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Minister of Finance, who knew that they would be needed. I
had the pleasure of talking to one of them in the early eighties,
who told me that by the end of the eighties, Hungary's economy
would collapse, something that not even Moscow could help.
This was calculated in a certain place, in a certain part of the
world. He didn't know what was going to happen. I argued with
him for a while that the government just made things easier:
they introduced the possibility of founding small businesses,
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GMK (unlimited enterprise), private taxis, etc. Private
enterprise began to gain respect. Until then, small businesses
could only gain recognition in social life, otherwise, in the
official view, anyone who dealt with such was a suspicious
figure. It has always meant more to many that I taught at the
university than to work in the language school industry. The
Seminary of Living Languages was not transformed into a
GMK, and the operating frameworks that had been set for it in
the past were not abolished. Negligence flourished in
communism. It was a huge disadvantage, because the regulation
did not allow the same leeway as for new businesses. The old
comrades still knew how to be tough. By the eighties, they had
softened and took everything for granted. There was a general
confusion in the leadership, and sometimes permissively,
sometimes seriously, they made it felt that they were in
possession of the full power of the proletarian dictatorship.
Despite this, more and more people in society knew that there
was a big problem, that indebtedness would lead to serious
consequences, that changes would be necessary. But for what?
Joking remarks about conditions were common. In this, Géza
Hofi created a great deal with his brilliant humour and talent,

37 Economic work community. In its name, it reminds me of the name of the teacher's
work community that was forced to come up by the management of the language school
in 1949. From 1982, the GMKs were intended to be a small-staffed business beyond the
main working hours, typical of the socialist spirit, in order to keep them under control,
but the genie was released from the bottle and many of them later became business
companies.

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