Revolution, counterrevolution, and the regency, 1918–45
On October 31, 1918, when the defeat of the monarchy was imminent, Charles appointed Károlyi prime minister at the head of an improvised administration based on a left-wing National Council. After the monarchy had signed an armistice on November 3 and Charles had “renounced participation” in public affairs on the 13th, the National Council dissolved Parliament on the 16th and proclaimed Hungary an independent republic, with Károlyi as provisional president. The separation from Austria was popular, but all Károlyi’s supposed friends disappointed him, and all his premises proved mistaken. Serb, Czech, and Romanian troops installed themselves in two-thirds of the helpless country, and, in the confusion, orderly social reform was impossible. The government steadily moved leftward, and on March 21, 1919, Károlyi’s government was replaced by a Soviet republic controlled by Béla Kun, who had promised Hungary Russian support against the Romanians. The help never arrived, and Kun’s doctrinaire Bolshevism, resting on the “Red Terror,” antagonized almost the entire population. On August 1 the Hungarian Soviet Republic fell, and Kun and his associates fled Budapest; three days later Romanian troops entered the city.
Shadow counterrevolutionary governments had already formed themselves in Szeged (then occupied by French troops) and Vienna and pressed the Allies to entrust them with the new government. The Allies insisted on the formation of a provisional regime including democratic elements that would be required to hold elections on a wide, secret suffrage. The Romanians were, with difficulty, induced to retire across the Tisza River, and a government, under the presidency of Károly Huszár, was formed in November 1919. Elections (for a single house) were held in January 1920.
The new Parliament declared null and void all measures enacted by the Károlyi and Kun regimes as well as the legislation embodying the Compromise of 1867. The institution of the monarchy was thus restored, but its permanent reinstatement was predicated on the resolution of the differences between the nation and the dynasty, an issue that divided Hungarians. In the interim, Admiral Miklós Horthy, who had organized the counterrevolutionary armed forces, was elected regent as provisional head of state (March 1, 1920). The Huszár government then resigned, and on March 15 a coalition government, composed of the two main parties in the Parliament (the Christian National Union and the Smallholders), took office under Sándor Simonyi-Semadam.
The regency, 1920–45
The Treaty of Trianon
The Allies had long had their peace terms for Hungary ready but had been unwilling to present them to an earlier regime. It was, thus, the Simonyi-Semadam government that was forced to sign the Treaty of Trianon (June 4, 1920). The Allies not only assumed without question that the country’s non-Hungarian populations wished to leave Hungary but also allowed the successor states, especially Czechoslovakia and Romania, to annex large areas of ethnic Hungarian population.
The final result was to leave Hungary with only 35,893 of the 125,641 square miles (92,962 of the 325,408 square km) that had constituted the lands of the Hungarian crown. Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia took large fragments, while others went to Austria and even Poland and Italy. Of the population of 20,866,447 (1910 census), Hungary was left with 7,615,117. Romania received 5,257,467; Yugoslavia, 4,131,249; Czechoslovakia, 3,517,568; and Austria, 291,618. Of the 10,050,575 persons for whom Hungarian was the mother tongue, no fewer than 3,219,579 were allotted to the successor states: 1,704,851 to Romania, 1,063,020 to Czechoslovakia, 547,735 to Yugoslavia, and 26,183 to Austria. While the homes of some of these—e.g., the Szeklers—had been in the remotest corners of historic Hungary, many were living immediately across the new frontiers.
In addition, the treaty required Hungary to pay in reparations an unspecified sum, which was to be “the first charge upon all its assets and revenues,” and limited its armed forces to 35,000, to be used exclusively for the maintenance of internal order and frontier defense.
Postwar confusion and reconstruction
Conditions in Hungary in 1920 were exceedingly difficult in every respect. The prolonged war, the Bolshevik regime (before which mobile capital had fled headlong), and the rapacious Romanian occupation had exhausted its resources, and the economy had been further disrupted by the new frontiers, which cut factories off from both their accustomed supply sources and their markets. Industrial unemployment had reached unprecedented heights, and the surviving national resources were being strained to support nearly 400,000 refugees from the successor states.
Both industrial and agrarian workers were embittered by the failure of their revolutionary hopes. Even more dangerous were the armies of the “new poor,” not only the homeless refugees but also a large part of the middle classes in general, reduced to penury by the galloping inflation. They formed a radical army, one of the right that ascribed their misery precisely to the revolutions, on which they put the blame for all Hungary’s misfortunes. Feelings ran particularly high against the Jews, who had played a disproportionately large part in both revolutions, especially Kun’s, but the resentment extended also to the Social Democrats and even to Liberal democracy.
“White terrorists” wreaked indiscriminate vengeance on persons whom they associated with the revolutions. Huszár’s government itself had turned so sharply on the Social Democrats and the trade unions that the former withdrew their representatives from the government and boycotted the elections, in protest against the widespread killings, arrests, and internments. (Modern calculations have put the number of those executed to somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000.) Communists, radical democrats, Jewish intellectuals, and assorted academics emigrated in large numbers, among them such renowned personalities as scientists Theodore von Kármán and Leo Szilárd, social philosophers Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim, economist Karl Polanyi, sociologist Oszkár Jászi, philosopher György Lukács, film directors Sir Alexander Korda and László Vajda, and artists László Moholy-Nagy and Béni Ferenczy.
The government of Pál, Count Teleki, who succeeded Simonyi-Semadam in July 1920, blunted the edge of the agrarian unrest with a modest reform—promised, indeed, only as a first installment—that took 1.7 million acres (7.5 percent of the total area of the country) from the biggest estates for distribution in smallholdings. But it had hardly touched any other social problem when in March 1921 the legitimist question was raised in acute form by King Charles’s sudden return to Hungary. He was ordered to withdraw by the Allies with the willing compliance of the right-wing radicals, toward whom Horthy was then leaning. The government, several of whose members were legitimists, resigned, and the succession was assumed by the conservative István, Count Bethlen, who had been waiting behind the scenes. Bethlen devised a formula that, while not legally excluding the king’s return (under Entente pressure, Parliament had voted a law dethroning the Habsburgs, but even Hungary’s own antilegitimists never took it as morally binding), excluded it in practice. In return for this, the Smallholders’ Party agreed with the antilegitimists among the Christian nationalists to form a new Party of Unity under Bethlen’s leadership.
In March 1922 Bethlen persuaded Parliament to accept as still legally in force the franchise enacted in 1918, which reduced the number of voters and reintroduced open voting in rural districts. As a result of this law, 2.4 million of Hungary’s 8 million citizens (about 29 percent of the population) had the right to vote. This proportion compared favorably with those of France, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia but less favorably with those of Austria, England, and the Scandinavian countries. Conducted under this law, the elections in May 1922 gave the Party of Unity a large majority.
Meanwhile, a second attempt by King Charles (in October 1921) to recover his throne failed, and the legitimist question lost its acuteness with Charles’s death in 1922. In December 1921 Bethlen concluded a secret pact with the Social Democrats, under which the latter promised to abstain from political agitation and to support the government’s foreign policy in return for the end of persecution, the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of the sequestrated trade union funds. The farm labor leaders were persuaded to accept the indefinite postponement of further land reform. The “White Terror” was liquidated quietly but effectively, chiefly by finding government employment for the right-wing radical leaders.
Bethlen’s domestic program was made possible by his cautious international policy. Almost all Hungarians were passionately convinced of the injustice of the Treaty of Trianon, the redress of which was the all-dominant motive of Hungary’s foreign policy throughout the interwar period and the key to the hostile relations between Hungary and those states that had chiefly profited by it. Bethlen was as revisionist at heart as any of his countrymen, but he was convinced that Hungary could not act effectively in this field until it had acquired friends abroad and had achieved political and economic consolidation at home. This depended on financial reconstruction. To achieve this, he applied for Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations, which was granted (not without difficulty) in September 1922. In March 1924, in return for an agreement to carry out loyally the obligations of the treaty, he obtained a League loan, which had almost magical effects. Inflation stopped immediately. The League loan was followed by a flood of private lending, and the expatriated domestic capital returned. With this help, Hungary enjoyed some years of prosperity, during which agriculture revived and industrialization made progress.
Abroad, Bethlen’s only other important move was the conclusion in 1927 of a treaty of friendship with Italy. At home his regime, which was conservative but not tyrannical, rested on what came to be called Hungary’s conservative-liberal forces, to the exclusion of extremism from left or right.
Financial crisis: the rise of right radicalism
Bethlen’s command of Parliament was complete and unshaken by the disastrous fall in world wheat prices in 1929. In June 1931 he had just held elections that returned his party with its usual large majority when a world financial crisis supervened on the economic one to shatter the foundations of his structure. Foreign creditors called in their money, and Hungary, its trade balance annihilated by the collapse of the wheat market, could not meet their demands and had to apply for help from the League of Nations, which imposed a regime of rigid orthodox deflation. Industrial unemployment soared again, the agricultural population was rendered almost literally penniless, and the government services had to carry through large-scale dismissals and salary reductions in the interests of a balanced budget. Consequently, in the early 1930s, many persons with university degrees were scurrying around for jobs as bellhops and street cleaners.
In August Bethlen resigned. His successor, Gyula, Count Károlyi, was unable to cope with the situation. Political agitation mounted, and on October 1, 1932, Horthy appointed as prime minister the leader of the right-wing radicals, Gyula Gömbös.
At home Gömbös found the financial forces, international and domestic, as invincible as had his predecessors. Previously a violent antisemite, he had to recant his views on this point and was unable to carry through any other points of his fascist program, particularly as Horthy at first refused to allow him to hold elections. Neither was he able to realize his foreign political ideal of an “Axis” composed of Hungary, Italy, and Germany, since his two proposed partners were then at loggerheads over Austria. Gömbös, one of whose first acts had been to dash to Rome and breathe new life into Hungary’s friendship with Italy, now found himself drawn into the “Rome Triangle” (Italy, Austria, and Hungary) that was directed precisely against Germany. Finally, Adolf Hitler upset another of Gömbös’s calculations by telling him that, while Germany would help Hungary against Czechoslovakia, it would not do so against Romania or Yugoslavia.
Nevertheless, by the time of Gömbös’s premature death in October 1936, he had managed to achieve at least some of his goals. Shortly before Gömbös died, Horthy had at last allowed him to hold elections, which had brought into Parliament a strong right-wing radical contingent from which it could never thereafter free itself. Abroad, when Benito Mussolini became subordinate to Hitler, Hungary found itself in a sort of Axis camp after all, membership of which might help it at least to accomplish partial revision of the Treaty of Trianon. On the other hand, if Germany chose to apply economic or political pressure, Hungary would be defenseless but for such shadow help as Italy could offer.
This threat already loomed large, and thenceforward it became inextricably involved with Hungary’s own internal politics, by reason of the ideological character of the Nazi regime and in particular its antisemitism. Antisemitism at that stage was running high in Hungary itself, and those infected by it—not just the right-wing radicals of various brands but other members of the middle classes as well—welcomed Germany’s support for their own ideas while making light of its dangers. They even argued, not without reason, that the danger lay in affronting Germany, which could easily crush unarmed little Hungary but would not wish to attack a friend and ideological partner. Many of them (as well as most army officers) further believed that, should Hitler’s policies lead to war, Germany would emerge the victor; Hungary’s salvation thus lay in joining forces with Germany.
On the other side, a curious shadow front emerged, composed of all elements antagonistic to Nazism—not only Hungary’s Jews but also the legitimists, the traditionalist conservative-liberals, and the Social Democrats. Many of these people were not convinced that Germany was invincible and held that, if war came, only disaster could follow for Hungary if it became too closely involved with Germany. Even they, however, were unwilling to draw the ultimate conclusion that Hungary should abandon all its revisionist claims and join hands with the Little Entente, which for its part indicated that it would accept nothing short of total renunciation. It was of the highest importance that by this time Horthy had shed his earlier right-wing radical leanings and sympathized with this shadow front.
To succeed Gömbös, Horthy appointed Kálmán Darányi, who was more of a conservative than a right-wing radical. His appointment was ill-received in Germany, which grew even more hostile the next year, when Darányi’s foreign minister, Kálmán Kánya, obtained the tacit consent of the Little Entente for Hungary to rearm, although Hungary was still sadly short of armaments, for which, again, Germany was its only source of supply. On a visit to Berlin, Darányi and Kánya smoothed over the difficulties, but, when Darányi tried to placate the extremists at home, Horthy replaced him (in May 1938) with Béla Imrédy, who introduced a largely token “Jewish Law” (May 29, 1938) but nevertheless pinned his hopes on the West.
When the crisis of the Munich Agreement broke in September 1938, Imrédy and Kánya, while presenting Hungary’s claims on Czechoslovakia, limited those claims to what they hoped would be acceptable to the Western powers, whose endorsement they made every effort to obtain. Ignored by the West, the Hungarian leaders had to turn to Germany and Italy after all, which, under the “First Vienna Award” of November 2, gave Hungary the fringe of southern Slovakia inhabited by ethnic Hungarians. Imrédy, disillusioned with the West, dismissed Kánya for the pro-Axis István, Count Csáky, and sought to recover Hitler’s favor by introducing a more far-reaching Jewish Law (May 2, 1939). Imrédy’s enemies secured his resignation in February 1939 by unearthing documents purporting to show a Jewish strain in his own ancestry. Pál, Count Teleki, who succeeded him, was sympathetic to the West, but Hungary’s recovery of Carpatho-Ruthenia (March 1939) with Hitler’s sanction and approval made it difficult for him to pursue a pro-Western policy.
War and renewed defeat
When Germany attacked Poland (September 1, 1939), Hungary refused to allow German troops to cross Hungarian territory but permitted remnants of the Polish army, fleeing civilians, and Polish Jews to enter the country. In the first months of World War II, none of the belligerents wanted the war to extend to southeastern Europe, so Teleki and Horthy were able to keep Hungary at peace. After the Soviet Union had occupied Bessarabia in June 1940, the Hungarian leaders compelled a reluctant Germany (but a willing Italy) to cede to Hungary northern Transylvania under the “Second Vienna Award” (August 30). They then allowed German troops to cross Hungarian territory into southern Romania and in November signed the Tripartite Pact.
The next step was more fatal still. In his search for insurance, Teleki concluded with the like-minded government of Yugoslavia a treaty (December 12, 1940) unluckily characterized as one of “Eternal Friendship.” On March 26, 1941, that Yugoslav government was overthrown by a pro-Western regime. Hitler prepared to invade Yugoslavia and called on Hungary to help. Caught in an unanticipated situation, Hungary refused to join in the attack but again allowed German troops to cross its territory. Great Britain threatened to declare war, and Teleki, blaming himself for the development of a situation that it had been his life’s aim to avoid, committed suicide on April 2. His successor, László Bárdossy, waited until Croatia had declared its independence (April 10) and then, arguing that Yugoslavia had already disintegrated, occupied the ex-Hungarian areas of Yugoslavia.
Although he was not a fascist, Bárdossy believed that the Axis powers would win the war and that Hungary’s salvation lay in placating them. Otherwise, so he believed, Romania (now pro-Axis) would persuade Hitler to reverse the Second Vienna Award. Accordingly, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), Bárdossy sent a token force to assist in what everyone expected to be a brief operation. The strength of the Soviet resistance upset the calculation, and in January 1942 the Germans forced Hungary to mobilize practically all its available manpower and send it to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, amid a flurry of declarations of war in December 1941 and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provoked the United States to formally enter the war, Britain (by this point allied with the Soviet Union) declared war on Hungary, which in turn declared war on the United States. Further, Britain recognized the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and withdrew recognition of the First Vienna Award, while the Soviet Union recognized Czechoslovakia’s 1937 frontiers.
Many Hungarians by then agreed with Bárdossy that Hungary’s only course was to fight on until the Axis won the war—the more so because all Hungarians except those of the extreme left regarded Bolshevism as the embodiment of evil. Horthy, however, while sharing this view, still believed in a Western victory and thought it possible for Hungary, while continuing the struggle in the East, to regain the favor of the West. In March 1942 he replaced Bárdossy with Miklós Kállay, who shared these hopes. For two years Kállay conducted a remarkable balancing act—protecting Hungary’s Jews and allowing the left (except for the communists) almost untrammeled freedom while putting out innumerable feelers to the Western Allies, to whom he actually promised to surrender unconditionally when their troops reached Hungary’s frontiers. Meanwhile, in January 1943 the Hungarian expeditionary force suffered a crushing defeat at Voronezh in western Russia that cost it much of its manpower and nearly all its equipment.
But the Western forces did not approach the Danube valley, and, as the Soviet army neared the Carpathians, Hitler, from whom few of Kállay’s activities were hidden, decided that he could not leave his vital communications at the mercy of an untrustworthy regime. In March 1944 he offered Horthy the choice between full cooperation under German supervision or undisguised German occupation with the treatment accorded to an enemy. On March 19, while Horthy was visiting Hitler in Klessheim, Germany, the Germans began the occupation of Hungary, leaving Horthy no choice but to appoint a collaborationist government under the openly Germanophile Döme Sztójay.
For a while the Germans did much as they wished—they suppressed parties and organizations of potential opponents and arrested their leaders. With the cooperation of Hungarian authorities, Jews were compelled to wear a yellow star, robbed of their property, and incarcerated in ghettos as in other Nazi-occupied areas. Except for the Jews in the capital and those in the forced-labor camps of the Hungarian army—whose turn would come later—Hungarian Jews were deported to the gas chambers of German extermination camps. In spite of the efforts of representatives of some neutral countries—such as Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, the papal nuncio, and diplomats from Switzerland, Portugal, and even Spain—which saved tens of thousands of lives, some 550,000 of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews (as defined by ‘‘racial’’ legislation) perished during the war. At the same time, with the help of sympathetic citizens who risked their own lives, about 250,000 Hungarian Jews survived.
In the summer of 1944, the pressure relaxed, and in August, after Romania’s surrender to the Allies, Horthy appointed a new government under the loyal general Géza Lakatos and again extended peace feelers. A “preliminary armistice” was concluded in Moscow, but, when on October 15 Horthy announced this on the radio, he was abducted by the Germans, who forced him to recant and to abdicate. The Germans put Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the right-wing extremist Arrow Cross Party, in charge. By then, however, Soviet troops were far inside the country. The Germans and their Hungarian allies were driven back slowly, while numerous refugees fled with them. The last armed forces crossed the Austrian frontier in April 1945.
The occupying Red Army wreaked havoc in the country. Hundreds of thousands of rapes were committed. A similar number of civilians were abducted; accused of various political crimes—such as alleged Nazi affiliation, fighting against Soviet forces, spying for the West, or being involved in sabotage activities—they were convicted and deported for 10 to 25 years to the Soviet Gulag. Others were simply taken off the streets to perform a ‘‘little work” (malenky robot) and were sent, without trial, for three to five years to the slave labor camps scattered throughout the Soviet Union. Still others became prisoners of war who, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, were reclassified by the tens of thousands as “war criminals” and kept for years as forced laborers in the Gulag.
Hungary’s defeat was sealed in a new peace treaty, signed in Paris on February 10, 1947, which restored the Trianon frontiers, with a rectification in favor of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. It imposed on Hungary a reparations bill of $300 million and limited its armed forces. The implementation of the treaty’s provisions was to be supervised by a Soviet occupation force, a large contingent of which remained in the country until June 1991.
Carlile Aylmer Macartney Steven Béla VárdyHungary in the Soviet orbit
As in 1920, a new regime recognized the defeat of its predecessor. As early as December 1944, a makeshift Provisional National Assembly had accepted a government list and program presented to it by communist agents following in the wake of the Soviet armies. Beginning cautiously, the communists announced that the new Hungary was to rest on “all its democratic elements.” The government contained only two communists; its other members were representatives of four noncommunist left-wing parties—the Smallholders, the Social Democrats, the National Peasants, and the Progressive Bourgeoisie—and four men associated with the Horthy regime, including two generals who had been in Moscow in connection with the armistice talks. The program provided for the expropriation of the large estates and the nationalization of the banks and heavy industry, but it promised guarantees of democratic rights and liberties, respect for private property, and encouragement of private initiative in trade and small industry.
The communist regime
Political developments
The full political takeover proceeded systematically, although not according to any timetable, because the communists, misjudging feeling in the country, allowed the first elections (November 1945) to be relatively free. Only the parties of the coalition were allowed to contest them, but the adherents of the proscribed parties voted for the Smallholders, who received an absolute majority. The head of the Soviet mission, however, insisted that the coalition must be maintained; a Smallholder was allowed to be prime minister, but the Ministry of the Interior, with the control of the police, was given to the communists. Pressure and intimidation were then applied to the Smallholders to expel their more-courageous members as “fascists,” and in the next manipulated election (August 1947) the Smallholders polled only 15 percent of the votes cast. The communists had meanwhile forced the Social Democrats to form a “workers’ bloc” with them. Although the pressure was considerable, the bloc still polled only 45 percent of the votes (other parties were allowed to participate this time). The communists then forced the Social Democrats to join them in a single Workers’ Party, from which recalcitrants were expelled.
In the next election, in May 1949, voting was open, and the voters were presented with a single list, on which candidates identified as Smallholders and National Peasants were actually crypto-communists. In late summer a new constitution was enacted, which was a copy of the constitution of the Soviet Union. It was promulgated on August 20—Hungary’s traditional St. Stephen’s Day—specifically with the goal of transforming that national holiday connected with Hungary’s Christianization into the politically inspired Constitution Day. With this constitution, Hungary—a republic since February 1, 1946—became a “people’s republic.” Although its president (Zoltán Tildy) and for a while its prime ministers (Ferenc Nagy, then Lajos Dinnyés) were Smallholders, all real power rested with the Hungarian Workers’ [communist] Party, controlled by its first secretary, Mátyás Rákosi.
Finally, the party’s “Muscovite” wing turned on its “national” wing. The leader of this latter group, László Rajk, was executed on questionable charges in October 1949, and his chief adherents were similarly executed or imprisoned. Meanwhile, hundreds were executed or imprisoned as war criminals, many of them for no offense other than loyalty to the Horthy regime. Many thousands more were interned. The State Security Department, replaced in 1948 by the State Security Authority, was omnipotent. The judiciary, civil service, and army were purged, and party orthodoxy became the criterion for positions in them. The trade unions were made into mere executants of party orders.
Those who were distrusted were collected, convicted, and sent to various internment camps, the most notorious of which was the camp at Recsk in north-central Hungary, which functioned in great secrecy between 1950 and 1953. In May–June 1951, about 12,700 upper- and upper-middle-class people were driven out of their apartments in Budapest and deported to small farming villages on the Great Alföld or to scattered labor camps on the mud flats of Hortobágy in the vicinity of Debrecen.
After the dissolution of the parties, the chief ideological opposition to the communist regime came from the churches, but their estates were expropriated, making it impossible for them to maintain their schools, and in 1948 the entire educational system was nationalized. The Calvinist and Lutheran churches accepted financial arrangements imposed by the state. The head of the Roman Catholic Church, József Cardinal Mindszenty, who refused to follow their example, was arrested on transparent charges in December 1948 and condemned to life imprisonment. The monastic orders were dissolved. Thereafter, the Roman Catholic Church accepted financial terms similar to those offered to other churches, and eventually the bishops, with visible repugnance, took the oath of loyalty to the state.
Economic developments
The communists’ economic program, like their political program, could not be realized immediately, because in 1945 Hungary was in a state of economic chaos worse even than that of 1918. This time the country had been a theater of war. Many cities were in ruins, and communications were wrecked; the retreating Germans had destroyed the bridges between Buda and Pest and had taken with them all they could of the country’s portable wealth. The Soviet armies lived off the land, and the Soviet Union took its share of reparations in kind, placing its own values on the objects seized. It also took over former German assets in Hungary, including Jewish property confiscated during the Nazi occupation.
A three-year plan introduced in August 1947 was devoted chiefly to the repair of immediate damage. This was declared completed, ahead of schedule, in December 1949. By then the communists were in full political control, and measures nationalizing banking, most industry, and most internal and all foreign trade had been enacted. Hungary joined other Soviet-bloc countries in founding Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) in 1949. The land outside the big estates was not touched at first, but in 1948 Rákosi announced a policy of collectivization of agriculture. Three forms were envisaged: state farms and two types of cooperative. Farmers were forced by various pressures into the cooperatives, the character of which approached ever more closely that of the state farms.
The three-year plan was succeeded by a five-year plan, the aim of which was to turn Hungary into a predominantly industrial country, with an emphasis on heavy industry. Huge sums were devoted to the construction of foundries and factories, many of them planned with little regard for Hungary’s real resources and less still for its needs. In fact, the plan was concerned with the needs of the Soviet Union, for which Hungary was to serve as a workshop. Hungary’s newly discovered deposits of uranium went straight out of the country. Industrial production rose steeply, but the standard of living did not; the production of consumer goods was throttled and that of agriculture stagnated.
The Revolution of 1956
Rákosi—who in 1952 came to preside over the government as well as the party—was, under Moscow’s direction, all-powerful until the death of Stalin in 1953, when a period of fluctuation began. In July 1953 Rákosi was deposed from the prime ministership in favor of Imre Nagy—a “Muscovite” but a Hungarian in his attitudes and not unpopular in the country. Nagy promised a new course—an end to the forced development of heavy industry, more consumer goods, no more forcing of farmers into the collectives, the release of political prisoners, and the closing of internment camps. He introduced some of these reforms, but Moscow hesitated to support him. In the spring of 1955, Nagy was dismissed from office and expelled from the party.
Rákosi was reinstated, and he put the country back on its previous course. He was dismissed again in July 1956, this time from all his offices and in disgrace. The new Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had sacrificed Rákosi as a gesture to the Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito, whom Rákosi had offended personally and whom the Soviet leadership wished to placate. The new leader, Ernő Gerő, Rákosi’s deputy, was almost as detested as Rákosi himself. Gerő promptly announced that there would be no concessions on matters of principle to Nagy and his group.
The relaxation of pressure under Nagy (though transitory), Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality—delivered at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956—and the Polish challenge to the Soviet Union in the spring and summer of 1956 emboldened Hungarians. On October 23, students in Budapest staged a great procession, which was to end with the presentation of a petition asking for redress of the nation’s grievances. People flocked into the streets to join them. Gerő answered with an unwise and truculent speech, and police fired into the crowds. The shots turned a peaceful demonstration into a revolutionary one. The army joined the revolutionaries, and army depots and munitions factories handed out arms. Outside Budapest, local councils sprang up in every center. The farmers reoccupied their confiscated fields. The communist bureaucracy melted away. Prison doors were opened. The members of the State Security Authority fled if they could. A cheering crowd escorted Cardinal Mindszenty back to the primate’s palace.
In kaleidoscopic political changes, Nagy resumed power on October 25 but then was driven from one concession to the next. On November 3 he found himself at the head of a new and genuine coalition government representing the reconstituted Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and the revived Smallholders’ Party, Social Democratic Party, and Petőfi [former National Peasant] Party.
The Soviet troops had withdrawn, and Nagy was negotiating for their complete evacuation from Hungary. On November 1 he announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (to which it had adhered since 1955) and asked the United Nations to recognize his country as a neutral state, under the joint protection of the great powers. Soviet officials were uncertain whether to act or to let matters take their course, for fear of Western intervention. But the growing pressures for intervention from China and neighboring Romania, Czechoslovakia, and eventually even Yugoslavia; the danger posed by Nagy’s gravitation out of the Soviet bloc; Israeli, British, and French involvement in the Suez Crisis; and an increasing realization that the United States would not risk a global confrontation over Hungary emboldened the Soviet leadership to act. Their tanks, which had halted just across the frontier, began to return, reinforced by other units. On November 4 the Soviet forces entered Budapest and began liquidating the revolution. Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy and Cardinal Mindszenty in the U.S. legation. Gen. Pál Maléter, the Nagy government’s minister of defense, who had been invited by the Soviet commanders to negotiate, was taken captive and eventually executed.
In the early morning of the same day, János Kádár—who had defected from the Nagy government and left Budapest on November 1—broadcast a radio speech wherein he declared the illegitimacy of the Nagy government and proclaimed the formation of the new Soviet-supported “Hungarian revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government.” It consisted entirely of communists, who now congregated under the flag of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party that had replaced the discredited Hungarian Workers’ Party. The new government was headed by Kádár as prime minister and Ferenc Münnich as his second in command. Kádár promised that once the “counterrevolution” was suppressed and order was restored, he would negotiate for the withdrawal of the Soviet garrison (although the denunciation of the Warsaw Pact was retracted). Having been imprisoned himself by Rákosi’s Stalinist regime, he now dissociated himself from the “Rákosi-Gerő clique” and promised substantial internal reforms.
Most Hungarians, however, were skeptical of these promises, and fighting continued. But the odds were too heavy in favor of the Soviets, and the major hostilities were over within a fortnight, although sporadic encounters continued into January 1957. The workers continued their struggle by proclaiming a general strike and other forms of peaceful resistance. It took many weeks before they were brought to heel and many more months before some semblance of normality returned to the country. The price in human lives was great. According to the calculations of historians, the Hungarians suffered about 20,000 casualties, among them some 2,500 deaths, while the Soviet losses consisted of about 1,250 wounded and more than 650 dead.
Meanwhile, Nagy, who had left his place of refuge under safe conduct, had been abducted and taken to Romania. After a secret trial, he and Maléter and a few close associates were executed in 1958. Many lesser figures were seized and transported to the Soviet Union, some never to return, and 200,000 refugees escaped to the West (about 38,000 of whom emigrated to North America in 1956–57). Thus, a substantial proportion of Hungary’s young and educated classes was lost to the country, including several top noncommunist political leaders and intellectuals, as well as Gen. Béla K. Király, the commander of the Hungarian National Guard organized during the revolution. Material damage was also very heavy, especially in Budapest.
The Kádár regime
In the first uncertain weeks of his regime, Kádár made many promises. Workers’ councils were to be given a large amount of control in the factories and mines. Compulsory deliveries of farm produce were to be abolished, and no compulsion, direct or indirect, was to be put on the farmers to enter the collectives. The five-year plan was to be revised to permit more production of consumer goods. The exchange rate of the ruble and forint was to be adjusted and the uranium contract revised. For a time there was even talk of a coalition government.
The larger hopes were dashed after representatives of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria conferred with those of Hungary in Budapest in January 1957. A new program was soon issued stating that Hungary was a dictatorship of the proletariat, which in foreign policy relied on the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. Further, it was asserted that the Soviet garrison was in Hungary to protect the country from imperialist aggression. Internal reforms were again promised, however, and foreign trade agreements were to be based on complete equality and mutual advantage.
Subsequently, Kádár was at great pains to give the Soviet Union no cause for uneasiness over Hungary’s loyalty. When any international issue arose, he invariably supported Moscow’s policy with meticulous orthodoxy, even sending a contingent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to help crush the “Prague Spring.” At home he ignored some of his promises and honored others only superficially. The farmers were so greatly pressured to enter cooperatives that within a few years practically no private farms survived. The workers’ councils were dissolved, but trade unions were later granted rights to query decisions by management. Parliament remained a rubber stamp, and a Patriotic People’s Front (PPF), on which noncommunists were represented, was a mere facade.
The bloody retributions in 1957–59 resulted in the execution of “counterrevolutionaries” (among them Prime Minister Imre Nagy and several of his associates) and the imprisonment of thousands of others. Yet by the 1960s, conditions had changed for the better. Between 1960 and 1963, by way of two separate amnesty decrees, most of those imprisoned for “counterrevolutionary activities” or for the misuse of their party positions during the “years of the personality cult” (i.e., the Rákosi regime) were pardoned and released. At this time the United Nations (UN) ended its debate on the “case of Hungary” and by June 1963 helped to remove the moral stigma from the Kádár regime by the formal acceptance of its credentials at the UN.
Almost simultaneously, Kádár enunciated the principle that “he who is not against us is with us,” which meant ordinary people could go about their business without fear of molestation or even much surveillance and could speak, read, and even write with reasonable freedom. Technical competence replaced party orthodoxy as a criterion for attaining posts of responsibility. More scope was allowed to private small-scale enterprise in trade and industry, and the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), initiated in 1968, introduced the profit motive into state-directed enterprises. Agricultural cooperatives were allowed to produce industrial goods for their own use or to sell on demand, while the private plots of their members supplied a large proportion of fruits and vegetables for the rest of the population.
Contacts with the West were encouraged. A modus vivendi was found with the Vatican and with Protestant churches. The standard of living began to rise substantially. Tourism developed as a significant industry. In addition to a huge influx of foreign visitors—many of them from western Europe, the United States, and Canada—an increasing number of Hungarians traveled abroad. This was especially true after the introduction (January 1, 1988) of “global passports,” which removed restrictions on travel. Income from tourism increased dramatically, yet the net balance was less in Hungary’s favor than would be expected, because Hungarians going to the West spent most of their official hard currency quotas on purchases of consumer goods, owing to shortages and skyrocketing prices at home.
The two decades of the NEM, which went beyond the liberalization that took place in the Soviet Union itself, were only partially successful. Productivity failed to rise according to expectations. Government regulations persisted in many areas, and the economy remained geared to the Soviet-led Comecon. A burdensome system of subventions aimed at keeping down the prices of basic necessities and services and at promoting the production of state-preferred goods made realistic cost accounting impossible. The price rise of petroleum and other industrial raw materials on the world market in the early 1970s also aggravated the situation. The gap grew between the price of energy, sophisticated industrial hardware, and raw materials, on the one hand, and the price of agricultural products, a main item in Hungary’s foreign trade, on the other. Also burdensome was Hungary’s growing indebtedness, which began in 1970 and climaxed in the mid-1990s. By the end of the Kádár regime, the nation’s gross foreign debt to the West had passed the $18 billion mark.
Carlile Aylmer Macartney George Barany Steven Béla VárdyPolitical opposition to reform, including Soviet and Comecon criticism of the NEM, all but brought it to a halt in 1973–78. Administrative interventions by state agencies and party and trade union organizations caused a return to the methods of the centralized command economy under the pretext of protecting the relative earnings of industrial workers compared with those in agriculture or of taxing only “unearned” profits of successful enterprises. Rezső Nyers, the architect of the NEM, was demoted in 1974, only to be brought back to the Politburo in May 1988, at a time of deepening political and economic crisis. By the end of the 1970s, reformers had again prevailed over their opponents. New measures included cuts in the central bureaucracy, encouragement of small firms and private enterprises, revisions of the price and wage system to reflect more closely conditions on the world market and costs of production, and the creation of a commercial banking system.
Reforms of the late 1980s
Economic reforms
The efforts to introduce market reforms into Hungary’s socialist economy extended to the international arena. Already a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Hungary was admitted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1982 and received assistance from the World Bank. Hungary was the first among members of Comecon to enter into agreement with the European Economic Community (later succeeded by the European Union). While the Soviet Union remained Hungary’s most important trading partner and the source of its energy supply, Hungary had to turn to the West for technological assistance and capital investment in the process of modernizing the economy. Trade relations with the West, in which Austria and West Germany played particularly important roles, were crucial at a time when barely half of Hungary’s foreign trade involved members of Comecon. Foreign trade constituted a larger proportion of Hungary’s gross national product (GNP) than that of any other Comecon country.
Efforts to adjust Hungary’s economy to the world market were handicapped by the adverse effects of the energy crisis of the 1970s and the de facto reversal of the NEM in the same decade. Although agricultural production continued to advance, in part because of favorable international market conditions, the rest of the economy deteriorated. This process was further aggravated by misallocation of funds, reluctance to abandon costly projects such as the Danube hydroelectric power plant, and participation in joint projects of Comecon. There was also unwillingness to drastically reduce subsidies to inefficient enterprises and for many basic necessities and services, which were kept at an artificially low price level. As a result, Hungary’s hard currency indebtedness by the end of the 1980s was the highest per capita indebtedness of any country in eastern Europe. Inflationary pressures began to build up, and real wages and living standards declined.
The appointment of Károly Grósz as prime minister in mid-1987 led to a program of severe belt-tightening; a harsh, hastily prepared income tax law aimed at cutting consumption; anticipated unemployment in some segments of the economy; and steep rises in consumer prices, transportation costs, and basic services such as gas, electricity, telephone, water, and rents. Minor changes in the party leadership, still controlled by Kádár, and the reshuffling of the government—including the establishment of the first Ministry of the Environment in eastern Europe—eased acceptance of unpopular measures introduced to stabilize the collapsing economy. But, as a consequence of these growing economic difficulties, Kádár’s prestige—which had peaked in the late 1970s and early ’80s and made him the most popular communist leader within the Soviet bloc—plummeted.
Political reforms
By the late 1980s, growing numbers of Hungarians had concluded that years of misgovernment could not be erased by economic reforms alone. The process of de-Stalinization reinforced the desire to reexamine the political premises of Grósz’s program, which seemed to imply that to keep their hard-won personal freedoms Hungarians should pay with economic misery and further social polarization. By the time the annual inflation rate reached 17 percent, public pressure compelled the party conference in May 1988 to replace Kádár with Grósz and also to replace several of Kádár’s supporters within the Politburo and the Central Committee. In November 1988 a young economist, Miklós Németh, became the prime minister, and in June 1989 a quadrumvirate composed of Imre Pozsgay, Grósz, Németh, and Nyers—chaired by the latter—temporarily took over the direction of a deeply split party. In October the party congress announced the dissolution of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and its transformation into the Hungarian Socialist Party. A splinter group of conservatives, under the leadership of Gyula Thürmer, saved a small fraction of the old party under its original name and continued allegiance to its communist policies.
Meanwhile, informal associations, clubs, and debating circles such as the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Federation of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége; Fidesz), the Network of Free Initiatives, and the Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Society proliferated and served as points of departure for new political parties. The Democratic Union of Scientific Workers, supported by a substantial portion of academic and clerical employees of scholarly institutions, was the first independent professional association to challenge the communist-controlled National Council of Trade Unions and to establish contact with the Polish union Solidarity, as well as with organized labor in the West. Filmmakers, writers, and journalists rediscovered their right of free speech, publishers printed manuscripts that had been kept locked up for decades, new periodicals appeared, and the press, radio, and television threw over taboos that had prevailed for more than 40 years.
The 950th anniversary of the death of King St. Stephen I, who led the Christianization of Hungary, was celebrated with medieval pomp in August 1988. It was commemorated in the presence of the primate of Poland, Józef Cardinal Glemp, representing Pope John Paul II. This began the transformation of Constitution Day—introduced four decades earlier under Rákosi—back into the original St. Stephen’s Day.
Major achievements were made in the areas of religious freedom and state-church relationship through the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religion, passed in January 1990. Full diplomatic relations with the Vatican were reestablished in March 1990, and Pope John Paul II made an official visit to Hungary in August 1991. In 1988 the Boy Scouts (viewed as a conspicuously Christian organization in Hungary) was resuscitated, in 1989 the law that had disbanded Christian religious orders in 1950 was repealed, and in 1990 the state began to return to the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches some of their former prestigious educational institutions. The World Jewish Congress held its executive session in Budapest in 1987, and in June 1990 the Hungarian Christian-Jewish Council was established to promote interaction among religious denominations.
The fate of the Hungarian minorities in the neighboring countries of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, as well as, after 1945, in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (now known as Carpatho-Ukraine), had been a concern of every Hungarian government in the period between Hungary’s dismemberment after World War I and the rise of communist domination following World War II. Territorial revisionism had been a cornerstone of interwar Hungarian foreign policy, and concern for the minorities remained alive among a significant portion of the Hungarians both at home and abroad even after World War II. But this concern did not apply to the communist Hungarian government, which forbade even mentioning this question during the three decades following World War II. The fate of the minorities, however, became an increasingly acute issue after Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rise to power in Romania and his brutal anti-Hungarian domestic policy in Transylvania.
The Kádár regime tried to avoid this question so as not to offend fraternal communist governments within the Soviet bloc, but the ascension of human rights in international politics during the 1970s made it increasingly difficult to do so. By the late 1980s, conditions had reached a point where Hungarian party and government leaders were obliged to join the worldwide public protests against the repression of Hungarians in the surrounding states. They were particularly incensed by Romania’s policy of reapportionment and relocation of the rural population, which, if fully implemented, would have destroyed a large number of ethnic Hungarian settlements and in effect would have advanced the cause of the policy of mass assimilation. By granting asylum to refugees from Transylvania (not only Hungarians but also Romanians and Germans) at a moment of economic insecurity, by tolerating if not encouraging a sharp media campaign and mass demonstrations in front of the Romanian embassy in Budapest, and by submitting formal complaints to international organizations after an unsuccessful meeting between Grósz and Ceaușescu in August 1988, the Hungarian government indicated its determination to take an active interest in the fate of Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries. This policy in defense of human rights, combined with renewed openings toward Austria, establishment of trade relations with South Korea, and resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel (severed since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967), was taken as a sign of a more independent foreign policy, as were the efforts at strengthening Hungary’s ties with western Europe.
All the while, Hungarian American organizations were very active—in advance of the Hungarian government—in trying to turn the attention of world leaders to the plight of the Hungarian minorities in the surrounding states, especially in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Their incessant agitation aggravated and embarrassed the Hungarian government, which soon addressed the issue of Hungarian minorities.
Nevertheless, by the late 1980s this issue created a breach in the leadership of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ (communist) Party, with some of the reform communists demanding greater attention to the plight of the Hungarian minorities. Some also asked for a reassessment of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which for more than three decades had simply been referred to as an “imperialist-inspired counterrevolution.” The first major figure to label that revolution a “popular uprising” (not a “counterrevolution”) was Imre Pozsgay, who, though a member of the Politburo, was already moving away from strict Marxist ideology. He joined forces with a most unlikely partner, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, the oldest son of the last king of Hungary, to sponsor the Pan-European Picnic of August 19, 1989, when hundreds of East Germans who were visiting Hungary breached the formerly unbreachable Iron Curtain and fled to Austria. Within three weeks the Hungarian government had opened the long-closed western border and permitted tens of thousands of East German refugees to cross into Austria on their way to West Germany. This government-approved mass exodus—combined with interviews broadcast by Hungarian television with Alexander Dubček and Ota Šik, leaders of the Czechoslovak reform movement, and with the exiled king Michael of Romania—led to formal protests by the governments in East Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest, but this did not alter the course of events.
The changes on the domestic scene were no less dramatic. They extended to the constitutional framework built since the communist takeover. Guidelines for a new constitution, drafted by the government and approved by both the party and the National Assembly, did not mention the “leading role of the Party,” spelled out by the constitution of 1949. The draft of the new constitution sanctioned a multiparty system that had already been accepted in principle by the party leadership. The new constitution—which transformed the communist-inspired “People’s Republic” into the “Republic of Hungary” and which was promulgated on October 23, 1989, the 33rd anniversary of the Revolution of 1956—was based on the principle of the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers and also included guarantees of individual and civil rights. Many additional changes followed that year, including the creation of the post of president (to be elected by Parliament) in place of the Presidential Council and the establishment of a Constitutional Court to examine the constitutionality of existing laws, decrees, and regulations and to nullify all laws found to violate the words and spirit of the constitution. The National Assembly, which theretofore had served only as a rubber stamp for party and governmental decisions, also underwent significant changes. In its autumn 1988 session, it rejected the government’s budget and then gradually transformed itself into an independent legislature that came to be solely responsible for all legislation.
Important new legislation included amendments to the law of assembly, which granted the holding of indoor meetings without special permission. It also featured a new enterprise law, which allowed the private ownership of businesses with up to 500 employees, permitted foreigners to own up to 100 percent of an enterprise, and allowed mixed (i.e., joint state and private) ownership of property. Also indicative of the new reforms, the government consulted with independent organizations and spokesmen of the opposition in the course of preparing the new laws.
Alternative independent parties and organizations continued to grow in the late 1980s. The first and most prominent among the new parties was the Hungarian Democratic Forum, followed by Fidesz and the Alliance of Free Democrats. Soon several of the traditional political parties that had been destroyed or emasculated by the communists in the late 1940s also emerged, including the Independent Smallholders’ Party, the Social Democratic Party, the National Peasant Party (under the new name of Hungarian People’s Party), the Christian Democratic People’s Party, and finally the ex-communist Hungarian Socialist Party. Their emergence was accompanied by the rise of several partylike interest groups, such as the Historical Justice Committee, the Independent Legal Forum, the Opposition Roundtable, and the Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Society. Some of these parties leaned toward socialism, others moved more in the direction of liberalism, still others positioned themselves as agrarian peasant parties, and there were also those that combined Christian Socialism with a big dose of traditionalism.
George Barany Steven Béla Várdy