Hungary and Hope

...Here, at least, there is plenty of food and an adequate amount of consumer goods in the stores...

...she asked After Soviet troops marched into Budapest and installed Janos Kadar as head of the Communist Party in 1956, one might have expected a tight dictatorship to be sustained indefinitely...

...All socialist countries sustain a bit of private enterprise, but Hungary has more than the others—some 100,000 people own such small businesses as retail shops, repair stores, and restaurants, and the regime intends to increase the number...

...The police are always around when anything out of the ordinary happens...

...The result was what officials describe as a small miracle: Meat consumption, thirty-seven kilograms per capita per year before World War II, is seventy-three kilograms today, and production is 150 kilograms per capita...

...There are no statues or historic markers in Bern Square to commemorate the tens of thousands of Hungarians who rose in revolt and were crushed in 1956...

...Their flat rented for $15 a month, they told me, and they owned a car and enjoyed a standard of living for themselves and their two children that is low by West European standards but above the average here...

...The teacher said he could tra.ei to Eastern Europe without restriction but was permitted to visit Western Europe- -if he could raise enough hard cur-:,'cricy ¦ only once every two years at most, and *h=i> ht would have to leave at least one membei of his family behind...

...With their help...

...Imre Nagy undid it in 1953, during a brief period of "liberal" communism, when he allowed peasants to leave the collectives...

...We adopted the Russian system," a leading communist boasts, "but unlike Stalin, who set back Soviet agriculture for decades, we made it work...

...The teacher was forty-five years old and earned 5,000 florints a month—about $150...

...Despite the bloody events of a quarter century ago, it is by no means a Stalinist dictatorship...

...In another part of town, outside a church near the Intercontinental Hotel, a well-dressed teacher had a different point of view: "The people remember Nagy," he said...

...In the 1960s, finally, the government put vast sums (for a nation of 10.7 million) into mechanization...

...the government apparently intends to make them so...

...The teacher (I never asked what he taught) was not happy with conditions in his country...

...It is not as relaxed as communism in Yugoslavia, but much more so than, say, in Czechoslovakia or Romania...

...There was also the usual allowance for small private plots, which still produce one-third of the nation's agricultural output...

...In fact, it took Peter Renyi, managing editor of the party's newspaper, Nepzabadsag, ten minutes to rummage one out of the files for me...

...Peasants were not to be rushed or pushed...

...It costs less than five cents to ride a streetcar and three cents to ride the beautiful subway...

...Kadar remodeled the economy to stimulate greater initiative in production and provide more consumer goods—the formula for what might be called a "relaxed communism...

...The state provided incentive by insisting that farmers be paid rent for the land they put into collectives—and that the title remain in their name...

...And developments in Poland have aroused hopes that the democracy Imre Nagy promised in 1956 may yet be achieved...

...There is still a shortage of apartments, but those who have one pay only $15 or $18 a month...

...it quietly encourages it...

...Democracy for us ended in 1956," he said, but he seemed resigned rather than bitter...

...his wife had a similar job and income, and both of them supplemented their earnings by moonlighting as tutors and translators...

...Kadar eschews personal glorification...

...And there are no political prisoners that I know of...

...but once he had gained full control, he returned to the liberal communism he had espoused before the Soviets gave him the unsavory job of serving as Nagy's successor...

...In 1948, the largest land holdings were taken by the government and distributed to 100,000 homeless families—about 11 to 13 per cent of the farm population...

...Hungary is a net exporter of farm produce, its largest source of hard currency, amounting to $800 million to $1 billion per year...

...We still talk about 1956," says a young woman student, "even though we weren't born at that time...

...Factories remain state-owned and plant managers are still appointed by a state ministry, but the government has introduced elements of the market system, permitting plant managers a considerable leeway in what and where they buy, what and where they sell, and what they produce...

...More than in other countries of the Soviet bloc, the government seems to be seriously committed to meeting the needs and wants of the people...

...The price of meat was raised the week I was there, but even at the higher rate it brings the state only 80 per cent of what it costs to produce...

...The teachers ambivalence seemed to define the ambivalence of Hungary...

...But if it is not oppressive, neither is it free...

...It seems to be waiting for history to suggest the next step...

...The first big change Kadar instituted was in agriculture...

...And why were the police in attendance...

...Increasingly, managers are compensated on the basis of the profits they generate, and workers, too, receive a share of their earnings in the form of profit-sharing...

...In 1956, Kadar reinstated the collectives but with a substantial difference: He insisted that collectivization be based on "free will...

...Everything now, she said, was ruhig—peaceful...

...Twenty-five years after the revolution of 1956, Hungary is not a worker's paradise, but it is not a worker's hell...

...There is also a "second economy," the dimensions of which are difficult to gauge—people who form cooperative groups to build condominiums, for instance, or electricians and plumbers who earn far more doing private jobs after hours than at their regular work in government plants...

...It also offered excellent credit terms for machinery and seed, and allowed the peasants to elect managers from their own ranks instead of having them chosen by the state...

...There is also, of course, the usual free medical care, pensions, education, and other social benefits...

...A second phase began in 1950, when the regime forced owners of middle-sized farms into collectives—a process that proved to be a total failure...

...Hungarian wages are low by Western standards, but the dollar figures are deceptive...

...At the Hilton, which was once part of a royal castle, an old Hungarian woman said she recalled what happened in 1956 and thought of it often, but she did not care to talk about it or say whether conditions have improved since then...

...This moonlighting economy may involve up to a third of the population and provides up to a fifth of the gross national product...

...Why stir up old memories...

...The present government of Janos Kadar would allow considerably more freedom, he believed, but "the Russians won't allow it...

...Officials lament the fact that incentives are not larger...

...no pictures of him are to be found in public places or party offices...

...Ji Senior Editor Sidney Lens traveled in Eastern Europe last summer...

...Asecond facet of the Kadar program was modification of the industrial system—the "New Economic Mechanism" instituted in 1968...

...There are no visible reminders of what communist leaders in Budapest call "the counterrevolution" and what most people in the West describe as "the Hungarian revolution...

...in fact...

...Streetcars and subway trains, for example, run far more often in Budapest than in Prague and are much less crowded...

...In Romania or Bulgaria," he added, "things are much worse...

...why stir up old memories...

...We talk about him among ourselves all the time...

...One evening last summer, some students from the music school were staging a small parade near the Hilton Hotel, chanting and carrying picket signs, and an American tourist wondered aloud whether this was, perhaps, a premature commemoration of 1956...

...But the event has not been erased from national consciousness, and the past year's developments in Poland have brought it to the fore...

...In fact, Hungary is looser and more easygoing than any other country of the Soviet bloc right now—except, of course, for Poland...

...The state does not try to stop it...

...But Kadar turned out to be something of a surprise: To be sure, he conducted a purge in the party and put some people in jail...

...Forced collectivization was tried again in 1954, with the same methods and the same bad results...

...More than a third of all basic purchases—bread, milk, transportation, for example—are subsidized by the state...

...And Kadar rehabilitated such people as the late Imre Vajda, who might a decade later have been called "socialists with a human face...

...She knows that Imre Nagy headed the communist government of Hungary and that the Soviets had him executed, and she can describe in detail what happened in those fateful weeks a quarter of a century ago...

...When the 1956 uprising occurred, peasants fled Hungary in great numbers...

...A student from Guinea, speaking exquisite French, set the tourist straight: "The students are only celebrating the end of the term...

...That seemed to bother him more than anything else we discussed...

...An old woman said the 1956 revolution was often on her mind but would tell me no more...