It is a curious fact that Hungary – which has always possessed a deeply conservative culture – continues to avidly celebrate a number of its revolutionary moments, especially those that caught the world’s attention. The first of these came in March 1848 when Hungarians revolted against Habsburg centralisation, ushered in an era first of reform and then of brutal warfare, and turned their leaders, notably Lajos Kossuth, into international celebrities. The second came in October 1956 when Hungarians revolted against the Stalinist regime, exposed the lie that communism had popular support, and were celebrated by Time magazine which made the (anonymous) ‘Hungarian freedom fighter’ its ‘Man of the Year’. The third revolutionary moment arrived during the long summer of 1989 when a series of astonishing news stories from Hungary captured the world’s attention as the country dismantled the first piece of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that had imprisoned most of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe within the communist dictatorships.

That process of reform bore its first fruits on 2 May when, ostensibly for financial reasons, reform-minded communist politicians in Budapest obtained Moscow’s approval to de-electrify the border fence with Austria. Initially, only Hungarian nationals were allowed to travel to ‘the West’, mostly on day-trips to go shopping, but on 11 September 1989 the entire border was opened to anyone travelling through Hungary. That led to a wave of pressure on other communist countries to open their own borders, culminating, on 9 November, with the East German border guards allowing the crowds to cross the Berlin Wall – the symbolic moment when communism visibly began imploding in Central Europe.

As Matthew Longo persuasively argues in this gripping account of how the Hungarian border was opened, a key precursor to the events of November 1989 came in the August that preceded it. On the afternoon of 19 August, a group of Hungarian activists took advantage of the liberalising atmosphere to hold a ‘Pan-European Picnic’ near the town of Sopron in the far west of the country. The plan was for Hungarians and Austrians living on both sides of the border to meet for food, drink and speeches as they symbolically cut open another section of the hated fence that they would then take home as souvenirs. In the resulting chaos up to 1,000 East Germans barged across the border. When again the USSR raised no objection, the Hungarian government felt confident enough to open the border to tens of thousands of other East Germans holidaying in the country, which unleashed the pressure for similar reforms across the entire Eastern Bloc.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Thomas Lorman is a lecturer in Central European History at UCL.