Hungry for Putin

Twenty Five years ago Hungary (now an EU and NATO member) followed Poland's lead in the victory over communism.

The three term Prime Minister, Viktor Orban who fought for freedom in the late 1980s calling for free elections and a demand that 80,000 Soviet troops go home is now kissing up to Russia.

What was once a triumph of democratic capitalism is eroding into a much more complex tale of a country and a leader who have come to question Western values, and look more openly at Russia as a model.

Not all Hungarians are on-board. Recently protesters stopped a planned Internet tax waving flags with the likenesses of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a rally in Budapest.

Soviet tanks roll in Hungary - 1956

Orban is rapidly centralizing power, raising a crop of crony oligarchs, cracking down on dissents, expanding ties with Moscow and generally drawing uneasy comparisons from Western leaders and internal opponents to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“He is the only Putinist governing in the European Union,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister.

Some other Eastern European countries, especially Poland, have remained oriented toward the West and still harbor deep suspicions of Russia long after the Cold War ended.


 In a speech this summer, Mr. Orban declared liberal democracy to be in  decline and praised authoritarian “illiberal democracies” in Turkey, China,  Singapore and Russia.

 Hungary, he said, will be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have  been adopted by the West” and will instead build a “new Hungarian state”  that will be “competitive in the great global race for decades to come.”

 As recently as 2008, Mr. Orban was a fierce critic of Mr. Putin. But the tone  has changed, and the two have grown friendly, with Russia investing heavily  in Hungary.


Nonetheless, foreign criticism is mounting. When President Obama recently listed states that are silencing civil society groups, Hungary was the only European country named. Washington has barred six unidentified public officials, deeming them too corrupt to enter the United States.


The book above Youth and the State in Hungary takes as its focus the nature of Hungary's youth movements over the last seventy years. In a detailed ethnographic study, Laszlo Kurti examines the lives of youth workers in the Csepel district of Budapest in the context of the wider political and economic transformations witnessed during the twentieth century. Nevertheless there remains a genuine space for resistance and consternation in the reproduction of youth culture.