Rural Hungary, former Hungarian-Romanian border
Outside Gyula
“I can tell you, you are not a particularly easy man to find.” smiled the reporter as he walked up the gravel foot path from the road, where a several decades old blue sedan sat parked by the road. In the shade of the veranda out front of an old log-cut farm house a middle-aged man in a wide brimmed hat and casual working slacks with the neck cut in a V leaned in his chair and smiled, showing his white teeth in a wide warm grin as he sat up to greet the foreign visitor.
The foreigner, middle height and with an average build was a blonde man with a wide inquisitive stare. His blue eyes scanned the professorial man ahead of him. A camera hung by the foreigner's strap on his neck and a tablet computer dangled in a case slung over his shoulder.
“It is not so much I make myself hard to find, but I don't play up my importance.” the man on the porch said with a smile, meeting his guest at the steps. “Daniel Halverston I presume? Your accent, you must be an American?” he guessed.
“Friends call me Dan.” Daniel said, reaching the steps and taking the man's hands in a gentile handshake. “Washington Post. You must be Ignac Kovichkas?”
Ignac nodded his head. He held a face as gentile as the handshake he had given the American reporter before him. Long and with the warmth of a good uncle. His cheeks were shallow, but it was more an effect of his wide cheekbones. His hair was thinning at fifty, and fell from under his hat in thin wisps. “That I am.” he said, “Signed and sealed member of the Gyula Union of Farmers, elected delegate to the Budapest assembly. A father of the revolution.”
“An honor.” Dan said, with a nervous smile. He scanned the front porch and asked nervously, “Where do you want to sit?”
Ignac smiled softly. “Well, the weather is warm. I would like to stay outside to enjoy the summer's warmth.”
“I can agree to that.” Dan complied, finding an empty wicker chair on the porch and sliding it closer to his subject.”
“So...” the American journalist began to trail, “I'm not frankly sure how to start this. To be completely honest with you: I was expecting something different from this interview. And someone more...”
“Military?” Ignac preemptively finished, crossing his hands in his lap. He leaned to the side and leveled a still measuring stare on the journalist, sizing him up.
“I suppose.” Dan said, flustered. He fished around in his computer case and produced his tablet computer. He smiled awkwardly as he turned it on, and nervously waited for it to turn on, unspeaking.
“I suppose that would be a fair assumption to make.” Ignac said in a dry, low voice, “Because of course: of all the revolutions had in the world in the last century and a half how many have been commanded by men no more common then the student, professor, or community leader? In all the rules and assumptions of revolution and government: the correct assumption would have been that I was a general in the old army.”
“Yes, I uh- I guess so.” Dan said. Ignac nodded.
“So... You realize how rare and uncommon a type of person you are?” Dan asked, his computer booted up, “I hope this isn't a bad ice-breaker.”
Ignac rose a hand in the air, and calmly dismissed his concerns, “No such thing.” he laughed, “There's is no point in being in free air if you can not speak as freely in it. I realize some might take offense, but I'm not going to take on that sort of role.”
“But comparatively speaking,” Ignac continued in a cracking voice, he cleared his throat. Dan began to translate his words to type, “That the differences between myself and your revolutionary fathers are not that different.” he proposed, “You had your military leaders and some career politicians but that is something that goes understood in these situations; your George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons are understood keystone figures. But I might call myself as something like the 21st century Henry Knox. A man who by no birth or prior training in the field that he became respected in rising to fill that post purely by the need to be filled for his people, by his people, and per the circumstances of the time.”
“Against the backdrop of the twentieth and twenty-first century, I can see why this is taken in astonishment.” he continued, “There has been a dire lack of revolution among the common man, for the common man, as lead by the common man.”
“It is unusual then, you might agree then that a sudden Communist revolution in Europe is something out of place and time?” Dan continued to pry, then adding apologetically, “Sorry if I'm being a bit, uh... hasty in this.”
Again, Ignac leveled his apologies, “You're doing well enough.” he laughed, “But to answer the question: is Fascism too making a resurgence in these passed twenty, thirty, or forty years unusual in itself? It would have seemed that after the Second World War the forces of fascism would have died away. As would had monarchist movements in East Asia and even your own home-country. So for a country to go Communist again, or for the first-time Anarchist even doesn't seem to be too far out of the ordinary.
“But, the factors at fault that lead to this situation here today go back some time.” Ignac continued, “The resurgent Russian since two-thousand-fifteen or sixteen and on into the twenties, committing its abuses through Europe and the broader world because Fascism fit its international policy. Fascism and ultra-nationalist disunified the peoples of Europe and the broader world by sewing fear and mistrust between so many parties that no international body could have been leveled against Russia to check it.
“But understanding this, it must be said that in such a period where the people's voice and privileges were revoked and so much power so quickly investing itself in the upper echelons - the bourgeoisie – during the war that the Russians caused in their meddling was doomed from the start to attract ire and mistrust from the people the State abused as pawns – all of us their pawns – would write the inevitable call for freedom, equality, and democratic rule again.
“And I feel I must address this for your readers back home, should they ever will change for themselves and their people: communism is not oppression. Anarchism is not loss of control. Both are control, where the people of the broader community of which you live – the neighborhood, the town, the village – all seizes and holds equally the control of government. And in this: we all hold in our equal labors the weight, rewards, and liberation of state and of manufacture.”
“I-I see.” Dan stuttered, “I suppose you've had a, uh, lot of people on you about that?”
“Time to time. But never personally.” Ignac dismissed, “Most often it's the dismissive attitudes of people who look at history through the lens of authoritarian leaders. But this sort of history is written only as political statement to protect in present and future a cult of personality. This level of reading and observation is – I personally feel – detrimental to liberty.”
Dan cut in, “That's fine, but for my paper I would have rather like to write a personal story of the leader – or the leader – of the revolution here in Hungary and not a political manifesto.” he laughed nervously, “But I guess I know why you take pains in being hard to identify.”
“Yes, yes. I'm sorry.” Ignac said with a sigh, “It's a habit of mine, after so many years of protesting, proselytizing, and fighting for what I believe is right and what so many others feel it's not hard to shake it.”
Dan shifted in his chair, and tugged at the collar of his shirt. He paused for several moments, finding the question as he looked about. Ignac was not a man who lived like a king. His house was simple, a small family home for a farmer. Beyond the cut grass of his lawn and on the far side of a bushy berm of overgrowth an orchard grew in a far-field, from whence came the smells of ripening plums on the soft summer breeze. How unusual, he thought, that a man such as this, who could have been the new Mao, Lenin, or Castro of the modern times given up on any pretense of glorified riches.
“I suppose...” he started, “How and why?” he looked across at Ignac who regarded him with a patient and thinking stare. His eyes lit up and he nodded softly.
“Why anything?” he asked.
“I don't know, you tell me.” responded Dan.
Ignac smiled. He saw in the American a young man who went out trying to find the story that would define his career going ahead, the man who interviewed one of the latest great revolutionary leaders in the contemporary world. But he had been disarmed coming to him, he lost his sense of expectation and he could tell that this had left Dan lost. “Well, I guess like any young man who spent his life wanting some great change.” he said musingly.
“I was born here, or rather, over in town – Gyula – 2015.” he began, “I had a working class up-bringing, my grandparents had come to live in Gyula seeking an urban life without the big city during the later chapters of the Cold War. My parents remained, and when the Iron Curtain fell they in their own respective ways worked first in the various jobs fields. My Mom worked at the hot-spring resort, my father was doing warehousing work. I came into the world at the bottom rung of society as it were. But I was also the first to go to college.
“And education and moving through the class structure of the world then, you see some things and you become aware. I was eventually introduced to the likes of Peter Kropotkin during my studies and began to read voraciously, what I couldn't in books I did so online. This was at the time in Budapest as well.
“Now this is an all well and good origin story: but I suppose it doesn't really answer the 'why'.” Ignac said flatly.
“Well I suppose it does depending on the reader...” Dan said, trailing off as he typed away on his tablet, catching up with Ignac's story, “But to turn radical, would that have been you as a student, or something else?”
“Not hardly.” Ignac dismissed with a passive smile, “Though at about this point I would have described myself as a voting follower and member of the socialist party. But what got to me, like so many others was the effective coup in government during the Third World War when Russian sympathizers were forced into power and the country went from fighting the Russians, to fighting for them.
“This shocked me, and I wondered how it could have happened. Seemingly over night with mid-war elections the country went from one state to another, and paranoia and hate for others became bitterly defining. Muslims, Gypsies, Germans, Jews: these were our enemies, the Russians now were here to help define our national identity and disagreement or arguing it was considered treason. I was one of the first to be arrested, and I was imprisoned for nearly fifteen years.
“That was my coming around to radical anarchism. The final piece that drove me to despise authoritarian government. A government that punishes its citizens for crying out at the abuses against them should not be allowed to live: it was too as I believed the model of government that lead us to war. Not for nationalism, but for the egocentric greed and pride of ruling men, and their active punishment of anyone saying otherwise to protect themselves in their bubble.
“The real government should have been what it was before, but so much more I believed. And to paraphrase the martyrs in the 1956 Uprising, that I did not want to see the country return to the era of barons and kings, never mind bankers and capitalists.
“Eventually, they set me free; I kept my head low, I was a nobody then. But when I got out I got work.”
“And what was that work?” Dan asked.
“Well, what you see before you!” Ignac declared, with a chuckle, “I went home to my friends, my family, and my community and began asking people what they wanted not as a country but as a community. I knew little of what else was happening elsewhere in similar circumstances, but as with those cliques the reach of opposition was being spread. The same sort of perfect harmony that lead to the '56 Uprising, the downtrodden many thinking, feeling, and speaking to each other about their fears and worries as slowly the new regime worked the very citizens of the country out of their rightful, soul defining labors and land in favor of the elites and a distracted, entitled middle-class.”
“Hold up,” Dan interjected, “What do you mean by 'distracted, entitled middle-class'?”
“The sorts of people who went to college abroad or studied technical fields at home so they could stay relevant as a work-force.” Ignac said, “They weren't bad-people as a whole, but were dependent on the new Oligarchs, who put them in charge of maintaining factories, running the trains, and all the many many fields of an aggressive machine. For many of the people already poor, incompatible to the new face of the economy – too unskilled, not competitive enough, too old, too young, or not Hungarian enough – this was a death sentence to their purpose in life. No one wants a hand-out, even around here we like to think we earn what we got. But we were being forced out of relevancy.”
Ignac leaned back and smiled for a moment. And with a light airy laugh he said, “Some types were talking about how a science-fiction dystopia was being fulfilled,” he chuckled, “That even some time in the future the oligarchs will set aside the middle-class as readily as the good workers of the country because by some future technological development they're no longer relevant; self-programming computers and robots and all that. And the human race would be looking at itself across a chasm that could not be spanned, and the few entitled elites who stood pretty on the other side scorned up and made no serious move to enable the rest of civilization behind. They would have become gods.
“But now... Now we all have that equal shot for god-hood.”
