What were people hoping from him? Did they want to restore him to his position?

Yes, they were demanding he came back as Prime Minister and other reformers around him as well, and the hardline government that they'd had to be replaced.

It's left the Soviets in Moscow in a difficult situation.

What will they do? The demonstration by now and the violence that had erupted at the...

at the radio, started started violence elsewhere and demonstrations elsewhere including the demolition of a huge statue of Stalin that had been in a very very central position in downtown Budapest and there were demonstrations all over the city by this stage way beyond what the local police authorities could deal with so the Soviets So they agreed, reluctantly, but agreed to let the Hungarian...

At this point, there were nearly 200,000 Russian troops still occupying Hungary.

So they let the Russian troops try and suppress the...

What happened in the pool that day and what did the match mean to the Hungarian players?

Right

... having been a very stuffy atmosphere to anything goes happened with a remarkable suddenness.

There were, there were the beginnings of kind of modernism in, in various art, art movements before.

But really, they, they were confined to tiny bits of, of, of the avant-garde in Berlin.

It didn't s- get into the, into the mainstream.

And what the far right did was sh- was, was, um, was pick up on this so much as yet another thing that the cultural elites in, in, in, in Berlin and, and, and the other big cities, um, were forcing down upon us and, um, it was changing, changing everything.

And to some extent, yes, the, um, artists were guilty, but they didn't consider themselves as, um, uh, as a movement.

Right

Wearing a wig.

Wearing a wig and shaving his beard.

to try and force the Bolsheviks to actually seize power.

He picked the date it would be, and it was when there was going to be this Congress of Soviets.

So he said it had to be in the middle of October, towards the end of October.

And at first, lots of dramatic moments in history when history's changed and, you know, on the barricades or on the battlefield or whatever, but actually quite often history's changed in committee rooms.

And he, overnight in an apartment block in Petrograd, He gets them all, literally by candlelight, to force them to vote on an agreement on one particular day that they were actually going to go for it and seize the power.

This is

to a constituent assembly.

Lenin never wanted those elections, but he thought he had to go through with them because he didn't believe in bourgeois democracy.

His version of the Soviets was his version of democracy.

And then finally met in January 1918, and he allowed it to remain open for 13 hours before closing.

And it didn't open again.

There wasn't a free parliament to come for 75 years.

But we should be under no illusions.

This

Wearing a wig

... wearing a wig and shaving his beard to try and force the Bolsheviks to actually seize power at one, you know...

He picked the date it would be, and it was when there was gonna be this Congress of Soviets, so he said it had to be in the middle of October, towards the end of October.

And at first, lots of dramatic moments in history when history's changed and, you know, on the barricades or on the battlefield or whatever, but actually quite often history's changed in committee rooms.

And he overnight, uh, in a apartment block in Petrograd, he gets them all literally by candlelight to force them to vote on an agreement on one particular day that they were gonna s- they were actually going to go for it and seize, seize the power.

All kinds, uh, he was in the minority to start with that night.

Overnight, he kind of bullied and threatened to resign, all kinds of things, and used clever arguments as well.

... and chance.

Tell me about the role of communism in the early Weimar Republic.

Well, there was...

In the early, there was an attempt after the first German revolution that got rid of the emperor, the Kaiser, was largely liberals and social democrats.

But, of course, there was a strong communist party, the Spartacist led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, principally.

And they were financed strongly and supported by the Russians.

It was an arm.

The German Communist Party was tiny on its own, but with the support of the Russians, it became bigger and more significant.

Were the Versailles reparations justified or did they just hand the German right a propaganda victory?

Victor knew him decades ago.

His story is full of ironies.

I asked him once, quite late at night in a bar, "Okay, all of this communism's gonna go.

What are your hopes for Hungary later on, uh, when that happens?" He said, "Oh, I want it to be a, a boring country just like Austria or Sweden." He always used to say that what he admired in Western Europe was the free press.

[upbeat music] How did this happen? Who is the challenger ahead of Orbán in the polls? And why should any of us care?

Hungary's this tiny landlocked nation of 9 million people that's really unimportant, yet everyone's heard of Viktor Orbán because he's the poster boy for the far right.

He's the poster boy for this populism.

And I think if he loses, that will send a message way beyond the significance of what happens in Hungary.