The Bell Tolls On

The Iron Curtain still stands between Eastern and Western Europe, preventing the captive peoples behind it from getting out. But what chiefly keeps Western public opinion from seeing in is a cliché curtain, held up by our own desire not to have to do anything about the Soviet slave-masters. Citizens and their leaders in the West would like to believe that the situation behind the Iron Curtain is improving, that “Stalinism” is a thing of the past, that the totalitarian system is softening into a benevolent despotism and will eventually turn into social democracy. Let us look behind the clichés to Hungary, which is regarded as the most Westernized of the satellites, indeed as Moscow’s economic and cultural showplace.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began in meetings of the Petofi Writers’ Circle, named after the nation’s greatest patriotic poet, who was killed in the struggle for independence from Austria in 1848. In November 1981 young intellectuals of the Jozsef Attila Circle commemorated the 25th anniversary of the events of 1956. Soon afterward they were called in by police for “identification,” and a few days after that the group was officially disbanded. The regime’s principal accusation against members of the club was that they were “counter-revolutionaries”—a ludicrous charge, given their spiritual antecedents.

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Thomas Molnar

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The Iron Curtain still stands between Eastern and Western Europe, preventing the captive peoples behind it from getting out. But what chiefly keeps Western public opinion from seeing in is a cliché curtain, held up by our own desire not to have to do anything about the Soviet slave-masters. Citizens and their leaders in the West would like to believe that the situation behind the Iron Curtain is improving, that “Stalinism” is a thing of the past, that the totalitarian system is softening into a benevolent despotism and will eventually turn into social democracy. Let us look behind the clichés to Hungary, which is regarded as the most Westernized of the satellites, indeed as Moscow’s economic and cultural showplace.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began in meetings of the Petofi Writers’ Circle, named after the nation’s greatest patriotic poet, who was killed in the struggle for independence from Austria in 1848. In November 1981 young intellectuals of the Jozsef Attila Circle commemorated the 25th anniversary of the events of 1956. Soon afterward they were called in by police for “identification,” and a few days after that the group was officially disbanded. The regime’s principal accusation against members of the club was that they were “counter-revolutionaries”—a ludicrous charge, given their spiritual antecedents.