Hungary: the road
The pre-war situation Hungary had been vicious, sustained repression following the overthrow of the 133-day Soviet Republic set up by an alliance of Bela Kun's Communist Party with the Social Democrats in 1919.
That revolution had pursued ultra-leftist course of nationalisation and anti-clericalism while rejecting the burning issue of land reform, which was they key to mobilise the country's large impoverished peasantry (even in the 1930s 85 per cent of Hungary's land holdings were below the subsistence level of 12 acres).
The counter-revolution sponsored by Romanian troops ushered in dictatorial regime under a Austro-Hungarian imperial Admiral Horty, who for the next 25 years collaborated with permutations of the old oligarchy and the rising anti-semitic "radical right" among the officer caste bureaucracy, who were towards Nazi Germany as a means of securing their ambitions.
Drawn eventually into an alliance to 1956 in of one reactionary country was invaded by troops, headed by the an took over for the 2 months before the crash
Red Army marched in.
campaign, semitic and hundred
German death camps.
illegal and persecuted since 1919, dwindled to a dozen had members
1942, in only a few thousand at most when the former new provisional government, headed by a general, was installed in December various
1944. The leader was Matyas Rakosi, a veteran of the 1919 Revolution, who had spent 15 years in Hungarian jails, and state and who returned from drawn
1944
Stalin.
nationalistic swollen to a members, recruiting wholesale from careerist forces, police and military allies the including numerous former members of the Arrow Cross.
end of 1945 were permitted to take place by Stalin's military commander on the understanding that whoever won,
Ministry through with Hitler, Horthy's regime declared war on the USSR. When it attempted to pull back from this in 1944 the
The
German
Interior and a puppet government fascist Arrow Cross
This final phase of the war had seen
Hungary swept by a full-scale antiwith several thousand Jews sent to
The Hungarian Communist Party or
SO and numbered recently-defected Horthyite
Moscow in as a hard-line supporter of
By the end of 1945 the Party had
500,000 staggering work
Army vehicles.
old regime, and
The elections that were held at the wracked
Masses rally in opposition to Stalinism the CP would control the of the Interior - and this the police and the dreaded AVH Secret Police, which was rapidly to expand its operations to hold files on 1 million of the 10 million population oi Hungary
First such Minister of the was Imre Nagy, another Moscow-trained CPer. But he was soon replaced by Laszlo Rajk, a longstanding hardliner active in the resistance to the Nazis despite having leadership. He had a popular base das close family ties to the Arrow Cross greater than the leaderhsip chosen by Moscow tor the tast growing CP.
The 1945 elections proved an embarrassment for the CP, which won only 17 per cent of the vote, trailing tar behind the 59 per cent for the right wing Smallholders Party which had worked hand in glove with the Horthy regime and which united the reactionary vote behind it. The Social Democrats also took 17 per cent of the vote yet to a certain extent this problem had been created by the Stalinists themselves, as Hugh SetonWatson reported:
"In the first months it is a curious paradox that the reconstruction of these (bourgeois) parties was largely of teams of communist agitators who travelled around in Red
A coalition government was formed with leaders of the Smallholders Party (Zoltan Tildy and Ferenc Nagy) as president and Prime Minister. But tensions grew, and the impossibility of restoring capitalism in a Hungary by runaway intlation (an