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...
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