If you create an organisation like the MSZMP (Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party), a body that attracted the most ruthless freebooters, the most morally depleted individuals, the most hardened opportunists, it should be no surprise that when an opportunity for enrichment and goodies came along, they would snatch it.

By 1989, the more intelligent, younger communists were tired of ill-fitting suits and not having holidays in the Bahamas, of not being cool. Encouraged by the West, they sold out. They sold out because they had never taken communism seriously, because they genuinely didn't understand how disliked they were and they thought they could win free elections and because they wanted the custard from the West, especially that bit of the West called Germany.

So 1989 was a year when the Hungarians were repeatedly scared by their daring. At Imre Nagy's reburial in June, the 26-year-old Viktor Orbán famously called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Hair turned white. Women fainted. A few months later, the communists themselves were insisting on the departure. (As a footnote, Sándor Rácz, who had courageously led the Workers' Councils after the revolution in 1956, who was jailed and generally handed a truly shitty life, also called for Soviet withdrawal that day, but because he was old, working-class and didn't speak English, the Western media didn't pay any attention to him.)

After Sopronpuszta, East German citizen Kurt Schulz became what is generally billed as the last victim of the Iron Curtain, when he was shot by Hungarian border guards days later. It's all about timing. On 10 September, it was officially announced: the Ossies could leave for the West if they wanted.