Feature

Rocking Behind the Iron Curtain

“Someone asked me recently, ‘Do you really think that rock and roll brought down the Iron Curtain?’ And I said no, because it was pulled down by the efforts of government and people on both sides. But I do believe that rock and roll played a key role.”

András Simonyi, now Hungary’s ambassador to the United States, was four years old when Russian tanks rolled down the streets of Budapest in 1956. A few years later, he moved with his father, a trade representative, to live in Denmark. Here he experienced life in much the same way as any young man growing up in the 1960s in the affluent West. 

But in his early teens he moved back to Budapest. “At that time it was a tough, dark and gloomy place, especially for me who’d got used to freedom--freedom in the way I dressed, in the way I talked to people. . . .” One thing that he especially missed was the music he had become enamored of in Denmark, the 1960s rock and pop which was beginning to boom in--and out of--the United States and the U.K. 


Music from the Free World

“The music that I thought so much of was simply not available in Hungary.” An old Bakelite radio that András and his brother received from their father became a precious link to life beyond the Iron Curtain. “Listening to that music at night . . . kept us sane and kind of made us part of the free world,” he says. “We were suddenly out of our bodies, and our soul was part of the free world.” 

Simonyi continues: “It is not as if all songs or works of art need to have a ‘Message,’ with a capital M. . . . Hungarians didn’t understand the lyrics. . . . It was not the text but the power of music, the power of a couple of guys standing on stage with a Stratocaster, with a Fender bass, a drummer playing a Gretsch drum set. . . . Music was the most powerful instrument to convey the message to my generation about the free world.” 

Simonyi believes that music and the arts do affect political processes. He points out that after Pink Floyd’s epic “The Wall,” young people looked at totalitarian regimes everywhere--including in Hungary--in quite a different light. 

When movements for greater freedom began in the Eastern bloc, those driving the initiative, Simonyi observes, were those of the generation reared on rock music from the West--his generation. 

It was “the guys who had grown up on this music that slowly began to infiltrate the ranks of power. And I seriously believe they opened us to the world. They were the ones with whom I had spent so many years walking around Budapest, talking about this music, and talking about us being part of the free world.”

When the Human Rights Now! world tour brought top musicians to perform in communist countries such as Hungary in 1988, Simonyi realized that it heralded a major turning point. “That was the year when I knew the Wall will be torn down and we will put an end to the Cold War.

“Rock is not a commercial success--rock is a cultural success. It kept millions going. . . . [It] went through the airwaves and through the Iron Curtain, it went through the Berlin Wall. It was a bridge.”


Universal Appeal

Reflecting on the nature of this bridge, Simonyi says, “Rock and roll music is a universal language. It’s easy to embrace. It speaks to the people, to the man on the street in Budapest, Warsaw or New York.” 

And asked if rock music is imperialistic, he firmly disagrees. “Mozart used to belong to the Austrians. Does anyone ask now where Mozart came from? You couldn’t care less. This music belongs to all of us. It is a glue. Rock is about freedom, rock is believing in our own freedom and the right to freedom of others.”

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