This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchew with Matthew Longo. The professor is the author of the new book, The Picnic, a dream of freedom in the collapse of the Iron Curtain. It is late June, 1989. Several months have gone by since the meeting with Gorbachev. Prior to the Warsaw Pact meeting, we're in a city, the second most populous city in Hungary,

I learned, Debritsen.

Fad Habsburg is in the room, a man who is part of the European Parliament, but he's

addressing a gathering of young people in a party that sees itself as

opposition to the Communist Party dominating conversation. He inspires the people in that room,

and one of them is Naji. And several days later, people in Debertson will say, we must do something.

We must act in a fashion that is consistent with our wish to be free.

And a young woman named Maria speaks up with a plan, and the plan is to hold a party.

Help me understand, Matt.

I don't know the geography.

How far is Debritson from the border?

And how is it that Maria comes to understand that is the soft place for the party?

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

And the people we're talking about are just kids, right?

I mean, they're either late 20s, let's say, some of even early 30s, but they're people who are young, the two main actress, so Ferenz and Maria, these two figures, begin to hatch this idea that, you know what, we can talk about issues. We can do something radical and strange,

because they're at a moment of their lives when, in a way, changes all they can look forward to.

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