Skip to content

Results:

1 - 5 of 5

Documents

April 9, 1946

Translation of Notes Kept by the Hungarian Foreign Minister Rergarding Conversations with Soviet Representatives

Schoenfeld's notes on a series of conversations held between the Hungarian delegation to Moscow and various Soviet officials. Conversations focused on primarily Hungarian populations abroad.

February 23, 1974

Hungarian Foreign Ministry report on current foreign affairs (excerpt)

This report by the foreign ministry states that socialist countries should seek to increase their influence among "progressive" Arab countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Algeria, and states that war in Indochina is unlikely.

May 22, 1957

Report of Hungarian Ambassador Sándor Nógrádi to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry About His Conversation With Mao Zedong on the Occasion of Presenting His Credentials

Mao Zedong and Nógrádi discuss and compare the communist parties in China and 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Transcribed from previously unpublished video recordings, these discussions point to the unwritten "rules" of mutual civility that arose in the nonviolent dissident movements and found an echo among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."