In Europe

recovered from that speech.
    ‘That was in February 1956. Within our very own party, a movement started that demanded greater democracy and more self-rule. It was on that wave that Gomulka made his comeback, and he stayed in power until 1970. I stood behind it four-square; rigid socialism was, in my eyes, a dead-end street. But we were all terribly concerned what the Russians would do. In October, Khrushchev and the commander of the Warsaw Pact forces suddenly arrived for a surprise visit. At the airport, the first thing he said was: ‘We are ready to intervene.’ Gomulka refused to talk with a loaded gun on the table. That same afternoon we chose him as our new party leader.
    ‘The Poles are spirited fighters, we all formed a single front, and it would have been havoc for the Russians. Khrushchev knew that. In the end, despite all their differences, Gomulka was able to convince the Russians that he was an upstanding communist. Khrushchev was even touched by his words, and so the Russians agreed to allow the Poles to follow their ‘own line’. That was definitely the wisest thing they couldhave done; Poland is quite a bit larger than Hungary, they couldn't risk an open conflict.
    ‘It was a huge success for us. We kept up our sovereign stance towards the Russians. The DDR never achieved that level of independence, and after 1956 it became unattainable for the Hungarians as well, and it failed with the Czechoslovakians in 1968. We did it better, in silence, almost without bloodshed.
    ‘Politicians are the people operating the machine. They hop on it, like onto a moving train, and they jump off again too. That's the way things were between Gomulka and I. I was always there for him, I advised him on a daily basis, but I was also critical. In 1956 I felt that we should launch a number of far-reaching changes, enter into a dramatic democratisation process. It wasn't enough just to change leaders. But the system remained rigid and totalitarian, an ironclad state apparatus.
    ‘My next-door neighbour here in the street is Mieczyslaw Rakowski, he was the last leader of the Polish Communist Party. He was the one who turned off the lights when he went out of the door in 1990. When I talk to him about it now, he says: ‘Oh, why didn't we give them more freedom? Why didn't we let them do as they pleased, with commerce, shops, permission to travel freely? We were so stupid, we wanted to arrange everything for them, everything had to be ironed smooth and tucked in tightly.’ He's right about that. Socialism is only tenable as an ideal. You can't force it down people's throats, you can't steer it. It has to come from the people themselves, the pursuit of justice, freedom, equality, brotherhood. In that context, we need to keep looking for new forms all the time. Because having only market forces, only inequality, spells disaster for the world that is now on its way.
    ‘In 1963 I asked Gomulka to release me from servitude. I went to school and studied mathematics and history, I've been a normal citizen for almost forty years now. My faith has changed to doubt. Let me tell you, my friend, politics is hard work. You must have a feeling for it, you must have a taste for it. I did it for years, but in the long run I don't really belong to that species.
    ‘When I was party overseer in Wroclaw, I used to spend whole evenings talking to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who became the first non-communist prime minister of Poland forty years later, the first one in an Eastern Bloccountry. He was a Catholic journalist and politician at the time, but we understood each other very well. He taught me that the word “religion” comes from “religio”, which means “to be attached”. You are religious if you feel attached, to the world, to people, to God. “You can't always believe,” he said. “But you can be bonded.”
    ‘I'm in my eighties now, and I've been an atheist all my life. But St Francis has always been very close to my heart. And he says the same thing: “That tree is my friend, that little dog is my friend.”
    ‘It's hard to understand everything that happens in your life. Sometimes my little dog understands better than I do.’

Chapter FIFTY
Budapest
    THE GRASS HAS BEEN MOWED. THE TREES ARE FULL OF RED APPLES. A man and a woman trudge along the road carrying pitchforks. Beside the houses lie the piles of logs, neatly stacked for the winter, heavy with the scent of resin. On a hillside two men are ploughing; one of them