Since 1976 my acquaintances were those who or considered themselves poitical dissidents or were convinced that it was a good thing that there were dissidents in Hungary.
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Economist, agrarian sociologist. He was born on February 20, 1944 in Debrecen. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the Faculty of Sciences of Loránd Eötvös University between 1962 and 1965. Since 1965 he began to attend Karl Marx University of Economics where he got his university degree in 1969. He met students of philosophy of the Faculty of Arts in the middle of the 1960s and he organized with them courses on marxism and sociology. In 1971 he got a second university degree of history at the Faculty of Arts of ELTE. In the meantime he worked for the Institute of Agrarian Cooperatives. He led research projects on agrarian and rural sociology until 1987. In the 1970s he was the author of several studies on the institutional structure of the agrarian economy as well as on „the first, the second and the third economies” of the socialist system and the strata of rural society. In 1968 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia he turned against the communist Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. He signed the „Charta petitions”. He wrote for the samizdat periodical Beszélő under pseudonym and he contributed for the Bibó Memorial Book in 1979. He made hundreds of lectures in the course of sociological projects on rural Hungary. He was active in the distribution of samizdat periodicals. Since 1982 he began to make documentaries on the dissolution of traditional rural communities and on the emerging entrepreneurs. He was engaged for Financial Research Plc in 1988 as a senior research fellow. In the same year he was elected to the leadership of the Association of Free Democrats. Between 1990 and 1998 he was elected MP of the same party. He was honoured with József Eötvös Memorial Statue in 1990 and decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2004.
