Two Funerals and Our Freedom

MOSCOW - My great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, has been on my mind recently. I suppose it was the 50^th anniversary of the so-called "kitchen debate" which he held with Richard Nixon that first triggered my memories. But the funeral last week in Budapest of General Béla Király, who commanded the Hungarian Revolution's freedom fighters in 1956, and this week's funeral in Warsaw of the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whose break with Stalinism that year inspired many intellectuals (in Poland and elsewhere) to abandon communism, made me reconsider my grandfather's legacy.

The year 1956 was the best of times and the worst of times for Khrushchev. His "secret speech" that year laid bare the monumentality of Stalin's crimes. Soon, the gulag was virtually emptied; a political thaw began, spurring whispers of freedom that could not be contained. In Poland and Hungary, in particular, an underground tide burst forth demanding change.

Hungary, of course, had its short and glorious revolution. That first war among socialist states shattered the myth of inviolable "fraternal" bonds between the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe. But Khrushchev never envisioned the breakup of the Soviet empire as part of his thaw. So the Red Army invaded Hungary - on a scale larger than the Allies' D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944.

Béla Király, released from a sentence of life in prison (one of the four death sentences he received from the communists having been commuted) was offered the job of commander of the Hungarian National Guard and the defense of Budapest. His task was to knock the rag-tag freedom fighters into an army, but there wasn't time to stop the Soviet advance. So, after a week of heroism he and a few thousand of his men crossed the border into Austria and exile.

Over the years, a mutual friend often tried to introduce me to General Király, but, to my regret, that meeting never happened. Any man who would frame the four death sentences he had received (one signed by Khrushchev, another by Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956) and hang them in his drawing room has the sort of quirky humor I relish.

And from what I know of the man and his history, particularly his work in Hungary after 1989, I can only wish that my great-grandfather could have met him. Certainly, Király would not have hesitated to meet the man who ordered the invasion. After all, when he learned that one of the Russian generals who had led the invasion was still alive in 2006, Király invited him to Budapest to join the 50^th anniversary celebrations. When General Yevgeni Malashenko declined in fear that he might be arrested, the 94-year-old Király flew to Moscow, where he spent a long weekend reminiscing and going to a banya for retired Red Army generals.

Kolakowski, on the other hand, was someone I knew. We frequently met at conferences, where it was always a delight to hear him speak Russian - a Russian that had the accent and elegance of Tolstoi and Pushkin, not the degraded Russian bark of Vladimir Putin. Like Király, in 1956, Kolakowski turned against the Communist party he had once joined in the hope, formed in the charnel house that the Nazis had wrought in Poland, that it would build a better world.

Kolakowski, modern Poland's most acclaimed philosopher, quickly learned that mendacity was the true building block of Communism, and he withdrew from it in horror. By 1968, the Polish regime could no longer tolerate his presence. He was expelled from his post at Warsaw University and, when he went to teach abroad, the government forced him into exile by never allowing him to return.

The question for me is how these three men with such different backgrounds and trajectories - Khrushchev, a Russian peasant turned proletarian who became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party; Király, a Magyar soldier of old world Europe, steeped in aristocratic traditions; and Kolakowski, a gentleman scholar from Warsaw more attuned to Jansenist heresies than the perverse logic of Leninist dialectics - could ultimately contribute to the same goal: the resurrection of liberty in Europe.

Khrushchev did not really know anything other than Communism. He tried to humanize it and undo the cruelty of Stalinist orthodoxy, but never doubted that the Leninist system was the way of the future. Király, who subscribed to the old codes of military honor (he would be named a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, for the hundreds of Jews he saved by keeping them with his army during WWII), saw that very system as the enemy of his country and its liberty.

But today, Khrushchev is remembered mostly for his contribution to the demise of Stalinism - and, via Mikhail Gorbachev, whose hero he was, ultimately for helping to bring about communism's demise. Király and Kolakowski became voices of moderation and reconciliation in the Hungary and Poland that emerged out of communism's darkness at noon. Király will be remembered not merely as a warrior, but as a humanist, the conciliator who called for no reprisals after 1989, and a liberal model for many Hungarians. Kolakowski, in upholding the sanctity of truth in the empire of the lie, connected the new democratic Poland to the old Poland of intellect and culture.

Király, Kolakowski, and Khrushchev: each in his own way is a symbol of today's new and uniting Europe, a Europe of rapprochement and forgiveness among erstwhile opponents.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

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