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lowing when I asked him how he liked teaching in the United
States. "In my country," he answered, "I can talk freely. But in
Santa Barbara, I had to watch myself." Evidently, the good pro–
fessor found that forthright anticommunism was suspect on that
campus, unlike in his own country, where it is somewhat taken
for granted.
The opposition, unlike in Poland, is being given full lever–
age and encouragement to form political parties for participation
in scheduled national elections. Hungarians already have found
that old prewar parties have been resurrected, including the peas–
ant Smallholders' Party, the Social Democratic Party, the League
of Free Democrats, as well as others, including a nascent group of
Christian Democrats. The goal of the ruling Communists is clear.
Hungary aspires to become the financial center of West
European investment, and the country has to be made more at–
tractive in order to reach that goal. All seem to agree that the old
Stalinist system is dead forever , and that political freedom is nec–
essary if a market economy is to take off. The fight now seems to
be between the socialist market economy advocated by centrist
Party chief Karoly Grosz, and the more fundamental antileftist
and social democratic program espoused by the top party re–
former, Imre Pozsgay, who is said to favor major constitutional
reforms to be enacted before the scheduled June 1990 parliamen–
tary
elections, and most observers of the political scene predict he
will soon replace Grosz as the Party's chief.
Gathering at the offices of the Hungarian Socialist Workers'
Party (HSWP) , as the full committee met a few halls down to
purge the now hated Janos Kadar, we met with Imre Szokai,
Deputy Head of the International Department of the HSWP, and
Csaba Tabajdi , Deputy Head of the Department of Inter-Party
relations of the Central Committee and a Ph.D. in Political
Science. The meeting started as the two men gave us their busi–
ness cards. Did Lenin, we wondered, have a business card to give
to Armand Hammer?
The two men apologized, lest they be called out in the mid–
dle of our meeting because of the purge of Kadar that was taking
place . Indeed, Tabajdi began by dramatically telling us how un–
controlled power and the Stalinist model had created monsters
like Kadar, whom he described as paranoid, crazed and de–
mented. This system, he emphasized, is what led to the 1956 up-
