kind of xenophobic populism that's

1:08:34

quite common in Europe as well. And

1:08:38

of course, these two poles, there really isn't much

1:08:40

of a center in Hungary, these two poles, I

1:08:44

claim in a way their lineage,

1:08:46

their origins from the same moment.

1:08:49

Right? So the Horn lineage are the reformers

1:08:51

of government and the

1:08:53

Orban lineage are the reformers outside of

1:08:56

government, the revolutioners in the

1:08:58

streets. And

1:09:00

people who only possibly follow

1:09:02

Hungarian politics or even European

1:09:04

politics find it

1:09:07

shocking that Orban, this man we

1:09:09

now take to be this

1:09:11

staunch right wing thinker,

1:09:14

has this revolutionary past. But

1:09:17

actually, he does, right? And he emerges from

1:09:19

the same moment and is carved

1:09:21

out a political space for himself as did Horn.

1:09:23

These are both classic political

1:09:25

operatives in a way that they're both

1:09:28

as one of the

1:09:31

more intelligent commentators that I interviewed for this

1:09:33

book. And I have the name of

1:09:35

Oplakka, who unfortunately

1:09:37

passed away two years ago, had

1:09:41

a brilliant line about Horn, but it applies to

1:09:43

Orban as well, which is that these people really

1:09:45

are politicians, which is that if you ask

1:09:47

what they stand for, they stand for themselves. And

1:09:50

the both of these people have carved out

1:09:52

a legacy of 89. And the

1:09:54

border opening is central. I mean, this is part of

1:09:58

the Hungarian legacy of the whole Cold War. is

1:10:00

the opening of this border. So,

1:10:02

89 is celebrated differently. The picnic has become

1:10:04

a cause to celebrate over the right of

1:10:06

Orban because it was

1:10:09

organized by the opposition, right? And so, Orban,

1:10:11

even though he wasn't the opposition figure, he

1:10:14

wasn't Fidesz, it was the MDA. But

1:10:17

if that lineage, the lineage of the

1:10:19

opposition in Hungary claims the

1:10:22

picnic, you

1:10:24

know, this is what happens with power. You can tell the story

1:10:26

as you want. I mean, we know that history

1:10:28

is told by the victors and so forth. This

1:10:31

is just that. We're now in an area

1:10:33

in which Orban is reimagining history in a

1:10:36

way that fits his image. Even

1:10:39

as I say that, one can't diminish his real

1:10:41

role in it, right? In fact, I think that

1:10:43

one of the great take-offs of this

1:10:45

for me, again, as someone that did not come out

1:10:47

of this with either a Cold War or even

1:10:50

a Hungarian history background, is

1:10:53

that it's also shocking to me that

1:10:56

this is where Orban came from. One

1:10:58

of the things that's interesting now when I listen to European

1:11:01

news and the way that the

1:11:03

EU in particular, Brussels in particular, vilifies

1:11:05

Orban for full disclaimer, I live

1:11:08

in Europe, I live in Amsterdam. It's

1:11:10

very normal to encounter people that

1:11:13

say things like, what is

1:11:15

wrong with Hungarians? They've lost their minds from

1:11:17

running for Orban. One

1:11:19

of the take-offs of the book is, well, okay, there's

1:11:22

a lot of ideological disagreement you might have with Orban, but

1:11:25

you have to understand what he signifies in

1:11:27

this country. You can't take

1:11:29

people out of the legacy, the lineage, the

1:11:31

history in which they in a

1:11:34

way are packaged as an idiom locally.

1:11:38

So Orban in a way

1:11:41

is difficult to understand for us in the

1:11:43

West. All we

1:11:45

encounter is his new xenophobia,

1:11:48

his building of walls, and so forth. The

1:11:51

question then is to say, well, there are

1:11:53

the two faces of Orban. Face

1:11:55

one is wall-builder, anti-migrant.

1:11:58

Face two is old revolutionary. the

1:12:00

man that said Soviets get out. Rather

1:12:04

than just talking about how discordant they

1:12:07

are and vilifying on the orbit ourselves,

1:12:09

the more interesting question is

1:12:11

to bridge them, is to ask how did we get there? Not

1:12:14

just in the big sense we all care about how did we

1:12:16

get from the fall of the Berlin Wall to

1:12:18

our new era building walls. This

1:12:20

is the question that basically spent

1:12:22

my career trying to answer. This is where I come

1:12:24

from. But

1:12:26

in this specific case, how do we get from an orb bomb that

1:12:28

tears down a wall? To an orb bomb that builds

1:12:30

up a wall? And the answer

1:12:33

has a lot to do with the

1:12:35

different ways people understood the

1:12:38

big ideas of the time, things

1:12:40

like freedom. There's a way that we

1:12:43

in the West saw all these

1:12:45

activists as being

1:12:47

like us. The

1:12:49

opposition, the students, they all looked great. They were

1:12:51

talking about freedom and democracy and they wanted all

1:12:53

the things that we had. They wanted free

1:12:56

markets, etc. And yet

1:12:59

freedom is more complicated than that. And a lot

1:13:01

of what's interesting about going back in

1:13:03

time and understanding what people like Orbán really say, their

1:13:06

freedom was much more about something like

1:13:09

self-determination. It really was

1:13:11

Soviets out. And

1:13:13

so once you repackage the calls for freedom

1:13:16

in a sovereignty language, not

1:13:18

a liberal language, it

1:13:21

makes total sense why the first

1:13:23

threat Orbán would face was

1:13:25

the Soviets to

1:13:28

sovereignty, to Hungarian sovereignty. And

1:13:31

the new threat Orbán faces to

1:13:33

the same sovereignty, in his view,

1:13:35

is the migrant. I

1:13:38

don't think that's inconsistent at all. I might not like it.

1:13:40

I might not share the ideological prior.

1:13:44

But it's a consistent ideological prior.

1:13:47

And so, and this goes back

1:13:49

to the merit of oral history, the

1:13:51

point of understanding, not just

1:13:54

what happened historically, but what people

1:13:56

thought at the time, what things

1:13:58

like freedom meant to them. Part

1:14:01

of what's so brilliant about talking to all

1:14:03

these Hungarian activists is being

1:14:05

able to start, let's say, to parse these

1:14:08

different conceptions of freedom embedded in their calls

1:14:10

in the 80s and

1:14:12

then take that lineage to the present, not

1:14:15

form-fit it to our own conception,

1:14:17

which in this case doesn't fit at all. The

1:14:20

book is called The Picnic, An Escape

1:14:22

to Freedom and the Collapse of the

1:14:24

Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo and it's

1:14:26

published by Bodle Head. Please

1:14:29

use the links in the episode notes to

1:14:31

buy the book and help support the podcast.

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