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EASTERN
EUROPE
IN
REVOLUTION
International Frontiers Federal Republicsin the Soviet Union,

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia

Eastern Europe in 1989

EASTERN
EUROPE
IN
REVOLUTION
Edited by IVO BANAC

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London
Copyright © 1992 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address
Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1992 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2711-8 (cloth)

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-9997-6 (paper)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-57903

Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the

last page of the book.

©The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the

American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
For Gaddis and Barclay
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2016 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/easterneuropeinr001989
 Contents

Preface ix

IVO BANAC
Introduction i

LASZLO BRUSZT AND DAVID STARK

Remaking the Political Field in Hungary: 13
From the Politics of Confrontation to the Politics
of Competition

JAN T. GROSS
Poland: From Civil Society to Political Nation 56

NORMAN M. NAIMARK
“Ich will hier raus”: Emigration and the Collapse 72
of the German Democratic Republic

TONY R. JUDT
Metamorphosis: The Democratic Revolution 96
in Czechoslovakia
Vlll Contents

KATHERINE VERDERY AND GAIL KLIGMAN

Romania after Ceau§escu: Post-Communist 117
Communism?

MARIA N. TODOROVA
Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? 148
Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria

IVO BANAC
Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism: The Yugoslav 168
Non-Revolutions of 1989—1990

ELEZ BIBERAJ
Albania: The Last Domino 188

KEN JOWITT
The Leninist Legacy 207

IVAN SZELENYI
Social and Political Landscape, Central 225
Europe, Fall 1990

Contributors 243

Index 245
 Preface

The articles assembled book represent the first thoroughgoing

in this

assessments of the East European revolution of 1989. More correctly,

since the revolutionary processes were not completed —
and in some cases
not even initiated —
1989, the authors have followed the time frame
in

imposed by their case studies. But whether they discuss the Hungarian
“refolution” that ended a decade of piecemeal retreat by the ruling Com-
munists, or the strange turnabout of 1991 in Albania, where the revi-
sionism of the Khrushchev era, the move toward a free market of the early
1980s, and the pluralist upsurge of 1989 were telescoped in an odd
revolutio interrupta, they always seek to explain the sources, issues, and
political contenders in the unheroic fall of EastEuropean communism.
For never has an ideology and a system of power built on such vast
pretensions and still greater human tragedies fallen so ignobly as did the
red star that sought to unite the lands from the gray shores of the Baltic to
the azure coves of the Adriatic within a single allegiance.
The downfall of East European communism was a heralded revolution,
but its timing was resistant to prediction. As soon as the magnitude of the
events became apparent, the Center for International and Area Studies at
Yale initiated a set of conferences, lectures, and seminars with the com-
mon theme “East European Turning Points, 1989 and Beyond.” The
partial proceedings of one of these conferences, titled “East Europe in
Revolution,” which was held at Yale on November 5, 1990, and some
additional material constitute the contents of this book. I thank the center
X Preface

and the Kempf Memorial Fund at Yale for providing the financial backing
for our spirited meeting. Three members of the center staff, Nancy
Ruther, the center’s Associate Director, who worked heroically on the
conceptual and financial planning of the conference, as well as Susan L.
Lichten and Kathleen A. Rossetti, who administered the financial and
publicity arrangements, respectively, have my special thanks. In addition,
I am enormously grateful to Marko Prelec, my graduate student and
assistant in myriad technical matters that attended the conference, and
Kelly Allen, my administrative assistant, who kindly retyped several inel-
egant submissions. Paul Jukic, another of my graduate students, has my
thanks for his assistance in bibliographical matters. The staffs of Sterling

Memorial Library, Colony and Pierson College helped make

Inn, Mory’s,
our meeting enjoyable as well as productive. take pleasure in acknowl-
I

edging the director, editors, notably Joanne Ainsworth, and staff of Corn-
ell University Press for their customary support, for which am more I

grateful than I can ever possibly let them know.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the vision of
Gaddis Smith, the Larned Professor of History at Yale and the Director of
the Center for International and Area Studies. Gaddis and Barclay Smith
have been dear and special friends for many years. It is a pleasure, writing
from the third floor of that house on Park Street in their Pierson, to
dedicate this book to them as a small token of my love and admiration.

Ivo Banac

New Haven, Connecticut

May 1991
EASTERN
EUROPE
IN
REVOLUTION
 Introduction

From a suspect song: “O comrades, are you sad, the day

of parting is at hand.”
— Aleksandar Beljak

Communist Eastern Europe always had a politicized future. The ex-

pressionists and the resisters, who were not necessarily of the Right, were
predisposed to recognize the weakness of Communist ideology and,
hence, the conditional and inherently unstable edifice of Communist
power. The cultural relativists and evolutionists, who were not necessarily
of the Left, were predisposed to recognize an immense human capacity to
adapt to anything that appears “natural.” They therefore exaggerated the
staying power of a political order (misunderstood as society) that has
been adrift since the generation of its founders. In the words of the Ser-
bian aphorist Aleksandar Beljak, “The new times are here again. We just
plain have no luck.”
Much ink has already been spilled in attempts to answer the question of
who was right and who was wrong in assessing the strengths and weak-
nesses of East European communism. It would be graceless for the author
of this introduction to cover himself with a magistrate’s gown and render
judgment on a phenomenon that will certainly continue to intrigue schol-
ars and political theorists. All the same, now that the vapors have lifted
after our raucous repeal party, we can see that the symptoms of the near
approaching end should have been recognizable ever since the spring of
1989.
When did the decline turn into a stampede? The Round Table agree-
ment between Poland’s government and opposition in April 1989 made
Lech Wal$sa’s Solidarity a legal trade union, but also charted a system of
2 luo Banac

semi-free elections that appeared to guarantee sufficient safeguards for

the ruling Communists. When the elections took place on June 4 (second
round on June 18), East European voters, albeit in a country noted for its
anti-Communist resistance, rendered judgment on the Communists for
the first time in over forty years. The results were stunning. Of the 161
seats (35 percent of all seats) in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament,
which it was allowed to contest under the terms of the pre-election agree-
ment, Solidarity won all of them. Even more embarrassing for the Com-
munists, they managed to lose all but two of the thirty-five seats for which
their ranking leaders, candidates of the so-called National List, ran unop-
posed. Among the National List candidates who did not manage to ob-
tain the necessary 50 percent of the vote were eight members of the party
Politburo and Mieczyslaw
the leading reformer, Prime Minister
Rakowski. The elections for the hundred-seat Senate, the restored upper
house of the parliament, were entirely free (without quotas for the Com-
munists), and Solidarity won all but one seat. The Polish voters did not
distinguish between Communist reformers and Communist dogmatists.
Their verdict seemed daring, especially as it came on June 4 the day of —
the Tiananmen massacre.
The Chinese terror astounded both the Communist reformers and dem-
ocratic East Europeans. This was the first successful dogmatist rebound
since the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika. It cast a pall over what
had seemed the irreversible process of democratization. It hastened the
discussions between the Hungarian government and the Opposition
Round Table, a coalition of principal nascent political groups. It gave
specialpoignancy to the June 16 reburial of Imre Nagy, the martyr-hero of
the 1956 Hungarian revolution, or “popular uprising” in the new par-
lance of reformist Hungarian Communists. It brought the Hungarian
party to legitimate the tug-of-war between the radical reformers and the
foot-draggers by electing the quadripartite leadership at the June 24 meet-
ing of the party Central Committee. But it also gave heart to the en-
trenched dogmatists in East Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest. Though they
had most to lose, they were as unsuccessful at reading the signs of the
times as most Western observers.
A vital element was, after all, missing in 1989 — the Soviet will to
preserve the empire. More precisely, by the summer of 1989, the Soviet
leadership clearly wanted to extricate from Eastern Europe. Begin-
itself

ning on June 1 2, Gorbachev’s triumphal visit to West Germany turned the

“Gorbymania” that has attended the Soviet leader in Western capitals
into what journalists gleefully referred to as “Gorbasm.” In the bonhomie
Introduction 3

of Gorbachev’s meetings with West German leaders, substantive feelers

were likely extended on Germany’s future in the “common European

house.” As miners’ strikes in Siberia rocked the Kremlin, Gorbachev was
becoming increasingly suggestive in his public statements. His speech to
the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on July 7 included reminders that he
rejected the Brezhnev doctrine: “Any interference in domestic affairs and
any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states, both friends and allies or
any others, are inadmissible.” He all but blessed systemic innovations in
Central Europe. At the same time his “allies” were contradicting him.
Erich Honecker of East Germany kept denouncing any thought of Ger-
many’s reunification (“Nobody could have an interest in again having a
Europe that would be hard to control”) and Nicolae
state in the heart of
Ceau§escu of Romania even condemned President George Bush’s July
visits to Poland and Hungary (“an attempt at the destabilization of so-

cialism”).
Gorbachev’s moment of truth came in August when the Polish parlia-
ment approved Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a leading Catholic and Solidarity
activist with an oppositional pedigree dating from the 1950s, as Poland’s
new prime minister. At stake was the Leninist notion that the rule of the
Communist Party cannot be reversed by peaceful means. At stake, too,
was the Western notion that Communist parties never give up power
without a fight. Not only was there no fight over the real revolution in
Poland, but the makeup of Mazowiecki’s cabinet, which emerged in Sep-
tember, lent weight to the thesis that the Solidarity government, for all its

appearing a coalition, was actually forging ahead toward a full accep-

tance of Western economic and political models. The Polish changes,
however, were overshadowed by the exodus from East Germany, as tens of
thousands of people started escaping to West Germany via Hungary and
even Czechoslovakia. When Hungary permitted the East German plastic
Trabants to drive on to Austria, it broke the fundamental convention of
the bloc — that states cooperate in restricting each other’s refugees.
There was little time for recriminations. The deluge had started. On
September 18 the Hungarian Round Table discussions brought forth an
agreement between the Communists and the opposition for a “peaceful
transition to democracy.” On September 25, eight thousand people dem-
onstrated in Leipzig, as several new organizations, notably the New For-
um, began organizing for a more humane socialist state. Honecker’s
fortieth birthday party for the GDR, scheduled for October 7, was spoiled
not only by thousands of demonstrators in East Berlin and several other
major cities, but also by Gorbachev, who cautioned Honecker about the
4 Ivo Banac

drawbacks of deferred reform. Only eleven days later, as popular demon-

strations engulfed the whole of the hapless GDR, Honecker was replaced
by Egon Krenz, a somewhat younger and crooning version of the old-style
GDR bosses, who immediately promised a turnabout Wende ). Whereas
(

only a few years earlier lesser trouble would have brought Soviet growls
and threats of intervention, this time the Soviet leaders pointedly declared
their disinterest. Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze said on
October 23 that the USSR recognized that every bloc country “has a right
to an absolute, absolute, freedom of choice,” something that a Soviet
spokesman leeringly touted as the new Soviet “Sinatra doctrine.”
The Soviet leaderships assumption still was that the growing popular
movement in Eastern Europe, if given a glimmer of a full loaf in the
distance, would settle in the near future for the half loaf of perestroika or
reform communism. Instead, Krenz’s “Ego(n)ism” — the protesters’ refer-
ence to his quick “election” to the posts of the head of East German state
and of the GDR national defense council, a passage that tookHonecker
five years to accomplish —
and even Imre Pozsgay’s radical reform in Hun-
gary increasingly played to an empty house. As Poszgay’s ex-Communists,
renamed Socialists at the party congress in early October, started abolish-
ing party cells in factories and disbanding the Workers’ Guard, the party’s
private army, the opposition grew even bolder and demanded a referen-
dum on presidential elections, thereby precluding Pozsgay’s easy corona-
tion inadvance of multiparty parliamentary elections. (The opposition
won the referendum on November 26.)
In the GDR, “Krenzman” (depicted by the demonstrators as a Batman
with the smile of a Cheshire Cat) sacked the government, and the Polit-
buro, initiated the bill would permit free travel abroad, promised
that
additional sweeping reforms, and on November 9 ordered the removal of
the Berlin Wall. Three million East Germans, out of the population of
16.7 million, immediately took advantage of the concession to visit the

forbidden West by breaching an ediface that was as much a symbol as an

obstacle. T he ruling Communists’ goal was no longer reform commu-
nism, but an orderly retreat that would prevent obliteration. In the mean-
while, on November 10, Bulgaria’s hard-line leader, Todor Zhivkov,
responsible for the embarrassment of the vast exodus of Bulgaria’s Turkish
minority, was removed by his Politburo opponents (Petur Mladenov,
Dobri Dzhurov, Georgi Atanasov, Andrei Lukanov) what amounted to
in

a well-orchestrated palace coup. And, already on October 28, the demon-

stration started in Czechoslovakia.
The Czechoslovak opposition was hesitant, spent too much time in
 —

Introduction 5

testing the waters for a rematch with an incredibly obtuse government,

and imitated the oppositional umbrella groups in the neighboring coun-
tries even in nomenclature (Civic Forum). Yet, for all of their faults, the

Czechs and Slovaks still managed to accomplish the quickest turnabout in

Eastern Europe. In part, the Prague Communist leadership was too
stunned by the developments in the GDR and the Soviet abandonment of
the old faith. More important, it had lost its will (though not its taste for
delaying tactics). Concessions on travel policy and softness toward the
accused dissidents in a Bratislava trial on November 14 gave courage to
the opposition. The half-hearted use of force against the Prague demon-
strators on November 17 compromised the government further, but did
not restore the healthy fear that it once commanded.
The party tried the palace coup tactic by dumping Milos Jakes, the
party’s secretary general, and his Politburo allies on November 24. But
ultimately as demonstrations and a paralyzing general strike reached a
crescendo on November 27, the party simply blinked. The next day Prime
Minister Ladislav Adamec started negotiations with the leaders of the
Civic Forum, an odd conglomerate of students, intellectuals, and liberal
Christians, augmented by economists from the Institute of Forecasting,
which collectively represented an enormously wide political spectrum.
The negotiators quickly agreed to a new government that would include
members of the Civic Forum. The parliament would abolish all laws that
gave advantage to the Communists, and the Soviet invasion of 1968
would be The Czechoslovak regime, which was built by vin-
reassessed.
tage Stalinists Klement Gottwald and Antonin Zapotocky and nurtured
by the equally fear-inspiring Antonin Novotny and Gustav Husak, col-
lapsed in less than a fortnight. By December 29, Czechoslovakia had a
new president, Vaclav Havel, the leading cultural and oppositional figure,
and the new president of its federal assembly was Alexander Dubcek, the
dismissed party leader of 1968.
The remarkable tranquillity of most of the revolutionary year 1989
the smoothness of its “velvet revolutions” — probably would be so strik-

ing were it not for the exceptions. On November 20, Nicolae Ceau§escu
opened the Fourteenth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party with
defiant phrases condemning his fellow dictators for losing their grip:
“What do we say to those who want to lead the way to capitalism? What
were they doing when they were in positions of responsibility? The answer
is they used their jobs to block socialism and did not serve their people.”

But Ceau§escu himself could offer no more than the timeworn tweaking of
Moscow, obliquely questioning the 1939 Soviet grab of Romania’s Bes-
6 Ivo Banac

sarabia. Whatever the secret background of his remarkable and bloody

downfall, which commenced less than a month later with the demonstra-
tions in Timisoara and ended with his summary execution on Christmas
Day, it is clear that the growing opposition within sections of Ceau§escu’s
party and army, helped along by well-wishers in foreign governments,
came to the conclusion that the increasingly irrational dictator and his
retinue could not be persuaded to depart peacefully.
Romania’s National Salvation Front might very well be little more than
a group of Communist chameleons, but Ion Iliescu and his friends,
spurred by the fury of a long brutalized people, managed to restore a
semblance of normality to a country that had been one of Eastern Eu-
rope’s nastiest dictatorships. Freedom of assembly, the end of Ceau§escu’s
“systematization” plan, whereby dozens of Wallachian villages were
razed, the end to the practice of exporting some 80 percent of Romania’s
foodstuffs in order to retire foreign debts, lights on the streets, and more
heat in the houses may not be synonymous with Western pluralism. It is
otherwise by Romania’s standards. Much the same can be said of Al-
bania, where the regime of Ramiz Alia had to contend with massive and
dramatic flights of people in July 1990 and student demonstrations the
following December. As for Yugoslavia, the republic-based split in the
ranks of its League of Communists in January 1990 and the party’s
subsequent demise simply confirmed that the future of that country de-
pended on the party’s cohesion. Without the Titoist party, without a
dictatorial core at the center, Yugoslavia could not survive as a coherent
political entity. The effective dissolution of Yugoslavia meant that each of
its republics found a separate path to a broad variety of post-Communist
models, ranging from the Czechoslovak and Hungarian patterns in Slov-

enia and Croatia to the Romanian pattern in Serbia.

T he first and perhaps foremost result of the revolution of 1989 was the
end of the Communist monopoly in politics. Political pluralism meant the
revival of party politics, although not all parties were new, and not all

were politically influential and capable of competing equally with the

remnants of the Communist apparatus. The temptation to root the Com-
munists out of public office, indeed out of all positions of leadership, was
tempered with concern for the requirements of an orderly transition and
fear of perpetuating Communist methods. Inexperience and the atmo-
sphere of mistrust (especially of joining political groups), dislike of party
discipline and bureaucracy, and the quick proliferation of myriad parties
all contributed to the bumpy start of new democratic habits. Yet, no
matter how haphazard the electoral process and how difficult the course
Introduction 7

for the emerging parties, the first series of free elections in Eastern Europe
since thewar (excepting the early postwar elections in Czechoslovakia
and Hungary) went ahead with great confidence.
Contrary to general expectations, these contests, whenever free of ma-
nipulation, could not be won by the Communists or even the broader
Not counting Polands semi-free elections of June 1989, when the
Left.
Communists protected themselves by agreement against a total electoral
defeat in the lower house, or the electoral farce performed by Serbia’s
strongman Slobodan Milosevic in November 1989 (when the 82 percent
electoral support claimed for Milosevic, added to the showing of the other
three Communist candidates for the Serbian presidency, came to a total of

104 percent), the elections of 1990 in East Central Europe (not the Bal-
kans) were generally won by the center-right parties. The tactical consid-
erations of theCommunist period, when opposition theorists kept devis-
ing ways of removing the Communists gradually, were no longer relevant.
The electorate wanted a quick jump into pluralist democracy and an even
quicker one into the hoped-for prosperity of free-market capitalism.
Power-sharing and halfway solutions were disparaged. Instead of being
greeted as the potential president of a Social Democratic German con-
federation, Willy Brandt found his campaign appearances in the GDR
marred by inauspicious slogans, such as “Willy! Never again socialism.”
At first it appeared that German exceptionalism was at work. The
existence of the GDR was predicated on a systemic difference from “cap-
italist” West Germany. Small wonder that, in East Germany’s elections of

March 1990, the Christian Democrats ran on a platform of speedy re-

unification and even speedier introduction of West German currency to
the East. West Germany’s Christian Democratic chancellor, Helmut Kohl,
stirred up East German expectations of an immediate changeover into the

sort of society that obtained in the West, an anticipation that permitted

his East German sister-party to sweep the go-slow, pro-neutralist, anti-
NATO, and anti-unitarian parties of the Left. Ironically, it was the voters
of the industrial south who gave clear majorities to the Alliance for Ger-
many, a conservative coalitiondominated by the Christian Democrats.
The Alliance won in Leipzig (51 percent), Gera (59), Dresden (60), Suhl
(60), Erfurt (61), and Karl-Marx-Stadt (61). The showing of the ex-Com-
munists was no less surprising. They won as much as 30 percent of the
vote in East Berlin and led the Social Democrats in Neubrandenburg and
Dresden. Alliance 90, the party formed by the old GDR dissidents, in-
cluding the New Eorum, did surprisingly poorly, gaining less than 3
percent of the ballots. Overall, the first (and last) democratically elected
8 ho Banac

East German parliament (Volkskammer) had 193 deputies from the Al-
liance for Germany (48 percent), 21 (liberal) Free Democrats (5 percent),

87 Social Democrats (22 percent), and 65 ex-Communists (16 percent).

The dominant force in East Germany was clearly the center-right Chris-
tian-nationalist bloc. The socialists of various hues represented almost
two-fifths of the electorate. The liberals were in a decided minority.
soon became evident that the East German electoral results were in
It

some ways not exceptional. The Hungarian elections of March-April

1990 also favored the center-right Christian-nationalists, including the
populist Hungarian Democratic Forum (43 percent), the Independent
Smallholders’ Party (11 percent), and Christian Democrats (5 percent),
who jointly formed the first post-Communist government. But, in a rever-
sal of the East German pattern, the Hungarian liberals turned out to be

stronger than the Left. The two liberal parties (Free Democrats and Young
Democrats) polled 24 and 5 percent respectively and became the main
oppositional force. The Left fared poorly. The reformist ex-Communist
Socialists won some 9 percent of the vote. The orthodox Communist
Hungarian Workers’ Party and the Social Democrats got less than the
required threshold of 4 percent needed to win parliamentary seats under
the proportional electoral law.
A similar pattern, though with a significantly better showing for the
Communists and weaker gains by the liberals, obtained in Slovenia and
Croatia, where the multiparty elections were held in April and May of

1990, but the trends are much more difficult to follow in these elections
because of the peculiar three-chamber parliaments inherited from the
Communists and the winner-take-all Communist-crafted electoral law in

Croatia, which unintendedly helped the nationalist opposition. The Slove-

nian Christian-nationalist bloc won a little over a third of all votes and
together with the Social Democrats (approximately 7 percent) and others
formed the governing coalition. Slovenia’s reformist ex-Communists (Par-
Democratic Reform) gained 18 percent of the vote and the liberals
ty of

some 16 percent. In Croatia, counting the results of the second round of

parliamentary elections, the populist center-right Croat Democratic
Union won 43, 41, and 23 percent of all chambers respec-
votes in three
tively, which, however, put it in absolute control of the parliament. The

reformist ex-Communists (Party of Democratic Change) gained as much

as 31, 32, and 27 percent respectively, and the liberals, various socialists,
and traditional Christian Democrats insignificant percentages.
Elections in Czechoslovakia, in June 1990, departed from this trend
only in degree. The country’s governing, though unelected, protest move-
 —

Introduction 9

—
ment Civic Forum and its Slovak equivalent, Public against Violence
was really liberal in orientation, especially the wing led by Finance Minis-
ter Vaclav Klaus. Its showing, in the representative Flouse of the People of
the federal parliament amounted 47 percent, or 53 percent in the
to
Czech lands and 33 percent in Slovakia. Nevertheless, the Forum/Public
chose to enter into a coalition with the Christian Democrats (9 percent in
the Czech lands and 19 percent in Slovakia), showing that the liberalism
of the anti-Klaus wing was hesitant in matters of privatization, or, as
Havel put it, in “selling off the family silver.” The Czechoslovak less-than-
reformist Communists were relatively strong, at a level 14 percent in both
the Czech lands and Slovakia, helped especially by the votes of Bohemia’s
rust belt, and the other Left parties were relatively weak. The elections in
Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, as well as Lech Walesa’s victory in
Poland’s presidential elections, in November and December of 1990,
complete the success story of the center-right/nationalist trend in East

Central Europe.
It was otherwise in the Balkan countries of predominantly Eastern
Orthodox culture. Without any particular insistence on the cultural roots
of the phenomenon, it must be stressed that reformed and sometimes —
fully recognizable — Communists won clear electoral victories in Ro-
mania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. The tendency was not
universal. Communists were strong, but did not prevail in predominantly
Orthodox Macedonia, and Albania is not properly an Orthodox country.
All the same, the trends in the Balkans demonstrated a less radical tenden-
cy in dealing with the remnants of the Communist regime. The Romanian
case is particularly striking, as it points to all kinds of untidiness left

behind by Ceau§escu, including the political behavior of former members

of the Communist Party, the party itself having been banned by the revo-
lutionary authorities. To be sure, the ruling National Salvation Front
publicly has stood for multiparty democracy, social democracy (“Swedish
model”), a market economy, and national reconciliation. Nevertheless,
the Front was not just the home of former dissidents. Itwas more ob-
viously the logical organization of Communist officials and military of-
ficers. More to the point, the Front has not encouraged pluralist dis-
course. Its treatment of political opponents, whom Iliescu typically
dubbed “hooligans,” has not been gentle. Front activists have disrupted
opposition meetings, and several opposition campaign workers may actu-
ally have been killed.

Romania’s opposition consisted of some sixty parties, but the only

viable ones were the old prewar Liberals and National Peasants, both led
IO Ivo Banac

bv
J
returned exiles. The issues were the Front itself and its electoral fair-

ness. On May 20, 1990, the Front gained a clear victory. In parliamentary
elections it won 66 percent of the votes and two thirds of the seats, lliescu
took the presidential election with an overwhelming majority of 85 per-
cent. The Liberals and the National Peasants were left far behind, the
second strongest party being the Democratic Hungarian Union, a party
representing the Hungarian minority, which won 7 percent of the votes.
The Bulgarian more nuanced, but nevertheless were the
elections were
first clear vote for reformed communism. The old Communist organiza-

tion was revamped and given the new Socialist Party label. Echoing every-
where else, the new/old Socialists argued for multiparty democracy and a
market economy, but they continued to be entrenched under their old

Communist personnel in their old centers, particularly in the provinces.

The Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), the alliance of oppositional
groups, consisted of some sixteen parties, notably the 1980s dissident
organizations (Club for Glasnost and Democracy, free trade union
Podkrepa, Independent Society for Human and two
Rights, Ecoglasnost)
historic parties (Social Democrats and the anti-Communist wing of the
Agrarian Union). In the June elections for the single-chamber assembly,
the Socialists won 52 percent of the vote and the UDF
36 percent. Never-
theless, soon after their victory the Socialists were embarrassed by revela-
tions that one of their leading members, Petur Mladenov, the country’s
had argued for the use of tanks against demonstrators in
acting president,
December 1989. Mladenov was obliged to resign. He was replaced by the
UDF leader Zheliu Zhelev in August 1990.
The overwhelming Socialist (ex-Communist) victories in Serbia and
Montenegro (December 1990) were conducted under conditions of na-
tional mobilization, the opposition in these two Yugoslav republics being
itself compromised by national exclusivism. The opposition that echoed

Milosevic’s national communism was also (as a result?) significantly

weaker than the opposition in Bulgaria. In addition, Milosevic was helped
by the electoral boycott of the Kosovar Albanians. The elections of
March-April 1991 in Albania itself were safely won by the Communists
(renamed Socialists), but not without embarrassments. The ex-Commu-
nists won 68 percent of the vote, to 25 percent for the permitted opposi-
tion, Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party. Yet the Communist leader, Ramiz
Alia, lost in his Tirana constituency. But is the unsure grip of the ex-
Communists (or are they neo-Communists?) sufficiently strong to charac-
terize the changes in the Balkans as no more than bogus revolutions?
That remains to be seen. Milosevic and Alia, like lliescu and the Bui-
Introduction i i

garian Socialists, are not presiding over the most stable polities in Eastern
Europe. The real question is whether they will be able to satisfy the

popular pressures for a semblance of prosperity. In East Central Europe,

too, there was little thought of a market economy based on private prop-
erty before the sudden collapse of communism. All sorts of halfway solu-
tions — self-management, worker ownership, social ownership — were in

vogue Poland and Hungary before 1989. Yet these were radical ideas
in

only a year before Polands deputy prime minister in charge of the econo-
my, Leszek Balcerowicz, imposed his bold and controversial stabilization
program.
East European transition will depend on both boldness and common
sense. Bold changes can be effective only in a responsive social and politi-
cal environment. The absence of any great scheme that would replace
Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies can initially be an advantage. The growth
of the culture of tolerant citizens — a civil society, to use a useful, if

mystified, buzzword — and effort. National

will take a great deal of time
independence will have to be strengthened before any possible integra-
tions can be pursued. United Germany and a weaker Soviet Union, to-
gether with the demise of the Warsaw Pact, have recast the power relations
in the region. With a bit of luck, the long-term effect will favor European

and regional cooperation.

The dislocations endemic to systemic changes will keep Eastern Europe
boiling for years. Are there any additional “subjective” destabilizing
forces on the horizon? The “revival” of nationality conflicts is generally
seen as a capricious development and an argument for apprehension
about the East European future. But even in Yugoslavia, where national
conflict has escalated into civil war, the issues are not irrational or evi-
dence for the supposedly choleric temperament of the Balkan nations.
The national question is an eminently political and ideological question.
It was necessarily revived after the collapse of communism, since Commu-

nist regimes repressed every autonomy, including that of national groups.

Can long-repressed nations be blamed for connecting freedom with inde-
pendence? Instead of trying an ideological lobotomy of an a-national
liberal sort, Western politicians and pundits would do well to analyze the
real causes of national conflicts and to devise ways of relieving them. It

must always be remembered, however, that democracy is not necessarily a

panacea in the thorny area of nationality relations. Were it otherwise, by
way of example, there would be no Irish question.
Non-Communist Eastern Europe will continue to have a politicized
future. The expressionists and the new national establishments, who are
1 1 Ivo Banac

not necessarily the Right, will find arguments for the restabilization of
post-Communist polities. The cultural relativists and evolutionists, who
are not necessarily the Left, will be predisposed to deny an immense
human capacity to adapt to anything that appears “unnatural.” In the
words of the Serbian aphorist Aleksandar Beljak, “You do not have to
lead us any further, the rest of the road is known.”
 Remaking the Political Field
in Hungary: From the
Politics of Confrontation to
the Politics of Competition

Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

Hungary in Comparative Perspective

The cataclysmic dissolution of Communist regimes and the clamorous

awakening of the East European peoples in 1989 prompted observers to
overestimate the strength of organized democratic forces in these events.
The stunning electoral victory of Solidarity in June, the public drama of
Imre Nagy’s reburial in Budapest that same month, the street demonstra-
tions in Leipzig in October, and the massive assemblies in Prague in
November were all signs of popular strivings for democracy. But many
observers mistook the enthusiastic expression of these aspirations as evi-

This chapter is based on the first stage of analysis of data gathered by the authors on the
transition from state socialism in Hungary. The data include interviews conducted by the
authors with the leaders of the major opposition parties as well as with numerous high
officials in the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, including all members of the party’s
Presidium, the minister of foreign affairs, the minister of internal affairs, and the heads of the
party’s delegations to the Round Table negotiations; transcripts of the Round Table negotia-
tions; detailed minutes of the opposition umbrella’s strategy sessions; and data from public-
opinion surveys conducted throughout the transition period. Data collection was supported
by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and the data archive will be housed in the
Hungarian National Archive and the Archive Department of Olin Library at Cornell Univer-
sity.

For comments on an earlier draft we thank Fallen Comisso, Monique Djokic, Peter
Katzenstein, Victor Nee, Mark Selden, and Sidney Tarrow. Research for this paper was
supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and by a postdoctoral fel-
lowship from the Joint Committee on Flastern Europe of the American Council of Learned
Societies/Social Science Research Council.
M Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

dence of far-reaching democratic organization and misinterpreted the first

stage of transition as the already- achieved triumph of citizenship and civic

values.
This overestimation of the strength of democratic forces in 1989 was a
direct consequence of an overestimation of the strength of Communist
party-states in the previous epoch. If only months earlier the “total-
itarian” regimes of the region were cast as powerful, stable, and immuta-
ble, their sudden demise could be explained only by equally powerful
forces organized for democracy. Behind the metaphors of volcanic erup-
tions ofdemocracy and popular revolutions sweeping aside powerful ty-
rants was the idea that strong states could be toppled only by strong
societies.

The contrary view contains its own share of misunderstandings but is

probably closer to reality: rather than strong states confronting strong

societies, the more typical cases in Eastern Europe in 1989 were moments
in which weak states faced weak societies. Instead of powerful party-

states, this view sees cumbersome but weak bureaucracies, ineffective for

achieving the goals of economic growth and social integration, headed by

demoralized leaders whose belief in their own ideologies had withered
apace with the exhaustion of their political and economic programs. 1

From such a perspective it is no longer necessary to invoke a “democrat-

ically organized society” as the agent that “overthrows” the old order. Of

course, the citizenry of Eastern Europe did act in 1989. But, with the
exception of Poland, these were extraordinarily weak civil societies with-
out organizations strongly rooted in the citizenry, without leaders experi-
enced in national politics, without elaborated economic and social pro-
grams, and without deeply engrained traditions of democratic habits and
practices.
One modification of this “weak states/weak societies” approach would
be to maintain some notion of the party-states of Eastern Europe as weak
(with limited sovereignty and only feeble capacity to achieve stated goals)
but to shift from a dichotomous view' of civil societies as either strong or
weak and instead regard the level of development of autonomous organi-
zation as a continuous variable. 2 A rough ranking of the societies of

1. These were states, moreover, with limited sovereignty, due, by 1989, not to direct
control by Moscow so much dependence on foreign creditors and international lend-
as to
ing institutions in Washington and Bonn.
1. The concept of civil society under state socialism here refers to the self-organization

of society in spheres of activity relatively autonomous from the state. Civil society would be
more or less strong depending upon the level of development of social and economic autono-
my, independent political organization, and civic values. On the concept of civil society, see
Hungary 15

Eastern Europe along such a dimension would yield the following (from
high to low): Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Such a preliminary
exercise suggests interesting hypotheses given that this rank order corre-
lates directly with the ordering of transitional events and inversely with a
ranking of the speed of the first stage of the transition in the countries in
the region.
Despite the observation that the relative strength of civil society seems a
good predictor of the timing and sequencing of upheavals in Eastern
Europe in 1989, we would argue that this notion of strength and weak-
ness still remains misspecified. In the first place, the degree of organiza-
tion of civil society should be analyzed not simply relative to that of other
cases but, more important, in relation to the forces obstructing (or pro-

moting) change inside the ruling elite. We argue that these relations can be
only partially captured by objective and static measurements of the rela-
tive strengths of hard-liners and reformers (inside the regime) and moder-
ates and radicals (in the opposition). The critical measure of these capaci-
ties is not the analyst’s but the actors’, and the interactionist framework

that we propose directs attention to their perceptions of the strategies of

their opponents. Moreover, as we shall see below, these capacities, percep-
tions, and strategies are fluid rather than fixed. In fact, as our case illus-

trates, the political organizational identities of the major social actors

change as they react to and interact with other competing strategies in the
political field. 3

In the same way that we shift the focus of analysis from relative
strengths to strategic interactions “internal” to the particular national
cases, so we shift attention from preoccupation with relative timing to
interactive effects among the cases in the East European transitions. That
is, the relationship among the various countries is not simply that some

John Keane, and the State (London, 1988), and, especially, Andrew Arato,
ed., Civil Society
“Revolution, Civil Society, and Democracy,” Cornell Working Papers on Transitions from
State Socialism, no. 90-5 (1990). On the “second economy” as a sphere of relative autono-
my, see David Stark, “Bending the Bars of the Iron Cage: Bureaucratization and Informaliza-
tion under Capitalism and Socialism,” Sociological Forum 4, no. 4 (1990): 637-64.
3. For more detailed discussion of this interactionist model, see Laszlo Bruszt and
David Stark, “Negotiating the Institutions of Democracy: Strategic Interactions and Con-
tingent Choices in the Hungarian and Polish Transitions,” Cornell Working Papers on
Transitions from State Socialism, no. 90-8 (1990). This interactionist framework draws
from the work of O’Donnell, Przeworski, and Schmitter. See Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe
C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Pros-
pects for Democracy (Baltimore, 1986); and Adam Przeworski, “The Games of Transition,”
unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago (1990).
16 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

cases come earlier or later hut that experiences in earlier cases have de-
monstrable effects on patterns of change in the later cases. 4 But this
learning process is actually obscured and distorted by diffusion or con-
tagion models that present the experiences of the stronger (bolder) civil

societies as charting the course to he emulated by citizens in countries

6
where civil society was far weaker. 5 As we shall see, not only citizens but

also actors within the old elite learned from observing the processes and
outcomes of the interactions of rulers and opposition in other countries.

Attention to the ranking of the strengths of civil societies and the

sequence and speed of transitions across the East European countries is

further misleading because it perpetuates the widely held misconception

that they represent simple variations on an underlying theme as if there —
were some basic unitary phenomenon called “East European Transition”
against which we could measure the particular cases as differing in degree,
whether that be the intensity, speed, or level of development of the asser-
tion of democratic impulses. In our view, however, these cases differ not
simply in degree but in kind. The year 1989 was one not of Transition in
Eastern Europe but of a plurality of transitions with diverse paths to
different types of political institutions.'
During the course of 1989, regime leaders throughout Eastern Europe
faced various forms of organized confrontation from society. The particu-
lar interactions of rulers and opposition, however, yielded different paths

4. language of comparative methodology, purely structuralist comparative expla-

In the
nations using the methods of similarity of differences are inappropriate here because the
country cases are not independent.
5. See, for example, Valerie Bunce and Dennis Chong, “The Party’s Over: Mass Protest

and the End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 1990. For another
review of the countries of Eastern Europe as cases of contagion, see Adam Przeworski,
“Transitions and Reforms: East and South,” unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago
(1990).
6. Ourperspective should similarly be counterposed to views of the East European
cases as a unitary phenomenon in which “Gorbachev pulled the plug and the water ran out”
(personal communication from a prominent area specialist). Our analysis of the Hungarian
case in light of comparisons with Poland and other countries in the region indicates that
there was not a single “Gorbachev effect” striking each of the countries with the same
resonance.
7. For provocative discussion of the multiplicity of modes of transition, see Terry Karl
and Philippe C. Schmitter, “Modes of Transition and Types of Democracy in Latin America,
Southern and Eastern Europe,” unpublished manuscript, Department of Political Science,
Stanford University, 1990; and Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Democratic Transition and
Consolidation in Southern Europe (with Reflections on Latin America and Eastern Eu-
rope),” paper presented at the Conference on Problems of Democratic Consolidation: Spain
and the New Europe, Madrid, July 1990.
Hungary 17

Confrontation

Use of force No decisive use of force

against society
China

Capitulation No capitulation

GDR
Czechoslovakia

Compromise No compromise
Poland

Constrained Unfettered
electoral electoral
competition competition

Bulgaria Hungary
Romania
Albania (1991)

State socialist regime responses to confrontation in 1989

in the first stage of transition: 8 in

some countries regime leaders capitu-
lated, in others they attempted to maintain some hold on power (in part
or total) through compromise or through electoral competition. The ac-
companying figure depicts these alternative paths in a preliminary ty-
pology. China is included among the “revolutions” of 1989 as that case

8. Following O’Donnell and others writing on Latin America and southern Europe, we
make a distinction in this paper between the first stage of transition (of extrication from
authoritarian rule and the establishment of new political institutions) and a second stage in
which democracy is either consolidated or stagnates. (See Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo
O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues and Prospects of Democratic Consolida-
tion: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective [Notre Dame,
Ind., 1991]). In the East European cases, the critical aspects of the second stage of transition
involve not only the question of whether democracy is consolidated but also the question of
whether property relations and economic processes are transformed.
 8

1 Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

where state socialist leaders used massive force to crush the democratic
opposition. Because of their very different geopolitical circumstances, re-

gime leaders across Eastern Europe were unable or unwilling to bear the
9
costs of the decisive use of force . The limited use of force against some
demonstrators in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, in fact, proves the rule: in
the final moment of the crises of escalating public demonstrations, lacking
either the ability or the resolve to use decisive force, these East European
rulers capitulated and their regimes collapsed.

In the other cases, key segments of the Communist leadership did not
capitulate. Instead, they negotiated compromise agreements containing
provisions for institutional guarantees for some aspects of their power or
entered into direct electoral competition without such guarantees. Poland
is where Communist reformers struck an agreement that guar-
that case
anteed their continued control over critical institutions not exposed to the
uncertainties of electoral competition. In Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ro-
mania, by contrast, segments of the old elite attempted to use electoral
competition as the very means to stay in power. Bulgarian and Romanian
elites (and later, also the Albanian) managed to do so successfully (if

perhaps temporarily) by renaming their parties, holding early elections,

and maintaining tight control over key institutions that severely con-
10
strained their weak electoral rivals . Hungary followed a different path

and it had different outcomes. There the interacting strategies of the op-
position and the ruling elite led to unfettered competition.
The different paths (capitulation, compromise, competition, and so on)
of extrication from monocratic state socialism in Eastern Europe, more-
over, have yielded different transitional institutions in the new polities of
the region. That is, the strategic interactions of rulers and opposition (as
well as patterns of conflict and alliance among competing opposition

9. The geopolitical differences include the full range of changing relations in the region,
including not only the relationship to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev hut also the weight
of economic dependence on, and increasing political pressure from, the West. The peaceful
character of the revolutions (Romania excepted, hut see below) is one distinctive feature of
the East European cases as a set. Discovery of an explanation for the absence of force
(Gorbachev’s unwillingness to send repressive assistance, the Communists’ shattered morale,
etc.)across the cases should not he mistaken as demonstration of the unitary character of
these upheavals.
10.might be objected that Romania does not belong under the same major East
It

European branch of “no decisive use of force against society.” Our reading of studies by
Vladimir Tismaneanu, Gail Kligman, and Katherine Verdery leads us to see Romania as a
case of intra-elite violence. That is, Bulgaria and Romania are similar as instances where one
part of the elite orchestrates a coup against the oldest guard. Unlike Bulgaria’s, Romania’s
palace coup was not peaceful and was coordinated with a popular uprising that in itself
lacked leadership and organization.
 1

Hungary 19

forces) have created different political institutions and rules of the game
across these cases.The rapid reconfiguration of the political field as a field
of party politics in the Hungarian case of unfettered electoral competi-
tion, for example, differs dramatically from the Polish and Czechoslovak
cases. Similarly, Hungary’s parliamentary system contrasts markedly
with Poland’s presidential system. In short, the diverse (and possibly
divergent) transitions in Eastern Europe are producing different kinds of
political fields with considerable variation in the relationships within the
and between them and their respective societies. Attention
political elite

to the differences in the broad contours of these restructured political

fields might reveal not only that the cases differed in the intensity and

forms of conflict during the period of extrication but also that the institu-
tional arrangements in the first stage of the transition can have conse-
quences for the capacities of these new political fields to consolidate

democracy and to transform the economy in the second stage of the

transition. In such a view, it is important that we study the recent past
because the problems and prospects of the consolidation of democracy
and the transformation of economic relations in the next stage of transi-
tion during the coming decade have been shaped by the broad configura-
tion of political institutions (however transitory) established during the
1
first stage.

These important differences in institutional “outcomes,” we argue, are

not simply a by-product of differences in the relative strengths and weak-
nesses between power holders and oppositions in the respective countries.

Instead, these differences can best be understood by focusing on the differ-

ent dynamics of interactions between rulers and opposition (including

their perceptions of strengths and weaknesses as well as perceptions of
opponents’ strategies), their changing perceptions of their geopolitical
situations, and their learning from elites and opposition elsewhere in

Eastern Europe.
Our task in this essay is to analyze these processes in the Hungarian
transition with the aim of understanding the specificity of its route

1 1. The danger of studying the illusive “What will happen next?” (the correlate of seeing

only stability and stagnation in the previous epoch) is particularly acute in the analysis of
contemporary Eastern Europe. In our view, we still know far too little about what actually
happened during the 1980s in the various countries of the region. Thorough comparative
research about the recent past, moreover, is a necessary corrective to the tendency to over-
emphasize discontinuities between state-socialist and post-Communist institutional config-
urations. In analyzing the results of the “fall of communism,” we argue that the differences in
how the pieces fell apart have consequences for how political and economic institutions can
be reconstructed in the current period.
20 Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

through unfettered electoral competition. It is precisely to encourage the

reader to draw out comparative insights throughout our explication that
we do not adopt the conventional formula of concluding with “implica-
tions of the Hungarian case” but instead open by highlighting some of the
comparative issues that motivate our analysis. Stated differently, under-
standing the specificity of the Hungarian case requires some comparative
reference points. All too briefly: in Poland and Hungary, leaders of weak
party-states at the outset of the transition period attempted to increase
their capacities for economic change by reforming but not entirely dis-

mantling the political institutions of the old regime. In both cases, reform
Communists eventually entered into agreements that resulted in the nego-
tiated demise of Communist rule. But despite their similarities as negoti-
ated transitions the Polish and Hungarian cases differ dramatically in the
institutional outcomes of the first stage of transition. Our task will be to
explain how the perceived weakness of the Hungarian opposition (in its

interaction with hard-liners and reformers in the ruling circle) led to the
creation of an uncompromised parliamentary system there in contrast —
to the Polish case, where the perceived strength of the opposition yielded a
compromised institutional arrangement marrying aspects of liberal de-
mocracy and one-party rule to produce a malformed parliamentarism as
its offspring. In Hungary, reform Communists facing an opposition not

only much weaker than Solidarity but also with a different organizational
identity and different institutional configuration perceived an oppor-
tunity to stabilize their power better through direct electoral competition
without guarantees.
We should not conclude from this observation, however, that the con-
ventional wisdom is correct in seeing Hungary where regime
as a case
change was initiated from above. Quite the contrary, Hungarian reform
Communists were spurred to action only when confronted by the orga-
nized opposition —
whose earlier strategy of compromise was replaced by
a strategy of mobilization and uncompromised confrontation in response
to a direct challenge from party hard-liners. It was the opposition’s strat-
egy of mobilization and confrontation (provoked by threats to its organi-
zational survival) that evoked images of larger-scale popular upheaval,
catalyzed the polarization of the forces inside the regime, and precipitated
the reformers’ ascendance within it. Yet it was also the anticipated elec-
toralweakness of these same oppositional forces that allowed reform
Communists in Hungary to change the party’s course from the politics of
confrontation to the politics of uncompromised free competition.
It is this attempt by (renamed) Communist/Socialist leaders to take
Hungary 21

advantage of the perceived weakness of civil marks the point

society that
of comparison between the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Alba-
nian cases. Only in the later cases (with their hastily called and arguably
less freely contested elections) does this strategy succeed. But their success
should not distract us from regarding the Hungarian case as the first

example showing the possibility of using electoral competition to salvage

Communist rule.

The Promise of Compromise

In the summer Hungary appeared to be that country in East-

of 1988,
ern Europe most likely to embark on political reforms of a compromised
character that would have institutionalized some form of power sharing
without questioning many of the basic prerogatives of the Communist
Party in the political system. Hungary’s organized opposition was vocal,
visible, and a force to be reckoned with but was, nonetheless, far too
weak to challenge the power of the party-state directly. Under these condi-
tions, it seemed a willing and able candidate for a junior role in a re-
formed political system. The reform wing of the Communist Party, more-
over, was certainly eager to engineer such a move. And although the
reform Communists had not yet consolidated a hegemonic position with-
in the party, compromise was unquestionably on the agenda in a country

where even party hardliners based their legitimacy on the claim not sim-
ply to be “reformers” but to be the leaders on the path of change in
socialist Eastern Europe. From all sides one could hear of the search for a
compromise solution to the questions of political power in order to “unite
all forces” to solve the nation’s momentous problems. Talk of some forms

of “institutionalized power sharing” was everywhere in the air.

This promise of compromise issued not from some surge of fresh opti-
mism following the ouster in May 1988 of Janos Kadar and his retinue
from the pinnacle of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar
Szocialista Munkaspart —
MSzMP) but from a growing sense of forebod-
ing crisis. 12 Hard-liners, party reformers, and independents (who, it

12. On the removal of Kadar George Schopflin, Rudolf Tokes, and Ivan Volgyes,
see
“Leadership Change and Crisis in Hungary,” Problems of Communism September-Oc-
,

tober 1988, 23-46. For the best analytic description of change in the Hungarian economy
during the Kadar era and criticism of the limitations of reform economics, see Janos Kornai,
“The Hungarian Reform Process: Visions, Hopes, and Reality,” in Victor Nee and David
Stark, eds.. Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe
(Stanford, Calif., 1989), pp. 32-94.
22 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

should be emphasized, had not yet coalesced into an “opposition”)

shared a basic perception of the situation:

• Left unchecked, the widening scope and quickening pace of Hungary’s

downward spiral into economic, social, and political crisis could lead
to chaotic threats to the social order.

• Reducing this threat called for large-scale economic changes of a

qualitative character far beyond earlier efforts to reform the economy.

• The economic measures required remedy the situation would un-

to
avoidably impose yet additional burdens on society and possibly fur-
ther erode public confidence.

• Economic changes must, thus, be accompanied by some changes in the

nation’s political institutions.

The major political actors differed, of course, in the scope and type of
political changes proposed as well as in the rationale for them. To increase
the role of the market in the economy and reduce tensions in society, the
conservatives positioned around Karoly Grosz (the party’s new first secre-
tary) advocated weakening the direct role of the party apparatus, giving a
freer (but not unconstrained) hand to the press, and strengthening the
position of “interest organizations” (such as the trade unions, agricultural
associations, and other similar satellite organizations). Unlike Kadar, who
had remarked with bravado that “what Gorbachev is trying to do now,
we already accomplished decades before,” Grosz saw that Hungary was
actually lagging behind the Soviet Union in the field of political reforms.
He was acutely aware that by losing its image as “ahead of the pack”
Hungary was losing millions of dollars and Deutsche marks in aid and
credits during a period when its hard-currency foreign debt was doubling
in only two years.
Placing greater emphasis on the importance of popular support to
transform the economy, reform Communists in the circle around Imre
Pozsgay stressed a liberalization of would allow greater
civil society that
scope for organizations that were genuinely autonomous from the party-
state So great was their emphasis on dialogue (“a partner is needed”)
.
1 5

iImre Pozsgay began his career as a party apparatchik in a provincial county. By the
3.
1970s he had become a reformist minister of education and culture and had established
close ties to the populist writers (who later created the Hungarian Democratic Forum) and
to some reformist intellectuals. Later, as the leader of the Patriotic Front, a satellite organiza-
tion of the MSzMP, he offered shelter to some newly emerging independent initiatives. By the
second half of the 1980s, he was appealing to selective aspects of the legacy of Imre Nagy,
Hungary 23

that they appeared at times to envy their Polish counterparts, who faced,
in the still illegal Solidarity, a strong antagonistic but potential in-
terlocutor. For their part, the leaders of Hungary’s fledgling opposition
movements (or “alternative organizations” as they were so labeled at the

time) were vocal advocates of measures that would institutionalize their

participation in affairs of state. 14
The “alternatives’ ” arguments for institutionalized power sharing rep-
resented an important development in the evolution of the rhetoric of the
Hungarian opposition. During its infancy earlier in the decade, its simple
plea to the party-state to Respect human rights had become the call to
Constrain yourself as it called on the authorities to separate state and
society, to restrict state activities to those prescribed in rules of law, to
allow some scope for societal self-organization, and to provide equal
rights for small-scale private property. By 1987, with increasing frequen-
cy and volume, Hungarian critical intellectuals did not encourage the
authorities simply to exercise self-restraint but voiced a qualitatively new
challenge to the party-state: Allow yourself to be constrained. Rather
than imploring the state to draw the boundaries across which it would not
interfere with society, they now called on the state to allow society a voice
in drawing those boundaries. The next step was to advocate that repre-
sentatives of civil society autonomous from the party be able to cross
those boundaries to participate in decision making inside state institu-
tions. Rather than calling on power to limit itself, it now called on the
state to Share power. Such co-decision would not be based on relations of
meaning of power sharing was far from sharing power equally.
parity; the
In 1988 and still as late as early 1989 the rhetoric of compromise from the
Hungarian opposition was voiced as Your prerogative to have special
discretionary rights will not be questioned, but our rights to a voice
should be institutionalized inside the state.

Compromise, moreover, was on the political agenda not only in princi-

ple but also in detailed blueprints for institutional change. Budapest was

who had an institution for societal consultation. By the end

identified the Patriotic Front as
of the decade he was moving publicly to appropriate the mantle of Imre Nagy, prime
minister and Communist Party leader in the revolution of 1956.
14. In mid- 1 988 the number of “alternative” organizations was still under ten, but by
the end of that yearmore than fifty organizations were listed in the first book that tried to
map the “alternative scene,” and many more were starting to form. Although some organi-
zations had several thousand members, most had only a few dozen. The majority of these
new organizations, movements, circles, clubs, networks, and independent trade unions were
organized by Budapest-based intellectuals and their organizations did not extend beyond
Budapest and several larger provincial cities.
2-4 Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

full of compromise proposals circulating in networks of communication

15
that crisscrossed the boundaries of opposition and officialdom. Typical
of these was the “Social Contract” written in 1987 by the editors of
Beszeld, the most influential samizdat journal of the democratic opposi-
tion. 16 The institutional changes outlined in “Social Contract” resembled
the transition from unenlightened despotism to a constitutional mon-
archy in which the Committee would be the reigning but
party’s Central
constitutionally constrained monarchy with a two-chamber parliament
giving special rights to the upper house (which, like the British House of
Lords, would not be elected but selected from above) and allowing for the
creation of a lower “House of Commons” with members elected via
competitive elections.
Focusing on such concrete proposals provides insights into the very
precise and specific ways in which a variety of political actors were at-

tempting to design institutions for political power sharing. But to grasp

the fundamental motivations underlying these intense preoccupations
with finding a resolution of the crisis we must understand how the search
for compromise solutions1988 was everywhere underscored by the
in

legacy of 1956. Although suppressed from public attention, memories of

the lost revolution of 1956 were never forgotten across the decades, and
signs of crisis were the surest stimulant for recalling this haunting past.
For the Communist elite, 1956 were the memories of the fury
the ghosts of
that can be unleashed when society has been pushed beyond its limits. It
was above all the fear of society that so deeply inscribed in the Commu-
an instinct to do everything to avoid another 1956. As the
nist leadership

economic and political crisis deepened throughout 1988, so increased the

references to 1956 in party leaders’ speeches. In mid-November, for ex-
ample, party ideologist Janos Berecz (certainly no liberal reformer) drew
out the “lessons of 1956.” Noting the growing “deterioration in the coun-
try’s situation” and pointing to the mounting “crisis in confidence and
pressure from the increasing social dissatisfaction,” Berecz asked: “Will
revolutionary restructuring [of political institutions] or will chaos provide

1 5. One precursor of compromise solutions was offered by reform economists inside and
outside the Ministry of Finance. Their Fordulat es reform, Medvetdnc 1987/1 supplement,
was initiated in a series of semipublic debating forums under the auspices of the Popular
Front. Political scientists and sociologists were quick to follow with detailed blueprints of
institutional changes centering on Parliament and related constitutional questions. See, for
example, Bela Pokol, “A politikai rendszer reformjarol,” Valosag 1986, no. 11; and Laszlo
Bruszt, “A tdbbszolamu politikai rendszer fele,” Valosag 1987, no. 5.
16. Janos Kis, Ferenc Koszeg, and Ottila Solt, “Tarsadalmi Szerzodes,” Beszeld, June
1987-
 —

Hungary 2-5

an answer to the great historical questions of Hungarian development?

We cannot avoid this question when we analyze the tragic experiences of
Hungary’s recent past. This dilemma emerged between 1953 and 1956
too, . . . and the fact that forces in the party and society which demanded
renewal failed to meet in solving the conflict should serve as a lesson that
is valid to this very day. The result: Hungarian blood flowed on each
side.” To halt the deterioration of political crisis into chaos, Berezc con-
cluded, “Our nation’s interests require us to find today the points of a
national consensus which could represent the framework and substance
of a The party is
compromise. . . . unable to implement the political
renewal on its own. There is no such force in the society that could carry
out this task on its own. Thus, the need for collaboration and cooperation
17
is an elementary consequence.”
If it —
was the fear of society the fear of the transformation of the
economic crisis into social and political crisis similar to that of 1956
that pushed the leaders of the regime to seek a compromise with the
organized forces of the society, it was the lesson of the Russian interven-
tion in 1956 that made the leaders of the newly emerging social and
political groups hesitant to question the legitimacy of the regime and to
seek, instead, a compromise with its leaders. Mikhail Gorbachev did not
automatically alter those calculations, for the limits of his toleration were
neither clearly articulated nor yet tested in this period. 18 Moreover, until
the showdown with Egor Ligachev in October 1988, his political survival
was itself a question mark. 19 As late as 1987 the authors of “Social
Contract” concluded: “One cannot count on the Soviet bloc’s disintegra-
tion within the foreseeable future. And there is no real chance of one or
another of the satellite countries breaking away, either. But there is an
opportunity for the satellites to increase their relative independence from
the Soviet Union.” Under circumstances where Gorbachev’s stability was
far from certain, they argued, “The more we are able to get the Soviet

leadership to accept today, the more we will be able to defend later during

17. Janos Berecz in Nepszabadsag, November 19, 1988, p. 5.

18.Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders explicitly rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine and
articulated the “Sinatra Doctrine” (“Do it your way”) several times throughout 1988-89.
But the first clear test of the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine was the Soviets’ acceptance of the
non-Communist Mazowiecki government in Poland.
19. Hard-liners in the MSzMP
based their plans, similar to those of Bulgarian, Roma-
nian, Czechoslovak, and East German leaders, on the hope of Gorbachev’s fall. Their hopes
were dashed when Ligachev lost his game against Gorbachev at the meeting of the Central
Committee of the CPSU in October 1988.
2.6 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

a possible backlash.” 20 Given these perceptions, some measure of cooper-

ation and considerable willingness for compromise, if not outright coali-
tion, seemed the wiser course.
Thus, with little exaggeration we can say that the end of 1988 still

marked a period of the ‘‘long fifties” in Hungarian history. The legacy of

1956 and the contradictions of Kadarist policies from 1957 onward were
still everywhere in evidence. Throughout the decade of the 1980s, nearly

every major party program had begun with some variant of the formula:
We must make big changes in the economy to prevent the explosion of
society. Society has reached the limits of its tolerance. But execution of the
policy changes prescribed in each of these programs was blocked in part
by the fear of popular response to the growing burdens that would be the
inevitable outcome of the policies. 21 By 1988 the economy was as bank-
rupt and exhausted as the theory of reform economics. It was no surprise
to Hungarians that state socialism was an economy of shortage, but now
there was also inflation and talk of unemployment. Stabilization and
economic transformation would exact yet additional sacrifices from a
society already short on patience. How could popular support for such
changes be secured?
The situation was thus very similar to that in Poland. In both cases,
leading opposition figures were ready to accept a compromise solution on
the condition that it place limitations on the powers of the party-state and
legalize and institutionalize the “right of society” to have its own autono-
mous representative organizations. In both countries, moreover, leading
figures inside the Communist Party were talking about dialogue, coopera-
tion, and the need for institutional changes to facilitate society’s support
for the economic changes. The difference in Hungary was that, precisely
at the time that compromise seemed most likely, the reformers were still

too weak to speak in the name of the regime and the opposition was much
too weak to speak in the name of society. Although there was a perceived
need, a justification, the political will, and concrete institutional pro-
grams for compromise, the two major political actors who most favored
compromise in 1988 did not have sufficient political power to bring it
about. But, as we shall see in the following sections, the closer that

reformers and the democratic opposition came to establishing the condi-

tions for negotiating a compromise, the more it became apparent that a

zo. Kis, Koszeg, and

“Tarsadalmi Szerzodes.”
Solt,
2. 1 . Throughout government revoked each of its programs for economic
the 1980s the
stabilization because it feared the social tensions they would produce. The first program of
stabilization to bring real results was the one endorsed by the opposition parties at the end
of 1989 —
three months after the signing of an agreement establishing free elections.
Hungary 2-7

compromise solution was an illusive and perhaps self-defeating strategy.

In the end, both reform Communists and democratic opposition shifted
from strategies of institutional compromise to strategies of unfettered
electoral competition. But they did not arrive at that “solution” directly.
The perceived weakness of the opposition made it an inviting target for
the party’s hard-liners, who favored institutional changes only as long as
they controlled all the terms. It was the hard-liners’ strategy of confronta-
tion and the opposition’s confrontational response that ironically
strengthened the hand of the reformers and finally brought Communists
and democrats to the negotiating table. Thus, in the course of only ten
months, Hungry moved from the politics of impending compromise, to
the politics of escalating confrontation, to the politics of electoral com-
petition.

The Politics of Confrontation

The Strategy of the Hard-liners

If Imre Pozsgay and fellow reform Communists saw in the political

crisis a pressing need to enlist the participation of the representatives of

the organized political opposition, the conservatives who still controlled
the party had their own ideas about the course to bring about “national
consensus and cooperation.” Basic to their strategy (in our view, defini-
tional of hard-liners from late 1988 to mid-1989), was the notion that a
multiparty system could be created by the party itself through political
institutions that allowed for “consultation with society.” The remedy for
social crisis was limited liberalization within society and not democra-
tization of the state. The desired result of these changes would leave
virtually every fundamental political institution of the old order intact.

The cornerstone was confrontation through a variety of

of that strategy
means, frequently combining frontal attacks and attempts at institutional
incorporation in the time-honored practice of dividing and conquering.
The hard-liners first considered the option of attempting to eliminate
the nascent independent organizations. The tactical maneuver of attempt-
ing to criminalize the opposition was most part
brief (coinciding for the
with the apparent resurgence of a hard-line faction in Moscow in October
22 Cracking down on “dissidents,” however invit-
1988) and half-hearted.

zz. It was during period that the hard-line ideologist Janos Berecz (quoted above)
this
referred to himself in an interview as the “Hungarian Ligachev” Reform 1988, no. 1). See
( ,

also the infamous speech in which the party chief, Karoly Grosz, referred to the opposition
as portending the danger of “white terror.”
i8 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

would have sullied the “nice guys” image they had

ing to the hard-liners,
worked so hard to construct. To conform to the new “rule of law” line
coming from Moscow and to keep their hands clean for IMF handouts,
the Hungarian regime would have to tolerate the opposition and con-
strain them through legal means alone. 23
If autonomous political organizations could not be eliminated, the
the
next step was to try to neutralize them. For the party hard-liners, the
closing months of 1988 and opening months of 1989 were a period of
defensive liberalization: 24 If some new political institutions are inevita-
ble, then let us shape them as much as possible after our own image,

seemed to be their thinking. First, they attempted to push through the

parliament a new law on association that would give the party-state un-
limited control over the formation of independent organizations. When
the earlier ritualized practice of submitting the proposed legislation to
“social debate” backfired, the hard-liners retreated and then, in an at-

tempted outflanking maneuver, even accepted the principle of a multipar-

ty system, pledging the party's commitment to prompt its realization at
the February 1989 meeting of the Central Committee. 25
Unsuccessful in their attempts to refigure the opposition to their own
likeness and constrained by geopolitical circumstances to operate within
strictly legal means, the hard-liners were then determined to ensnare the

opposition precisely on the terrain of legality. They accepted a multiparty

system but then proposed that the parliament (where 75 percent of the
representatives were party members) adopt a new constitution allowing
only for the existence of political organizations that accepted “socialism.”
The task of protecting the societal goal of developing socialism enshrined
in the constitution, moreover, would fall to a special constitutional court
whose members would be appointed for life by the Hungarian Socialist

23. In addition to their general moderating influence, foreign governments, creditors,

and other international agencies often directly expressed their policy preferences to the
Hungarian leadership. In parr the protests of international trade union federalists and
intensive negotiations between the Hungarian government and the 11.0 and the U.S. Depart-
ment of Labor curbed the hard-liners’ attempt to pass new regulations that would have
restricted the right to strike and organize trade unions. For example, extending the protec-
tion of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to U.S. investors in Hungary
required certification by the AFL-CIO that the Hungarian labor code protected trade-union
pluralism.
24. For a more elaborate discussion of “defensive liberalization,” see Laszlo Bruszt,
“FTingary’s Negotiated Revolution,” Social Research 57, no. 2 (1990): 365-87.
25. The Western media misinterpreted this decision when it called it a decision about
“giving up the monopoly of power” of the Communist Party. In fact, the decision more
closely resembled the following calculation: if our North Korean or blast German comrades
are able to thrive in “multiparty systems,” why can’t we make such accommodations?
Hungary 29

Workers’ Party. This court would rule on the constitutionality of legisla-

tion passed by a newly elected parliament and would have the responsibil-
ity for the registration, or nonregistration, of political organizations.
At the same time that it tried to weaken and marginalize the opposi-
tion, the hard-line faction also tried to incorporate, coordinate, co-opt,
and corrupt the opposition. While some autonomous organizations were
referred to as ellenzek (opposition), others were ellenseg (enemies). The
latter received only opprobrium; the former might be promised resources

in highly selective bargaining on a one-by-one basis: “So, your party

would like to get back its former headquarters from the pre-1948 peri-
od?” or “We hear that your organization is still in need of a telephone
line.”

More important than trying to pick off the various independent organi-
zations through backroom was another divide-and-con-
deals, however,
quer tactic of attempting to separate public negotiations. By February
1989, with the MSzMP committed to a multiparty system and with
Polish Communists already engaged in their Round Table negotiations
with Solidarity, it became obvious to all political actors that some kind of
national forum must be convened to discuss the creation of new political
institutions. To this end, the leaders of the Communist Party initiated
efforts at a series of separate, bilateral negotiations with various organiza-
tions, including some of the independent organizations that were begin-
ning to call themselves political parties. When this tactic failed to split the

opposition, the hard-liners hoped that they could conquer even if they
still

failed to divide. At the end of March, the party’s Central Committee

issued a call to all the major social organizations (including its satellite

organizations, such as the National Council of Trade Unions) and vir-

tually all the major opposition organizations for the creation of a national
Round Table to be convened on April 8.

The hard-liners’ conception of a national Round Table of “harmoniza-

tion and reconciliation” was to downgrade independent organizations to
the level of its satellite organizations — as organizations representing only
partial social interests. As the ultimate guardian of social order and na-
tional sovereignty during this difficult transition, the party’s “historic
role”was to act as the big broker. This emphasis on negotiation was thus
a new development in the party’s claim to “represent society”; yet it was
but merely a step to a higher stage of paternalism. 26 Now no longer as the

26. On the concept of paternalism as applied to state-socialist political systems, see

Ferenc Feher, “Paternalism as a Mode of Legitimation in Soviet-Type Societies,” in T. H.
Rigby and Ferenc Feher, eds., Political Legitimation in Communist States (New York, 1982).
 —

3 ° Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

monopoly holder of Truth but as the prime negotiator did the party claim
to represent general societal interests. In assuming this posture, the hard-
liners did not perceive themselves as a party to a two-sided negotiation
between the representatives of power and the representatives of civil soci-

ety. Instead, in their conception of a Hungarian Round Table the party, as

prime negotiator, would resemble a teacher sitting before a class of unruly
students or an arbiter before so many squabbling disputants in small-
claims court.
But the opposition refused to accept such a paternalistic framing of the
negotiations and issued a united refusal to attend the April 8 meeting.
Formal negotiations between the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and
an umbrella federation of the democratic opposition would be inaugu-
rated only on June 13. In the interim, the reformers around Imre Pozsgay
had gained the support of intraregime forces to confront the hard-liners
with a new conception of the party’s future. In challenging the party’s old
paternalistic representational claims, they established a framework for the
Hungarian Round Table negotiations more closely approximating the
civic principles of electoral competition in liberal democracies. To under-
stand the ascendancy of the reform Communists, we must turn to analyz-
ing the strategy of the democratic opposition in its interaction with the
hard-liners’ strategy of confrontation.

The Strategy of the Opposition

At the end of 1988, the independent organizations of Hungary’s civil

society were neither large nor cohesive nor fundamentally committed to
challenging the legitimacy of the Communist regime. In fact, that the
category of “opposition” could be used as a collective noun to refer to
such a weak, diverse, and fragmented organizations would have
set of

occurred to almost no one active on the Hungarian political scene. As we

shall see, the party hard-liners’ strategy of confrontation acted as the

catalyst to change all that.

1988 the two largest autonomous political organizations, the

In late

Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Forum MDF) and —

the Alliance Democrats (Szabad Demokratak Szovetsege
of Free
SzDSz), had memberships of just under 10,000 and 1,500, respectively. 27

Z7. The Hungarian Democratic Forum was founded as a movement in 1987 by 160
moderate intellectuals, especially populist writers, many of whom had strong ties to the
leading reform Communist, Imre Pozsgay (who himself attended the founding meeting at
Lakitelek). The MDF reorganized itself as a political party in mid- 989. The Alliance of Free
1

Democrats was the organizational offspring of the Network of Free Initiatives created by
radical Budapest intellectuals, many of whom were outspoken dissidents in the 1970s.
Hungary 3i

With no institutionalized means to coordinate (or even communicate

about) the activities of the proliferating alternative political organizations,
the MDF
and the SzDSz each offered to be the umbrella under which
other movements and independent-minded citizens could stand as the two
organizations competed for the right to speak in the name of society. 28
More urban, liberal, and Democrats (together
secular, the Alliance of Free
with the Federation of Young Democrats, or FIDESZ) was earlier inclined
to a more radically challenging posture vis-a-vis the regime. The populist
writers of the MDF, on the other hand, were more likely to give ex-
pression to the national issues and Christian traditions of Hungary’s rural
society, and its politicians were initially more cautious about directly
confronting the authorities. The MDF leaders asserted repeatedly that
they were neither an opposition nor aligned with power. In this moderate
posture they were typical of Hungarian “alternatives” before 1989.
A measure of the opposition’s willingness and ability to challenge the
legitimacy of the regime can be taken by examining a series of public
demonstrations from June 16, 1988, to June 16, 1989. On the latter date,
one-quarter million Hungarians assembled in Budapest’s Heroes Square
to honor and rebury the former prime minister Imre Nagy and other
heroes of the 1956 revolution on the anniversary of their execution. For
the same commemoration only one year earlier in 1988, police easily
dispersed a small crowd of only several hundred people when virtually all
independent organizations chose to stay away from a demonstration
whose premise directly challenged the legitimacy of the regime.
The beginning steps toward a more radical approach were taken in
September 1988 when a group of environmentalists took the initiative to
organize a demonstration before parliament that succeeded in gaining the
endorsement of the major independent organizations in a protest against

the construction of a dam on

Danube. The demonstration was the first
the
major public questioning of the legitimacy of parliament, whose members
had been chosen in elections that were competitive in name only. “De-
mocracy or Dam!” the protestors declared. And, when the parliamentary
representatives (including all the leaders of the party’s reform wing)

2.8. By late 1988 there were over fifty organized independent groups. These included

such organizations as the Federation of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokratak Szovetsege,

or FIDESZ) founded by young law school students in March 1988 as the first independent
group to declare itself a “political organization.” The first independent white-collar trade
unions were created by scientific and cultural employees in the early summer of 1988, and
the League of Independent Trade Unions was established in December of that year. The
changing political field also saw the reemergence of parties that traced their lineages to some
of the pre-1948 political parties. The Independent Smallholders’ Party was organized in
September 1988, the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in December 1988, and the
Christian Democrats in early spring 1989.
32. Ldszlo Bruszt and David Stark

bowed to the intimidation of the hard-liners and voted to continue con-

struction, some of the “alternatives” organized successful public cam-
paigns for the recall of several representatives.
If the environmentalists’ demonstration illustrated the potential gains
of more active mobilization, the hard-liners’ threats provoked recognition
of the potential costs of failing to do so. That is, it was the hard-liners’
threats escalating confrontational policies that determined the urgency
and the timing of the opposition’s shift toward popular mobilization. By
late 1988 and early 1989 the alternatives faced a conservative party lead-

ership that was vilifying them in public, drafting piece after piece of
legislation to exclude some organizations or tie the hands of those it
legalized, and launching constitutional initiatives that promised to mar-
ginalize any surviving autonomous organization from any serious par-
ticipation in political power. The alternatives could retreat, or they could
change to a strategy of confrontation, popular mobilization, and efforts at

undermining the legitimacy of the official political institutions. By the

spring of 1989 most chose the latter course. And in mid-March the major
independent organizations formed a loose umbrella federation to coordi-
nate their activities.
Although it is clear how the hard-liners’ assault could make it a vital
issue of organizational survival for the alternatives to demonstrate their
popular support, it is less immediately obvious how that attack contrib-
uted to bringing about considerable cohesion among disparate opposi-
tional groupings. The fact that no single party or movement was suffi-
ciently strong enough to challenge the party on its own might be seen as a
factor pressing the alternatives toward mutual cooperation as an opposi-
tion. That is, perhaps it was the very fragility of the individual opposition
organizations that provided the basis for their unity. But as any good
game theorist or historian knows, the potential benefits of cooperation
posited in the abstract are not sufficient to explain why some projects of
collective action cohere and others dissipate. The problem is even more
acute in this case where the party was promising resources to organiza-
tions that would defect from or never join an oppositional coalition.
The emergence of an oppositional umbrella federation becomes under-
standable when we consider the following: forced to conform to the
formalities of glasnost’ and to its own rules of “social debate,” the various
public forums that accompanied the party hard-liners’ policies of defen-
sive liberalization increasingly provided the occasions for opposition fig-

ures to assemble. Every draft of each new piece of legislation (the new law
on strikes, the law on association, the proposed constitutional changes,
Hungary 33

and so on) — however restrictive in intent and however short the time
given for public reaction — yielded another opportunity for the experts
and organizers of the opposition movements to meet. More important, at
these meetings, and then increasingly while working to prepare joint
position papers, the opposition leaders punctuated their words in early
1989 with references to 1948. Entering the stage of declaring their groups
opposition political parties, the leaders of the independents were led to
reflect on the disappearance of opposition parties during the postwar
period when Communists succeeded in the divide-and-conquer tactics
their counterparts were attempting to emulate in the present. The alter-

natives’ leadersreminded themselves and each other that although some

opposition parties had been eliminated quickly while others lasted for a
short time in coalition with the Communists, none survived. If they were
not to repeat past mistakes, the nascent opposition groups would need to
find some institutional means to coordinate their efforts. Whether the
analyst uses the language of “iterative games” or of “collective memo-
ries,” Hungary’s young opposition parties had learned important lessons
from a previous confrontation. Thus, increasingly over the course of the
early months of 1989, public statements responding to this or that party
initiative were circulated for endorsement by numerous independent or-
ganizations. In some cases the list of signatory organizations was longer
than the text in which the independents collectively confronted the party
with a blunt and dismissive challenge.
If the memories
1948 provided the negative lesson, then the anniver-
of
sary of 1848 celebrated on March 15 provided the occasion to manifest
the opposition’s shift in identity and strategy. Communist party au-
thorities, of course, hoped to fit the anniversary into their plans of mar-
ginalizing the opposition by incorporating it. Under the auspices of the
Patriotic Front, they issued an invitation to most, although not all, of
the autonomous organizations to participate together in commemorating
the Revolution of 1848. The national holiday could become a celebration
of national unity in which everyone wanting “democracy” and a “multi-
party system” could march together under the party’s slogans for “re-
newal.”
But Budapest on March 15, 1989, not one but two
in the streets of

commemorations were held. Twenty-four alternative organizations re-

fused the party’s invitation. Instead, they organized their own demonstra-
tion,which was attended by more than 100,000 participants and over-
shadowed the official ceremonies. That demonstration was the public
signal that the alternatives could also play the politics of confrontation. In
34 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

terms most concrete (Are you going to their demonstration or to ours?), it

began the process of redrawing the boundaries of the political space along
dichotomous lines between officialdom and the opposition. It was the act
of standing withpower or with those challenging power that created an
“opposition.” The March 1 5 demonstration was the performative action
that made possible the mutual self-recognition of an oppositional identity
transcending the boundaries of the various participating organizations.
Eight days later, on March 23 in the building of the law faculty under the
auspices of the Association of Independent Lawyers, representatives of
eight independent organizations met to formalize this new identity by
establishing a mechanism for coordinating their activities. Acknowledg-
ing their commitment to resolving differences in a framework of equality,
they called their umbrella federation a “Round Table.” Confirming their
newly formed collective identity, they specified it as the “Opposition
Round Table” (Ellenzeki Kerekasztal, or EKA). The stated purpose of the
metaorganization was to create the basis for a common stance vis-a-vis
the MSzMP, “the power holders.”
The formation of the Opposition Round Table fundamentally altered
the map of Hungarian politics. Its consequence was to unite and radi-
calize the opposition and eventually to polarize the political camps. At the
beginning of 1989, even the more radical groups in the democratic op-
position such as the SzDSz still made distinctions between reformers and
hard-liners and discussed the possibility of alliance with the party’s re-
formers. Their perceptions and depictions of the political landscape had
changed dramatically by the time that EKA was founded only months
later. In the lengthy debates and discussions that marked the first meet-

ings of the new umbrella federation, the representatives of all the organi-
zations of the EKA opposition (ranging from radicals to moderates to
those who had only recently resigned their membership in the party’s
organizations) came to agree that there were only two political camps in
Hungary: on the one hand, those who represent the “monopolistic
power” together with those who want to make compromises with them,
and, on the other hand, those who want to re-establish popular sov-
ereignty. Against the party’s paternalistic representational claims, the
EKA representatives argued, first among themselves and later to the pub-
lic, for an alternative legitimating claim based on purely civic principles:
I'he politicaland economic crisis cannot he solved by any kind of “ power
sharing .” The solution to the crisis is not for power to he shared with
society hut for power to he legitimated by genuinely free, fully contested,
elections. Anyone who disagrees with this principle, and anyone who is
Hungary 35

compromise this principle is with “ them.” 1 On the new politi-

'*
willing to ,

cal map being drawn by EKA there was no intermediate space, as there

had once been only months earlier, between “the paternalistic power”
and “democracy.” Those who continued to speak about the need for
reforming the system and who claimed that they were using their power to
empower society for the future, the opposition argued, were but the Siren
voice of monopoly power, which only obstructed transforming the system
to one in which power resided in the citizenry. To the party’s strategy of
attempting to delegitimate, marginalize, and divide the opposition, the
opposition now answered with its own strategy of delegitimating, mar-
ginalizing,and dividing the holders of power.
Although the opposition figures were committed to the escalation of
confrontation as the only means to arrive at a situation where they could
negotiate with the representatives of the regime on terms that recognized
them as major political actors, few were optimistic that these goals could
be achieved in a short time. Their plans for further demonstrations as
“tests of strength” looked to dates already marked well ahead on the
calendar. May i (Labor Day), June 16 (the anniversary of the execution of

Imre Nagy), October 23 (the anniversary of the revolution of 1956). They

could use these opportunities to challenge the regime’s legitimacy and
expose its “naked power.” Their reading of the changed geopolitical situa-
tion suggested that they could now move onto territory that was once
unimaginable, but also that they could do so only as long as Gorbachev
was in power. 30

The Results of the Politics of Confrontation

The same perceptions that emboldened the opposition worried the

power holders in offices high and low. With the use of force ruled out as

19. The precondition for cooperation within EKA was acceptance of the principle that
the relative levels of support of the various parties of the opposition could be determined
only by free elections. That is, only free elections could adjudicate among the competing
claims to speak in the name of society. Acceptance of this principle, of course, could not
entirely suppress the problem of measuring the relative power of organizations within the
opposition. In the absence of free elections, other tests of strength could be attempted; but
they were illegitimate in terms of the explicit self-conception of the Opposition Round Table.
30. At the time of their negotiations from February to April, the Polish opposition still
did not trust the “End of Yalta,” and the formation of their strategies was shaped by
considerations of some of the imperatives of the empire. Late in the spring, leaders of the
Hungarian opposition (encouraged in part by Gorbachev’s apparent toleration of the Polish
developments) shaped their strategy on the assumption that they were
— —
at least temporarily
under Gorbachev “outside Yalta.” Whereas the Polish opposition spoke about “self-
Finlandization,” the slogan in Hungary was “Back to Europe!”
36 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

an option, with a more liberal law on association ensuring that opposi-

tion groups would not be eliminated, and with the hard-liners’ policy of
attempting to freeze out the opposition not only sputtering but backfir-
ing, officeholders at the local level and members at the party’s base were
the first to voice concern. 31 Hungarian television had broadcast the par-
alleland competing March 15 demonstrations into every home. Local
party officials could see which was the larger demonstration, and it was
simple arithmetic to calculate from trends which side’s numbers would
grow in future demonstrations. To those sensitive to shifts in the political
winds, moreover, the opposition’s refusal to attend the Round Table of
April 8 signaled the futility of the hard-liners’ hopes of dividing the op-
position.
As the first and party activ-
to feel politically vulnerable, local officials
ists were among the first to respond to the newly drawn boundary lines.

Local apparatchiks had been early to see the impossibility and absurdity
of the orders coming from above to marginalize, co-opt, corrupt, or
divide and conquer the independents. From their vantage point, the strat-
egy of confrontation would not work when combined with deteriorating
economic conditions and liberalized regulations allowing for genuinely
autonomous political organizations. By late March and early April they
were sending the message upward that instead of trying to eliminate the
opposition, we should be competing with them to offer better alter-
natives.
Party members who were not officials in the apparatus were even more
fearful that a cataclysmic rupture of the social order might threaten their
personal safety or destroy their professional careers. Afraid that the par-
ty’s leadership was headed toward the brink of disaster, they began to take
organization into their own hands. “Reform Circles” within the party’s
local branches had already begun to emerge at the end of 1988; by April
they were sprouting up everywhere and taking the local party organiza-
tions as their targets. From one provincial city to the next, reformist
Communists ousted conservative leaders. From one county to the next,
they battled successfully to hold party conferences remove the
to
staunchest supporters of Karoly Grosz in the Central Committee. The
Reform Circles were slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, but then more

3 1. The continued
existence and growing legitimacy of the opposition parties were fur-
ther strengthened when, starting from early 1989, Western delegations (presidents, prime
ministers, party leaders, and parliamentarians) officially invited by the Hungarian govern-
ment also held meetings with representatives of the opposition organizations. Increasingly as
the spring progressed, such foreign delegations scheduled meetings with their Hungarian
opposition-party counterparts before meeting with representatives of the government.
 —

Hungary 37

rapidly and visibly, encircling the party leadership. Their chorus: the
hard-liners’ policy has become a most damaging liability. We cannot let

ourselves be trapped with “them.” By late April some Reform Circles

were not only calling for unconditional acceptance of the EKA’s precondi-
tions for negotiations but were also threatening to spit the MSzMP and
create a new socialist party that would join the EKA opposition. The
party was disintegrating at its base.
Defections from the conservative policy line were not limited, however,
to local party organizations. Throughout the spring, an increasing
number of parliamentary representatives indicated their independence
from party discipline. Together with the growing
and unpredict-
visibility

ability of the “Independent Faction” this demarcation of a dichotomous

boundary inside parliament made things increasingly uncomfortable for
“them.” With each new day more and more high-ranking party officials
and governmental bureaucrats were discovering that in their hearts they
had always been reformers, and the press (now unleashed and hungry)
was scarcely able to conceal its derision as it described yet another regime
figure’s conversion on the road to Damascus. So was that on April 25,
it

Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth (an appointee and protege of Karoly

Grosz) took the unprecedented step of calling an evening television news
program to repudiate a speech of Grosz and distance himself from the
party hierarchy. 32 The government was clearly separating itself from the
party.
May 1, the last glorious celebration of the highest (and only remaining)
party holiday, marked the next stage in the polarization of the political
field. With enough sense to avoid the traditional viewing stand located at

the site where Stalin’s gargantuan statue was torn down in 1956, the
Communists had convened their May Day rally in the city’s central park,
where the party boss, Grosz, addressed the celebrants. But following the
successful formula of March 15, the opposition also held a rally, this time
organized by the League of Independent Trade Unions. Estimates vary
but the question was whether the opposition’s crowd of 60,000 to
100,000 was ten times or only six times larger than the audience that
came to hear Karoly Grosz. With both rallies adjourning to separate
public forums, the League used this opportunity to orchestrate the first

3Z.Miklos Nemeth was a leading representative of a new generation of young tech-

nocrats, mainly economists, who worked for rapid marketization of the economy but made
compromises with the party apparatchiks in the 1980s by accepting important positions in
the state and party bureaucracies. His public realignment with the party’s reform faction was
a dramatic indication of the party’s crumbling hold on state institutions.
38 Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark

public appearance of the EKA representatives as a collectivity. Both for-

ums were televised in question-and-answer formats; the Independent
Unionists’ contacts among television reporters, producers, and techni-
cians yielded proportional coverage, perhaps as important as the content:
fifty minutes for the ruling party, fifty minutes for the united opposition.
The growing defections from the ruling bloc accelerated exponentially
throughout the month of May. Their timing was caused less by the events
of the past than by those of the future. After the May Day celebrations, all
the political actors began to orient toward the next public demonstration
of political identityand strength in which they would be forced to take a
position. The next date circled on the calendar was June 16, the anniver-
sary of the execution of Imre Nagy. Under the pressure of public opinion,
domestic and international, the Grosz regime had been forced to accept
the reburial of Nagy and his close associates. 33 Although the results of
complex negotiations between the Committee for Historical Justice and
the authorities were publicly announced only on May 24, everyone in
leadership positions had known for weeks that it was impossible to avoid
granting permission for a public ceremony to honor the fallen heroes of
the failed revolution of 1956. It was not difficult for them to imagine the
possibilities for a dramatic declaration, demarcation, and enactment of
the boundaries of “them” and “us.” Regardless of your cosmetic surgery
and the new labels you now use for yourselves, the opposition stated in
effect, you are still those who came to power with the Soviet tanks. You

represent the interests of the empire and even now, when the Russians give
us a chance to loosen the chains, you are still trying to salvage your power
with reformist tricks. With each day, the time bomb ticked louder, threat-
ening an explosive release of the ghosts of 1956.
Thus, whereas the hard-liners’ strategy of attempting to divide the op-
position had the effect of pushing the independent organizations together,
the opposition’s strategy of attempting to portray hard-liners and reform-
ers as conjoined had the effect of forcing an open division within the
ruling bloc. For the party’s reform Communist leaders it was now a race
against time. They had forty days to show that instead of a well-meaning
but subordinated junior faction they were in a position to exert the de-
cisive, if not entirely uncontested, leadership of the government and the
party. Hundreds of thousands were likely to be in Heroes Square on June
16, and a national audience would watch the funeral on television. Would

33. Karoly Grosz had conceded to the reburial as a “humanitarian gesture” after repeat-
ed questioning by reporters during his visit to the United States in 1988.
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Title: The Undetected

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

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 The Undetected

By GEORGE O. SMITH

Illustrated by FINLAY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Galaxy Science Fiction December 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
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 Nothing can possibly be more baffling than
a crime in a sealed room ... but what if the
investigator happens to have an open mind?

I took a quick look around the apartment, even though I already

knew what I had to know.
Gordon Andrews had been slain in his sleep by the quick thrust of
some rapierlike instrument. There was no sign of any struggle. The
wall safe stood with its door open and its contents missing. Every
door and window was closed, locked, burglar-bugged, and non-
openable from the inside; the front door had been forced by the
police. Furthermore, it had been raining in wind-whipped torrents for
hours, yet there was no trace of moisture on any of the floors.
Of course no one had heard a sound, and naturally there were no
fingerprints.
Police Chief Weston spied me and snapped, "What do you make of
it, Schnell?"
I shrugged and said, "Completely sealed room."
"Got any ideas?" he demanded.
I had a lot of ideas, but I was not going to express myself without a
lot of stark evidence. I do not yearn to have the prefix "ex-" installed
in front of my title of Captain of Detectives. I'm much too young to
be retired. So instead of trying to explain, I said, "The modus
operandi is—"
Chief Weston snorted, "Schnell, there isn't a clue in the whole
damned building, and yet you stand there and yap about modus
operandi?"
"That's the point, Chief. The cluelessness is itself the modus
operandi that points to—"
"You talk as if we had a whole file of unsolved, clueless, sealed-room
homicides!"
"Chief," I said, "a true 'perfect crime' would be one in which no clue
existed, including the fact of the crime itself—except those clues that
were deliberately planned by the perpetrator for some purpose of his
own."

He glowered at me. "What are you driving at, Schnell?"

"I'm trying to convince you that we are faced with a very clever
criminal mind," I said. "A man with a fine talent. One who plans his
crimes so well that they aren't even recognized as criminal."
"Nonsense. You can't conceal any crime forever."
"Forever isn't necessary, Chief. Just long enough to cover up
completely, to remove all connection. We don't know how many
bank tellers have been running on reduced salary because they
somehow paid out a hundred in cashing a ten-dollar check. We
couldn't demand an audit of all the big financial accounts in town, to
know the why and wherefore of the transfer of any sum of money
larger than the limit of petty larceny."
"But now you are talking about a sly, clever operator, Schnell. This is
a plain case of homicide and burglary."
Plain? Was he kidding himself?
I smiled crookedly. "Chief, there is no doubt in my mind that our
crook intended to clean out Gordon Andrews' safe without disturbing
a soul. But the imminent awakening of Andrews presented a physical
threat that had to be silenced immediately."
"So that is the work of your sly thief?"
"Chief, just remember that Gordon Andrews was an eccentric old
sourpuss who hated to do business with bankers. Now let's suppose
that Andrews had awakened in the morning to find his safe cleaned
out. He screeches for the cops. We come a-roaring in with the
fingerprint detail and the safe specialists and the break-in experts.
We find," I said with a wave of my hand, "everything just as we
found it here and now. So we look Gordon Andrews in the eye and
tell him that no one could get in, no one had gotten in, and that we
suspect him of cleaning out his own safe and yelling 'Copper' to
make trouble for the Mayor and the Commissioner, who refused to
appoint him a special detail of city employees for bodyguards last
year."
"Go on, Schnell," said Chief Weston with deadly patience.
"The homicide was a spur-of-the-moment necessity. Had it been
planned, the crook would have plugged Andrews with the old man's
personal Banker's Special, which he kept on the bedside table, and
made it look like suicide."
"Know a lot about Andrews, don't you, Schnell?"
"What do you mean, Chief?"
"About the Banker's Special."
"I have an excellent memory," I said. "Andrews had a license for the
thing. The serial number is 233,467,819 and the gun and license
were acquired on August seventh, 1951."

The Chief sarcastically grunted, "Has it been fired since?"

"It was fired six times at the date of delivery by the police laboratory
for the land-mark records," I said.
"Let's not try being funny, Schnell. This is a serious business.
Andrews was an eccentric old curmudgeon, but he was also a
philanthropist, and the papers will be after our throats if we don't
come up with this super-criminal."
"He's going to be damned tough, Chief."
"Okay, this is your project. Nothing else matters until he's caught
and convicted—of homicide committed during the course of grand
robbery, meaning automatic hot seat."
I nodded slowly.
"Just remember, Schnell—the whole department's behind you," Chief
Weston assured me.
I continued to nod, but his assurance didn't reassure me in the least.
With about ninety-eight per cent of the general public still not quite
willing to accept rockets, missiles and space travel, I had a fat
chance of convincing anybody that a telepath had kept guard over
the slumbering mind of Gordon Andrews, while a perceptive solved
the combination to the wall safe, so that a kinematic could twirl the
dial; that the imminent awakening of Gordon Andrews had indeed
been an imminent physical threat to a delicate extra-sensory
undertaking, and that therefore he had been silenced by the
kinematic, with a weapon located by the perceptive, after warning
from the telepath; after which the crime had continued, with the loot
being floated by a levitator along a freeway explored by the
perceptive and scouted by the telepath and cleared of barriers by
the kinematic who opened and debugged them as he went along—
and that the real topper for this whopper was that this operation
was not the integrated effort of a clever gang of extra-sensory
specialists, but rather the single-handed accomplishment of one
highly talented Psi-man!
A Psi-man ruthless enough to kill before he would permit his victim
to watch the turning dial, the floating loot, the opening portal,
simply because there stood a probability that one of the two billion
persons on Earth might suspect the phenomena as parapsychical
activity, instead of the hallucinatory ravings of a rich old eccentric
who hated the incumbent political party!
How best to keep a secret?
Let no one suspect that any secret exists!

II

The rain was still coming down in wind-whipped torrents that slatted
along the avenue in drenching sheets. Huddled in the scant cover of
the apartment door was a girl of about eighteen. The raincoat she
wore was no protection; the wind drove the rain up under it.
Womanlike, she was struggling with the ruins of a fashionable little
umbrella instead of abandoning it for the tangled mess that it was.
She looked at me as I opened the door. She was without guile. She
was wet and miserable and determined to take whatever help was
proffered, and hope afterward that no unfair advantage would be
taken of the situation.
I showed her my I.D. card and she read: "Howard Schnell, Captain,
Special Detail." Her face changed from cautious immobility to a sort
of wet animation, and she added as if it were important under the
circumstances to be completely open, "I'm Florence Wood."
I took the ruined umbrella from her unresisting hand and stood it in
the foyer for the janitor to dispose of, and pointed out across the
rain-ponded sidewalk to the police car. It was almost high noon, but
the rain was so heavy that the identity of the car was by no means
conspicuous from the apartment door. Florence Wood nodded as she
caught sight of it.
I said, "Now, I'll make a run for it and open the door, and get in first
so that I'll be on the driver's side. As soon as I'm out of your way,
just dive in and don't worry about closing the door until you're out of
this rain. Catch?"
She nodded.
"I'd play Sir Galahad and give you my foul-weather gear to wear," I
said, "but you're already so wet that it wouldn't do more than keep
the water in."
She smiled at me understandingly.
Then she looked at me with curiosity because I was standing there
waiting instead of making my dash immediately. I thought of how
my Psi-man could have floated the loot out of an open window and
kept the rain from soaking the floor at the same time.
So, to make conversation, I said, "I'm waiting until my will power
builds up enough to overcome the forces of gravity, barometric
pressure, and the rest of whatever goes into the making of a
howling downpour like this. Considering that nature is dissipating
energy equal to a couple of hundred atom bombs per second, it
takes a bit of time to collect the necessary amount of mental power."
Florence Wood laughed. In mere instants she'd changed from
weather-drenched misery to a cheerful sort of discomfort no worse
than many a human has endured for hours at a football game. She
said with amusement, "Captain Schnell, why don't you start the car
and drive it over here? Seems to me it would take less power than
stopping this storm."
"The law says that it is considered unlawful to operate a motor
vehicle from any position other than the driver's seat," I replied.

When the slack in the storm I'd been anticipating finally arrived, I
took advantage of it to make my run across the sidewalk. Miss Wood
followed: her timing was perfect. Everything happened in a
continuous sequence without a stoppage at any point. The door
opened and I went in, landing hard and bouncing deliberately on the
seat springs to hunch myself over; Miss Wood landed and whirled in
a flurry of wet skirt and clammy raincoat, hauling one rain-booted
ankle out of the way as the door swung closed with a solid and
satisfying thunk.
I started the car and let the engine idle to warm it up and dry it off.
Then I said, "Part of my duty to the citizen includes protection of his
health and comfort as well as protection from unlawful behavior. So,
where do you wish to be taken?"
She regarded me out of clear gray eyes. "Don't you know?" she
asked with a quirk at the corner of her mouth.
"Do I look like a mind reader?"
"Well, you did slow down the storm."
I laughed. "Miss Wood, King Canute would have been a hero instead
of a bum if he'd waited until high water before he told the tide to
stop. Now, what gave you any reason to suppose that I am endowed
with special talents?"
"Well," she said, fumbling through her handbag for the comb, which
naturally was at the bottom, "you did come along when I needed
help, and you did identify yourself when I so much wanted to know
—"
"And since I also remembered that storms as violent as this always
have lulls, you put two and two together? Well, it doesn't require
telepathy to conclude that you are soaked to the skin, that you need
and want help, and that you'd prefer to know just whom you are
driving off in a car with. Any other ideas about my talents?"
"Well, I should think—"
"Address first, Miss Wood."
She gave me an address in a residential district that was the
maximum distance one could get from City Hall and still enjoy the
privilege of paying city taxes. I started the car and headed in that
direction. Then I said, "Now, Miss Wood, let's go on with your little
fancy."
"Fancy?"
"You've been moonbeaming about a little courtroom drama where
twelve good telepaths and true are reading the mental testimony of
a witness who had located some vital bit of evidence by perception
and brought it to light by kinematic power."
"Well, it does seem that any truly gifted person would work for the
good of humanity."
"I doubt that being gifted with a sense of perception would
automatically endow a man with a sense of honor."
"But doesn't it seem just awful to think of anything as miraculous as
telepathy being used for—for—"
She was trying to avoid the word "immoral" because she was of an
age and experience that felt sensitive about its use. Unfortunately
the only substitute was the word "sin."
I came to her rescue. "It's deplorable but true that nothing was ever
developed for the benefit of mankind without a few sharpshooters
quickly figuring out some way to make it pay them a dishonest
buck."
"But it would be frightfully hard to bamboozle a telepathic
policeman, wouldn't it?" she asked hopefully.

I thought of my PSI-man, whose only mistake in the sealed room

murder of Gordon Andrews had been in being so good that he'd
actually disclosed the existence of a criminal who employed Psi
faculties.
"Wouldn't that depend upon whether the policeman or the criminal
was the more talented?" I parried. "But that supposes that the police
force would have a corps of Psi policemen."
"Wouldn't they?"
"Honey-chile," I said, "at the first thin hint that the Commissioner
was even interested in the possibility of hiring someone who knew
what the term 'parapsychic phenomena' really meant, there would
be a universal howl against 'Thought Police' so loud that it would
shatter the polar icecaps."
"But why?" she asked, bewildered.
"They'd start screaming about 'invasion of privacy,' and cite the Bill
of Rights, and that would be that."
"You mean that the law has laws against telepathy?"
"No, it doesn't say anything about telepathy," I admitted, knowing
what was to come next.
"Well, then?"
"Don't sound so superior, Miss Wood. At the first attempt, the law
would discover that it had a hell of a lot to say about telepathy and
perception, since they'd definitely affect the interpretation of the
Fourth and Fifth Amendments."
"I know the Fifth," she said, "but how about the Fourth?"
"Unreasonable and unwarranted search," I told her.
"But isn't a man guilty when he's guilty?"
"I wish it were as simple as that."
"But why isn't it?"
"Little Miss Wood, you are now asking me to solve an ethical
question that's been unanswered for more than ten thousand years."
I smiled wistfully. "I am not—repeat not—big enough to answer the
following question: 'Shall a killer in the confessional, who has been
given absolution by his God, subsequently be punished by his fellow
man?'"
"But what has that to do with it?"
"Let's have you answer one: 'Could you truly bare your secret soul to
God if you suspected that some prying human being was taking it all
down on a tape recorder?'"
"No, I suppose not."
"Then our 'Thought Police' would be standing as a human barrier
between any man and his God."
"I suppose so—but couldn't I tell?"
"Tell?"
"Tell whether someone was listening to my thoughts?"
That was another stumper. Does the sign wear out any faster if it's
read? Can the radio transmitter be measured to tell whether the
broadcast has any audience? Does the tree that falls in the forest
barren of animal life generate the same wave-motion as it would if
all the leaves were replaced by active eardrums? There are lots of
analogs, but are any of them valid?
I said, "If I cry out, how can I know whether I am being heard?"
And in my mind I made my own reply. I thought in deep
concentration: "How do you read me, Psi-man?"
The response was zero-zero. And it meant—nothing. My Psi-man
could have been following my every thought from the moment that
my ringing telephone summoned me to Gordon Andrews' apartment
to the present instant, so far as I could tell. There was no feeling of
intrusion, no feeling of presence.

III

Florence Wood giggled. "Going to stop the rain again, Captain

Schnell?"
The storm was still howling. In the near suburbs, the rain came in
more gracefully draped sheets and the wind was not whirlpooled by
the fluelike canyons between the buildings, but residential rainwater
is just as wet per cubic centimeter as the metropolitan variety.
"Maybe I should drive up over the lawn," I suggested.
"Daddy would blow a fuse."
"We might wait for it to let up."
"I'd rather not," she said soberly. "It's one thing to be driven home
in a strange car during a cloudburst, but it's something else to sit
out here making it look as if I were paying off by making out."
It came as a pleasant surprise that she did not consider me a
superannuated gaffer, and it was her youth that allowed her to
discuss parapsychic phenomena without the tongue-in-cheek
attitude of the older know-it-alls. I considered Florence Wood and
realized that she was at least old enough so that I wouldn't be
jugged for cradle-robbing so long as I had a parental acceptance.
And I did want someone to talk out the business of psionics without
having someone wind me in a sheet and ship me to a shrinker.
And so I said, "If it will smooth things a bit, I'll umbrella you to the
door and make official explanation to the stern and anxious parent."
"That we'll enjoy," she giggled. "Daddy always says that he doesn't
have to be a mind reader to advise against what my boy friends
have in mind. It'll be fun to face him with a—policeman."
Darkly, I said, "Most folks don't look upon me as the fun-loving type.
Policemen aren't always welcome, you know."
"Oh, Daddy will enjoy it. He writes a bit. He'll never be another
Ellery Queen, but he will enjoy talking to a real live captain of
detectives."
At this point a lot of favorable things took place at once, such as the
arrival of another convenient letup in the storm, the mad rush and
the ringing of the doorbell, the opening of the door and some
gasped introductions as we stood in a little hallway dripping puddles
of rainwater on a small rug.
"Police Captain—?"
"Howard Schnell."
"But Florence isn't—?"
I laughed at Mrs. Wood. "Not at all. This is just the rescue of a very
wet maiden in distress. When we're not shooting bank robbers, we
also help little old ladies—and lovely young girls—across streets. All
in the day's work, you know."
Mrs. Wood hauled Florence off, saying something about hot showers
and dry clothing, while Mr. Wood regarded me with interest.
He beat all the way around the bush, trying to ascertain without
actually asking pointblank whether I could spend a few moments,
and, if so, would I like a drink.
One must not anticipate, so I waited until he'd made his meaning
clear. Then I accepted his offer of some bourbon, refused his offer of
a cigar and settled myself into the chair he waved at.
I tasted the highball, smiled in approval, and opened the
conversation by saying, "Your daughter tells me that you write, Mr.
Wood."
He smiled wistfully. "Well, I'm not at the stage where the mere
announcement that I am working on a novel causes an immediate
pre-publication sale of seventy thousand copies. You see, I'm still
trying to work out a good association gimmick."
"A what?"
"An association gimmick. The name Erle Stanley Gardner, for
instance, always means a story about Perry Mason and the inevitable
courtroom scene full of legal fireworks. Rex Stout has his Nero Wolf,
the fabulous detective who lets his secretary do all the work."
"And," I added, "John Dickson Carr writes about Gideon Fell, who is
an expert at solving sealed-room mysteries."
"Exactly!" he said. "I've a series of gimmicks all planned, but I really
need a strong, out-of-the-ordinary character to go along with them.
You see, I propose to write a series of stories about 'perfect crimes.'"
"I'm not smart," I said. "I've always assumed that the so-called
'perfect crime' would be one in which the criminal walks off scot-free
with the loot under one arm and the girl on the other."
He said, "From your point of view, a true 'perfect crime' would be
one in which no clue existed, including the fact of the crime itself—
except those clues that were deliberately planned by the perpetrator
for some purpose of his own. That is your own angle, isn't it?"
I nodded. Indeed it was, and it had been expressed in precisely the
same words that I had used in speaking to Chief Weston.
"However," he went on blandly, "you'll agree that a clue is usually
the result of a mistake, or failure to plan completely, or the result of
some accidental circumstance."
"Right."
"But in a 'perfect crime' there would be no error, no mistake."
"Yes, but aren't you backing yourself into a hole that you've lined
with fish hooks yourself?"
"Not at all," he replied. "Clues must be cleverly contrived, created,
and established in such a way that the episode is ultimately known
to be crime and not labeled misadventure, suicide, or the like.
Otherwise," he said with a genial smile, "we're writing about a
'perfectly justifiable homicide' instead of a 'perfect crime.'"
I nodded again.
"And, of course," he finished, "these clues must also provide
precisely the correct amount of information so that the motive of the
criminal is not only fulfilled, but exposed—if not to one of the
characters in the book, at least to the reader."

Mr. Wood relaxed and sipped his own drink. From somewhere aloft,
a number of individually insignificant traces added up to fairly
reliable evidence that Florence and Mrs. Wood were about to return.
I gathered that the cross-questioning had allayed any parental
suspicion.
I said, "One thing you haven't mentioned," and paused for effect.
"To the Hindu, 'perfection' means the inclusion of an almost
imperceptible flaw so that its maker cannot be accused of presuming
to be as good as God. Is your 'perfect crime' to be perfect in the
eyes of the criminal, or in the eyes of the police?"
He said, "Ah, Captain Schnell, that is indeed one of my bothersome
problems."
Mrs. Wood came into the room, followed by Florence. The girl had
lost the soaked-gamin look. She was transformed by modern
alchemy into a poised young woman who forced me to revise my
estimated eighteen several years upward. She nodded affably at her
father, smiled at me and then came over because she noticed that
my highball glass was empty.
I thanked her, and she smiled wide and bright as she asked, "Has
Daddy been giving you the details of his impossible bandit?"
"Well, in a way."
Mr. Wood said, "I'm sort of like the standard television father—
incapable of adding two and two without the close supervision of the
female members of my family."
"I—that is, we—keep telling Daddy he should hire Superman for a
hero."
"You've changed," chuckled Mr. Wood.
"Changed?"
"Yesterday you advocated that I hire a detective with telepathy and
a sense of perception."
"We discussed it on the way home," said Florence.
"Superman?" I asked.
"No, this extra-sensory business," said Florence.
Mr. Wood inquired, "Are you interested in parapsychology, Captain
Schnell?"
"I've been interested in the subject for a good many years," I
answered.
"Would the public accept it, I wonder," he mused.
Mrs. Wood said, "A lot of people read psychic books."
Mr. Wood said plaintively, "I don't want to write psychic books. I
want to write whodunits. But it would solve my problem, wouldn't it?
My series would consist of crimes that would be perfect, except for
the introduction of a Master of Psionics who tells the story in the first
person singular, and who solves the crime by parapsychic power."
"It might read better if you made your extra-sensory character the
criminal," I suggested.
He shook his head. "Wouldn't do at all. A criminal with extra-sensory
talent would always win out over the police. There have been only a
very few successful stories written in which the criminal got away."
"Maybe he wouldn't," I said.
"But how could he possibly fail?"
"He might get sloppy."
"Sloppy! Mind reading every anticipated move?"
"Or bored."
"Bored!"
"One often leads to the other," I told him with a smile. "Which is just
my policeman's way of thinking. From the policeman's point of view,
you're overlooking one rather important angle."
"Indeed? Well, you must tell me all about it."

"Okay," I said. "My point is that you should not view this as a single
incident in the life of an extra-sensory who has turned his talent to
crime, but rather take the overall view. For instance, we can write
the life history of our Psi-man in broad terms. As a schoolboy, he
was considered extraordinarily lucky at games of chance and skilled
in games of manual dexterity; he stood high in schoolwork and at
the same time managed to do it without working very hard. By the
time he enters high school, he realizes that his success is due to
some sort of 'sensing' of when things will be right. This increases the
efficiency of his talent and he surges forward and would have
become top-of-class if he hadn't discovered that brilliance in
recitation made up for a lack of handed-in homework.
"In other words, nothing stands as a real challenge to him. His
talents surmount the obstacles that confront his fellow man. He
could collect corporations or be a labor leader, President or bum.
Anything he wants can be gotten without much fuss. Our Psi-man is
primarily interested in a statistical income sufficient to support him
to the dictates of his ambition. The trick is to achieve, say, twenty
grand per annum, in such a way that the manipulation is never
discovered.
"At first our Psi-man plans meticulously. But soon this process seems
unnecessary because the poor ignorant homo saps don't even know
they're being conned. He has no hard surface against which to whet
his nervous edge, and so he begins to play games. He leaves clues,
at first to ascertain the true level of his fellow man's intelligence and
ability. Next he leaves conflicting clues to see which way the poor
dopes will jump. In a world that scoffs at parapsychic phenomena,
he leaves clues to support the theory that only an extra-sensory
criminal could have done the dastardly deed. Will one of the ignorant
apes recognize the truth? If he does, will he be in a high position, or
will he be one of the diligent ones who fetch coffee for the guy in
the upper office? If the work of a Psi-man is recognized, how will our
bright policeman go about it, and what will he do with the evidence
after it's been shown to him?
"And so, Mr. Wood, our Psi-man criminal has become bored because
there is no one in the world to challenge him, and he gets sloppy
through his growing contempt for the antlike activities of his fellow
creatures. At last he shows himself, deliberately taunting them to
take action against him. And that," I concluded, with a nod at him,
"might be the 'perfect crime' in which your extra-sensory criminal
finally exposes himself."
"But why," Mrs. Wood asked in perplexity, "would such a talented
person turn to crime—or do you think that all extra-sensory people
—"
I turned to smile at her. "Mrs. Wood, I was not speaking of extra-
sensory people as a statistical body. I was referring to one particular
character."
"I find him hard to believe in."
"On the contrary, my dear," said Mr. Wood, "Captain Schnell has
drawn an amazingly accurate thumbnail sketch of our Psi-man, and I
daresay that he could go on and on, filling in more minute details."
"Oh, yes, indeed," I said. "But I must leave it up to the professional
writer to tell what the brilliant policeman does when he recognizes
the work as that of an extra-sensory. For instance, does he become
bold enough to mention it to Chief Weston, or to Commissioner
Stone? Or will he confine his discussion to the company of a rain-
soaked young woman so circumstantially available and coincidentally
willing to discuss Psionics?"
"Captain Schnell," breathed Florence Wood, "what on Earth are you
talking about?"
"Your father," I said.
Mr. Wood stepped into the breach. "Captain Schnell was dramatizing
for your benefit, I'm sure. Because Captain Schnell knows very well
how impossible it is to surprise a telepath into revealing himself."
Florence Wood's expression changed to a mildly bothered smile. "It
certainly sounded as if he were accusing you of something."
"You mean—like—mind reading?" he asked with a big belly laugh
that closed the subject.

IV
By most of the rules of society, both Mr. Wood and I were guilty of
gross gentility. He greeted me overtly as the welcome guest and
needled me with a show of patronizing tolerance as he implied that
my basic interest was in Florence.
To match him, I accepted his hospitality and made use of the
proximity to spy on him and his family.
There are ways and means of making a pretended deaf-mute reveal
himself—the human being does not live who will not leap halfway
out of his skin at the shock of an unexpected revolver shot, no
matter how well trained he is at feigning deafness.
As for surprising a telepath, I knew it wouldn't work, but I had to try
it anyway. I put both Mrs. Wood and Florence through a number of
mental hurdles. To this, Mr. Wood took a quietly tolerant attitude. He
understood and was prepared to accept as healthily normal a certain
amount of lust and carnal conjecture in the minds of males who
were interested in his daughter. He forgave me for mentally insulting
his wife because he knew that my mental peregrinations were only
aimed at determining whether his wife was telepathic. Finally he
came out flatly and told me to stop wasting my effort, because
neither Florence nor Mrs. Wood had a trace of extra-sensory power.
Their lack of shocked or outraged response was not a case of the
well-trained telepath divining my intention and planning a blank
response.
Furthermore, Mr. Wood asserted that neither of them knew of his
extra-sensory faculty, that he fully intended to keep it that way, and
that I should know damned well that such stunts wouldn't work in
the first place.
And so I continued to enjoy a dinner now and then, and occasionally
the company of Florence.
Ultimately the lack of progress brought Chief Weston's nervous
system to the blowup point. He called me in and I went, knowing
that trouble cannot always be avoided, and when it can't, it's just
plain sense to kick out the props and have done with it.
He plowed right in: "And what in hell have you been doing?"
"Chief, I've been—"
"You put a make-team on some half-baked writer named Wood."
"Edward Hazlett—"
"Because," he yelled, "the first person you saw when you stuck your
nose outside of Gordon Andrews' apartment was Florence Wood!"
"Well, Chief, you see—"
"You perhaps suspected that she'd just walked through the wall of
that apartment? And naturally you pulled out your hip-pocket crime
laboratory and checked that umbrella tip for bloodstains before you
threw it aside."
"Well, you see—"
"Schnell, would you have been so damned gallant if she'd been an
ugly old hag in a ratty dress carrying a dead halibut wrapped in an
old newspaper?"
"But you see—"
"So you leap into gallant action, and after you've rescued the fair
maiden from her watery grave, you suddenly find it desirable to use
a department automobile to deliver the damsel home."
"But—"
"Schnell, I'll bet that Wood girl wasn't any wetter than you were.
And that's how you put the long arm of coincidence to work?"

It was more than coincidence. Florence Wood had been in that

soaking rain and whipping wind for more than an hour. Any
housewife would have corroborated my statement that only a
prolonged soaking can achieve a truly wet-through-the-seams
condition. Oh, Daddy Wood was just the guy to think of a stunt like
saturating the seams and fibers of his daughter's clothing by
agitating the water supersonically at high amplitude, but, let's face
it, that would have beaten hell out of her soft white skin.
As for the umbrella, the wound could indeed have been made by a
rapierlike thrust. But a comparison between the depth of the wound
and the length of the tip showed that the bottom of the wound could
not have been reached without forcing part of the umbrella itself
into the victim's body. The face of the wound showed no such
outsize penetration, hence the umbrella was not the sought-for
weapon.
At this point, Chief Weston's telephone interrupted him and he
snatched it up, bellowed his name, and then listened. Finally he
snarled that it was for me and fairly hurled the handset at me.
I caught it at the end of its cord and said: "Captain Schnell, Special
Detail—"
"Oh, I know it is you, Captain Schnell," said the suave voice of
Edward Hazlett Wood. "I just wanted to tell you that your analysis of
the umbrella's uselessness as evidence was quite brilliant. Also your
logic in the matter of my daughter's rain-soaked clothing was clever.
I really don't regret the chewing out you are getting. You deserve it.
I was hoping to find you bright enough to avoid it. Anyway, can we
expect you for dinner this evening?"
"Yes," I snapped, and hung up, thinking a few things that would
have called for a terse reprimand about foul and abusive language if
telepathy were administered by the Federal Communications
Commission.
"Wood?" snapped Chief Weston.
"Yes."
"Date?" he snarled.
I groaned. Wood did have the nasty telepath's ability to maneuver
me into a situation that I could not conveniently avoid.
"When they start calling the office to pester you for dates—"
"I know what I'm doing!"
"So do I!" he yelled. "You're doing nothing!"
"Listen, Chief, I'll admit the long arm of coincidence, but you'll have
to admit that when there's trouble, I'm usually the first one to smell
it."
"So how do you connect them up?"
"Chief, I walk out of that apartment with your own words ringing in
my ears. 'Looks like the classical setup for a "perfect crime,"' you
said. And then I meet this girl who just happens to have a father
who writes whodunits and is planning a series of books based upon
the 'perfect crime.'"
"Maybe," sneered Chief Weston, "the guy is a mind reader."
"I've given even that some consideration."
"So I hear tell."
"Any objections?" I asked.

"Objections? I've got a lot of objections!" he howled. "This is a police

department, not a soothsayers' convention! We're subject to enough
criticism as it is. You needn't have added the act that makes us look
like a bunch of damned fools."
"But, Chief, I—"
"So what do I hear tell?" He hauled the tray drawer of his desk open
and pulled out one of the tabloids, opened to one of its hate-
everything columnists. "Listen! 'In recent years the legality of the
famous witchcraft trials of the past has been subject to debate, with
the result that these past convictions have now been declared
"miscarriages of justice." Posthumously, I must unhappily add.
However, there has been little or no amendment to the laws against
witchcraft, wizardry, charms, amulets and spells.
"'But brace yourselves, citizens. One of our younger and more
brilliant captains of detectives has shown an interest recently in
parapsychics and may be training to track down criminals by the
application of extra-sensory detection. If this be true, the laws will
have to be ruptured to permit him to secure evidence, since it is a
tenet of the law that evidence must be secured through legal
methods and processes.
"'Fortune Tellers of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but
your crystal balls!'"
Chief Weston slapped the paper down. "What do you think of that?"
I said, "He's just making noise. Telepathy has nothing in common
with—"
"I wish I could stop you from even thinking about telepathy!"
"If you could," I said calmly, "you'd have to be telepathic to
determine when I had violated your dictum—and if you were
telepathic, Chief, you'd have been on my side from the beginning."
He merely glared at me. At this moment I should have been
expecting the worst, and prepared to meet it. But please remember
that there's always that mental block against prying, especially when
the United States mail is concerned. But now Edward Hazlett Wood
was about to show me how a real extra-sensory sharpshooter
clobbers his enemies.

Weston's secretary entered, carrying a package.

I saw it, knew at once what it was, and groaned with despair. The
only chance I saw of getting out of this was the forlorn hope that
Weston would believe the package was a dig, probably mailed by the
sniping columnist.
It was cleverly contrived. The addressee's name had been blurred
and half-obliterated so that it couldn't have been quietly dropped on
my desk where I could have disposed of its damning contents
quietly. It had, of course, come special delivery, urgent, immediate
handling. If I were a believer in amulets, witches and spells, I'd have
been of the opinion that an aura of urgency had been created about
the box.
Chief Weston's secretary handed it to him with a mumbled
suggestion that it seemed to be important, and perhaps it should be
opened in hopes that the contents would convey information as to
the identity of the owner.
I said nothing.

Inside the package was a fine crystal ball, a set of tarot cards with a
thick book of explanations, and a second deck of cards the like of
which most people have heard but few have actually seen. These
were the square, circle, wiggly line cards used in parapsychic
research.
There was the damning evidence of a packing slip with my name
clearly printed on it, and a rubber stamp notation that the
merchandise order had been accompanied by a prepaid postal note.
The timing was perfect. The problem of keeping that package on
schedule all the way from its point of origin to its devastating
delivery must have taxed Wood's faculties, but he'd done it.
Chief Weston's choler rose visibly, and in a voice loud enough to be
heard in Asbury Park, he yelled: "Schnell, did you—buy—this?"
I was trapped. No matter what I said, it was calculated to get me
into trouble. For in the petty cash box in the secretary's desk was a
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