Viktor Orban rose to fame in a live television appearance in 1989 when he demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary so it could escape a "dead-end street" and embrace its western future.
But Hungary's prime minister - who has expressed disdain for liberal democracy since coming to power - on Tuesday defied an EU ban on bilateral summits with Russian president Vladimir Putin and welcomed him to Budapest for an official visit.
In an ironic twist, Mr Putin's official itinerary included a visit to a cemetery for Soviet soldiers - including those who died while crushing Hungary's ill-fated 1956 uprising against Russian control. Mr Putin avoided a memorial to the dead of 1956 however, and laid a wreath at a nearby world war two memorial.
For the Russian leader, the visit demonstrated that he is still feted in some European capitals, despite Russia's military presence in eastern Ukraine, where violence continues to flare despite a ceasefire agreement.
In the eyes of his western critics, Mr Putin's Hungarian visit underlines his influence over eastern European states reliant on Russian energy. In addition to ministers, the Russian delegation included the head of Gazprom and the atomic energy agency Rosatom.
Hungarian officials said the timing and content of Tuesday's visit was decided in Moscow, not Budapest. Few media were allowed to observe Mr Putin's visit to the Soviet military memorial before he joined Mr Orban for talks that touched on the war in Ukraine.
Officials said the two leaders signed political agreements and agreed that Hungary could stretch out its gas purchasing commitments.
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Coming just two weeks after a visit by Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, the summit with the Russian president highlights Mr Orban's ambiguous position as an EU leader who has pursued ever-closer ties with Moscow.
Mr Orban said his ambitions for the summit were modest. He assured EU ambassadors in Budapest that he would not seek to mediate between Russia and the west on Ukraine. Nor did he withdraw Hungary's support for EU sanctions against Russia, which he has publicly criticised as counter-productive.
Instead, Mr Orban said talks focused on a flexible, long-term gas supply contract with the Russian leader, although it was unclear what commitments this involved.
Hungarian officials said Mr Orban had negotiated an extension of the country's gas supply contracts with Gazprom, allowing it to stretch out its gas-buying obligations until 2018.
Hungary's annual gas consumption has fallen to 9bn cubic metres a year, one quarter below the annual volume it committed to buying from Gazprom in 1995.
Mr Orban hopes the deal will allow him to continue cutting voters' utility bills and revive his party's public support - a tactic he used just days before his government's re-election last year.
But analysts noted that utility price cuts were inevitable under Gazprom's oil-indexed pricing structures, with or without a new agreement.
"Orban will announce the deal after the meeting and say it allows him to continue with household utility bill cuts," says Andras Deak, a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. "But these price reductions would happen without the Putin visit anyway, simply because of the fall in the oil price."
The two leaders also discussed whether a controversial €10bn Kremlin-financed nuclear energy project would go ahead as planned. Contracts for the construction of the Paks energy plant were granted to Rosatom without a public tender in 2014 and few details have been made public.
Opposition politicians claim that the rationale for the project is poor and that Moscow's economic crisis puts the deal at risk.
"It's quite clear that this deal cannot be financed by Russia as originally planned," says Bernadett Szel, co-leader of the opposition green LMP party.
In a sign of Mr Putin's popularity among extremist European movements, politicians from the far-right Jobbik movement - Hungary's second-most popular political party - welcomed the Russian president's visit.
"The summit of Hungary's and Russia's leaders is important and useful," said Marton Gyongyosi, Jobbik's deputy leader, in a statement last month. "The lifting of the anti-Russia sanctions should be the common interest of the European states and Hungary," he added.