Hungary Under Kadar

...They were charged with blindly following the Yugoslav example of workers' autonomy, "'which caused such serious contradictions in the Yugoslav economy...

...Its power revived, the secret police has taken vengeance for last October...

...Kadar's close associates enjoy an equal measure of popular disdain...

...The cubicles of the Foutca police prison, the barracks of the Kistarcsa and Recs camps, have been filled with so-called "counter-revolutionaries'" from every layer of the population—respected scholars and patriotic youngsters, peasant leaders and courageous workers...

...A Communist for 16 years, he led a group on October 23 under the banner, "Long Live the Party...

...and "coming men" like Bela Biszku and Geza Revesz, who respectively head the Interior and Defense Ministries...

...The first victims of this new purge were higher-ranking Communists who had thrown their support to Nagy during the Revolution...

...When this failed to have any effect, it imprisoned some 30 writers and journalists, including such figures as the renowned novelist Tibor Dery, prize-winning poet Zoltan Zelk, and Gyula Hay, internationally known playwright...

...First, the central and regional councils were abolished...

...The impact of Mao's recent pronouncements on cultural "freedom" hardly helped the Kadar crackdown on the intellectuals...

...Concurrently a hard battle has been waged in the world of art and literature against "bourgeois decadence, revisionist infection, harmful deviations...

...The main bone of contention between the feuding groups within the Party is the critical reappraisal of the past...

...The official organ of the regime, Nepszabadsag, was more explicit, declaring on November 18 that "the independence of our country demands that no foreign troops be stationed on Hungarian soil...

...Compulsory study of Russian and of Marxism-Leninism has been reinstituted in the schools...

...According to official statistics, the intellectual component of the Party has dropped from 19.4 per cent before the Revolution to 6.9 per cent at present...

...And Geza Kassai, a spokesman of the regime, wrote in Nepszabadsag (April 14) : "The events of last October-November proved that in certain situations the armed help of another socialist state is not only right and necessary, but that to request such help is a patriotic duty, and the granting of the request an international duty...

...Referring to the speech, Kadar stressed that "it is first of all applicable to China...

...Equally conspicuous has been the Kadar regime's failure to carry out its November 4 promise of a coalition The continuing unpopularity of the counter-revolutionary Kadar regime in Hungary has been underscored by rumors that followers of the imprisoned Imre Nagy would be included in a revamped cabinet...

...Their guiding spirit is Jozsef Revai, an able old Communist, former "third man" in Rakosi's command...

...Backtracking is evident in other areas as well...

...All the Party's resolutions and the statements of the June Party conference have reflected the basic attitude of the Kadar group: In the case of Hungary, there is no middle course between liberalization (which would lead to another October) and a return to the old forms of pre-revolutionary Communism...

...Nepszabadsag has complained, for example, that hundreds of people "spring to the defense" of accused prisoners, attempting to organize "virtual saving actions...

...Among the weapons left to them, perhaps the most effective is simply refusal to produce...

...The only concessions which they still enjoy are the continued ban on compulsory deliveries and a slightly more liberal market economy for agricultural produce...

...The pro-Stalinist old guard is represented by Deputy Premier Antal Apro, Party Secretary Karoly Kiss, Istvan Friss and others...

...Under renewed pressure from the regime, the number of collective farms climbed back from its low point to 2,584 by July 1, and the tax burden borne by the peasantry has become increasingly heavy...

...In April the Party's literary organ reprimanded him for "blindness" but hailed the part he had played in hindering the summary execution of several AVH officers...

...This was the prelude to the Government's reintroduction on August 1 of the hated old system of shock-work and production norms, which meant in effect a flat 10-per-cent cut in industrial wages...

...According to reliable estimates, some 300 workers' council leaders were thrown into prison or concentration camps...

...In some respects, the Kadar regime has succeeded in creating a surface impression of recovery...

...Accumulated reserve stocks of goods have tumbled, future export receipts have been mortgaged, and immense strains have developed on the consumer-goods market and in the trade balance of payments...

...In this writer's view, this debate is connected with the struggle for personal power and does not represent a clash in ideology...

...in Budapest battered buildings have been repaired, and the crowds trailing through the streets are somewhat better dressed and fed than they imagined they would be...

...This report, condensed from Problems of Communism, explains why Kad-ar's stock is as low as last fall...

...On March 29, 1957, a joint Hungarian-Soviet declaration affirmed that the two governments deemed it "absolutely necessary that . Soviet troops should be temporarily stationed in Hungary...

...While the old guard tries partially to exculpate the Rakosi-Gero group, the present leadership is rigidly following the December resolution of the temporary Central Committee, which criticized the "anti-Leninist, sectarian mistakes" of Rakosi-Gero...

...But the general mood of a driven and exhausted people, denied the respite they believed they had earned in the Revolution, is something the regime cannot camouflage...

...While in the USSR there is at least some effort toward economic decentralization going on (whatever the political impetus and implications of the program), in Kadar's Hungary Marxist economists who hinted at the necessity for a major overhaul of the economy have been labeled "revisionists...

...an embittered behind-the-scenes struggle for leadership is going on...

...So far this effort has been in vain: The majority of writers and artists are still firmly, and even openly, opposed to the regime...

...The regime has announced publicly the imposition of only 105 death sentences, but the real number has been estimated in the thousands...

...At the same time, workers in a number of factories were ordered to pay back "unjustified wage increases...

...According to reliable sources, there have been at least 40,000 arrests and 20,000 internments...

...Characteristic of the Kadar group's outlook was Bela Biszku's statement last May that the old Stalinists had not been severe enough in crushing enemies, that the greatest mistake of the past was the "insufficient application of the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...All summer long, alleged plots have been "uncovered," "spies" unmasked, arrests made, threats issued...

...The Kadar regime's resort to naked terrorism is, of course, the most outrageous aspect of its eleven-month reign...

...Ou'irgv Peter (director of the Central Statistical Rureau) and Peter Erdos (director of the Economic Research Institute) were refuted by the assertion that their proposals did not take into account the role of the Party and undermined the central direction of the state...

...Puppet regime, having broken most of the promises it made on taking power, survives by terror Hungary Under Kadar By Paul Landy The Kadar Government, in its broadcast declaration on assuming power in Hungary on November 4, announced as its first objective "to secure our national independence and our country's sovereignty...

...More important, the workers' councils which sprang up during the Revolution, and which received official recognition in the early days of the Kadar regime, have been reduced to an empty farce...

...then, the authority of the individual councils was curtailed, reducing them to mere advisory bodies...

...In the economic sphere, too, however, there has been a noticeable re-tightening of the screws...

...secret political meetings in coffee houses and in flats are reported...

...Personal tensions, moods, inclinations, views...

...Party declarations have demonstrated particular bitterness against the writers and journalists, whom the Communists regard as the "brain-trust" of the Revolution...

...Former Communists were soon joined in the prisons by the leaders of the revived non-Communist parties, and among the population at large a staggering number of arrests and imprisonments have taken place...

...Promises, threats, intimidation and economic pressure have been mixed together in this campaign...

...yet three months later Foldes was sentenced to death on the charge that he had "organized" a massacre of AVH members...

...The middle classes were benefited by the relaxation of restrictions on the establishment of private shops and by light taxation of the private sector...

...The regime proclaimed that there would be no forcible attempt to reconstitute the 2,455 collective farms (out of a total of 3,954) which had been dissolved during the Revolution...

...The moderate taxes levied on private shopowners have likewise been replaced by heavy ones...

...Accordingly, the regime maintains that even a "multi-party system such as in China or Poland" is not permissible under the "special conditions" in Hungary...

...As Nepszabadsag put it: "It was easier to preserve the unity of the Party under the direct threat of the counterrevolution than now, when the question of power is decided...

...While the press published the edited version of Mao Tse-tung's speech, the leaders made it clear that they had no intention of transplanting Chinese flowers to Hungarian soil...

...Arguments envisaging a "new economic pattern' put forward bv such men as Tamas Nagv (a translator of Marx...

...Despite this atmosphere of terror, the most striking fact emerging from reports leaking out of Hungary is the existence of a strong feeling of underground solidarity among the Hungarian people...

...and it also allowed the Nagy Government's abolition of compulsory farm deliveries to the state to remain in force...

...The Party-controlled literary bi-monthly Elet es irodalom has frequently bewailed "the deaf silence of our writers," and demanded a "thorough purge at the publishing houses, in the theater and film...

...These dangerous signs threaten the barely-established unity of the Party...

...By the admission of Jeno Incze, Minister of Foreign Trade, Hungary's large unfavorable trade balance can be covered only by the "brotherly help" of the Communist-bloc countries...

...By June 1957, some Party spokesmen were airing the ominous view that even the legality of the councils was "controversial" because they had come into being as products of the "counter-revolution...

...Kadar himself declared the same day that the whole question of the stationing of Soviet troops in Hungary would be made the subject of negotiations with the other Warsaw Pact signatories...

...The manifest signs of passive resistance constitute as much a costly loss of face for Communism in Hungary as did the Revolution itself...

...Gyorgy Marosan, renegade Social Democrat, who serves as Minister of State...

...Kadar declared on April 2 that "Soviet troops will remain here as long as their presence is needed...

...While the early political concessions of the regime remained unfulfilled, it did, at the outset, grant substantial concessions in certain economic areas...

...As for the top leadership, Janos Kadar is a career Party functionary, a second-fiddler of long standing who never had the stature of a Rakosi or a Nagy and who now has lost the remnants of whatever limited popularity he did enjoy...

...But none of the pressures brought to bear have succeeded in smashing the boycott of silence...

...Two-thirds of the arrested intellectuals, for example, were former Party members...

...Quite naturally, the regime found supporters among those whose personal security was indissolubly linked with the power and affluence of the Communist party: primarily members of the Party, Government and Army bureaucracies...

...Elet es irodalom applied Mao's now-famous phrase in another way, in the course of lamenting the outlook among Hungary's film producers: "The Chinese slogan, 'let a hundred flowers bloom' has been turned inside out in our film production...

...Despite the regime's efforts to revive production, the Hungarian economy is now in a worse state than it was on the eve of the Revolution...

...A typical case of their treatment at the Kadar regime's hands is that of Ga-bor Foldes, the former chief director of the National Theater at Gyor...

...The regime dissolved the Writers' and Journalists' Union and created separate, closely-controlled Literary and Press Councils in its stead...

...the aging First Deputy Premier Ferenc Muennich...

...Since the Revolution, however, only 345,000 out of the total 900,000 pre-revolutionary Communist party members are said to have re-enrolled...

...In view of the fact that the Kadar regime from its inception has ruled in manifest defiance of the will of the nation, the question poses itself: What groups did give the regime their support and thus become the governing class of post-revolutionary Hungary...

...While both Kadar's supporters and the old guard put main emphasis on the fight against "revisionists...

...All in all, the ruling class in Hungary today may bo estimated at not more than 400,000, or 4 per cent of the national population...

...Therefore, the choice must be the latter—but with "new" methods and leaders...

...These include Gyula Kallai, Minister of Education and the regime's "ideological pope...

...Far from instituting "free elections," the Government has held none at all since the Revolution...

...government embracing non-Communists, much less Kadar's November 15 declaration favoring "free, honest elections...

...Industrial workers were accorded an average 10-per-cent wage increase...

...when the mandate of the existing Parliament expired in May, rubber-stamp legislation prolonged its tenure for two years in disregard of constitutional provisions...

...Budapest physicians openly collected 300,000 forints to help the relatives of political prisoners...

...The old pattern can be adapted with slight modifications, using as convenient scapegoats for all past and recent ills the crimes, respectively, of Rakosi and of Nagy...

...The hopes encouraged by these pronouncements were soon dashed...

...Meanwhile, the Party-controlled press began calling for the re-establishment of a "healthy balance" between wages and productivity to avoid "sacrificing the future...

...On April 26, five months after the Revolution, Nepszabadsag sought to justify the continuation of Communist one-party rule by arguing that "the reappearance of other parties would have given legal camouflage to anti-socialist forces...

...In addition, the bulk of the present rank-and-file Party membership may be regarded as active supporters of the regime, though they are motivated more by fear than by enthusiasm, by self-interest rather than Communist conviction...

...in our films every flower is budding but the socialist one...