February 10, 2003

Letter from Budapest

Hungary tackles future by choosing its past

by Adam le Bor

THE most difficult thing about living in Eastern Europe, runs an old Soviet-era joke, is having to predict the past.

That is still true today, at least in Budapest. The days when disgraced Politburo members were airbrushed out of textbooks are gone, but the city is polarised over the fate of the Terror House, a museum chronicling the atrocities that took place at one of Budapest's most infamous addresses: 60 Andrassy Way.

Behind the imposing entrance of this Habsburg-era apartment block lies a gruesome past. In 1944 it housed the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross headquarters. After the Soviet conquest in January 1945, its torture chambers were taken over by the Communist political police, the dreaded AVO. A visit to the Terror House is a disturbing look through the darkest periods of modern Hungarian history. But while most of the three floors portray in gory detail the torture, executions and deportations of Hungary's Stalinist era in the late 1940s and 1950s, only a few rooms are concerned with the Arrow Cross terror of 1944.

Supporters of the former governing right-wing Fidesz Party say that it was pure coincidence that the museum opened last spring in the midst of the country's bitterest election. More than 100,000 people visited the Terror House and it is fair to say that the exhibits, including reconstructed torture chambers, did not win many votes for the Socialists, the successor party to the Communists.

The Socialists won by a whisker, and it comes as no surprise to Budapest cynics that the new left-wing, liberal coalition wants to slash the museum's budget from 330 million forints (£811,000), to 150 million forints.

PETER Medgyessy, the Prime Minister, is a former Communist secret agent, albeit in the late 1970s after the terror era was over. He has visited the museum, but the knives are out on the government benches. The charge is being led by an unlikely figure: Ivan Peto, a Free Democrat MP and one of the few anti-Communist dissidents in the 1980s.

He denies that this is because the 400 photographs that line the "Wall of the Perpetrators" includes one supposedly of his father, Laszlo Peto, who, according to the files, was an interrogations officer for the AVO. Echoing a widespread criticism, Mr Peto says that the problem with the Terror House is that it offers a false version of history. There is scant mention of the regime of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who ruled Hungary between 1920 and 1944. "Between the wars the Horthy regime passed three anti-Jewish laws, sent Jewish men to labour service on the eastern front and declared martial law," he says.

Maria Schmidt, the museum director and an adviser to Viktor Orban, the former Fidesz Prime Minister, rejects the criticisms. "The past is a very sensitive issue in every country. It gives you legitimacy, or it takes it away," Dr Schmidt said. "I do not think any government should concern itself with an exhibition or the way that history is portrayed.

"So far Hungary has only had one version of history. It was the official version and was accepted as such. Now they are confronted with a different version, and people are not used to this. They are not used to debate." And so the debate rolls on as Hungary attempts to come to terms with its dark and complex past. These are bitter, rancorous discussions. But at least they are finally taking place.

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