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On Tuesday the Director of the Institute for the Research of Communism told Hungarian news agency MTI that Hungary’s last prince primate József Mindszenty and brave heroes like him overthrew the rule of the communists while declaring that they were not afraid of it.

Rajmund Fekete was the only Hungarian invited to speak in the Latvian capital of Riga at a conference in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The conference, entitled “Living under a Totalitarian Regime: Conceptual Approaches to Collaboration and Resistance”, was attended by researchers from Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Germany.

He explained that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are unique in having experienced, from 1939 to 1991, both the totalitarian dictatorships of Nazism and communism, as well as the genocide and terror that accompanied them. These countries lost their sovereignty, their populations were oppressed and exploited, and totalitarian power caused people to be “divided into friends and enemies on the basis of race or class”, he said.

According to Mr. Fekete, the Riga conference showed that at the same time this shared historical experience increases the chances for mutual understanding and a sense of collective identity among the countries concerned.

In his presentation he discussed the relationship between religion and communism, noting that there are worrying trends taking root in the present that were in vogue under communism: “Belief in God is seen as ridiculous, the nation as obsolete, history as at an end, the family as irrelevant and gender as interchangeable.”

He described these trends as “an attempt to redefine identities, in the same way that communism did, [which] promised a new identity, a new type of man.”

He also pointed out that communism presented itself as the custodian of the one true and incontestable faith. At this point, he quoted the Széchenyi Prize-winning historian Mária Schmidt, Director-General of the House of Terror Museum, who has said that “Communism was also a religion. There was a bible: Das Kapital, by Marx. Its sacred texts were the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Its catechism was The Communist Manifesto.”

Mr. Fekete went on to say that communism persecuted, broke and made life impossible for churches, believers, priests and pastors, “so that in the end they could be completely eliminated”. In his presentation he said that the communist dictatorship had mobilised enormous forces to break Joseph Mindszenty, but had failed.

He observed that József Mindszenty became the conscience of Hungary despite the enormous suffering he had to endure, and added that the martyrdom of the Prince Primate proved that an anti-religious attitude will sooner or later become an anti-human attitude.

At the same time, he said that Mindszenty’s “courage, his loyalty to the nation [...] are an example to us all that resisting evil is a duty.” In his presentation Mr. Fekete showed how the resistance of the head of the Catholic Church had become a kind of national resistance, and how it had strengthened national consciousness.