Erasing 1956: Hungary’s collective memory of war

My Hungarian grandmother’s perception and history of Russia is not academic, but rather an empirical and firsthand account of history. She lived through the Second World War, a period which to her meant the beginning of a new type of occupation and repression. She has tragic stories of the arrival of the Soviets and how they confiscated the belongings and properties of her family, and of the fear that the post-war period brought. Her anti-Soviet sentiments became even more profound during 1956, when the Hungarians stood up against oppression and fought to achieve independence, which was later brutally suppressed by the Soviet Union.

For my entire life, she has been a living collection of this trauma. Her anti-Soviet, and by extension, anti-Russian sentiment was not a political view—it had been a core part of her identity. 

That is why one of our conversations I had with her over the summer of 2024, shocked me to my core. 

We were talking about the Ukraine-Russia War, and I was expecting to hear another story about life under Soviet rule. Instead, for the first time in her life, she paused. Her voice started to echo the messages of the state-run radio she listens to every day. Ultimately, the historical victim was blaming the current one. 

How can decades of lived personal trauma be neutralized, or even reversed, so effectively by two years of constant media exposure? We will try to find an answer to this question by analysing the landscape of the Hungarian media and the messages they broadcast.

European standard for support: Similarity or difference?

Since the outbreak of Russia’s unjustified and unlawful war on Ukraine in 2022, the public perception of the war has been relatively stable within the boundaries of the European Union. In the same year that Russia launched the attack, almost 75% of the European population, in a European Council on Foreign Relations poll, identified Russia as the aggressor and Ukraine as the victim. Other polls showed the same level of support towards Ukraine, but there have always been multiple ‘black sheep’ countries, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Greece, and Hungary, where support for Ukraine has been below the European average. 

In 2022, Publicus Research revealed that 64% of the respondents had viewed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as aggression rather than a defense by the Russians, in reaction to Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO and the EU. To present the contrast, in January 2024, Policy Solutions launched a survey, which resulted in a drastic change in public opinion. Hungarians became more likely to view Ukraine (51%) as a threat than Russia (46%). In the same survey, the respondents had an equally negative image of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, as that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

It became evident that it was not only my grandma’s perception that had been fundamentally changed, but also that of many other Hungarians, who would turn back to Ukraine by 2024, even if they had wholeheartedly supported it in 2022. To understand the dynamics behind the changes, we must analyse what messages are being transmitted and how these messages reach the public.

‘Pro-Peace’ rhetoric of Viktor Orban’s Hungary

The reasons behind the rising anti-Ukrainian sentiments can be attributed to the paradoxical set of messages from Viktor Orbán and his political party, FIDESZ. Their narrative is that Hungary is not pro-Russia, but pro-peace. This is the rhetorical linchpin of the government’s entire communication strategy. On the surface, it may sound cliché-ish and benign, but in the context of the war in Ukraine, the ‘pro-peace’ slogan is a masterclass in political reframing 

It immediately depicts anyone supporting Ukraine—the European Union, the US, and NATO allies—as ‘pro-war’. In their eyes, the ‘pro-war’ foreign countries and international organizations are not more than mere “globalist warmongers” actively “escalating” the conflict and dragging Hungary toward a new world war. In the lead-up to the 2026 general elections, state rhetoric also portrays opposition leaders as ‘pro-war.’

Furthermore, the central message is one of zero-sum economics: “They get the money, you pay the price”. The Hungarian government is repeatedly portraying Ukraine’s accession to the European Union as a mistake, which brings problems to all Hungarian households, from farmers to pensioners. This creates a constant situation of fear, which acts as the primary catalyst behind the rising anti-Ukrainian sentiment. 

To sell these narratives, it is vital to have total control over the flow of information and the entire communication ecosystem. It has been proven that, controlling the media is easier with analogic than digital media. During a press conference, PM Viktor Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán, stated that “Media is a strategic sector and a question of sovereignty, because whoever controls the media of a given country controls the thinking of that country and through it the country”. It is up to you, dear reader to decide whether this statement is a Freudian slip or the direct admission of a calculated strategy: to build a fortress of one-way communication where reality is not reported, but constructed.

Inside the state media machinery

Since 2010, Viktor Orbán’s government has been highly successful in shaping the political narrative through direct and indirect control of much of the media market, including the public service media, and by putting pressure on non-government-aligned outlets. Reuters Digital News Report of 2025 reveals that among the top 10 offline media entities, 7 are fully affiliated with the government. 

The state-run foundation called MTVA, which virtually controls all public media: the 24/7 news channel M1, the main public radio station Kossuth Rádió, and the national news agency, is at the center of the closed-loop information ecosystem. My granda, who consumes the news of M1 and Kossuth Rádió, which are available free of charge, is echoing narratives such as: “This is not our war” and “EU sanctions are failing.”

An independent fact-checking site found that the state news portal Hirado.hu had published 633 articles based on official Russian sources, compared to only 325 based on official Ukrainian sources. These daily information diets, whether offline or online, can easily outweigh 70 years of lived memory. 

A nation in two bubbles and a New Iron Curtain

But the reality shows that the state narrative is less effective on younger generations. The key to this campaign’s success lies in how different generations consume news. The government’s message is effective because its target audience—older, more conservative Hungarians—is a captive one.

Statista reports that while younger Hungarians (over 83%) overwhelmingly get their news from social media, where they can grasp information from diverse sources, the older segment of the generation (87%) is far more dependent on television when it comes to news consumption. 

This is where the state’s control becomes absolute. The government and its allies dominate the broadcast market. For a person in my grandmother's demographic, who is less likely to use the internet for news, the state-run M1 is the sole source of information. They are not living in a ‘filter bubble’ but rather in a state-run informational mansion.

The Hungarian example thus stands as a sorrowfully effective new model of information warfare, waged not by a foreign adversary, but by a government against its own people’s history. It shows that a sophisticated and continuous media campaign can be strong enough to neutralize—and even reverse—the most deeply embedded, personal, and traumatic historical memories. 

If the government can make a survivor of 1956 fear the Ukrainian victim more than the Russian aggressor, the government has achieved a complete victory in its war for memory and its war of information. This case also shows that lived experience is fragile and that a new kind of Iron Curtain is being constructed, not from barbed wire and concrete, but built from broadcast frequencies and a centrally controlled construction of headlines, intended to dismember a nation from its own past.