The Red Army entered the country in enormous numbers, arrested Nagy, who was later executed, and set Kádár at the head of a puppet government. Around a quarter of a million people left the country for good.

Kádár spent a few bloody years arresting and liquidating those involved, before making his famous “anyone who is not against us is with us” speech. His so-called Goulash Communism allowed a secondary economy to grow, with people working in the state sector by day and for themselves by night. Gorbachev, impressed by his record, once said that his perestroika had been partly inspired by the Hungarian model.

When in 1989 the Red Star was finally removed from the tip of the Parliament building Hungary, as a result of Kádár’s measures, was not as paralysed by the emergence of a market economy as might have been expected. Budapest itself has changed with extraordinary speed over the last decade, and is now a bustling, prospering modern capital. Perhaps now, at long last, the predictions of those optimistic, excited turn-of-the-twentieth-century voices will come true: “Budapest will be a world metropolis, and crowds of people will flock from far and wide to see it”.