The Withering Away of a Communist State?
Cohen, Mitchell
Hungary today is a land of possibilities, perils, and unpredictability. In the past year, the ruling (Communist) Hungarian Socialist Workers party (HSWP) reluctantly recognized that ineffective...
...Finding it requires the HSWP to yield its role, not just past theoretical pretenses...
...One hundred and fifty thousand Hungarians signed petitions calling for a referendum on the dam, and finally, in May 1989, work on the Hungarian side was partially suspended with the backing of HSWP Reformers...
...Former members visited him shortly thereafter, and on January 9, 1989 it was decided to resurrect Hungarian Social 458 • DISSENT Democracy...
...It rested on the ruling party's ability to deliver rising living FALL • 1989 • 455 standards...
...Struggling Democrats The democratic opposition to the regime has been spearheaded by the Democratic Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats...
...According to György Kerekes, a member of the organizing committee of the Budapest Reform Circle, his comrades aim to end "democratic centralism...
...Neither has mass bases today...
...In Budapest's bookstores they could find, prominently displayed, the Hungarian translations of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm along with works by once-banned Hungarian authors like GyOrgy Konrad...
...We are moving and thinking in a dark room and we don't know where the walls are," says Minas Zala, editor of the Hungarian Observer...
...The old guard apparently thinks the younger generation, having grown up under HSWP rule, is untutored in Social Democracy...
...An outsider is tempted to wonder if talk of leaving the Warsaw Pact isn't reckless...
...It appears, however, that factionalism will remain a serious problem in the foreseeable future...
...Hungary is a relatively small military power, he notes...
...The latter, a stumbling centrist, became the party's secretarygeneral in May 1988, displacing Janos Kadar, Hungary's chief since his betrayal of the 1956 revolution...
...If the U.S...
...Its purpose, says Geza Jeszenszky, a historian who sits on its Executive, is to unite three tendencies that were eliminated by Stalinist rule: agrarian and peasant interests, non-Marxist and nonradical professionals, and Christian Democrats...
...A Culture Minister suggests to a writer that he leave the country...
...A civil (or "civic") society apart from the state is required: For potential freedom to become real freedom, property reforms must be accompanied by the emergence of a private or communal form of proprietary self-pride that will spur sovereign citizens on to restoring their civic society, thereby making it possible for genuine pluralism to thrive and political battles to be fought...
...Kaddr, who died in July, was given considerable leeway by Moscow because he made it clear that he would be the Kremlin's obedient servant...
...Pozsgay attacks the "Stalinist" vanguard party for absorbing the economy into politics and politics "into a bureaucratic party state" that controlled "every manifestation of its citizens...
...The result: "We are missing at least two generations of ecologists...
...The Prague Spring made it an inauspicious year for economic reform in Budapest...
...While I feel an ideological commonality with people like Pozsgay, the moral-historical question is crucial to me...
...Unforeseeable circumstances could curtail Gorbachev's largess, or his term of office...
...Nyers was named party president and Pozsgay, the nation's most popular politician, became the party's candidate for president under a proposed revised constitution...
...Economic historian Istvan Rev expresses concern that discussions of economic reform have paid insufficient attention to its negative side effects, which could carry political consequences...
...At least something has been learned from Karl Marx: Ruling classes must reproduce themselves...
...Something reminiscent might emerge in the 1990s with a reformed Communist—Pozsgay — as president and a democratically elected government running the nation's affairs...
...Environmental activism has also started in Hungary...
...There is, however, some disputation in the Forum between proponents of populist and advocates of free-market policies...
...I spent four years in prison afterward...
...In public meetings last spring, they called for their country's "democratic socialist transformation," its neutrality, and the ouster of Karoly Grosz...
...Then came 1956...
...Bihari, an associate of Pozsgay who was expelled from the HSWP last year for his reformism, had traveled in Democratic Forum circles too...
...No one, save neo-Stalinists, thinks a command economy makes sense for Hungary (or anywhere else...
...NeoStalinists have their own jokes: "Q: Why did Pozsgay want Nagy's rehabilitation...
...He declares himself "close to the ideas of Austro-Marxism," and advocates a "socialist version of 'social market economy.' " Nyers rose to prominence as the architect of the "New Economic Mechanism" (NEM) of 1968, which trimmed central planning, transferred many management prerogatives from state organs to the enterprises themselves, and introduced market forces in determining prices for about half the economy...
...Youth, Trade Unionists, Ecologists Among the new actors on the Hungarian stage is the League of Young Democrats, which declares itself "a voice of the small awakening civil society in Hungary, one of the many `small circles of liberty' "—the latter phrase coming from Istvan Bibo (1911-1979), a left-leaning liberal populist whose ideas inspire many Hungarian democrats...
...partners will be required to form a cabinet...
...When Pozsgay was Minister of Culture, he proposed that my emigration could be arranged...
...The most serious difficulty faced by Social Democrats is bitter internal squabbling — political, personal, and generational...
...Behind all this lies the organic system of society in which the individual is capable of self-determination and the collective is able to govern itself...
...As Gy6rgy Konrad notes, "Pozsgay's advantage is the party he is in...
...it was the transforming experience of a lifetime...
...The independent unions have pushed the official unions into acting more like unions, instead of transmission belts...
...Not long ago an unofficial journal ran a satirical ad for the "clothing store" of the Ferenc Mtinnich Society, where one could buy "used truncheons and leather padded jackets...
...Practical political wisdom would seem to make Hungary's democratization, not the Warsaw Pact, the priority...
...Nyers began his career in the Hungarian Social Democratic party, which was forcibly merged with the Communists in the late 1940s, and there is a competition between him and Pozsgay...
...When people like Kissinger and Brzezinski propose declaring that the U.S...
...Marxist-Leninist "fundamentalists" have suffered setbacks recently, but they remain a force...
...More could bring serious unrest...
...it is also his disadvantage...
...Still, it survived until 1972, when Moscow's desire for increased "coordination" of its bloc and discontent among workers adversely affected by market reforms led to retrenchment...
...GyOrgy Konrad suggests looking to history for ideas for the future...
...won't go into Hungary if Moscow pulls out, they are advocating a hypocritical policy," he says...
...Varghas argues that in the future, ecological issues will depend on "the reconstruction of Hungarian civil society so that we have political and social pluralism...
...A substantive article he published in March in Marczius Tizenotodike denounces, without qualification, the idea that political freedom should be sacrificed for the sake of a future, more "complete form of human freedom...
...It has a potential ally in the neo-Stalinist "Ferenc Miinnich Society," which claims 456 • DISSENT twelve thousand members and is named for the minister who helped "clean house" after 1956...
...A posthumous victory for Stalin...
...The threat facing any reformist government will be disgruntled Leninist fundamentalists demagogically telling a socially distressed working population: "All this talk of constitutional democracy, free speech, and markets may be in the interests of their proponents, but when people like us have power, your factories aren't closed because of subsidy cuts, inflation is lower, and things are in order...
...The Forum is composed mainly of the country intelligentsia, whereas the Free Democrats, with about four thousand members, tend to be urban, and particularly Budapest-based, intellectuals with a coherent liberal, as opposed to populist, worldview...
...Exiting the military alliance is another matter...
...Its a new world," says GyOrgy Ruttner, a party spokesman, "and part of the old guard, having been unable to engage in politics for forty years, is having trouble adjusting...
...A series of clashes, partly over whether Bihari had truly become a social democrat, led to his exit...
...A: Because he needs a place in Plot 301"—where the bodies of Nagy and his associates were dumped following their executions in 1958...
...But Gorbachev also warned against expectations that Eastern Europe would "return to the capitalist fold" and earlier in the year he apparently told Grosz that everything is permissible save leaving the Warsaw Pact and ending the "leading role" of the party...
...Stalinism's stress on rapid economic development, especially of heavy industry, engendered blindness to environmental issues...
...A month after the party's re-formation, it appeared that an important political scientist, Mihaly Bihari, would become secretary-general...
...In the Austro460 • DISSENT Hungarian "Compromise of 1867" —nineteen years after Lajos Kossuth's Hungarian Republic was thwarted by Vienna (with the help of Russian troops)—Emperor Franz Josef gave Hungary almost complete self-rule...
...What the party yields, it can take back, but if the current direction continues, the forty-one-year-old identity of state and ruling party will become a thing of the past...
...Signals from Moscow have been mixed...
...In the end, I'd rather be comrades with people I trust but don't agree with entirely—we can argue—than with people to whom I'm ideologically close but can't trust...
...The Free Democrats have, with some exceptions, opposed joining a coalition...
...Consequently, it allowed its state power to begin to wither away...
...After intense speculation about a possible party split, the reformers gained ground in early summer...
...Nostalgic" Parties: Smallholders and Social Democrats Parties that played significant roles before 1948, and were eliminated by Stalinism, are reconstituting themselves...
...It has no Lech Walesa, and when workers look at the HSWP they say: this party ruled in our name, but without us...
...The manner in which the state's tasks are performed, the qualities of the services it provides, are controlled directly by the citizens or their representatives...
...Leaving the alliance creates the possibility of a "mini-entente" of disgruntled conservative Communist states against Hungary, something Moscow would not countenance if Budapest remained a member...
...Hardly Leninism...
...Pozsgay and Nyers may be able to do so...
...These protoparties work together for democratic goals, although their orientations differ and they will be electoral competitors...
...For fundamentalists, fundamentals can't be disproved...
...By the Gorbachev era, however, the system he fashioned was in trouble...
...In their economic ideas," claims Kerekes, "party reformers are much closer to [opposition groups like] the Association of Free Democrats, the Democratic Forum, and the Social Democrats, than to party conservatives...
...A plethora of opposition organizations have burst into the open, ranging from protoparties and youth and environmental movements to trade unions and a Helsinki Watch affiliate...
...The Ferenc Miinnich Society has significant influence in the 60,000-strong "Worker's Militia," a paramilitary organization tied to the party, and apparently in the Interior Ministry...
...Konrad contends that a Hungarian exit from the Warsaw Pact depends on fundamental changes in the bloc system as a whole, which, in turn, are dependent on what the United States is willing to do...
...The Free Democrats, with a Western orientation, embrace a liberalism that would place them somewhere between the Free Democrats and Social Democrats in West Germany, according to sociologist Mint Magyar, a leading activist...
...The great tragedy, Nyers told an Austrian newspaper last spring, is that "reformers always get to power when the situation is messed up...
...Some older members want to re-create a working-class party, while Rev6sz and the younger generation want something broader, "a people's party, like Brandt and Schmidt tried to build" in Germany...
...The current mood among some oppositionists mitigates against talk of social problems because it "sounds too left-leaning...
...Even Mark Palmer, the astute (and popular) American ambassador to Budapest, expresses concern that this matter is not always kept in perspective by oppositionists (with whom he has an amicable relationship...
...The Smallholders, who themselves claim only about six thousand members, want to represent the countryside...
...Domestic hazards complement foreign ones...
...The League, founded in March 1988, was beleaguered initially by the state security apparatus because of its demonstrations and educational work on behalf of liberal ideas...
...In France," he comments, "the word 'socialist' in a party name is no problem...
...The Reform Communists," Jeszenszky says, "are not really Communists and it would be a mistake to leave the government entirely in HSWP hands...
...The Forum favors participation and has had contacts with Pozsgay since its founding...
...KAdär was not Big Brother as much as a relatively liberal Little Father, feeding the family, which, for its part, was expected to behave...
...Mihaly Bihari estimates that during a transition to a market economy, a Hungarian government could deal with a rise from the current 20 percent inflation rate to one of 60-70 percent...
...Perhaps it sounds dramatic, but the key for me is whether I could live in a prison cell with someone...
...It is known by its Hungarian acronym, FIDESZ, chosen for its correspondence with fides —"Fidelity to the ideas of democracy, civil liberties and human rights...
...The orientation of the Smallholders is similar to that of the Democratic Forum, but Peter Hardi, its deputy secretary-general, views the Forum, and also the Free Democrats, as too dominated by intellectuals and unable to address "the working masses...
...Past market reforms have led to discontent among adversely affected workers...
...Striking a populist note, he insists that all achievements during the past four decades were due to "unique Hungarian characteristics" and the rejection of "alien" Stalinism...
...The latter can be fudged if Pozsgay is elected president as a Communist, and then constructs a multiparty—but not necessarily Communist-dominated— government...
...The HSWP was forced into change because, lacking legitimacy, it could not ask major sacrifices of the population...
...An HSWP congress in October will debate far-reaching changes in party structure...
...One of the most startling aspects of political discourse in Budapest today is open discussion of a Hungarian departure from the Warsaw Pact...
...Nyers was in the Central Committee when Nagy was executed...
...A July conference with representatives from eighteen of Hungary's nineteen counties gave the party new momentum, in preparation for a national congress in the fall...
...However, the unspoken premise of most economic reformers seems to be that very substantial Western aid and investment must ease economic transformation...
...The most publicized ecological struggle has been over the building of the GagcikovoNagymaros twin hydroelectric dams on the Danube, on both sides of the Czech-Hungarian boarder...
...Magyar argues against it on grounds of democratic practice: "The consolidation of a democratic system requires both an elected government and a parliamentary opposition...
...A draft program circulated under Revesz's name called for parliamentary democracy, guaranteed human rights, a neutral Hungary, and a mixed economy "in which priority is given to free enterprise and market economics," but in which the state has the "duty to rectify the imperfections of the market and to insure social security...
...Nyers fell along with the NEM...
...In July Gorbachev declared that how Poles and Hungarians "structure their societies will be their affair...
...This is not enough...
...wants the USSR out of Hungary so that democracy can flourish here, it must be willing to pay a price, say, a reciprocal move such as an American pullout from Greece or Italy...
...Also debated is the idea of a "Hungarian Third Road," one that would follow neither the communist East nor the capitalist West...
...In his view, Hungary's immediate economic problems require liberal rather than social democratic responses...
...Also to be considered is increasing agitation among conservative Communist signatories of the Pact—East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania—who fear that reformist viruses can cross frontiers...
...Last spring the relatively conservative Grosz spoke of eight billion dollars in foreign capital needed during the next half decade to begin modernizing the economy...
...In late 1988 Andras Revesz, the party's deputy secretary-general for that week, surfaced on a Budapest radio program to declare that he wanted the movement organized anew...
...The HSWP's "Marxist Unity Platform" group denounces liberalization on behalf of "order" and attacks "selling-out" to the West...
...Censorship is gone and the first free elections since the 1940s are planned for next year...
...Such expectations may be unrealistic...
...Consequently, Hungary now searches for a pluralist—and multiparty— formula for its future...
...Similarly, he thinks that the number of unemployed— currently estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand out of a workforce of approximately four and one half million—would be manageable if it went up to about one hundred thousand, but not if it climbed toward 10 percent or more (four hundred thousand...
...A striking perspective on mistrust of the HSWP—including its reformers—is presented by playwright Istvan EOrsi, a former student of Georg Lukacs...
...it is akin to accepting competition between, say, a brain surgeon and witch doctors.' By permitting a "civil society" to emerge, however reluctantly, the HSWP revealed that this fundamental of Leninism has run aground...
...Although new reforms were later introduced, he did not regain a seat in the Politburo until 1988...
...The two most important of these "nostalgic parties" are the Smallholders, founded in 1930 and recipient of 57 percent of the vote in the 1945 elections, and the Social Democrats...
...Reformers are proponents of a dramatically altered HSWP, willing to play by democratic rules and step aside if defeated...
...The party has been debating—sometimes acrimoniously—what it means to be a Hungarian Social Democrat today...
...Revesz, though eighty years old and ill, tries to be a bridge by advocating a broader party and urging that young Social Democrats be sent to Western Europe to learn from sister parties there...
...official" trade unions have existed for the last forty years as "transmission belts" for the ruling party...
...A quarter of the sixty thousand Soviet troops now on Hungarian soil are scheduled to leave soon...
...Since Hungary's economic issues are bound to political ones, TDDSZ fights for its members' needs—higher salaries, research funds, and so on—but also joins the opposition's efforts to promote democratic reform and a market economy...
...It appears that parties will compete openly in all constituencies in parliamentary elections, unlike the June balloting in Poland where a percentage was guaranteed to the Communists...
...A sign of the new times: In June 1987, a group of opposition intellectuals published "Social Contract," a program whose title conveyed a demand for a democratic politics based on citizen participation, not acquiescence to Kadar's "consensus...
...In the past year, the ruling (Communist) Hungarian Socialist Workers party (HSWP) reluctantly recognized that ineffective leadership and lack of legitimacy had rendered it increasingly incapable of coping with the country's mounting problems...
...The Social Democrats are beset by material problems...
...Their journal Nepszava (Voice of the People) was taken over by the official trade unions in 1948...
...The Czechs are furious about the dam controversy and recent Hungarian TV interviews with Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Prague Spring, and dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel...
...The Social Democrats are potentially a force of great significance since they both could compete with the HSWP for working-class allegiance and might serve in a coalition government with Reformers...
...Moreover, The true custodian of political freedom is the citizen, its framework is the nation, and its means is the state...
...FALL • 1989 • 461...
...The decision to do so is generally presumed to be what triggered the Soviet invasion in 1956...
...When the HSWP criticized Hungary's participation in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Prague accused Budapest of interfering in Czech internal affairs (which, presumably, the invasion itself did not...
...However, the face of rural Hungary has changed dramatically after forty years of Communist rule, and so too have the party's old social bases...
...hence their danger...
...Since some estimates place 140,000 arms in private hands in Hungary, some left over from 1956, the failure of reform could potentially bring bloodshed in its wake...
...here it is a synonym for bastard...
...The Forum and the Free Democrats differ on relations with HSWP Reformers and/or a reformed HSWP...
...There are many Jews among the Free Democrats, and allegations of anti-Semitism within a segment of the Forum's leadership has been a source of friction between the two groups...
...He is now turning back toward the HSWP Reformers...
...Both organizations oppose centrally planned economies...
...Revësz, a charismatic octogenarian, became president, and Social Democrats have been attending meetings of the Socialist International...
...Earlier that week Hungarians watched negotiations between the government and the opposition on live television...
...I like many of his ideas today, but I'm forced to be suspicious...
...Since Budapest began dismantling its barbed-wire "iron curtain" with Austria recently, Hungary has become an escape route to the West for East German citizens, to their government's great chagrin...
...In May 1988 the Democratic Union of Scientific Workers (TDDSZ) was formed by scholars and workers in cultural, research, and public institutions...
...Their goals: establish the bases for political pluralism and a market economy...
...Reformers also demanded the BUDAPEST rehabilitation of Imre Nagy, the reform Communist premier executed for his role in the 1956 revolution...
...The Free Democrats should be an articulate opposition party...
...The HSWP is divided among reformers, centrists, and Marxist-Leninist "fundamentalists...
...It is planning to run in next year's elections and sent observers to the Polish elections...
...Their slogan: "Create a civil society" —a domain of public life not controlled by the state...
...Hardi, a twenty-eight-year-old pastor of the Reform Church, calls for a restructuring of the agricultural system, "which was forced on the peasants," and significant expansion of health and educational programs for residents of the countryside...
...Goulash Communism" worked for a good many years but was undone by deepening economic malaise...
...Whoever isn't against us, is for us," he declared in 1962, reversing the formula traditional to totalitarian systems...
...There is, however, a potentially dangerous tendency among reformers and democrats to speak of "the market" as if it were magic...
...Imagine...
...A new version, using the same name but declaring itself Social Democratic on the masthead, appeared under Nyakas's editorship with a two-thousand-copy run in May...
...The pace of events within Hungary is astonishing, but they are ultimately dependent on external factors— Moscow and Washington...
...We know we want to go out, but we don't know exactly where the door is...
...A battle was waged with public activities and samizdat publications...
...Reformers, Fundamentalists, Opportunists Imre Pozsgay increasingly presents himself as a social democrat...
...FIDESZ competes with the official Communist youth organization and champions "the elimination of military alliances [and] the re-establishment of the cultural and political unity" of Europe...
...Unlike the liberal mainstream FALL • 1989 • 457 Summer 1989: Bookstore window in Budapest...
...Two years later, Kadar was out, his successor in trouble, and on June 16, 1989, the thirty-first anniversary of the execution of Nagy and his comrades, two hundred and fifty thousand people, including leading HSWP reformers, attended their ceremonial reburial...
...Alas...
...Though not as visible as FIDESZ, the emergence of independent trade unions is another important development...
...In contrast to Poland, where the regime's foes were concentrated in a mass workers' movement with a charismatic leader, the Hungarian unions are small and largely white-collar, although a blue-collar effort, named "Solidarity," began to operate in Spring 1989...
...The "Reform Circles," initiated in the fall of 1988, advocate multiparty democracy and a market economy...
...Bucharest is bristling because of criticism of its treatment of its Magyar minority...
...The Social Democratic party reappeared for the one week during the 1956 revolution in which parties were legal...
...Should the HSWP declare itself "social democratic," the Hungarian Social Democratic party will face an especially difficult challenge of self-definition...
...Hungary's economic crisis is one reason why economist ReszO Nyers stepped to the fore...
...Polls indicate the HSWP will emerge as the largest party in free elections, although with only 30-35 percent of the vote...
...Forming TDDSZ, which now has about four FALL • 1989...
...In the meantime, party hierarchs and technicians of the ancien regime are positioning themselves to be the economic and managerial elites in a reformed Hungary...
...The Forum was initiated by populist writers in September 1987, and has about sixteen thousand members...
...Pluralism is almost conceptually impossible if one claims to be the political embodiment of the science of society...
...Szilard Nyakas, a journalist and one of the new generation of Social Democrats, comments that "today, the Hungarian working class is waiting...
...But it was not orthodox Leninism that ruled post-1956 Hungary...
...Following the massacre of the democratic student movement in Beijing, FIDESZ organized protests outside the Chinese embassy in Budapest...
...High party officials began sending their children to foreign business schools some years ago...
...Social dislocations, unemployment, and inflation are likely to accompany a transition to a market economy...
...Ecology "was viewed as 'bourgeois,' " notes the country's leading "Green" activist, Janos Vargha...
...The other members are reform-minded Premier Miklós Nemeth and Imre Pozsgay, a radical reformer...
...They want something for nothing...
...of the Free Democrats, he is a socialist—the Free Democrats contain socialist and Green factions—who advocates a "socialist market economy...
...459 thousand members, was a political act...
...Since its establishment, six additional independent unions have appeared...
...He is not opposed in principle to joining a governing coalition with HSWP Reformers, but when asked why, with his left-wing politics, he works not with them but with the Free Democrats, he says, I once wrote poems to Stalin and Rakosi...
...The Central Committee curtailed Grosz's powers by placing him in a presidium headed by Rersii Nyers, author of Hungary's 1968 market-oriented reforms...
...An argument for remaining in the Pact, at least for now, is made by the Democratic Front's Jeszenszky — for Hungarian national reasons...
...Commercial banks, both Hungarian and foreign, are preparing to give individual loans for their purchase of shares in privatizing companies...
...It believes nobody...
...The "Danube Circle," founded by Vargha in 1984, maintained that the dams were ecologically dangerous—threatening drinking water reserves and important Wetland forests, as well as posing a potentially serious flood risk for southern Slovakia—and economically unsound...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
