Catharsis In Hungary

A pyramid of funeral wreaths lay beside the wooden coffins in Heroes' Square. There, last week, more than 200,000 mourners gathered in downtown Budapest to bury the Stalinist ghost in Hungarian history. Church bells tolled, and the people sang the Szozat, the emotionally charged hymn of the nation's repeated triumphs over foreign domination.

It was a proper tribute for Imre Nagy. He was Hungary's Prime Minister in 1956, when Soviet tanks stormed into Budapest to crush the tumultuous uprising that for a moment seemed to promise freedom and democracy in one of Moscow's East European satellites. Nagy and four of his top aides were executed in 1958 after a secret trial and buried in an unmarked grave. Earlier this year, their bodies were exhumed for a formal, cathartic reburial. "Never again should such a terror occur," Miklos Vasarhelyi, Nagy's former press secretary, told the crowd. "We hereby close once and for all a tragic, painful epoch to be able to open a new page in the history of our nation."

After the speeches, the coffins were reinterred in the Rakoskeresztur cemetery in the same plot from which they had been exhumed. A sixth coffin was lowered empty into the ground in symbolic memory of more than 200 other Hungarians who were executed in the terror that followed the uprising.