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Documents

June 26, 1989

Hungary: Reformers Take Over Party Leadership

An analysis of the Hungarian government's leaders and their movement toward political pluralism.

April 26, 1989

Hungary: Grosz Increasingly Isolated

An analysis of the future of the Hungarian political system and its principle actors.

April 22, 1989

Hungary: Leadership Proposes Sweeping Reforms

An analysis of Hungarian Politburo actions that reduce Party control over politics and the economy.

October 31, 1988

Report on Prime Minister Károly Grósz’s official visit to Iran between 25 and 27 October 1988

This report by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes Prime Minister Károly Grósz’s visit to Iran in 1988, during which Iranian officials expressed their distrust of the Soviet Union and sought to reinforce positive relations with Hungary.

July 25, 1989

Report of the President of Hungary Rezso Nyers and General Secretary Karoly Grosz on Talks with Gorbachev in Moscow (excerpts)

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.

June 13, 1989

Excerpts from the Opening Full Session of the Hungarian National Roundtable Negotiations

Transcribed from previously unpublished video recordings, these discussions point to the unwritten "rules" of mutual civility that arose in the nonviolent dissident movements and found an echo among the Communist reformers during the negotiated revolutions of 1989. For example, Dr. Istvan Kukorelli from the Patriotic People’s Front proposes to "refrain from questioning the legitimacy of each other, since the legitimacy of all of us is debatable. It is a question which belongs to the future - who will be given credit by history and who will be forgotten."

March 24, 1989

Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and Karoly Grosz, General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, March 23-24, 1989

These conversations reveal Gorbachev’s contradictions, as the Soviet leader proclaims again that the Brezhnev doctrine is dead and military interventions should be "precluded in the future, yet at the same time, tries to set "boundaries" for the changes in Eastern Europe as "the safekeeping of socialism and assurance of stability."

March 29, 1989

Memorandum of Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and HSWP General Secretary Károly Grósz,14, Moscow

Memorandum of Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and HSWP General Secretary Károly Grósz, discussing how to define the events of 1956 and the extent of political transition in Hungary

July 24, 1989

Memorandum of Conversation between President Mikhail Gorbachev, President Rezsö Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP), Károly Grósz, Moscow

Memorandum of conversation between President Mikhail Gorbachev, President Rezsö Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP), Károly Grósz, Moscow regarding the publicized withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and the commemoration of Hungarians who died on the Soviet Front or in POW camps in WWII