Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
Scandal in Budapest
By Istvan Deak
There are fewer policemen in the streets of authoritarian countries than in democracies because control is exercised more subtly, by a system of undercover informers, some of whom are coerced, others voluntary. The volunteers are sometimes rewarded by such privileges as a passport for vacationing abroad or a new car delivered ahead of the waiting list. Whenever I visited Hungary to do research in the 1960s and early 1970s, my movements were watched. As a Hungarian expatriate who had lived in the United States since the 1950s, I was suspect; and as a scholar at Columbia University who wrote, among other things, about Hungarian history, I was apparently something worse—a likely agent of the US government sent to spread hostile propaganda about the Communist regime. This is one conclusion that emerged when the Hungarian government recently released many of the police files from this period, including my own. The file reveals that Hungarian interest in my activities went beyond my research in Budapest. One entry records that
Feature, 5521 words
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