The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; A Movie about Hungary

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Twenty years ago this week, the people of Hungary rose up against Soviet domination and their Hungarian puppet leaders. For a brief moment, freedom lived. Then, Kruschev ordered the rebellion crushed, and the Soviet tanks moved in. What has happened to Hungary in those twenty years? The question would be interesting anyway, but it`s even more appropriate now in view of Mr. Ford`s much-discussed comments about Eastern Europe. Tonight, a film report just made in Hungary by the BBC. It begins with those haunting moments twenty years ago, with the last desperate appeals to the West by the freedom fighters over the short-wave radio:

RADIO HUNGARY: This is Hungary Calling. This is Hungary calling. The last remaining station calls to the United Nations. Only this morning the Soviet troops launched a general attack on Hungary. We are requesting you to send us immediate aid in the form of parachute troops over the Trans-Danubian provinces. For the sake of God and freedom, help Hungary l

FIRST SPEAKER: Correspondents just arrived in Budapest saw today more of the vast extent of the brutal fighting that`s taken place here this past week. They saw many dead Russian soldiers still lying in the streets. Some of the Russians were literally pulled to pieces by infuriated Hungarians.

SECOND SPEAKER: A leading member of the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party, Mr. Kruschev, said today that it was in the interest of the Hungarian people that the new Hungarian government had asked for Soviet assistance. "The forces of reaction," he said, "have been smashed."

MICHAEL COCKERELL: This is the rarest sight in Hungary today -- Russian soldiers. They`re not to be seen, the authorities informed us. But 20 years after the revolution you can see many things that don`t exist in Hungary. This unit of the Red Army is commemorating its previous liberation of Budapest in 1945. The soldiers were having a day out at the Russian section of the Budapest National Cemetary, away from their closely guarded and unfilmable barracks. Their day of rest happily coincided with that of our guide from Hungarian television. Russian soldiers are ordered to keep the lowest of profiles in Budapest today; but there are four divisions of Soviet troops still, as the official language has it, "temporarily stationed" in Hungary.

Most of the Russian soldiers here were born after 1956. Only the tombstones tell them "The Hungarian people offer eternal gratitude to those heroes fallen in the fight for socialism and a free world." The Hungarian Communist Party headquarters, in Soviet utilitarian concrete and glass, is known as the White House. On the banks of the gray Danube, it overlooks the Margit Bridge; here, 20 years ago, the revolution began. On October the twenty-third, in the first unregimented demonstration of public opinion since the war, students and workers marched against the communist government. The regime was peculiarly brutal and oppressive, even by iron curtain standards, as the official history now admits. Students were demanding free elections, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and free speech. As the demonstrators tore down the stone symbols of Stalinist rule, Mr. Kruschev in Moscow put it less coyly: "If ten or so Hungarian writers had been shot at the right moment, the revolution would never have occurred."

But in a sense Mr. Kruschev had only himself to blame. Earlier that year he had violently denounced Stalin and all his works. Hungarians now erupted against the bread queues, the forced labor camps and the torture chambers. Now all the secret police dossiers, the propaganda, the false confessions came fluttering out onto the streets in the biggest bombfire night Budapest had had in years. The next target was the Communist. Party Paper, the parrot of the Rakosy regime. The fighting went on for seven days. On the one side were loosely organized bands of students, workers and former political prisoners, aided by the Hungarian Army. Against them, the secret police -- the Avo- -and units of the Soviet Army. There was no mercy for any captured any officer. The news that the secret police had gunned down six hundred unarmed demonstrators in Parliament Square led to a frenzy of revenge.

Then, in captured tanks, the rebels turned on the Budapest Communist Party headquarters; and as they rushed into the previously impregnable bastion, a sudden realization dawned on the fighters: the city itself was in their hands,.

Outside the Budapest Party headquarters now, the heady days of October, 1956 are just a memory locked in a drawer marked "Do not open." People don`t talk about 1956, but they remember the leading revolutionary minister who threatened the Russians: Send the tanks back in and I`ll fight them with my bare hands." But he didn`t. Instead, he forsook the revolution, and today that man still rules Hungary. Janos Kadar has achieved a miraculous political transformation from being the most reviled man in Hungary.

Kadar`s popularity is built on washing machines, refrigerators and cars. More Hungarians now have more than ever before, and Kadar has also learnt to run the apparatus of a police state with more delicacy than his predecessors.

DEZSO KEMENY: We have no opposition parties in Hungary; but I daresay, we can criticize our government.

COCKERELL: Have you criticized members of the politburo, for instance?

KEMENY: Criticized members of the politburo? Well, I never tried it.

COCKERELL: But do you think one would be allowed to do that?

KEMENY: Well, I propose, ask that from Mr. Kadar. COCKERELL: Do you think he would allow criticism of himself?

KEMENY: Yes. COCKERELL: You do?

KEMENY: Yes, yes, yes. As I know Kadar is a man who... he`s a wise man, a very wise man -- realty a wise man -and I think you can make jokes about him and you can go freely -- you can walk freely on the streets after it. I did it.

COCKERELL: You`ve made jokes about Mr. Kadar?

KENNY: (Laughing) Yes.

COCKERELL: The writer., Dezso Kemeny, claims that before 1956 he walked the streets of his home town of Stalinvaros in fear. Since then the town has changed its name, six of his books have been published, and a mass of showpiece high-rise flats for workers, each with identical curtains,. have sprouted up. But it`s a workers` paradise, with the housing shortage. There`s now a thriving black market in property, and a flat is the most precious possession. But any young couple can jump the housing list and acquire a flat if they promise to state they`ll have two babies within five years. Mr. Kadar introduced the scheme to counter his country`s declining birth rate; there are more abortions than live births in Hungary every year, and the new scheme is part of Janos Kadar`s delicate balance.

Earlier this year, food prices that Kadar had kept artificially stable for ten years went up overnight by 30 percent. But there were no riots, unlike in neighboring Poland. The people were prepared to accept Kadar`s word, "The price rise has been necessary," so long as he goes on pushing up their wages. But relative affluence brings its own problems.

Alongside the free national health service there`s now a black market in medicine, with an elaborate system of bribes for doctors. It can cost X00, a worker`s monthly pay, for a gynecologist to deliver a baby. Like other. doctors, Tamas Reves is deliberately underpaid.

He`s a leading pediatrician, but he only earns x,1.2/50 a week. He`s expected by the state to make up the rest in "thank-you" money.

TAMAS REVES: Patients, when they leave the hospital, can give small gifts to the doctors, and that can take the form of a small present or sometimes a small sum of money; and that contributes to a doctor`s salary.

COCKERELL: How much more in a month do you earn from these presents, or tips?

REVES: Frankly, very little, mainly because pediatrics is not a very profitable field, if you`d like to put it that way, and also because I find it rather difficult to accept money.

COCKERELL: Are you a communist?

REVES: I think so.

COCK RELL: You think you are. You`re not sure about that?

REVES:. Well, I believe in the ideas of communism and I think Hungary and the socialist countries are on the way, but it`s obviously along way away.

COCKERELL: Janos Kadar and the Kremlin are joint architects of Hungary`s road to communism. As he sets off for a regular visit to Moscow, he`s careful to shake hands with every member of his politburo, for he knows there are many hard-line comrades who`d be happy for his delicate balancing act of the past twenty years to collapse. Behind the earthy exterior, Kadar is the most supple of politicians. Unlike the pre-1956 leaders he`s deliberately built up a cult of non-personality -- no official portraits, no television interviews -- but he`s gained considerable freedom of action in domestic affairs from the Soviet Union.

At Lenin`s tomb in Moscow, Kadar arrives to lay the inevitable wreath. Hungary is still a client state, almost totally dependent on Soviet raw materials and forming a buffer from the West. But Kadar has been allowed to develop his own brand of communism in exchange for one thing: total loyalty to Russia on foreign policy. Kadar never forgets what happened to Mr. Dubcek, the East European who strayed too far off the Moscow road. For all his obeisance to Moscow, Kadar is becoming increasingly dependent on the West. Hungary now owes Western creditors more than x.,000 million; and exactly opposite the Party headquarters there`s a new building going up on the fashionable side of the Danube. In the heart of-the most historic and sacred part of Budapest they`ve demolished a 14th century convent. In its place they`re building the iron curtain`s first Hilton Hotel. Andras Bolgir is manager of the Hilton project; and like only five percent of Hungarians, he`s been accepted as a member of the Communist Party. Bolgar told me he was born to be a director, he`s part of the new Western-oriented management elite growing up in Hungary. Unlike other East European countries, Hungary has reintroduced the profit motive, and Andras Bolgir finds no inherent contradiction in serving at the same time the ideals of Karl Marx and Conrad N. Hilton.

ANDRAS BOLGAR: It`s quite the same, whether this business is coming from a capitalist firm or a capitalist idea; if the business is good, it`s good for us from the capitalist countries, too.

COCKERELL: I wonder what makes you a communist.

BOLGAR: I think now, here in Hungary, to be a communist means to work a little bit harder than everybody for this country, to build up new hotels, to build up new buildings, and to work efficient for the country.

COCKERELL: One of the things that strikes me is that you look, and almost sound and dress like a western businessman. I just wondered if you thought that, with out 1956, you doing the job that you do now, would exist.

BOLGAR: In my opinion, anyhow, this change should happen without `56 because as I told, this progression could have -- had to come anyhow, and it`s not the reason of `56.

COCKERELL: The greatly improved living standards of peasants and workers date from 1956 and the massive injections of Russian money into Hungary. Twenty years ago many coal miners were political prisoners and criminals, sentenced to work down the pit; and when the uprising came the miners were in the forefront. A s a result, the miners these days are paid four times as much as a doctor, though they only produce half as much as an equivalent English mine.Szoke Gabor is a coalface worker. He earned 10,000 forints last month -- about 50 a week. Like everyone else in Hungary, Gabor pays no income tax.

Do you think it`s right that you should be paid four times as much as a doctor?

SZOKE GABOR: Well, I`d say we were both doing a different job. And don`t forget that I`m doing physical work for that money; but in any case I wish he`d earn more as well.

COCKERELL: Szoke Gabor has his own private vineyard that he bought from the state mining company. Before 1956 the landowners were dispossessed. Today, nearly half Hungary`s food and drink is produced on private lots. Labor and his daughter, Eva, claim their lives are now less restrictive. They can now apply for visas to travel to the West once every three years and Labor now feels he`s doing well under the communist system.

SZOKE: Yes, but I`m not really satisfied. I want more and more, and so I always work to get more,

COCKERELL: Are you a communist?

SZOKE: No.

COCKERELL: Why not?

SZOKE: I don`t know, I don`t know. I`m Just not a communist. I think I`m better than some communists, because I work with my hands. Perhaps the truth is, you know, you just have to be somebody worthy to be accepted into the Communist Party.

COCKERELL: Gypsy violin music was banned before 1956 as anti-communist; now, it`s allowed. Filmmaking is a real test of freedom in Hungary today. Zoltan Varkonyi is Hungary`s richest and most successful film director. We had asked to interview one of Hungary`s young, avant-garde filmmakers; permission at first granted was then withdrawn. In recent years there have been many controversial films made in Hungary, very different from the chauvinist box-office successes of Zoltan VArkonyi, but they`ve never been shown to the public. As Dean of the Film Academy, Virkonyi not only makes his own films; he helps unmake other people`s.

ZOLTAN VARKONYI: lay job is to educate people toward socialist culture. If somebody`s making an animate film and want to disturb the socialism, that film shouldn`t be shown.

COCKERELL: Why is that?

VARKONYI: ...and that film is going not in the studio. Why not? Why we, other artists, are defending our culture against the enemies, you know? And an enemy, if he wants to make against the socialism a film, can go outside the border, and there he can make it; here, not.

COCKERELL: For those creative artists who`ve been prepared to stay and work within Hungary, the system has brought its own rewards. Zoltan Varkonyi, the filmmaker, has a maid and two houses. His country house is set in its own grounds in the fashionable hills outside Budapest. With his film- actress wife, the Varkonyi`s are part of a new, privileged class growing up in Hungary. They share a taste for luxury items like Scotch whiskey and American cigarettes, only available for western currency or on the black market. Varkonyi was the first Hungarian to order his own helicopter and owns many icons and inflation-proof paintings. Not included among life`s comforts is the right of political opposition. Parliament meets a few days each year; the communists win 99.6 percent of the votes. In the streets of Budapest that still bear the scars of 1956, one question kept going through .my mind: Is Janos Kadar right in believing he can buy off the people with cars, washing machines and a certain limited freedom? As they drive past the Hotel Astoria, that 20 years ago was the headquarters of the Russians, do Hungarians believe the costs of 1956 match the benefits of today? When the Russians came back into Budapest they put down the revolution with unparalleled savagery; 30,000 Hungarians died in the uprising and many more were imprisoned in Siberia. They`d fought to end economic subjugation and the rule of terror. They demanded the withdrawal of Soviet tanks from Budapest and all Russian troops from Hungary. They wanted the right to live and speak freely that was theirs when they took over the radio station.

Twenty years later, the regime has its licensed free speakers, like Pal Eper, the news commentator.

PAL EPER: I wouldn`t say that never happened, that somebody called me from upstairs, but you know, that happens once in a year, let`s say, when there is some special interest of the Hungarian government. You have to know that our television is owned and run by the government, so it`s a government TV, though I always try -- and I do my best -- to represent my own views, within a certain framework, which cannot be just contrary of the government`s views. But it really very rarely happens that somebody tells me what to say and how to say it.

COCKERELL: Is that because you are effectively self-censoring -- you know exactly what the limits are?

EPER: Yes, sure. Self-censorship is sometimes stronger than an official one.

COCKERELL: In the town that 20 years ago was called Stalinvarosch, the military band rehearses the "Internationale" for the grand parade. "We peasants... artisans and others, enrolled among the sons of toil; let`s claim the earth henceforth for brothers and drive the indolent from the soil." In Hungary today, the general sentiment is less lofty. Self- censorship is a way of life." A man like Solzhenitsyn couldn`t exist here, one diplomat told me; "Hungarians have realism genes passed on at birth."

The newest second lieutenants in the Hungarian Army publicly take the oath of loyalty. Last year, more than a thousand Hungarians went to jail for political offenses. The rest -- Hungary has become the gayest barracks in the socialist camp.

MacNEIL: Michael Cockerell of the BBC, reporting from Hungary. It`s worth remembering that 20 years ago many Hungarians believed all the tough talk from this country about supporting freedom in Eastern Europe. Some naively thought the West would actively help them. They have obviously outgrown that illusion. And they probably know that the latest outburst of freedom rhetoric here is aimed at American voters, not the captive nations. All the same, some Hungarians are said to be worried that it might provoke a revival of the cold war. Jim Lehrer and I will be back on Monday. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.