In memoriam: Gáspár Miklós Tamás

Gáspár Miklós Tamás (aka TGM, or Gazsi to friends) is being remembered in his many facets: essayist, liberal dissident, Tory anarchist and even in one case as “intellectual rock star.” But I knew him as a communist revolutionary. Almost in the image of protagonists of the Victor Serge novels he had read when young: blazing at the inept and corrupt ruling classes, agitating at rallies, surrounded by papers and books, insatiably curious, and – unlike most rock stars, even of the intellectual sort – blacklisted by employers, hounded by the security services, and struggling to make ends meet. I say “almost” because he grew into this role late in life and because in his world, whether Gheorghiu-Dej’s Romania or Orbán’s Hungary, bands of comrades operating within mass workers’ movements were absent. His arrival at revolutionary Marxism was individual and circuitous. Tamás was born in mid-century, a historical breakpoint. The insurgent and internationalist struggles of 1917-23 were receding in memory, and “Communist” states were being constructed on the Stalin model. In the earlier era his parents had been incarcerated as communists. They remained party members after the war, yet “Communism” was also their enemy, and the feeling was mutual – most evidently when his father was sacked from his position in the Hungarian State Theatre. His communist parents, Tamás would joke, had given him an impeccably anti-communist education. Tamás lived across that communist fault-line and also across borders. He was foreign as a Hungarian (in Romania) and as Romanian-born (in Hungary); his identities included half Jewish, lapsed Calvinist, and atheist. His experience of class was multi-layered, with working-class friends, peasant cousins, and his father in a comfortable middle-class position until defenestrated. As a child he devoured books omnivorously, with parents and their milieu providing continual encouragement – and all under a regime that, notwithstanding its thuggery, did foster mass literacy and high culture. These were some ingredients of his brilliance, but so too was his ability to know intimately a range of ideological camps, having pitched his tent in several. In 1978 Tamás was booted out of Romania for criticizing the Ceauşescu regime’s antiMagyar policies. This act, though brutish, may have done him a favour as he dodged the worst of the Ceauşescu period and was able, in Budapest, to devote his energies to democratic change: petitioning in solidarity with Charter 77, speaking at rallies, and defying the regime to arrest him for attempting to stand in an election. Even in goulash state capitalism, being a dissident meant job insecurity and occasional violence from the cops. (He was once shielded from a police beating by a fellow activist, Viktor Orbán. It’s an image that elicits mixed emotions.)