The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page A

opened the way for everything that would follow,” he said, from the creation of a democratic Hungary to, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall. This brief encounter with Gorbachev, coming with the first breath of spring after a long winter, would prove to be a hidden but decisive turning point in the end of the Cold War.
    Yet Nemeth was not finished. Having accomplished his chief mission, he dropped a second bomb, in some ways even bigger than the first. He told Gorbachev that he wanted to pull Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet military alliance established as a counterweight to NATO.
    In late December, shortly before Christmas, Nemeth had been summoned to a secret meeting at the Hungarian Defense Ministry. Karoly Grosz informed him that, as the country’s new prime minister, he had to review and sign some papers. “So I went. Never will I forget that terrible day.” Military security guards met Nemeth at the gate and escorted him into the bowels of the building. A small group of senior officials awaited him, including the commanding general of Soviet forces in Hungary. There he was briefed on the threat from the West. “NATO plans to invade from Italy,” he was informed. Maps showed the likely movements of Allied and Warsaw Pact forces. Nemeth’s personal command bunker was, coincidentally, located in his native village in eastern Hungary. “Then came the really secret part,” according to Nemeth. “I was informed that nuclear warheads were stored in Hungary,” secured in bunkers in the forests around Lake Balaton, where he loved to sail. After signing some documents and a statement agreeing not to disclose the information, he left.
    Nemeth was stunned. Moscow had always denied the presence of nuclear weapons in Hungary, but they were there in “quite substantial numbers.” Nemeth broke his pledge of secrecy immediately, telling his wife and two key advisers, one of them Defense Minister Ferenc Karpati. Even then, Nemeth had planned to inform Gorbachev that he wanted Soviet troops withdrawn from Hungary. Now he included Russia’s nuclear weapons in the request. Gorbachev blinked. “I will get back to you,” he said, giving no hint of what he would decide. Both men understood that they were talking about a staggering development, as yet unimaginable in the West.
    Nemeth left the Kremlin for the airport, his feelings weirdlymixed. Elation coupled with relief, yet he felt a deep trepidation. He and his reformers had come a long way. They had just negotiated a passage that many among them had dreaded. But that only set the stage for greater dangers ahead. In the end, a meeting that was to last twenty minutes had stretched to nearly three hours.
    If Miklos Nemeth’s visit to Moscow cracked the edifice that was the Soviet bloc, another fissure opened a few weeks later in Poland, far more visibly. To the surprise of almost everyone, the Polish Round Table ended on April 7 with a historic pact. At a glittery ceremony in Warsaw’s seventeenth-century Namiestnikowski Palace, the two sides toasted one another with vodka and champagne. Both got more than they bargained for. Neither knew it.
    Solidarity had dreamed of regaining its legal standing, seven years after being outlawed under martial law. It came away not only with that, but also with the right to compete in Poland’s next parliamentary elections, just two months away. For Poles, this was breathtaking—the country’s first free elections since World War II. To be sure,
free
was a qualified term. Under the deal, Solidarity could contest only a third of the seats in the Sejm, the lower house of the national legislature; the remaining two-thirds were reserved for the communists. A new upper house, the Senate, was to be created, though its role would be confined to reviewing legislation proposed by the lower house. Key posts such as the Defense and Interior ministries would be kept by the