Friday26 July 2019 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES 7

FT BIG READ. EUROPEAN POLITICS

Even opponents admit that Hungarian premier Viktor Orban played a significant role in the end of

communism. But some now accuse him of trying to forge a new narrative about the country’s recent past.

By Valerie Hopkins

Marton Bekes, a historian at the

House of Terror and editor of a right-

wing history journal Commentary, says

“the Hungarian government and partic-

ularly Mr Orban have a correct idea

about the history of Hungary”, with a

narrative focused on the loss of territory

in the first half of the 20th century dur-

ing the treaty of Trianon and occupation

during the second half by theGermans

and Soviets. “As we see the actual events

in the world and in Europe now, we

think that national independence and

sovereignty of the state are the very best

tools against the dark side of globalis-

ation.”

Collective victimhood

Orbancritics, however, are withering.

His push to createinstitutions that forge

a new national grand narrative about

the past have been aimed at reinforcing

a sense of collective victimhood, says

Gergely Romsics, a historian and lec-

turer at Budapest’s ELTE university and

a senior research fellow at the Hungar-

ian Academy of Sciences.

“This would legitimise a defiant

stance towards western institutions on

the one hand, and foster a national com-

munity on the basis of all groups having

suffered at some point in history,” he

says, alluding to Mr Orban’s regular

clashes with Brusselsin recent years.

Mr Romsics says that until the past

year, he thought the effortsto create

newhistorical institutes was designed to

forma “parallel” of research bodies

focused ontopics of interest to thegov-

ernment, on the assumption that other

researchers would be allowed to get on

with their work. Now he is less sure.

“The new organisations appeared

more often in the limelight, but itdid

not affect academic work directly,” he

says. “Today, that could change.”

For his part, Mr Rainer says in the

case ofthe 1956 Institute the shake-up

had less to do withNagy than with Mr

Orban. “Imre Nagy is a talisman for

Mr Orban because he is a symbol for the

start of his political career... but now

he wants to replace Nagy symbolically

with himself,” says Mr Rainer.

O

n a bright morning in early

June, Janos Rainer was

taking his daughter’s pet

parrot to the vet when he

received a call that could

change, if not Hungary’s modern his-

tory, then how it is written and taught.

“Have you heard the news?” his col-

league asked as the parrot chirped nois-

ily in the back. “The Institute is over.”

Until that moment, Mr Rainer had

been unaware of government plans to

fold the 1956 Institute,the historical

research centre he directed and which

is dedicated to the Hungarian uprising

against the SovietUnion, into a body

close to the government ofViktor

Orban, Hungary’s conservative pre-

mier.

Without consulting Mr Rainer, Mr

Orban signed a government decree to

incorporate the 1956 Institute into the

Veritas Historical Research Institute

and Archive, createdby the government

five years ago and which critics say pro-

motes aversion of history that favours

Mr Orban’s agenda. The Veritas institute

is administered by the government,

which has abigrole in both appointing

its leadership and setting its research

priorities.

The change in control at the 1956

Institute follows a decision late last year

to relocate a statue of Imre Nagy, who

was the premierduring the shortlived

revolution of 1956.Nagy, who was exe-

cuted and buried in a mass grave for his

decision to withdrawfrom the Warsaw

Pact, is considered one of the most sig-

nificant figures in modern Hungarian

history. His reburialin 1989 in Budapest

was a milestone in the collapse of com-

munism in Hungary and the eastern

bloc. The 1956 Institute was founded the

following day.

Critics say the decisions are part of a

wider trend of controlling researchers,

stifling academic freedom and limiting

public dissent. They say they are also

part of the creation of a narrative that

portrays Hungary as a victim in the 20th

century of first the Nazis and then the

Soviets, but which is now standing up

for itself under the leadership of an

authentic patriot.

The move of the statue “symbolises

and demonstrates [Mr Orban’s] intent

to create, recreate, construct and recon-

struct his own story,”says Mr Rainer.

The Hungarian government deniesit

is trying to shape the way that history is

written. In a blog post, government

spokesman Zoltan Kovacs character-

ised the 1956 Institute’s absorption by

Veritas as “a minor administrative

change to make research more efficient

by integrating related fields into the

same structure”.

With just10 employees, the Institute

had been part of the national library. All

of the historians resigned before the

handover, except one, who said he

would “test” the new structure. After

three weeks with Veritas, he also quit.

A Veritas spokesman saysthat it

would have let the academics research

“with full and unchanged independ-

ence” and denied the claimthat their

function was to produce a version of his-

tory hewing to a government narrative.

The spokesman says that there is a

need to revisit the version of history that

was told during the communist regime,

adding that thehistorians at Veritas

strive to “provide nuance on data and

perspectives that have been false for

decades.. .History is by no means a

fossilised finished process.”

New mandate, new history

The controversy over the 1956 Institute

is in line with a vision Mr Orban spelt

out last summer. Speakingat a summer

festival in Transylvania,organised by

his party and its local partners, Mr

Orban said his victory in elections that

year which brought him a fourth term as

premierhad given his administration

“nothing short of a mandate to build a

new era”.

“An era is a special and characteristic

cultural reality... a spiritual order, a

kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even

taste — a form of attitude... deter-

mined by cultural trends, collective

beliefs and social customs,” he said.

“This is now the task we are faced with:

we must embed the political system in a

cultural era.”

Mr Orban has kept his word. Since the

speech, the government has effectively

forced the Central European University,

founded by billionaire Hungarian-

American philanthropistGeorge Soros

in 1991,to relocate the bulk of its activ-

ities to Vienna, the Austrian capital.

man for his newly founded party,said

thatNagy, even though he was a com-

munist, “identified himself with the

wishes of the Hungarian nation to put

an end to the communist taboos, blind

obedience to the Russian empire and

the dictatorship of a single party”.

Evenhis fiercest opponentsrecall the

importance of the speeches made that

day. “I could see a dictatorship blowing

up in front of my eyes,” says Adam

Michnik, a Polish former dissident who

is the editor-in-chief of the independent

Gazeta Wyborcza, who was present.

But critics say Mr Orban’s rolehas

been exaggeratedby the government.

They point out that other speakers also

called on the government to expel the

Russians and hold free elections and

that months before Mr Orban’s speech,

the Soviet Union had already begun a

partial withdrawal of troops.

Maria Schmidt, a high-profile histo-

rianclose to Mr Orban, produced a con-

cert in June to commemorate his speech

30 years earlier. The museum she leads,

the House of Terror, which focuses on

Hungary’s fascist and communist his-

tory, is overseeing events throughout

the year and paid more than €600,

to a music festival to air clips of Mr

Orban’s1989 speech in between acts.

“They are trying to sell the idea that

there is only one hero in the change of

the regime — that [Mr Orban] single-

handedly defeated communism and cut

the iron curtain,” says Gabor Egry,

director of the Budapest-based Institute

of Political History. Adding that their

version “is a very simple story, taken out

of international context”.

A spokesman for the 21st Century

Institute, which Ms Schmidtchairs, says

the criticism is “nonsense”. The video

spent “a few seconds on the rallying cry

‘Russians, go home’. Nobody else had

the courage to say it and in fact there

were voices suggesting that ‘perhaps

Orban went too far’. History proved him

right and questioning it is nothing but

spiteful revisionism,” he says.

The debate over history is also chang-

ing Budapest’s physical appearance.

Since 1996, a Nagy statuehas stoodin a

park adjacent to Hungary’s neo-gothic

parliament building. Several days after

Christmas last year, it was removed and

placed in another square less than a kil-

ometre away, as part of an overhaul of

the area. In its place, a monument to vic-

tims of a shortlived communist regime

in 1919, which had previously stood in

that spot, is to be reinstalled.

Some Holocaust scholars say this is

evidence of a broadereffort to play

downHungary’srole in the murder and

deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps

— 437,000 Jews were deported after the

Germans invaded in 1944.

In 2014, the Orban government

erected a statue in central Budapest “to

the victims of the German invasion of

1944”.Although some government fig-

uresemphasised Hungarian culpability

in what happened to the country’s Jew-

ish population, Mr Orban said it was a

monument to allvictims of the Nazis,

including the 100,000 Hungarians, who

were not Jewish, whoalsoperished.

But critics say by portraying Hungary

as innocent, it whitewashes the Hungar-

ian role in deporting Jews, or in the

pogroms, forced labour and deporta-

tions Jews faced even before the German

occupation.

Similar accusations surfaced last year

over plans for a second Holocaust

museum, the House of Fates. Itwas

meant to open this year to mark the 75th

anniversary of the deportation of Hun-

garian Jews to Nazi death camps, but

controversy over the make-up of its

board delayed that.

Ms Schmidt was originally given

responsibility for coming up with the

concept for the museum but her

involvementtriggeredan international

outcry, and she was removed from the

board. The museum’s building is ready,

but “it’s not open because there is no

content”, says Slomo Koves, leader of

the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congreg-

ations, who appointed a new board of

directors for the museum in May.

Next year, Hungary will mark 100

years since the Treaty of Trianon, which

saw it lose almost two-thirds of its terri-

tory. The government is spendingFt5bn

(nearly $17m) on a monument to

Trianon that willfaceparliament. It will

be a ramp made out of granite featuring

13,000 localities that were part of Hun-

gary historically, accompanied by an

eternal flame. In addition to Hungarian

towns and cities, the list also includes

places in modern-day Slovakia,

Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia,

Austria, Slovenia and Poland.

(It can still issue Hungarian degrees, but

many of its local and international stu-

dents are attractedby the US degrees.)

The government stopped accrediting

courses in gender studies, which was

only taught at one university outside of

CEU. In November, ownership of almost

500 media outlets, mainly runby gov-

ernment-friendly businessmen,passed

to a new non-profit media foundation

run by a publisher loyal to Mr Orban.

Then in July, the government

increased its control over the country’s

premier research body, the Hungarian

Academy of Sciences — a decision that

was taken despite opposition fromits

administratorsand employees, includ-

ingsome of its 3,000 researchers. A joint

group of top academics from Poland,

Austria and Germany condemned the

change in control, saying it“infringes

upon the internationally applied and

accepted principles of academic free-

dom and the self-governance of scien-

tific institutions”.

The government insiststhechangeis

intended to improve the efficiency of

the research. “Every government moves

in the direction of saying, ‘we’re paying

you a lot of money, what do we get for

this?’” says Gyorgy Schopflin,an outgo-

ing MEP from Mr Orban’s Fidesz party.

“They try to maintain or establish bet-

ter control over research... a certain

amount of research can be guided in

that way, some can’t.”

Academy leaders see a deeper

agenda. “It is about having the power to

control us,” says onemember of the

Academy’s administration. “It is exactly

the same when you think of the govern-

ment’s intention to have a say in the

politically important acts in history.”

Student voices

Thetakeover of the 1956 Institute came

on the eve of the 30thanniversary of the

reburial ofNagy in June 1989. On that

day, Mr Orban, then a student who later

won a Soros scholarship, was catapulted

to fame after he made a speech in Buda-

pest’s Heroes’ Square, in which he called

on the Soviets to remove their tanks and

demanded free elections.

Mr Orban, then a 26-year-old spokes-

Symbolic datesChanging control of an

institute dedicated to the 1956 uprising

is part of a broader fight about history

Competing versionsOrban critics say

he is constructing a narrative about

Hungary that plays up his own role

Taking back controlSupporters of

the premier say that under him the

country is standing up for itself

‘They are trying to sell

the idea that.. .[Mr

Orban] single-handedly

defeated communism

and cut the iron curtain’

‘We think that national

independence and

sovereignty are the very

best tools against the

dark side of globalisation’

Rewriting

his place in

history

Viktor Orban,

premier of

Hungary who

shot to national

fame in 1989

with an anti-

Soviet speech.

Hungarians light

a candle to

victims of

Nazism and

communism at a

Budapest

museum (right)

and Soviet tanks

put down the

1956 uprising

(below)— AFP

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