M.S. GORBACHEV: THE LAST PLOY? – OR WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON
M.S. GORBACHEV: THE LAST PLOY? – OR WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON

Summary/Abstract: Hungary and I go back quite a long way, in fact some fifty years, and I have learned a vast amount from the country. I first came here in 1961, to attend a Hungarian language course in Debrecen. Back then I was taken up with the Habsburg Monarchy and the British Council had started an arrangement with the Hungarians, who looked after a mixed bag of students very well – there were some west Europeans, as well as people from the Bloc, headed by a Ukrainian colonel, as I remember, who may have been from formerly Hungarian Ruthenia for all I know. My Hungarian was not very good but I could at least read it, and, after a period when I was greatly influenced by the works of the elder Seton Watson, I began to understand Hungary’s enormous strengths. I read various books about it – whether John Lukacs’s splendid book on Budapest or Josef Horvath’s Budapest um die Jahrhundertwende or for that matter the three-volume Erdély Története which I did manage to read and review for The Times Literary Supplement back in 1987: then in 1988 when there was a Hungarian Festival in London I was chosen to do four lectures on Hungarian history in which I think I struck the right notes. The Hungarians certainly did, because right at the moment they replaced János Kádár, and brought the leading reformist Imre Pozsgay into the Politburo, a very clear indication that a big change was in the offing. As it happens I was sent to Budapest by The Daily Telegraph just in time to see the change, in Parliament itself. After that, people in the streets outside somehow just walked differently. I have known Maria Schmidt for more than twenty years and have admired what she has done with the Museum here; by chance I also taught some of the members of the present government when they were students at Oxford. A long story in other words and thank you for the invitation.

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