In Budapest, Kadar’s Passing Stirs Up Resentment and Sorrow

In front of the neo-Gothic Parliament Building where Janos Kadar reigned as Hungary’s leader for 32 years, a young art student struggled Thursday to express her mixed emotions about the death of the one-time Communist boss.

“Kadar called in the Soviet army in ‘56, and I hate him for that,” said Anna Lendyel, 22. “But it was a result of him that we could live a better life, and so I can feel some sorrow for him now.”

Throughout Budapest, black flags flew from government buildings Thursday to mark what Hungarian Premier Miklos Nemeth called “the end of an era.”

“Without Kadar, we could not have established the reforms,” said the 42-year-old reformist.

The Kadar era was launched with great bloodshed in 1956 when Kadar helped the Kremlin squelch the Hungarian revolt. It was buoyed up when he introduced economic reforms in the late 1960s. And it was plagued by mounting inflation, plunging living standards and an increasingly disillusioned population when he inched toward senility and indecision in old age.

Kadar was replaced as the Communist Party’s general secretary by Karoly Grosz in May, 1988, and lost even the ceremonial title of party president several weeks ago. He spent his last months in a secluded villa outside Budapest, suffering from ailing health and increasing criticism.

Environmental Minister Laszlo Marothy, 42, a friend of Kadar’s, said the former leader died a bitter man, unhappy with moves toward democracy that his successors have made and saddened by the personal attacks against him.

But as many Hungarians noted with relish, the end of the Kadar era also marked the symbolic rebirth of his long-dead political rival, Imre Nagy, who was formally declared innocent Thursday by the Supreme Court, 31 years after he was hanged as a traitor for his actions during the Hungarian revolt.

For many, it was poetic justice that Kadar, who collaborated with the Soviets to crush the 1956 uprising and ordered Nagy’s execution after a show trial, should die on the same day that Nagy was exonerated by the highest court in the land.

“Kadar died as a mass killer, and the Hungarian nation can’t forget that,” said Viktor Orban, a leader of the Young Democratic Federation, one of Hungary’s most outspoken political groups.

Orban incurred official wrath in Hungary last month when he gave a fiery speech at Nagy’s ceremonial reburial in which he criticized the Hungarian Communist leadership and demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary. The reburial of Nagy as a national hero on June 16 was televised nationally and attended by about 100,000 people.

Hungary’s newspapers, which criticized Kadar with increasing frequency in recent months, seemed to reconsider at his death. Although admitting that he made mistakes, they lauded him as a “good Communist,” “a Hungarian patriot” and “the first reformer in Eastern Europe.”

At subway stations and street corners, passers-by snapped up copies of the afternoon papers, practically before vendors could bark out the headlines. The newspapers, with pictures of a beatific and dignified-looking Kadar, competed for space with books about Nagy, which were banned under Kadar but are now proliferating under the new press and political freedoms.

Kadar also competed for news attention this week with President Bush, the latest face to break the covers of political weeklies. Hungarians are abuzz over the presidential visit next week, and a popular topic for conjecture in intellectual circles is what kind of financial aid package, if any, the President will announce during his visit.

Kadar’s funeral is scheduled for July 13, after Bush’s departure, Nemeth said. Although it is unclear how extensive the funeral will be, the government predicts it will be well attended by Hungary’s masses. Indeed, many young adults say they grew up believing that Kadar was a wise patriarch, a humble worker who gained the trust and support of people.

“We are the children of the Kadar regime, and Kadar was my second father, an important personage for me,” said Zoltan Lovas, a journalist. “It is popular now to criticize him, but the reality is that never in 500 years have we had the peace, stability and standard of living like in his regime.”