ABSTRACT: Anne Losonscy is a Hungarian who personally experienced the tragedy of Budapest in 1956 because her father, Geza, was one of Nagy's ministers. In 1988 she decided to become a member of the trans-national PR. Hers could be called "love at first sight". To judge from her speech at the last Congress in Budapest, her discovery of the PR, its policies, values and methods, must have been something rather important in her life. Anne Losoncsy has not lived in Hungary since 1972, she is a naturalised Belgian, working and living in Brussels (where she is occupied with ethnology which she teaches at the University of Paris-Nanterre). She is married to a Catalan (an ex Communist which is an interesting detail). She is spending a few days in Rome together with her husband Javier Ruiz y Portella.

(Notizie Radicali no. 175 of August 14, 1989)

Q. Before speaking of her adventure with the trans-national PR, I would like Anne to tell of the circumstances which forced her as a child into exile. It will inevitably be a painful memory since it means recalling a two-year-long deportation to Romania for her and her family, but above all of the death of her father Geza who was supposed to die by hanging along with Nagy and four other ministers of his cabinet, but who died earlier as the result of a hunger strike.

A. It would be well to distinguish between two experiences that may at first sight both seem to be experiences of exile: the deportation and interment which was imposed on us, the families of Imre Nagy's cabinet in 1956, and which I as a child endured between the ages of seven and nine; the deportation to Romania and then the decision which I took at 22, the fruit of mature reflection, to leave Hungary and go to live in another country. This decision was partly due to my marriage, but I think I would have made it in any case. Thus they are two different decisions both emotionally and for what they meant.

My father was a Communist. I remember those years perfectly. I was eight years old when he died. He had been a registered member of the Hungarian Communist Party since 1939. He fought the war in Hungary as a partisan. After the liberation he was elected as a deputy to Parliament and held various public offices as a representative of the Communist Party. Then in 1949 the period of the trials started - the Rajk trial in Hungary and the Lansk trial in Czechoslovakia. He was arrested during the second trial of the so-called Hungarian "Titoists", the Kadar trial. He was convicted and liberated at the end of 1953 - I was about five years old - and rehabilitated. That was when I first met him. They introduced him to me as a stranger. Then, after that meeting which is perfectly impressed on my memory, we spent two years together, two years of extraordinary intensity, an intensity which was furthermore to be found on the outside too, in the life of the country, in the exceptional ferment of discontent, the desi

re for change, the desire for democracy which was so wide-spread in the country, an emotional intensity which I also remember between the two of us. The events of 1956 are well known, I don't presume to summarise them in a few words. What may be less well known is that we - the members of the government and their families - for reasons that would be too long to explain, fled to the Yugoslavian embassy, having been personally invited by Tito. We spent three weeks closed up in that embassy, under siege by the Soviet army and their machine-guns. After that we were forced to leave, in part because of hunger and in part because the new Kadar government, which had come to power thanks to the Soviet government, promised that the members of the Imre Nagy government would be allowed to answer freely for their actions during the fifteen days of the '56 revolution, that is to say they would not be imprisoned, and that they would then be able to return to their homes. We found ourselves in a Soviet army barracks and th

en in Romania where, to hear the official version that the Kadar government served out for world opinion, we had asked for political asylum - an absurd idea, especially since the two years we spent in Romania we were interned, surrounded by armed guards. In April 1957 we the men were sent back to Budapest, blindfolded and subjected to an infamous trial like all the trials that for a while were held in that part of the world. Some of them were executed, their names by now are known. As far as my father is concerned, he went - it seems that he went - on a hunger strike, even before the trial, which led to his death because he was force fed and the tube perforated his lungs. That is the official version, but it is the best known version of his death. It is not the only version, there are others...

Q. ...which is plausible, however. According to you...

A. Yes, its plausible. One thing is certain, however, absolutely certain - he died a violent death, in one way or another they murdered him.

Q. ...And in any case he would have been shot by a firing squad...

A. Certainly, however it went, he would have been convicted and condemned to being shot or hanged, since the others were hanged. The only one to be shot was General Maleter, the Minister of Defence.

This, in short, is the story of that experience.

On September 8 they sent us back to Budapest where we tried to take up a "normal" life again. With my grandfather still in prison (later, with the 1960 amnesty, he was released), my grandmother, my mother, and me were always three women alone.

Then came my high-school years and the university, the Department of Literature. I took my diploma in psychology and Romanian philology, after which I decided to go abroad, made this decision quite freely and without much difficulty because in the meantime I had got married, married to a foreigner who was a Communist at the time, a young Catalan Communist...

Q. ... A fact that facilitated things...

A. Certainly.

Q. ... And who is no longer a Communist...

A. (Javier Ruiz y Portella): No, not since then. I came from the anti-Franco resistance in Spain where, among other things, I was convicted. A few months in Hungary and Romania where, I worked for a Spanish Communist Party radio that sent clandestine broadcasts to Spain, were enough to make me realise that there was nothing to be done except to break with Communist theory and practice and that our only hope was to reach the West as soon as possible.

Q. Did you also become a Radical Party member?

A. (Javier Ruiz y Portella): Yes we both became members a year ago.

Q. It would be interesting to speak of the Sixties in Hungary too... You, Anne, did you mix with and have you kept in touch with Hungarian dissidents and opponents of the regime? Were you already thinking about the future of Hungary at that time with others - I don't know at what level, intellectuals perhaps, university people?

A. Of course, how could you help thinking about the future of Hungary... and of our future.

Q. How about Laszlo Rajk, just to mention one important name... did you have much contact with him...?

A. Certainly. But my relationship with Laszlo Rajk should be defined in other terms. I have known Laszlo for 35 years, we even spent our two years of internment in Romania together.

Q. Wait a moment, it would be a good idea to remind our listeners that Laszlo Rajk is the man who set up and organised the PR's Congress in Budapest...

A. ... and who also arranged the funeral ceremony in Paris as well as the one in the Square of Heroes in Budapest this year.

Q. What about your first contact with the PR. Were you already acquainted with it, had you already heard about Pannella?... During the Seventies people began talking about it in Europe...

A. We had some vague knowledge of the PR through the image of it that the mass media gave... Something folkloristic, so we didn't know it well. We had to go to to the PR's sources, read the documentation, to get past the banalities and become enthusiastic, not only for the Party's ideas, but - and this is what struck me the most personally - its style, its language, the fact of its having found a new way of making politics, at the other pole from what all or almost all of the other parties have in common.

Q. ... And maybe the PR's non-violent methods, seeing that there aren't many parties that have chosen non-violence as a tool of political struggle.

A. Certainly. Our knowledge of the PR dates back to June 16, 1988, the anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy in '58. The Hungarian Human Rights League chose that day to unveil the monument at Père Lachaise in Paris to the memory of those martyrs who had no tomb in Hungary. Père Lachaise is the main cemetery in Paris. A PR representative was there, Olivier Dupuis, who contacted me after the ceremony asking me if I were willing to be interviewed by Notizie Radicali. I said I would be, but the interview actually never took place. But in recompense he got the PR documentation to me in the French translation. We read it attentively and found it extremely close to our own ideas, our worries, on the level of means as well as ends, goals. And since it gave a picture of the party's critical financial situation and urgent calls for membership, we said let's join... it seems to me this was last November. Then the idea came up of holding the Congress in Budapest (which was extremely interesting for me in particula

r) and to which I think I made my small contribution, at least I hope so. Then I was elected to the Federal Council. So almost without noticing it I found myself working as a militant.

(Javier Ruiz y Portella): The PR Congress in Budapest was held in the same hall where I went in 1971 for the Congress of the International Federation of Communist Youth and where I met Anne who was working as an interpreter.

Q. If I have understood rightly, then, quite unwittingly you have followed a road running parallel to that of the PR. When you encountered the PR you discovered other people, organised into a political party, who were following ideals and methods rather like your own.

A. That's hard to say, especially for me, in the sense that my road was a little different from Javier's. I have never wanted - not even twenty years ago before leaving Hungary when I tried to be a little active - to join any organisation whose objective was to gain political power. For me it is a question of principle, I have never wanted to be active in an organisation of this type, and even if I was in agreement with the ends, then probably it was the means that I didn't agree with. The first time I found an organisation where the means were consonant with the ends and the tools, was one year ago when I got to know the Radical Party from close up.

Q. I have here before me your speech to the Congress. At a certain point you said:

"What connects all those who are close to this party is much more the "how" than the "what", which means that it is the respect for the tools, the means, that also determines the ends and bear the ends within themselves." It seems to me that this what we Radicals have always been saying, which is that the means determine the ends, not that they justify them, but that they foreshadow them.

A. Exactly right. If there is something I have always detested and that disgusts me deeply it is just this fundamental idea of Bolshevik ideology - and not only of its ideology - but which finds its most sinister realisation in this ideology, as it does in Nazi ideology furthermore, according to which the end justifies the means. Not only have I never accepted this ideology, but I have really loathed it on an emotional level, because I have always been convinced that the means can prejudice, destroy, or contrarily nourish the ends, and that the means are just as important, if not more important, than the ends, the objectives. I have never found the least echo of this idea in politics. As a result of this stock-taking of conscience, I decided never to become an activist except for humanitarian organisations like "Survivor" which is a branch of Amnesty International for religious and ethnic minorities, and to which I have been committing myself for years, also because of my profession of ethnologist. This, h

owever, is something quite different from political activity.

Q. I think this means that you must feel the trans-national PR to be something quite different from any other party, otherwise you couldn't have enrolled in an organisation that calls itself a "party" but which certainly has not got the traditional party forms, which is something "different".

A. I joined the PR emotionally and politically the day on which Javier explained it to me, because I am not a political animal.

Q. So it was the ex Communist who...

A. Oh yes, in our family he is doubtless the one with the clearest understanding, at once more lucid and technical, of politics. It was the day on which he translated for me, translated into my language, the language I am capable of understanding, the PR's relationship, in practise and theory, between means and ends; the way in which the PR was capable of going back on its ideas, on its own practises, with a critical sense that for me was something absolutely unheard-of, and the way this party was capable of radically putting into question - it is really necessary to say it - its very existence as soon as a break seemed to be created along the way between means and ends, in particular regarding financial problems, the problem of membership.

This capacity to reject the temptation of power, of a certain type of institutional work - this is what makes me feel at my ease in the PR.

Q. From this point of view the history of the PR is eloquent. Javier has something to add...

A. (Javier Ruiz y Portella): I wanted to say in this regard that what literally fascinated us when we saw the party documents was the public announcement of self-dissolution, clamorous and truly unheard-of. This is something from another world. Parties can die, dissolve, disappear, but not from their free choice. The fact of belonging to a party that has the courage to proclaim its self-dissolution which - thank heaven - has so far been postponed, is something entirely encouraging.

Q. Are you intending to work with the Radical activists and members in Belgium or rather with those living in Hungary?

A. Just in the last few days we have sketched out the main lines of a project with the Secretary General, or the First Secretary - I'm not sure what to call him - Sergio, and the Treasurer, a project regarding ways in which the party can become active in the processes of democratisation that are going on in Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland while respecting the trans-party principle and the idea of trans-nationality. This project, this first draft of a project is based, at least in part, on a certain commitment of mine, on an exploratory level for now, and then we will see how things go. Starting with the 200 members who exist in Hungary since last April, but also those in Poland and Yugoslavia, and with everything we have to say, do, think, and propose in these democratisation processes by way of non-violence, the United States of Europe, we will try to work with the future candidates in the first free elections that take place next year - if everything goes well - so that there are deputies connected with o

rganisations which for the time are alternative ones, but which will one day simply be in the opposition, as well as being at the same time bearers of the PR's ideals and values.

Q. Do you have contact with, do you feel close to the three non-Communist deputies elected to the Hungarian Parliament? I am thinking, among others, of the Protestant pastor that I understand was elected and put to rout the Communist candidate.

A. The non-Communist deputies elected are a part of the Democratic Forum, which is the strongest opposition force as far as membership goes. I recently joined another group, the Free Democrats, so my sympathies go primarily to the ideas advanced by this organisation. This much being said, I know personally many members of the Democratic Forum and other organisations of the opposition. I have been in contact with them, with many of them, ever since I was born. They are people who have always been part of my world and vice versa. This fact may help on the pragmatic level that the presence of the PR and Radical ideas contribute to realising what is so difficult in the context of those countries, which is a serene confrontation among the organisations of the opposition on the one hand and the Party reformers on the other.

Q. The re-founding of democracy, even more in a country like yours - is it possible by keeping rancour at a distance?

A. I believe that rancour, bitterness, wounds are always present, they have not healed, but they are all things on which politics cannot be based. I do not hide the fact that I have such feelings things towards people who are opportunists, if not downright Stalinists, and that I have an absolute and reasonable antipathy for the methods of government that this Communist Party has used for forty years. But on this basis it is not possible to construct anything for the future of this country, and that for me is something equally strong. It is not a question of forgetting anything, one cannot forget the dead, because a historical memory intact is the condition for a people's having a decent future. So do not forget, but work. To be democratic - as a Radical friend of ours would say - is not so difficult among other democrats, but to be democratic with non democrats or ex non democrats is hard, is humanly, emotionally and practically hard. But it is the price that has to be paid if blood is not to start flowing

again and if one is to build a liveable society.

Q. Javier, as a Catalan, are you in some kind of contact with people in Catalonia in Spain who have together with you chosen to create the PR there?

A. (Javier Ruiz y Portella): My contacts with Spain and Catalonia are constant and frequent, but I must confess that I have not been able to establish relations with other PR members in Spain. I cannot hide the fact that there have been problems which have prevented the work done beyond the Pyrenees from producing the hoped-for results. But I think that Catalonia presents a more specific problem because the Catalonian national question plays a leading role there. This may make it more difficult to accept a policy so openly cosmopolitan, so openly trans-national such as that of our party. Whatever the practical and political problems may be, however, I believe there is a great deal to be done in Catalonia, and it would be a good thing for the party to do its utmost down there too.

Q. Thank you Anne, and thank you Javier. Until next time then, and our best wishes for your good work in this trans-national party which is yours and ours.