This is John Batchel, conversation with the author Matthew Longo, his book The Picnic,

A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain, 1989.

Matthew very carefully establishes the outside-the-box thinking that was possible for the young people

at the time in Hungary and behind the iron curtain.

They dreamed of being free.

They dreamed of celebrating freedom.

They couldn't escape, but they could do it at the iron curtain itself, right at the curtain.

And that becomes the predicate for an amazing conduct of young

people as the iron curtain fell down between 89 and 91. People were free in their minds and then they

were free in person. Difficult to recapture that joy here many decades later

when all Europe is at each other's throats, including Hungary.

And Russia is again the aggressor, the predator, the predicate for fear.

But this is the moment in 89 when young people imagine being free,

imagine celebrating freedom. Matthew Longo, much more of this later tonight. Party.

Yeah, fantastic. So we're now in late June 1989 in Debrezen, right? So these two things that John's

referring to this is June 20th is the beginning of this idea, and then June 30th starts to form.

To understand and to appreciate the whole context, one has to completely change their register

of thinking. We're no longer dealing with elites, right? This is no longer

Nemet and Gorbachev and Chichescu names that we know, very high-powered political figures.

We're now out in the borderlands. To give me an idea of where Debrzen is, Debrzen is a, you know,

a 20-minute drive from the edge of what it was then the Soviet Union, right? So now it's

Ukraine. It's absolutely at the edge of the Romanian border and the now Ukrainian, then-Soviet

...