Hungary

on the World Today

TO SAY that the regimes in the satellite countries start sneezing whenever the temperature in Moscow drops is to use a cliché, but it does not even come near to explaining the appalling regimentation and uniformity imposed on those unfortunate nations by the Kremlin. A mere decade ago they were quite different from one another. All had characteristics of their own, good ones and bad ones. Within ten years they have been made over in the image of the U.S.S.R. They are all small Soviet Unions now.

This uniformity is not imposed by direct orders from Moscow. It is inherent in the system—the type of society, economy, and government — foisted upon them. They all have identical problems, needs, and difficulties in practically every sphere of life. If one knows one satellite, one knows them all. With a few minor variations in emphasis — not in substance or principle— the story is the same in any of the satellite nations from Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria on the Black Sea.

Through the same acts of terror the governments of these countries are trying to enforce the making over of an agricultural society into an industrial one which fits neither the resources nor the background or temperament of the particular nation and therefore encounters resistance at every turn.

The governments themselves have unintentionally caused the dislocations of manpower, the disruptions of markets, the destruction of their nations’ natural balance. The results are a decrease in output and lack of food in countries which could produce plenty if left undisturbed. The governments counter these results with unsuccessful drives to step up production by coercion and terror and by greater emphasis on the principles which brought on the whole calamity. Then come still more resistance, suspicion, hatred, still lower morale among the people; and the vicious circle grows wider. In every satellite country these circles are about the same, and are created by their own force, not by the daily or weekly policy orders from Moscow.

Take Hungary as an example. Right now she is perhaps the black sheep in the eyes of the Communist leaders. Not too long ago the magazine of the Cominform summed it up in these words: “In analyzing the economic developments the Central Committees of Communist and Labor Parties in the Peoples’ Democracies have discovered . . . very serious difficulties. . . . One can see that the productivity drives have slackened in most Peoples’ Democracies . . . [and] that this has been caused by poor leadership on the part of the Government and Party.”

In Hungary, where a large decrease in productivity has been admitted over the past year and a half, party officials and publications have carried on a constant though unsuccessful campaign to remedy the situation. From their exhortations and accusations we learn what is going on behind the Iron Curtain of censorship and control.

For the time being, they say, it is impossible to boost production through construction of the additional factories which would be needed. This is why it is imperative to accomplish the goal without them. Of course that is easier said than done. But what lies behind this criticism and request is much more significant than the demand itself.

Agricultural cities

It has been said that the trouble with the Communists is that their prophet Karl Marx was a city boy who knew nothing about the farm and the farmer. This is true to a certain extent. But the problem lies deeper. The totalitarian Communist dictatorship can be imposed more easily on a city, on a factory, on a large group of people who are concentrated in a comparatively small area and who have little or no ownership of the tools of production or the land — which to a farmer is a major tool of production.

The system does not and cannot work with millions of individual farmers. Stalin discovered this despite his cruelty to the farmers in the 1930s; Tito grudgingly acknowledged it after the famine of 1948. Russia’s present party boss, Khrushchev, several years ago drew the same conclusion when he advocated agricultural cities in which farmers would live like factory workers and then go out to the field every day as a factory worker goes to the plant. The scheme was a failure and came to a quick end by order of Stalin.

But the agricultural city is merely the collective farm on a grand scale, and the collective farm is still the core of Communist agriculture. Without collectivization on the farm, Communism ends; with collectivization, farms don’t produce enough. This is the unsolved and probably hopeless dilemma of the Communist leaders; Can you have private ownership, capitalism, on the farm and Communism in the city? Naturally, this would mean a compromise in their whole ideology. Therefore the Communist leaders are forced to ride the farmer harder and harder, while his resistance grows fiercer, his output smaller.

A logical tactic of the Soviets and satellites was to overemphasize industry, which not only is more suited to regimentation but also promises the machines needed for a mechanization of agriculture. If farming is to be put on a factory basis, it must be mechanized to begin with. So the Communist countries plunged head over heels into industrialization regardless of the consequences to an already weakened agriculture.

From farm factory

In Hungary the number of industrial workers increased by 54 per cent between 1949 and 1953. In 1953, roughly four years after the Communists really went to work remodeling the nation in the image of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin, the number of industrial workers was twice what it was before the war and the number of construction workers was two and one-half times as great.

Where did all these hands come from? Some 200,000 were transferred from the land to the city. This may seem like a small number, but for a nation the size of Hungary it is comparable to transferring well over 4 million people in the United States from the farm to the factory in the brief span of four years.

The effect on agriculture has been extremely severe. It has taken the youngest, strongest, and most efficient elements off the farm and moved them to the city factories. The age level on the farms has risen sharply, and efficiency and productivity have proportionally dropped.

These adverse effects, plus the lowered morale of the peasant, his unwillingness to produce in the shadow of a commissar, and the devastating interference of the commissars, have made Hungary a country of food shortages, whereas she used to be a country overflowing with food.

In desperation and out of resentment against the farmer, the Communists have adopted a principle of collective guilt, so to speak. A farmer is requested to deliver a certain quota of, say, grain or fruit. If he claims that his farm has not produced that much in the past year, he must buy the difference from another farmer, because he must deliver the quota whether or not he grows it himself. The latest idea is that the entire village is held responsible. None of the farmers is allowed to sell anything on the free market until every one of them has delivered his quota to the government.

The effect on industry

All this has pretty well ruined agriculture in Hungary, as in the other satellite nations. But has it helped industry? Here we can let the Communists tell their own story.

“While the workers are fulfilling their part as leaders with ever-growing self-assurance,”wrote the official Communist Party paper in Budapest not long ago, “plenty remains to be done in improving discipline and fulfillment of duties. The reason for this is that about 50 per cent of the workers in industry and in the building trades have come from the farms. Some of these new workers have carried over the attitudes of the small landholders and the lack of discipline of the petit bourgeois. . . . Among the workers are many uprooted elements from other classes who are determined to wreck discipline. Their ideas have found fertile soil in many factories; discipline has been undermined; absenteeism has increased and so has restless shifting back and forth. . . . The productivity trend is unsatisfactory.”

A few weeks later the same paper, Szabad Nep, again inveighed against these dangerous elements among the workers. “It is necessary,” the paper said, “to take strong measures first against those who do not conform to work discipline because in the past twelve months half a million work shifts have been lost through unjustified absence from work.” This year coal production has lagged behind the already unsatisfactory output of 1954, according to Szabad Sep.

Slumping morale

So the transfer of anti-Communist elements from the farms to the factories has seriously and progressively undermined the morale and production of Hungarian industry also. But it would be a mistake to blame it only on the newcomers. The evil lies much deeper. The regular workers in industry, too, have little use for the Communist sweatshop principles.

In almost amusingly naïve amazement another Communist Hungarian paper, Hirlap Gyor, put it this way: “If occasionally good yarn reaches the weavers from the spinning mill, they still don’t dare to produce more because the norm inspector stands behind them and would increase the norms. The higher norms would of course remain even when there is poorer yarn again. . . . A worker remarked: ‘I have been a weaver for ten years now; I am considered an experienced laborer but this does not show in my wages.’ . . . This is why one sees nothing but sullen, uninterested expressions on the faces of the workers.”

The go-slow movement is growing fast for these and other reasons, and the effects have multiplied the difficulties. Nonfulfillment of orders, belated shipment of raw materials and products, are playing havoc with production schedules, compelling plants to slow down even more drastically than their own labor trouble necessitates, and so more work hours are lost. This boosts production costs and cuts the much-demanded productivity.

There are two additional signs of low morale: an ever-growing rate of industrial accidents and a mounting number of thefts of raw materials and tools from the plants. The death penalty has been employed as punishment for such “crimes against the nation” as stealing a few dollars’ worth of stuff from a state-owned factory. But not even such Draconic measures have been effective, and Hungary now has set up what are called “honesty brigades,” which are supposed to “guard the nation’s property.”

Resistance among youth

The Communist revolution has also boomeranged in two other spheres. As in the U.S.S.R. and in the other satellite nations, the Hungarian party bosses have waged a fierce war against the well-to-do classes, the professions, the former merchants, and the kulaks or once comfortably off farmers. None of them has been allowed to give his children a higher education. Now the government has discovered with amazement and chagrin that “it must be noted with regret that especially the children of workers and small farmers do not want to study.”

This lack of interest is not confined to studies in the scholastic field; it also applies to the learning of the ideas and theories of the party. So the party complains about lack of discipline, absenteeism, and malingering among youngsters as well as among adults.

Laments one Communist mouthpiece: “This proves that the studying youths have not been impressed with the merits of the Soviet Union. . . . Dissatisfaction with and contempt for our achievements, refusal to make sacrifices, and pacifism arc not rare. Such weakness can he found particularly with the studying youth and the farm youth. . . . The influence of reactionary clergymen and in some areas even of the kulaks is spreading constantly . . . the number of illegal Sunday-school teachers has grown. . . . Education has not been sufficient to arouse in the youth love of and respect for the Soviet Union and friendly nations.”

The regime has been unable to impose its principles on the nation - not even on the younger generation, whose entire education has been dominated by Communist regulations. Obviously, despite all totalitarian ruthlessness and trickery, a large proportion of the population has remained immune to indoctrination.

A rather revealing instance came to light in an indignant outburst of one Hungarian party paper last May when it complained that the party’s candidate for chairman of the council (mayor) in one Hungarian town was beaten by the former chairman, who had the support of the kulaks and reactionary elements. How did he do it?

He spread the rumor that the first act of the new mayor would be to close the churches, and so a whispering campaign started against electing any party member to the council. It was a partial success, preventing the election of several comrades. Needless to say, headquarters in the capital put things “ right ” in the end by force, but not until after a county commission had failed to straighten out the situation, which indicates that the grass-roots uprising was not confined to the town but had even affected the trusted party investigators on the county level.

Tightening the reins

This poses the ultimate question: In whom can the regime trust if not in the peasants, the workers, the Communist-educated youth, or the functionaries on the town and county level? The answer is pretty obvious: They can trust only in the bayonets and bullets of the militia. In other words, they have returned to the old imperialistic slogan that war is the continuation of politics by other means. This is why, over the past year, terror, arrest, deportation, and show trials have reached a new high.

The Hungarian rulers especially remember that it was their party which first tried to copy the Soviet experiment after World War I in the blood-stained regime of Bela Kun, who had no more popular support than the present government. But Bela Kun was followed by the first Fascist or Nazi-type regime, even prior to Mussolini and Hitler. So the Communists will take no chances. They know the alternative to their terror methods is not compromise but suicide. Unwilling to commit harakiri, they have only one choice: namely, to tighten their grip still further. This they will do to their last ounce of strength.

Any display of more liberal policies is merely a show and temporary. In the end they must carry on according to the principle by which they have gained power, the principle of force. Then they cannot but alienate wider and wider segments of the population, including the working class. They cannot help sowing the wind, and they are bound to reap the whirlwind.