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population learnt of this after decades. Similarly, to the Greek
tragedy, it was clear by 1989, when Kádár died a lunatic, that
we had paid a high price for small concessions, for our
allegedly better lifestyle amongst the other communist
16
countries. “Goulash Communism” was believed to be a great
success, but it came with the lack of public opinion, lack of
freedom of speech, and Hungarian history was spoken of as an
ever-lost series of events. It was forgotten that Hungary had a
beautiful, albeit not free from conflicts, history, that the country
was well-known for standing till the last man, that its people
can and are willing to stick and belong together. Its victories,
noble centuries were forgotten. All in all, nobody realized that
reality and our history was different than that which they taught
you in school.
Kádár had a new, poisonous slogan: “He that is not against us is
with us.” It referred to the small concessions, which began the
process of the country’s indebtedness. It made us having this
ambiguous feeling of living differently, whereas the country
was getting along with loans. We could travel to other socialist
countries with an identity inset (the precedent of passports –
well, passports were hard to obtain, and it took long...). We
could witness that the 1950s meant something different to those
other countries. The surrounding countries lived to see the
fulfilment of their nationalism, and their nationalism resulted in
a disaster in Hungary. Slovakia became a popular destination
for travellers, and to their greatest surprise, shops offered better
prices and more hotels were in operation. Their prosperity lived
17
on the optimism of their successful nationalism. Only to
restricted extent.

16 This was the so-called “Goulash Communism” (named after the traditional Hungarian
goulash soup) or “Kadarism” (named after Kádár), which is believed to become a
lighter-in-tone totalitarianism as time passed, but today many believe it differently.
17 As they were relatively new countries, since they became separate countries or grew
in size only after WWI, Trianon, 1920.

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