Hungary: the party that tried to forget its past

tried to bury its past Joan Phillips Hungary is at the forefront of change in Eastern Europe. These are extraordinary times as the past, even the very recent past, is constantly rewritten, in a process of unprecedented ideological and political ferment. All the action is in the Communist Party (the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, HSWP): it is the party that is setting the pace in revising the past and reforming the present, making public statements today that yesterday's dissidents would only have dared to whisper in private. Let's look at how the old orthodoxies are being challenged, the perspectives for the future that are emerging and the debates among the opposition groups.

1. Redefining Coming to terms with the past is a crucial part of the process of the past transition in Eastern Europe. This is because since the forties the past has been appropriated by the Stalinist regimes in a vain attempt to legitimise their rule. In Hungary, what opposition spokesman Janos Kis called the 'contract of forgetting, established between the Kadar regime and the nation after the 1956 revolt, is now being openly breached. It is difficult to keep up with the pace at which the old restrictions have been overturned in the months since Janos Kadar was ousted by Karoly Grosz from the leadership of the HSWP in May 1988.

The major development is that communism' has been officially disowned. The process of calling the system into question began early last year in the run-up to the special party conference. It was the first such conference in 30 years, convened in the midst of a major crisis and a drastic drop in membership.

49 In March 1988 Janos Barabas, head of agitation and propaganda'

and one of the old guard, complained that the party had put too little distance between itself and the Stalinist heritage/ In July 1988 Jeno Andies, HSWP propaganda chief, declared that my party has been an absolute failure for the past 10 years. When the official responsible for propaganda issues such a statement, you know that the party is on the road to liquidation. Andies added that 'the basic economic idea has gone down a cul-de-sac, so why spread it?'? Justice minister Kalman Kulesar said that Hungary had been taken by socialism into a side-road of history and is 'unable to go further": it had to detach itself from this type of system. Attacking the system has become almost obligatory in Hungary today. A popular joke in Budapest goes: 'Question: What is socialism? Answer: The longest and most complicated road from capitalism to capitalism."

The biggest bombshell to hit communist orthodoxy was the report of the central committee's historical commission on the events of 1956, under the chairmanship of Imre Pozsgay.4 The report rejected the traditional Stalinist account which explains the revolt as an attempted counter-revolution under the revisionist leadership of Imre Nagy. Instead Pozsgay's report blamed 'the socialist model chosen or enforced in 1948-9 which has proved to be a false path in its entirety. The report did not merely blame the Stalinist leadership, but the Stalinist system in its entirety: not only Stalinism, but the whole edifice of Marxism-Leninism. Even Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 never went as far as Pozsgay and his four central committee colleagues.

Khrushchev diagnosed the disease as Stalin, but pronounced the system itself healthy. Now everything has been put in question in a report that is the most damning indictment of communism ever to be published in Eastern Europe. The thrust of the argument is that the Bolshevik Revolution was a mistake.

Stalin's contribution to Marxism a heresy, and the introduction of communism in Eastern Europe an unmitigated disaster.

According to Pozsgay's commission Lenin made a fatal error when he opted for communism in a semi-feudal country like Russia. The report quotes Marx against Lenin: 'Marx had warned that an isolated experiment with communism, especially in a backward country, was doomed because it would create the egalitarianism of poverty. Under Stalin the ideal of international communism was turned into a merciless imperial programme Marxist humanism was destroyed. Stalin establised a system built on bloody dictatorship, bureaucratic centralism, fear and 50

retribution. This system was forced on Eastern Europe "by political and military means'. The post-Stalinist system was simply a milder version of the same dictatorship, but the whole system is still rotten to the core. From this perspective 1956 was not a counter-revolution but a justified popular uprising against oligarchic tyranny. Pozsgay did not baulk at declaring the inescapable conclusion: 'Socialism has come to the end of its days and is an obstacle to progress in all fields." The commission's categorical judgements were made by Pozsgay on Budapest Radio while Grosz was out of the country. The manner of their release and their findings about 1956 and the whole experience of communism in Hungary, caused a sensation.* We should remember that public discussion of these matters had been silenced for 30 years. Just a few months earlier police had batoned protesters off the streets on the anniversary of Nagy's execution. Everybody had been convinced that there would be no rehabilitation of the victims of 1956 while Kadar remained in the party. Yet now Nagy's widow and other relatives of the victims of 1956 were being interviewed on television. Not surprisingly an emergency central committee meeting was called 10 days ahead of schedule in response to the furore over Pozsgay's statements. What was remarkable, however, was the fact that Pozsgay was not censured; the party leadership merely described his remarks as 'hasty'. A central committee communiqué confirmed that 1956 was a popular uprising, but one which came to embrace counter-revolutionary tendencies.

Party leader Grosz told the press after the meeting that the post-war experiment with the one-party system had indeed been a failure? In an unprecedented move the party published the controversial findings of the 1956 commission in the party's theoretical journal, which immediately sold out its 200 000 print run. There can be little doubt that Pozsgay's bold report outraged the conservatives in the leadership. There was even some speculation that the party came very close to a formal split at the emergency meeting called to discuss his statements on 1956. But if there was a concerted attempt to oust Pozsgay, it failed when the radicals on the central committee threatened to walk out. It seems that politburo member Reso Nyers may have raised the stakes by sounding out some of his closest supporters about setting up a new party. The fact that Pozsgay emerged unscathed from this confrontation shows that the radical reform faction 51 now has the upper hand. The reformers are forcing the pace of

change: in April they won a victory in the politburo reshuffle which saw the removal of four party spokesmen.° The radical reassessment of Hungary's past will serve to further undermine the legitimacy of the Stalinist regime. It seems to be a deliberate exercise on the part of the authorities to demonstrate that the party is shedding its Stalinist skin. All the skeletons are being brought out of the cupboard and paraded in public. The party leadership hopes that by exorcising the ghosts of the past it can deprive the opposition of the historical themes around which it has rallied resistance against the regime.

Extraordinary things are now happening in Hungary. The Soviet Red Star is being removed from the national emblem, in favour of the apostolic crown of the old Hungarian kingdoms.

The 7 November anniversary of the Russian Revolution has been declared a normal working day instead of a national holiday. The 15 March anniversary of the 1848 revolution seems set to become the official substitute. The authorities have announced the abolition of compulsory Russian language teaching in Hungary's schools.!° There is a general process of de-Russification in society and de-Bolshevisation in the party.

Western reactionaries are following events in Hungary with glee. Right-wing politicians and journalists are celebrating the official rejection of Stalinism and Leninism and can be found on trips to Budapest, jubilant that even the rulers of Eastern Europe now admit that communism is obsolete.

For the past year virtually the whole of Hungary has been 2. The nature of engaged in the great debate about the transition to a new form of the transition society. A host of previously unmentionable topics—the problems of the one-party system, the meaning of pluralism, the role and internal structure of the party, the place of the opposition - have been thrown open for discussion and are the subject of heated public debates.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain after the death of General Franco in 1975 is one popular model for Hungary. Justice minister Kalman Kulsar has made a particular study of the Spanish experience, as well as casting a wary eye on the more turbulent course of events in Portugal, with a view to charting a smooth transformation for Hungary.

*Hungary needs to draw a clear line between the past and the present. We have to follow the example of Spain. The Spanish Civil War was full of blood and suffering. Here, there is nostalgia on the part of people who fought on both sides in 1956. There are 52

some people who could never be convinced —those who fought on the streets, who were young, who felt important. It is against human nature for people to convince themselves that what they did was for nothing. But to continue this debate leads nowhere.

We have to bury the dead." The Hungarian bureaucrats want to see 1956 accepted as their equivalent of the Spanish Civil War; they want a new start on the basis of mutual forgiveness.

The term 'modernisation" has also been used frequently to describe the process of transition which is under way. Again it was Kulesar who coined the phrase: The modernisation of Hungarian society cannot develop in the framework of an authoritarian political system."2 His alternative model of development is to be found in the social democratic traditions of Western Europe. This discussion started before the May 1988 conference, when the HSWP debated a central committee document on political reform.

"Finlandisation', a long and dirty word in the Eastern bloc, is another term that now constantly recurs in the literature on the transition. The settlement reached between the Soviet Union and Finland after the Soviet occupation in 1939 allowed Finland to remain neutral in the Second World War on the understanding that its influential Communist Party would remain hospitable to the Soviet bloc. The coalition of communists and social democrats that shared power in Finland in the sixties is a model which many in Hungary would like to emulate.

Discussion about pluralism, socialist democracy and civil society is part of the broader debate about the transition to a new form of society. Proposals for a new constitution by 1990, reform of the judicial system, legalisation of trade unions and the right to strike, the right to form political parties and free elections by 1990, form the core of the reform programme.

The party has taken over the vocabulary of the opposition. All the discussion is now about the need to rethink the socialist project, the one-party system, the leading role of the party, the need to undertake a renewal of the party and the state and their relations with society. Party spokesman on ideology, Janos Berecz, says the party is engaged in 'a profound reflection on the link between democracy and socialism'." Party reformers aim to popularise their cause by engaging in a dialogue with non-party D independent groups. They hope to institutionalise this dialogue and establish a new social consensus within the framework of the e proposed new constitution.

The debate about pluralism directly raises the question of the leading role of the party, and the widespread desire to end the e 53

monolithic one-party rule of the past 40 years. This discussion began in earnest on the eve of the special party conference last year when there were open calls to end party power and restore a pluralistic civil society. Even conservatives like Berecz have rushed into the reformist camp, declaring that 'power does not belong to the party, nor the government, but to the people'. All this would have been inconceivable a year ago.

The findings of the historical commission exploded the legitimacy of the one-party system, a fact acknowledged by the central committee when it stated after its discussion on the report that the one-party system was at an end. In February the leadership discussed the new draft constitution and agreed to abandon the clause in the 1949 constitution guaranteeing the primacy of the party. Central committee member Gyorgy Feti simply stated: We can see no sense in continuing with the leading role of the HSWP. 14 The abandonment of this central tenet of Stalinism is another milestone in the transformation of the party in Hungary. In response to the unprecedented shifts of the Hungarian bureaucracy a Budapest satirist imagined Lenin's ghost saying: *The Hungarian government is indeed revolutionary, and if it goes on like this it could soon overthrow itself. The question is: is the HSWP committing suicide by surrendering its leading role? Some have drawn parallels with the self-destruction of the Spanish Falange after the death of Franco.

The simple answer is: no! The party envisages a process of controlled pluralism, in which it will maintain a pre-eminent position in coalition with others. The question is how to maintain the ascendancy of the party through this process of pluralisation. The leadership hopes to achieve this through incorporating and institutionalising the opposition. If it is successful the party will gain the authority and legitimacy it needs to implement economic reform. It will also be able to devolve responsibility for the conduct of public affairs without relinquishing its grip on state power.

In summary, the party aims to oversee the organic and ordered development of a pluralist society through incorporating the opposition. All the talk is of coalitions, consensus, institutionalisation, dialogue, a popular front—all leading to round-table talks and national agreement before the elections in 1990. At the December central committee meeting Berecz complained that the diversity of the new organisations made it more 54 difficult to achieve national solidarity. Hence he emphasised the

need to use the new constitution to groom the opposition. He recommended that the party should work to a calculated 2 timetable, encouraging the creation of a coalition force by promoting firmer links among opposition groups that demonstrated a responsible attitude. Is The possibility of a coalition was raised again at the January national assembly debate, where several organisations, such as the Hungarian Democratic Front (HDF, the New March Front (NMF) and the Association of Free Democrats, were named as potential partners in creating a new national consensus.l6 In February the central committee welcomed the NMF's proposal to bring all political forces together into a national committee.

Informal talks have already started and there is likely to be some ti sort of round-table on the Polish model by the summer to discuss the transition to a multi-party system and the formation of electoral pacts. Key central committee members such as Pozsgay and Nyers seem to have been encouraged to build bridges with the opposition. They have often attended and spoken at conferences of the HDF and NMF for example. A novel development is that the boundaries between the party and the opposition are starting to break down for the first time since the sixties. Thus Pozsgay is closely associated with non-party intellectuals and Nyers was instrumental in setting up the NMF. Even Grosz has been holding regular discussions with groups such as the Writers Union, which the government tried to dissolve as recently as 1987. The debate in Hungary is no longer about whether a multiparty system is desirable, but about how it is to be introduced. In particular the focus of the discussion is about what form any potential coalition should take. Nyers has called for a return to the polities of the anti-fascist popular front, linking all progressive forces in alliance with the party.!? Another model is the post-war coalition between the communists and social democrats: the party could forge a new alliance with the HDF, d Social Democrats and Smallholders. This would have the advantages of broadening the party's base, lending it legitimacy, pulling in 75 per cent of the vote and reassuring the conservatives in the party.!* An Italian-style moderate Communist party or a coalition of communist and social democratic forces on the Finnish model?

The debate is likely to continue.

55

3. Ideas from the The Hungarian opposition is entirely responsive to the ideas opposition being generated by the party and it is being forced to move fast to keep up with the pace of developments. The main opposition groups have adopted a highly conciliatory approach. The Budapest radicals around the NMF have tabled what amounts to a social contract. Istan Csurka of the HDF imagines the front in some sort of coalition or supportive role with the HSWP before too long: "We need a national consensus. The question is whether we find ourselves a Churchill. 1º Mihaly Bihari of the Social Democrats says the opposition should accept three conditions for the duration of the transition period: membership of the Warsaw Pact, the historical aim of socialism and the dominant role of the HSWP20 It is ironic that all three conditions have been called into question by the party itself.

There is some division in the opposition, between those around the Network of Free Initiatives, who are pessimistic about the prospects for genuine reform, and the more populist, nationalist adherents of the HDF who are more willing to seek incremental change. In general, however, the Hungarian opposition favours social democracy and market solutions.

To anticipate the likely direction of the opposition it is useful to look at the ideas of the intelligentsia over the past 20 years.?!

After the suppression of the Prague spring in 1968 the idea that reforms could come through engagement with the party apparatus lost all credibility. Intellectuals who had pursued this course found themselves isolated from both the party and the working class. During the course of the seventies the project of absorbing civil society into the state was universally judged to have failed. By the late seventies the hallmark of the opposition was the new politics of anti-politics. This meant little more than elevating the refusal to conform into a conscious ideological and oppositional posture. The language of rights became the mainstay of the new opposition. By focusing on the issue of civil liberties the opposition found a way of engaging the regime at the most abstract level. It succeeded in asserting a claim to rights that were already acknowledged in the constitutions of East European regimes and through the Helsinki accords. The opposition hoped to use the issue of rights to challenge totalitarian rule; they are possessed by the individual not the state. The very existence of rights, that can be abused or ignored but not removed, was held to prove the existence of civil society, a space between the individual and the state. The difficulty is that at this 56 abstract level it is impossible to make an effective challenge to

the Stalinist state. Indeed, by asserting the rights formally upheld by the regime, the opposition implied that mere legislative reform was required to give them substance. In reality, the lack of rights in Eastern Europe is rooted in the backwardness of the whole Stalinist system. Legislative reform is a major preoccupation of opposition movements throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary Janos Kis and others campaigned for a return to the distinction between public law and private or civil law, with rights and identities attached to all persons. This is an attempt to formalise the sphere of civil society, and forge a constitutional continuity with a pre-socialist past. The anti-political legalism of such oppositionists reveals a make-believe approach to life in East European society. The aim seems to be to live as if things were as the dissidents would like them to be—to play at being citizens, being grown up and legally independent. The idea is that by living as though you are a free citizen, rather than demanding of the regime freedoms you know it will not grant, you create the very social sphere whose existence you seek. In other words the idea is to suggest to the nation how it might live by example, not to advise the government how it should govern.

Anti-political opposition has gone furthest in Czechoslovakia where the intelligentsia has yet to recover from the trauma of 1968. For some Czechs even the very suggestion of political activity smacks of compromise. This has led Charter 77 into a dead end and made it even more isolated. The fear of becoming marginalised has recently provoked a split in the Czech opposition between those who want to try again through political organisation, and those who reduce the whole question to one of achieving national moral integrity by individual example. The same theme takes a different form in Hungary, where even the most resolute anti-political oppositionist cannot ignore the greater potential for political engagement. In Hungary, to practice the politics of as if is fraught with difficulty. Because there is a real space for public political activity there is strong support for a return to traditional party politics. This in turn raises questions about political programmes and about how far to compromise with the regime. Whether to compromise and to what end, is likely to become more and more of a theme in opposition debates in Hungary, as it is in Poland.

The move towards pluralism in Hungary has encouraged a shift in debate from the social and cultural to the predominantly 57 political. The economic sphere remains problematic because it D

raises the issue of the working class. The sense of isolation from the working class is felt acutely by many intellectuals. The opposition spokesmen of the eighties, throughout Eastern Europe, are the children (sometimes literally) of the ruling elite of the first generation of the Stalinist regime. Particularly in Hungary, the education and privileges of the ruling clite have passed efficiently down the generations, and this does not endear the opposition to the working class.? In addition, the middle classes are intellectually predisposed towards economic reform, while workers, who stand to suffer the consequences, are hostile to reform, whether it is called perestroika or any other name.?3 For these reasons there is little prospect of the opposition establishing a meaningful point of contact with the working class.

The question confronting the opposition today, especially in Hungary and Poland, is whether to seek compromise with the regime or risk permanent isolation. In both East and West, there is a tendency to overestimate and exaggerate the size and influence of the opposition forces. The much-vaunted renaissance of civil society over the past decade has made a far stronger impression in the media than it has on the reality of life in the Stalinist regimes. Reading accounts of opposition gatherings in the Western press, you come across the same names again and again. This is because the opposition in an active sense amounts to a few hundred people. The isolation of the intelligentsia is apparent in the endless discussions on the themes "who is our audience?' "who are we writing for?'. The defensive tone of the opposition is summed up in the title of one underground journal: Jestesmy, meaning simply We are'. As one writer observed in the New York Review of Books, this is the contemporary Polish version of Descartes' philosophy: 'I print therefore 1 am. 24 After 30 years in the wilderness in Hungary and 20 in Poland, there can be little doubt that the opposition will opt for compromise rather than isolation. Finally, it is important to look at developments in Eastern Europe in a balanced way, and to recognise that while things are moving fast, much of the opposition remains confined to the sphere of discussion and debate. It is one thing to float ideas and make statements, but quite another matter altogether to put them into practice. The practical difficulties of organising and implementing real change in Stalinist societies are obvious.

Events in China, where the authorities embarked on a programme of radical reform, only to have to pull back when the problems became apparent, have had a cautionary effect in 58 Eastern Europe. The prospects for making the transition to a

new form of society may be brighter in Hungary, where the working class has yet to recover from the crushing defeats of the past and the bureaucracy has decisively seized the initiative. But a long and difficult road lies ahead.

Notes Times, 23 March 1988.

2. Independent. 1 July 1988.

3. İndependent Magazine, 4 February 1989.

4. Tarsadalmi Szemle, theoretical journal of the HSWP.

March 1989. 5. Independent, 14 February 1989.

6. Pozsgay made his statement on Budapest Radio on 28 January 1989: This commission regards what took place in 1956 as a popular uprising an uprising against an oligarchic system of power which had humiliated the nation."

7. Independent, 13 February 1989.

8. Eastern Europe Newsletter, Vol 3 No 4, 22 February 1989.

9. Financial Times 14 April 1989.

10 Guardian, 3 March 1989.

11. Daily Telegraph, 13 March 1989.

12 Times, 12 January 1989.

13 Corriere della Sera, 17 February 1988.

14. Guardian, 21 February 1989.

15. Radio Free Europe, "Situation report, 12 January 1989.

16. Radio Free Europe, 'Situation report: 10 February 1989.

17. Quoted by J Kris, "Why be afraid?", in Beszelo (samizdat organ).

30 March 1988. 18. See G Schopflin, Soviet Analyst, 8 March 1989.

19. Daily Telegraph, 13 March 1989.

20. Times, 20 February 1989.

21. For a very uscful survey of the opposition in Eastern Europe see T Judt, The dilemmas of dissidence: The politics of opposition in East-Central Europe, in Eastern European Politics and Societies, Vol 2 No 2, Spring 1988. 22. Writing in the Financial Times 14 April 1989, Leslie Colitt says the opposition parties are still largely shells without content or effective leadership. They arouse as little popular enthusiasm as the party itself. The spectacle of two 80-ycar olds heading the resurrected Social Democrat (SP) and Small Landowners 59 parties inspires little confidence among potential voters

23. Ibid, 'Ordinary Hungarians suspect that they will he losers in a free market system. Economic reforms are now linked in the popular mind with 17 per cent inflation and falling real wages since 1982. 24. See T Garton Ash, "The opposition", New York Review of Books, 13 October 1989. 60