On not becoming a communist doctor

摘要

Recently, I was miraculously reunited with my "Leckekonyv" (fig 1). English has no satisfactory single word for a leckekonyv, but the Magyar-Angol dictionary defines it as a university registration document. Mine was issued in the autumn of 1953, and it records my progress through three years as a medical student in Budapest, Hungary. In 1953 Stalin died, and this triggered a power struggle in the Russian Politburo, closely mirrored by an upheaval among Hungary's Muscovite leaders. How did the Byzantine machinations of the time affect medical students?