Despite his rather favorable image abroad, he incarnated for Hungarians the official lie at the heart of ‘goulash Communism’: that the Hungarian reform movement had been nothing but a ‘counter-revolution’. Kádár was also the living embodiment of the conspiracy of silence surrounding Imre Nagy ever since his kidnapping, secret trial and even more secret execution and burial three decades before.19 The removal of Kádár thus seemed to suggest that something fundamental had shifted in Hungarian public life—an
