The presence of Soviet troops in Hungary was of course illegal. The Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, which ended the war, required them to be withdrawn from our country, and although the treaty allowed for the necessary number of soldiers to remain here to ‘maintain the lines of supply’, there were obviously many more than that. The ‘legalisation’ of the presence of the Soviet forces that crushed the 1956 revolution was carried out by the new, collaborationist Kádár government in 1957.
The events of the 1990s are becoming part of history everywhere, including in Hungarian politics. It has been a quarter century since Viktor Orbán formed his first administration in 1998, which was then followed by four more after 2010.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.