Narratology: If You Have a Hungarian For a Friend...

Tucker and Viktor on Monday, photo by the Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister, via The New York Times.

Not how the old saying goes, but if you have a Hungarian for a friend, you might want to know who his other friends are.

I don't know to what extent readers are following the adventures of the wingnut brethren in Hungary, where Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been serving as a visiting fellow of the Danube Institute since spring (his substack says he went 17 April, and was about to return to the US when he last posted on 4 August, but he's also traveled around a bit in France, Spain, Romania, and Poland, I think), exuding enthusiasm for the illiberalism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, one of the politicians who emerged from the velvet revolutions of 1989, a more or less conventional, pro-Western though very conservative, leader in his first premiership from 1998 to 2002 and an increasingly authoritarian one in his second, beginning 2010, during which he has battled immigrants (especially Muslim ones), LBGTQ+ Hungarians (that's important to Rod, of course), press freedom, and George Soros and his Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation gave him a scholarship to Oxford in 1989, but he returned to Hungary to run for Parliament less than a year after starting).

On the press freedom, Rod rodsplains, in a post datelined Ljubljana (note how, for evidence, he cites himself, talking to an anonymous Slovene, reporting the authority of some anonymous Magyars without explaining what makes them authorities):

I mentioned to a conservative writer here that a couple of Hungarians told me that if Orban had not engineered the takeover of a number of Hungarian press titles by his friends and allies, there would be no conservative media presence at all in Hungary — this, even though conservative voters are a majority. Whenever you hear people on the Left demanding government intervention to guarantee “equity” — meaning equal outcomes [if I ever hear it, but I haven't so far, though I've heard talk about reviving the FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949-87 requiring individual broadcasters to represent a range of views] — remind them that that is pretty much what Viktor Orban did with the Hungarian media landscape. I should say that I have serious misgivings [sure, Rod, that's why you're defending it] about the media operation Orban pulled off, but the de facto monopoly the Left has on the media, especially in a small country like Hungary, tempers my criticism. Orban is far more realistic about the world people on the Right actually live in, I think.

Which brings us to this write-by-numbers Atlantic piece on how the 2022 election might be the last time to stop Hungary from turning into an Orban autocracy. It’s typical of the coverage you see in the Western media: no interest at all in trying to understand the nuances of the issues in play. It’s all Magyar Man Bad....

Actually there are reasons why Hungary's rank in the World Press Freedom Index has fallen from 23rd (of 178 countries) in 2010 to 92nd (of 189) today. As the US Freedom House organization reports, the Origo news outlet was bought out by Orbán supporters in 2015, and the biggest independent daily, Népszabadság, was shut down in 2016. In 2018, 476 pro-government outlets were merged into the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA) as a matter of "national strategic importance", allowing the government to exempt it from anti-monopoly laws, and in March 2020, the country's largest online news outlet, index.hu, gave up a controlling share to another Orbán crony, and in June the editor-in-chief was fired, almost the entire staff resigned, and it reopened with a completely new team.

The KESMA outlets essentially constituting a state press masquerading as an independent press kept afloat by government advertising revenue, while opposition outlets starve because advertisers fear retialiation fromt the government, as Quentin Ariés noted in a 2019 story in The Atlantic (not the 2021 one by Yasmeen Serhan that Dreher was adverting to).

Independent broadcasting too is being destroyed by the advertising ploy: 

In 2018, for instance, the pro-government broadcaster TV2 received 67% of state advertising in the television sector, while the independent RTL Klub, which has a similar audience reach, received just 1%.

But that wasn't enough, so government forced Klubradio off the air entirely last February, after all DAB+ (digital audio broadcasting) outlets in Hungary were shut down in November, basically ending independent radio altogether (though the resurrection of the Trump-killed Radio Free Europe is expected to provide some international competition). So, no. They're not "guaranteeing 'equity' meaning equal outcomes", nor are they preserving an endangered conservative media from death (endangered because nobody likes it except for the proudly "illiberal" government and an apparent majority of voters?), they're gradually putting an end to all the others, and they've nearly finished. As in Russia, rebellious intellectuals are able to find more challenging material to read, and unlike Russia, no journalists are being poisoned, or gunned down in the street, or pushed out of upper-story windows, so it's not that bad, but it's really not free.

Now we've got Mr. Tucker Carlson getting a big interview from Orbán, in which Carlson's favorite subject is discussed—I'm looking at reporting from the Washington Post:

The interview’s central feature is Carlson gushing over Orban’s virulently anti-immigrant policies and demagoguery. Orban describes these as urgent to defending national identity, defined as his country’s “population” and “culture” and “language” and “tradition” and “land,” a right of defense dictated by “God” and “nature.”

There's a kind of cult growing on the American right around this guy, and it's kind of spooky, Trumpies with a crush on him, as Ishaan Tharoor writes at WaPo, from Stephen Bannon calling him "Trump before Trump" to J.D. Vance praising him for offering financial rewards to Hungarian women for staying married and making babies—but it's mostly very, very Trumpy:

he and his allies peddle a traditionalist, ethnic nationalism and constantly sound the alarm over the rather illusory menace posed by immigrants, minorities and refugees — or “invaders,” as Orban described them — to Hungary’s way of life. Like a number of Republican state governments in the United States, Orban has sought to make Hungarian education more “patriotic.” In his attacks on various civil society institutions, Orban has been accused of invoking antisemitic tropes. The Hungarian parliament recently passed anti-LGBT legislation that prompted furious backlash elsewhere on the continent, with some European leaders calling for Hungary’s departure from the E.U. And under Orban’s watch, Hungary appears to have deployed military-grade spyware to tap the phones of independent journalists and dissidents, a slap in the face of the E.U.’s strict digital privacy protections. (Orban’s office responded to the allegations with a broad statement asserting its continued governance by “rule of law.”)

But all that's not even what I'm here to talk about. I've got some Orbán material that's totally new to me, and it has blown my mind—about Orbán and his relation to Russia, which started out, for the first 25 or so years, fairly standard Central European post-Communist, suspicious and defensive, and positive toward the West, bringing Hungary into NATO during his term (1998) and preparing for membership in the European Union (two years after the term ended, in 2004). But then, as Anastasia Kirilenko reports at the Free Russia website, something happened in the run-up to the 2010 parliamentary elections:

Suddenly in 2009, everything changed. Orban unexpectedly showed up at the “United Russia” convention in Saint Petersburg, where he met Putin.  He immediately ceased criticizing Russia, and a year later, when Orbán became the Hungarian Prime Minister, he became one of the key Putin apologists in Europe.  Whatever happened to Orbán in such a short period of time? Could it be the arrest of criminal kingpin Semion Mogilevich in Moscow, that influenced the Hungarian leader?

That's the January 2008 arrest of Mogilevich, capo of the biggest Russian mafia organization, the Solntsevskaya Bratva syndicate, on tax evasion charges, dropped in July 2009 because they were "not of a particularly grave nature" or "insufficient crime elements" as Kirilenko puts it, and she has an idea of what the real reason might be, from a 2016 book by the German investigative journalist Jürgen Roth, Schmutzige Demokratie (Dirty Democracy), which includes interview material from an exotic German businessman (and former Red Army Faction member) called Dietmar Clodo, who was working various jobs in Budapest in the 1990s, and indeed spent some time assisting Mogilevich in his money laundering operations; he was responsible for distributing bribe money buying cooperation from various Hungarian police officers and other officials. Clodo would receive suitcases full of cash from Mogilevich, and then pass the money out to Hungarian bagmen inside his apartment, where the transaction was filmed by a hidden camera (as insurance in case the bagman stole the money), and guess who one of the bagmen was?

Once in the spring of 1994, on the eve of the parliamentary elections, Mogilevich’s interpreter brought me a suitcase with almost one million Deutsche Marks. This money was supposed to be handed to a young man.  However, the young man refused to enter my home. I’ve told him: “Listen, I have the suitcase with the damn money, and I am not going to step out to the street with this cash. If you refuse to enter, I’ll give the suitcase with the million back to Mr. Mogilevich. I don’t care.”  He went up to my place with another elderly looking gentleman, and I handed over the suitcase with cash.  I didn’t care who he was. Only after the parliamentary elections I realized that the young man was Viktor Orbán from the Fidesz. (Kirilenko's translation)

Clodo's theory is that Mogilevich's 2008 arrest was essentially a shakedown operation, and that Mogilevich bought his freedom (he's been living openly in Moscow ever since, free from the danger of extradition to the US on charges of $10 billion worth of money laundering, and said by Leonid Derkach to be "very close" to Putin personally) not just with financial assets but also valuable documentation, things that Putin would be able to use as kompromat material, like, for instance, a film of young Viktor Orbán receiving an illegal payment of a million marks. Which Orbán could have learned about on the November 2009 visit to St. Petersburg during which his attitude to Russia underwent such a radical change. 

Which is not evidence, but it's great narratology, as is the immediate followup, a secret visit to Moscow by two old friends and political associates of Orbán's, Lajos Simicska and Zsolt Nyerges

to Lubyanka Square, one of the most notorious locations in the Russian capital. The large yellowish building towering over the square used to be the headquarters of the KGB, the feared Soviet secret police. Now it is the home of its successor, the FSB. Simicska and Nyerges had a meeting with a senior official of this organization.... Orbán’s allies went to meet an FSB official because the Russian secret service is often involved in state-related businesses. Sources familiar with the meeting said that no concrete deals came out of it. One source described it as an “introductory visit.” Another said that the FSB official told Simicska and Nyerges that, if they need help in business, they “can rely on Russia.”

After which, of course, Orbán duly won his election. He didn't need much, if any, outside help on that, in the wake of the Socialists' poor handling of the 2008 financial crisis, although earlier there had been, in addition, a pretty dirty trick in the form of a spectacular leak: 

The Őszöd speech (Hungarian: Őszödi beszéd) was a speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány delivered to the Hungarian Socialist Party's 2006 party congress in Balatonőszöd. Though the May congress was confidential, Gyurcsány's address was leaked and broadcast by Magyar Rádió on Sunday, 17 September 2006,^[1] igniting a nationwide political crisis.

Liberally using vulgar language, Gyurcsány criticized the Socialist Party (MSZP) for misleading the electorate and said that its coalition government had enacted no significant measures over its tenure. The mass protests the speech's release precipitated are considered a major turning point in Hungary's post-communist political history. MSZP's inability to contain the speech's political fallout led to the popular collapse of MSZP and, more broadly considered, of the Hungarian political left, paving the way for Fidesz's supermajority victory in the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections.

Could that have been engineered on behalf of Fidesz by Russians? Gyurcsány himself remarked, obliquely, ten years later in 2016,

Experts say that today around 600-800 people in Hungary are definitely working for the KGB [i.e., FSB] in some capacity. This is not a small number. And their capacity is such that if they want to listen in on our phone calls, they can do it. If they want to know where we’re going and when, who we’re having dinner with and what we’re talking about, they can find out. I think that this coterie exerts a substantial influence on the world of Jobbik [the explicitly fascist party] and Fidesz.

OK, enough. What I'm looking to do is to illustrate how the fuzzy relationship between Putin and the illiberal political forces of Central and Western Europe, and the equally fuzzy relationship between Putin and Russian organized crime, sometimes harden into remarkable focus in the same way as we might think they do in the United States, where the Trump-Mogilevich relationship (mediated through Felix Sater, the son of a Mogilevich underboss) long preceded Trump's relations with Putin, and persisted through Trump's presidency (Dmytro Firtash, a Giuliani associate central figure in the Ukraine matter over which Trump was impeached, is a Mogilevich man, while Andrii Derkach, FSB in his own right, is also an associate of Mogilevich through his father, Leonid Derkach, who is in turn tied to Oleg Deripaska and hence Konstantin Kilimnik, FSB and GRU, and Paul Manafort, and to the Alfa Bank).

It's conspiracy theorizing to suggest that these intermeshed criminal and political forces are designing what happens, in Hungary or in the US, and people like Orbán and Trump simply their puppets, consciously or unconsciously carrying out their plans. But it's not conspiracy theorizing to imagine them hovering around, looking for opportunities to exploit and profit from; that's what organized crime does.

Idiots like Dreher and Carlson, Vance, and so on, meanwhile, likely have little sense of the forces that they are playing with on their Hungarian junkets, and it's not likely to get them in any trouble anyway, but they are certainly being used. It's the rest of us, with the institutions of democracy, that suffer.