Hungary's Silent Revolt
FABIAN, BELA
Hungary's silent revolt Individual peasants and workers, through passive resistance, sabotage and slowdowns, are making life impossible for the Communist dictatorship By Bela Fabian Since the...
...The soil has to be plowed deep under corn, and it has to be hoed three times during the season in order to prevent the growth of weeds...
...Anti-Communists have turned to individual action and passive resistance against the regime...
...And repairing these defective shoes would have cost more than manufacturing new ones.' Another matter currently preoccupying the regime is the state of Hungarian youth...
...Among the measures adopted are these: -A thousand men have recently undergone a three-month "scientific" training course in combating factory sabotage...
...Large quantities of shoes were returned from all parts of the country to the factory in Budapest...
...The peasants are forced to deliver their produce to the state, keeping for themselves only what the authorities prescribe...
...You cannot count on the West...
...But why, she asked, did they need her if they were furnishing the money and labor...
...Czako went on to say: "Not quite two months ago, the county court of Kecskemet passed death sentences against two leaders of the baking industry trust, who with 30 accomplices caused over one million forint worth of damage to the people's economy...
...Judging from current reports, future efforts to quench the Hungarian people's love of freedom will also fail...
...In the spring of 1915, when he was liberated by U.S...
...They have reacted by concealing whatever they can...
...To date, however, every measure of Communist propaganda and terror has failed to stem the tide of popular discontent and silent revolt...
...Kolkhoz chairmen, bookkeepers and night watchmen were accused of working together in gangs of pillagers...
...In an article in the Budapest daily Nepszava last April 14...
...Cooperate with the great, powerful, invincible Soviet Union...
...The council thereupon offered to grant her a loan and permit her to engage as many workers as she wished...
...The heels had come off as soon as the customers tried them on...
...The stitchings on the soles of several thousand men's sport shoes unraveled as soon as they were worn...
...According to provincial Communist papers, however, this plan has failed...
...His remonstrances that in the old days everything had belonged to the capitalists, whereas now the factories and land belonged to the people, fell on deaf ears...
...Fabian also published a biography of Cardinal Mindszenty...
...The views of clericals and chauvinists are sometimes voiced in our lower and middle schools...
...The silent anti-Communist resistance has penetrated not only offices and industrial plants, farms and schools, but even the Army and the secret police...
...Peasants also often leave tractors, so vital to collective farming, in the fields in the wintertime...
...A three-month training course started on August 1 for a special police force to supplement the 3.000 boxcar attendants who now guard railway transport...
...The state and the Communists deprived us of everything, and we are only taking back what is ours," was the philosophy of the Hungarian masses, to whom sabotaging the Communist economy was a mark of patriotism...
...Factory managers, truck drivers and leaders of factor) CP cells sat side by side...
...A propaganda of despair is being preached in Party lectures in factories, schools and prisons, and priests are forced to include it in their sermons...
...Present kolkhoz chairmen are being replaced by "convinced young Communists," also the products of a special three-month course...
...To which one of the council members replied with a smile: "They wouldn't work for us...
...In Hungary, the regime acknowledges the existence of a "silent revolution" and is trying to quell it by various methods...
...Why risk your life and that of your loved ones for an empty dream...
...To her surprise, she was asked if she would like her vineyard restored to her...
...He who tolerates the stealing and looting of state and cooperative property promotes the undermining of the regime...
...You have been abandoned," runs the refrain...
...These crack operatives attract the pigs by rattling corn in paper bags and imitating the porkers' grunts...
...Istvan Soter, a professor at Budapest University, wrote recently in the Higher Education Review: "Instructors who openly or secretly oppose Marxist-Communist ideology sometimes falsify the prescribed textbooks and teach the opposite of the theories which we would like to implant in the minds of our youth...
...Peasant indifference is also responsible for the shortage of corn--a crop which has long grown as tall in the Danube Valley as in Iowa...
...One species of nationalism is the emphasizing of our cultural superiority.' The proclaimers of cultural superiority express derogatory opinions regarding the Soviet Union and the people's democracies, but at the same time receive with rapture any manifestation coming from the West...
...Needless to say, the Communists are bending every effort to check the present trend...
...According to a report received by the Free Europe Press in August...
...The abandoned tractor, rusting in the snow, is a frequent subject of satirical cartoons in Communist magazines...
...An escaped worker has reported the following: "15,000 pairs of defective shoes have piled up in the warehouse of the Fashion Shoe Factory in the first-three months of this year...
...kolkhoz hogs, it was said, had lost weight while those belonging to individual peasants got fat...
...Bela Fabian (left), a member of the Hungarian National Council, is a former prisoner of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps...
...When the village children see the "corn-rattlers" approaching, they gather in the road and receive them with a chorus of squeals...
...Special secret-police units are being trained to detect and prevent thievery in industrial plants...
...Almost 3,000 pairs of high-heeled women's shoes came back without heels...
...A year and a half ago, several members of the Hungarian MVD--including a lieutenant in Party boss Rakosi's personal bodyguard--were executed in the courtyard of the Fo Utca prison in Budapest, accused of conspiring to prevent the flight of Communist leaders should the regime be toppled...
...Between the two World Wars, Hungary had an annual grain surplus averaging 40 million bushels and was hard put to find markets for its famous wines and its surplus lard, live stock and poultry...
...In Hungary today, however, the tractor drivers do no more than scratch the topsoil, and the kolkhoz (collective farm) peasants merely go through the motions of hoeing...
...anything not nailed down with an iron bar disappears...
...Besides, it was against the law and "anti-social" to employ workers...
...Hungary's Chief Prosecutor, Kalman Czako, has been removed from his post...
...Hungary had to import sugar, even though the area under sugar-beet cultivation has increased almost threefold since before the war...
...She declined, saying that it was in bad condition and had to be newly planted, and that she had neither the strength to work it herself nor the money to hire help...
...Czako's main assignment had been to check sabotage and looting in industrial plants, which had grown so serious that, in his words...
...Since that time, as regular contributor to The New Leader, reader's Digest and other periodicals, be has reported on the Communist extinction of liberty in Eastern Europe...
...Deputy Prime Minister Erno Gero indicated the dimensions of the passive-resistance campaign when he wrote on June 12 in the official daily, Szabad Nep: "During the last year, we have been forced to import large quantities of bread grains and fodder...
...at this, she consented to take back 17 acres of her former property...
...According to official Government reports, the rate of rejects in industrial production ranges from 20 to 25 per cent...
...The result is that the Communist police now include men specially trained in the arts of luring, for example, delinquent pigs out of hiding...
...It is not normal for a grain-exporting country suddenly to turn into a grain-importing country...
...A significant incident occurred in December 1954, when the widow of a former vineyard owner was summoned before the council of a small wine-growing community near Lake Balaton...
...The contrast today is startling...
...madam: perhaps they will for you...
...troops, he was one of the first to reveal the extent of Nazi genocide...
...Czako quoted Stalin's words: "The thief is as bad, if not worse, than the conspirator and the spy...
...The greater part of children's footwear was also unsalable because of faulty sewing...
...Farmers' markets, which flourished under the recent Imre Nagy regime, have now been abolished...
...Hungary's silent revolt Individual peasants and workers, through passive resistance, sabotage and slowdowns, are making life impossible for the Communist dictatorship By Bela Fabian Since the 1953 uprisings in East Berlin, Pilsen, and the Tiszalok concentration camp in Hungary, resistance to Communism in the Soviethloc has gone underground...
...Kolkhoz peasants were tried for stealing the fodder of kolkhoz cows and feeding it to their own...
...Yet, the looting and sabotage continued unabated, and finally Czako was forced to resign...
...In nationwide trials of persons charged with looting industrial plants and collective farms, Czako had as many as 25 to 50 defendants in the dock at once...
...According to the latest statistics, the looting of freight-cars has assumed alarming proportions...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 40
