Gyula László: The Magyars of Conquest-Period Hungary

1996 is the millecentenary of the Magyar Conquest, an event described in picturesque detail by the chronicles as the occupation of the Carpathian Basin by Chief Árpád and the seven Magyar tribes. In what is the first of a series of articles to commemorate the event, Professor László juxtaposes written sources - Byzantine reports, descriptions by Arab geographers, early Slav and western chronicles as well as descriptions by the early 13th century Gesta Hungarorum - with archaeological evidence. He argues that the early Magyars were well on the way to sedentary farming and animal husbandry and had a sophisticated social organisation and culture by the time of the Conquest and were anything but the nomadic barbarians some legends and also some historians describe.

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Sándor Márai: Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948
With an essay by Michael Blumenthal

What the novelist Sándor Márai registers in this section of his Journal is the very moment of recognition that the time of change has come. The ruins of Budapest may be cleared but the country would be surrendered to the Communists who will "open up the nation's body joint by joint". Márai describes the painful process by which his kin, the educated middle class, see a world and a culture slipping from under them and still resolve to survive keeping their self-esteem and integrity "by fashioning order in the loneliness".

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László Valki: NATO Enlargement: The Hungarian Interest

Learning the lessons of its tumultuous history, Eastern Europe is eager to join the "security community" as embodied by NATO. The article, written by an expert on international law, looks at the beneficial consequences of possible future membership and examines the fluctuations of NATO policy as regards enlargement in the context of Russian opposition formulated in various documents and statements. It concludes that with "partnership of peace" the process has started de facto. Threats and protests notwithstanding Russia will have no other choice but to accept it.

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The Social Issue in the Era of Transition
János Kornai in Conversation with Mihály Laki

János Kornai, the best known of Hungarian economists and Professors of Economics at Harvard University, is the author of The Economy of Shortage, the classic study on the "planned economy". In this interview he gives an impassioned account of what he labels the premature welfare state. This paternalistic welfare system, coupled with a "grey economy", was created during the soft dictatorship of the Kádár regime as a trade-off between social tranquillity and consumption cum entitlements. To this day, it has been necessary to impose ever higher social security contributions and taxes in order to cover costly and inefficient state care and thus to withdraw resources from investments that would promote growth. In the changing economic environment Professor Kornai argues for a more progressive sharing of the tax burden, fighting of tax evasion and competition in welfare too. The state should provide assistance to the needy but allow its citizens to be their own masters in non-state schemes of savings and care.

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The Interrogation of László Rajk. 7 June 1949
A Transcript of the Secret Recording with an Introduction by Tibor Hajdu

The show trial of László Rajk in September 1949 hallmarked he era of fear and terror in Hungary. A hardened communist who became Minister of the Interior and then, as a first sign of disgrace, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rajk was tortured, persuaded to plead guilty and hanged on shamelessly fabricated evidence. János Kádár followed Rajk as Minister of Interior and was to follow him in disgrace and prison n 1951-54. János Kádár never admitted being more than an inadvertant eye-witness at one of the interrogations. The publication in Hungary in 1992 of the transcript of the recording, however, made when, after a week of night-long interrogations, Rajk was confronted with Defence Minister Mihály Farkas and Kádár, reveals the otherwise soft-spoken Kádár as brutal in speech and eager to prove Rajk's guilt.

In March 1956 Rajk was rehabilitated and the reinterment of his remains in October 1956, in the presence of two hundred thousand mourners, marked the end of the Rákosi era and the prelude to the Revolution to follow. The postlude to all this, the story of Mátyás Rákosi's long exile and his burial in 1971, is described in all its bizarre detail by Gábor Murányi, including Rákosi's letter to Moscow incriminating Kádár in Rajk's interrogation. Articles in the Summer and Autumn issues will discuss new evidence on the tragic role Kádár was to play in the 1956 Revolution and his involvement in the execution of Imre Nagy.

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András Szilágyi: The Princes Esterházy as Patrons of Art

Two illustarted articles discuss this topic. András Szilágyi's review of the exhibition held in the Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt/Kismarton in the Burgenland in Austria is the occasion for an account of successive members of this fabulously rich family, many of whom played important roles in public affairs as well as excelling in the patronage of the art. Miklós the Magnificent, who was patron to Haydn for some thirty years and who built he Hungarian Versailles at Eszterháza, as perhaps the most famous but they were all passionate collectors, assembling a unique gallery of paintings and sculpture later to become the basis of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, as well as the magnificent Treasury, discussed in a lavishly illustrated book by András Szilágyi, which is here reviewed by István Kristó Nagy.