Miklós Szabó
Kádár's Pied Piper
Sándor Révész: Aczél és korunk
(Aczél and Our Age),
Budapest, Sík Kiadó, 1997, 436 pp.
Kádár held office as General Secretary of the Communist
Party and was de facto ruler far longer than anyone else in twentieth-century
Hungary. This era dragged on from 1956 until 1988. Kádár
may well be regarded as the most successful "people's democratic dictator".
He was able to make adjustments to the system out of line with Kremlin
policy and to extend the country's Western contacts while avoiding any
ac-tual clash with the Moscow leadership. The West, on the other hand,
was able to maintain markedly good relations with a "people's democracy",
accepting the latter's non-conformity by Moscow's standards, and yet still
avoid a confrontation with Moscow. Kádár's Hungary spared
West ern governments the embarrassment of having to choose between détente
and support for the independence aspirations of a people. Kádár
took care to be supported discretely and inconspicuously, something which
was impossible for Yugoslavia, Albania or Romania. Hungary, therefore,
was much preferred as a partner for the West to those making loud noises
of independence and irritating the Russian bear by pulling "irresponsible"
faces at it. Yet having crushed the 1956 Revolution, the Kádár
regime had started out as an utterly lawless and authoritarian regime,
a position from which it succeeded in acquiring the reputation of the Communist
regime with the most moderate policies.
A Kádár memorial, if it were a sculptural group with Kádár
at the centre, would have two supporting figures, both of whom made major
personal and creative contributions to the development of the peculiar
features of Hungarian goulash com munism. One would be György Aczél,
definitely closer to the centre, the subject of the book under review,
the other the regime's chief agricultural policy-maker, Lajos Fehér.
For artists and intellectuals, their relationship to the regime for almost
the entire period was practically synonymous with their relationship--a
personal relationship for many--with György Aczél.
The title "Aczél and Our Age", a take-off of the clichéd
biography title, is meant to hint that the protagonist had a decisive influence
on the age in which we lived, and also implies that the era, in many respects,
continues to survive under current conditions.
György Aczél was born as Henrik Appel in 1917 in a working-class
district in Budapest. He came from a grindingly poor Jewish family, whose
members were drifters and proletarians barely clinging to a more or less
respectable existence. He grew up in orphanages, mainly in that of the
Jewish community. His way from there led rather self-evidently to Zionism
and on to the Communist Party, outlawed, persecuted and barely kept going
by its few members between the two World Wars. The Left-Zionist movement
in Hungary was used by the Communists as one of their cover organizations.
Aczél, like so many Communist activists, was completely self-taught.
He tried his hand at acting without formal training. He was well read,
mainly in fiction and poetry, though his reading was unsystematic. In 1944,
he was active in the tiny Com munist underground resistance but was chiefly
concerned with saving Jews regardless of their politics. In 1945, Aczél,
little influenced by Jewish religious traditions anyway, saw assimilation
as the only way for Hungarian and Communist Jews, and rejected emigration,
bi-culturalism and all other possible options. He saw assimilation as an
escape from anti-Semitism, retaining, nevertheless, a marked sensiti-vity
regarding anti-Semitism all his life. Be tween 1945 and 1948, the years
of the quasi-democratic republic that temporarily survived under Soviet
occupation, he work ed as a Communist apparatchik in various parts of the
country, and was highly successful.
With the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, the Sovietization of the
"people's democracies" also started, and was swiftly followed
by a series of show trials. When the break with Yugoslavia became final,
László Rajk, a member of the party's top leadership, was
put on trial on the trumped-up charge of being an agent of Tito's planted
inside the Hungarian leadership in an attempt to demonstrate the wide dimensions
of the new threat. The alleged key meeting between Rajk and Rankovic',
the Yugoslav Interior Minister, was supposed to have taken place at a section
of the border in the county of which Aczél was the Party Secretary.
It being only natural that the county secretary should have been involved,
Aczél was dragged into the case, arrested and convicted. One of
the worst experiences he went through while in prison was violence he suffered
at the hands of fellow prisoners who had been fascists.
The development of the attitudes of Aczél, released in 1954 as
part of the thaw after Stalin's death, is subtly analysed by Révész.
Aczél found it shocking that even during the wave of rehabilitations
following the thaw, the leaders of his party showed no haste in freeing
their comrades. Covering up what had happened was evidently far more important
to them. Aczél's prison experiences produced in him a veritable
Arrow Cross phobia. It was his absolute conviction that fascism was still
existing, and a highly virulent political force. He felt that the regime
would be unable to rid itself of its Stalinist past unless it made the
real history of the show trials public and punished those responsible--without
that, it could all happen again--but he was also afraid that, if the cleansing
really took place, the regime might become compromised to an extent which
would leave only the extreme right as a political force untarnished by
all that happened. As he saw it, the country had a choice between continued
Stalinism or fascist restoration. To avoid this dilemma, Aczél at
first did not want to return to the arena. The 1956 Revolution, however,
once again confirmed his paranoid fear of the fascist threat. After the
crushing of the Revolution by the Soviet intervention of November 4, 1956,
he joined Kádár's collaborationist regime, supporting a Com
munist dictatorship which he saw as the only force capable of resisting
attempts at a fascist restoration. His other objective, however, was to
do all in his power to abort a possible full return to Stalinism.
Aczél favoured a line aimed at driving the Stalinists out of
the camp of the new regime's supporters, while taking over as much of the
policies of Imre Nagy--the Revolution's Prime Minister--as was possible.
In the debates within the Party leadership, Aczél urged that Imre
Nagy be included in the new leadership and allowed to found a new Peasant
Party, and he also suggested the withdrawal of Soviet troops and their
replacement by Yugoslav and "Gomulkaist" Polish troops, to ensure
the elimination of the counter- revolutionary threat and, to guarantee
the survival of socialism while the country could become neutral.
When all this turned out to be an illusion, he was not among those few
members of the early Kádár leadership who had been followers
of Imre Nagy, and who--because of their insistence on demands of a similar
kind--were expelled from the leadership. One of the reasons that he was
allowed to stay on may have been his efforts to strengthen the position
of rehabilitated politicians in the new leadership. Early on it had been
unacceptable to Moscow that in Poland and Hungary the rehabilitated survivors
of show trials should be returned to leading positions after 1954. On November
4, 1956, it was the rehabilitated Kádár who became the head
of the collaborationist government and Party, and there were several other
rehabilitated persons on the second and third levels of leadership. Aczél
also intended to support Kádár in the internal struggle in
the leadership between the Stalinists and the rehabilitated.
A conflict developed (once again behind the scenes) over the judgement
of the role of the Rákosi leadership and over the retaliation policies.
The Stalinists demanded full-scale reprisals, while the Kádár
leadership wanted to limit reprisals and punishment to those who had taken
up arms. They wanted to spare the influential writers, artists and scientists
who had played a major role in paving the way toward the revolution if
they, in turn, were ready to stop organizing resistance. They wanted to
calm these intellectuals rather than terrorize them.
In 1957, attempts were made to put on trial the most influential workers'
council or Party organizers, those who were considered key figures. At
the same time, about a quarter of the "minor" wrongdoers were
imprisoned, more or less at random, without any real selection, mainly
to set an example. By early 1958, those concerned began to sense that having
escaped punishment so far, they were no longer in danger. This method of
pacification appeared very successful: the examples were enough for those
who got away to show them what they had succeeded in avoiding, thus ensuring
they would appreciate their good luck.
In the first half of 1957, great efforts were made by the Stalinists
to extend the scope of reprisals. The struggle was decided in Moscow. The
defeat of the Molotov-Kaganovich group helped those around Kádár
in the Hungarian leadership to victory, since the Hungarian Stalinists
were regarded by the Khrushchev leadership as the allies of Molotov and
Co. It also meant that Kádár had won the trust of Khrushchev
who, from then on, was no longer troubled by the fact that the Hungarian
leadership was headed by rehabilitated politicians. The battle between
the Stalinist and Kádárist wings within the Hungarian Party
leadership was brought to a head at the Party conference in the summer
of 1957 and ended with the complete victory of Kádár. From
that time on, Kádár and his group no longer had to fear that
Khrushchev might replace them by Rákosi and Gerõ because
of the relative mildness--by Moscow standards, that is--of the reprisals
(ten thousand executions had been "advised" by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej,
regarded as Moscow's spokesman, when he was on a visit to Budapest.) According
to rumours seized upon eagerly and diligently spread by the Kádár
regime, Chou En-lai, who had also been to Budapest early in 1957, was supposed
to have "proposed" the complete extermination of the rebellious
intelligentsia. By having Imre Nagy executed in 1958, Kádár
made still another move to ensure his pos-ition against just such a replacement,
but, the fact is that by that time he already enjoyed the full-scale support
of the Khrushchev leadership.
Thus entrenched the Kádár leadership felt it was time
to launch its policy vis à vis the intellectuals, a politically
highly dangerous group having a key role in Hungary in influencing public
opinion. Aczél gradually became the lynchpin of that policy. As
a Deputy Minister of Culture (1957-1967) and then as head of cultural policy
within the top Party leadership (1967-1974), he was, however, no cultural
policy-maker in either the broader or the narrower sense of the term. He
was not concerned with creating institutions associated with his name,
neither was he interested in science policy or in messianistic ideas about
the education of people in their leisure time, let alone the budgetary
problems of the financing of culture. Aczél was in charge of the
"intelligentsia policy" of the Party. This meant the Party's
handling of the major opinion-making intellectuals. For a long time it
was an especially important and sensitive area, where a very real political
struggle was going on even at a time when nothing could be seen on the
surface. This was the only part of society where some kind of latent resistance
was discernible. In 1957 the situation was one of open battle. The political
authorities were facing a choice: they could either eliminate the rebellious
influential intellectuals or try to come to a compromise with them. Since
their backbone consisted of writers and poets, the issue boiled down to
the future of Hungarian literature.
Practically every prominent writer was an active member of the political
resistance. They were the finest and most widely read authors of their
time: Tibor Déry, Gyula Illyés, Gyula Háy, László
Németh, Péter Veres, István Örkény, Zoltán
Zelk. Only a few completely non-political writers like Sándor Weöres,
Géza Ottlik, János Pilinszky or Miklós Szentkuthy--were
not involved. It was left to Aczél to decide whether to restore
the continuity of Hun garian literature in exchange for a pledge on the
part of the writers to refrain from political resistance or to "remove"
the entire Hungarian literature and to "appoint" a bunch of rhymesters
and fiction-manufacturing Party propagandists to replace them. In 1957,
writers were "on strike". They boycotted the publications of
the new regime. They refused to publish--if they were free at all, that
is. Of those mentioned above, Déry, Háy and Zelk were in
prison. Those who had been anywhere near the armed resistance were threatened
by the gallows: the theatre manager Gábor Földes was executed
because he had organized a protest rally against the action of borderguards
who had opened fire on a crowd of civilians, and the rally had turned into
a lynch mob. The playwright József Gáli, who had contacts
with armed groups, was also sentenced to death, and was only pardoned because
of a wave of international protest. István Bibó, the most
important Hungarian political thinker in the twentieth century and Minister
without Portfolio in the Imre Nagy government, avoided being hanged for
getting a protest memorandum to a foreign legation only because the legation
concerned was that of India, and the Soviet Union could not afford to risk
losing the goodwill of India at that time.
Still, the "silent" writers and poets could not even be persuaded
to publish a politically completely neutral poem. What propelled Aczél
toward the highest level of decision-making was that he took a bold initiative:
he decided to re-integrate the rebellious writers into the official literary
life of the regime at all costs. That solution was far from obvious. The
"replacing" of rebellious or not completely trustworthy intellectuals
by more compliant ones was not as mad and absurd an idea as it may sound.
Suffice it to recall the elimination of the flourishing, internationally
acknowledged Russian-Soviet avant-garde art of the 1920s or the attempts
by the Husak regime in the aftermath of 1968.
In 1957, the Hungarian regime, too, was ready for its own kind of "replacing".
A group faithfully toeing the Party line had rallied in the "period
of vacuum" around the anthology of poetry Tûztánc (Fire
Dance); here insignificant party activist writers were making a determined
effort to take over the place of the silent writers. Those in power, however,
understood that if that line was taken, they could easily turn the majority
of the intelligentsia in the broader sense of the term against them for
a long time thereby putting consolidation at risk. Aczél was given
the task of persuading the resisting writers to break their silence. It
was this crucial task that raised him gradually to the rank of the leadership.
Beside the practical aspects of power politics, the decision to maintain
the continuity of art, rather than to "appoint" a new art was
fundamentally influenced by the differing relationship to art, especially
to literature, of successive generations in the Communist leading élite.
The first set who had seized power was made up
of educated revolutionary intellectuals. This was the type of Lenin, Trotsky,
Lunacharsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin or, in the Hungarian Communist movement,
György Lukács and József Révai, the chief ideologue
of the Rákosi period. The consolidation of power, on the other hand
, was carried out by militants of worker or peasant origin, most of them
self-taught, with little formal education. They too were aware of the part
played by culture in undermining the credibility of the old ruling class
and regarded art as a revolutionary force. Stalin belonged to that type.
So did Rákosi in Hungary or, in the movement's third line, Aczél
too. Their snobbery inclined them to relative mildness vis à vis
literature in the period of the early terror, when the regime was settling
in. There was no writer's trial during the Rákosi era between 1948
and 1953. For the next set of Communist leaders, coming into power after
1956, art was a "deviancy" like alcoholism. Who else but people
with sick minds would use convoluted, artificial forms to relate things
that could be spelt out "straight"? Khrushchev belonged to that
type, as did Kádár in Hungary. Out of policy considerations,
the latter consented to keeping the continuity of literature but yielded
the area "intellectual policy", a field alien to him, to Aczél
the snob, who, nevertheless, shared his political views on the issues of
consolidation.
Aczél carried out his task in an exemplary manner. He made influential
writers believe that the eventual release of their imprisoned fellow writers
actually hinged on their readiness to abandon their silence, so that they
could have a ready justification for any opportunistic move they would
make in the future. Aczél's snobbery was coupled with extensive
reading and a certain sense of quality which helped him to form a fair
judgement of the real merit of writers. In his subsequent activity, too,
he regarded the really most valuable members of the writers' world as key
men in influencing the opinions of others, so it was mainly them that he
attempted to create good contacts with, and to rely on as far as was possible.
Thus he mostly resisted the temptation of turning insignificant writers
into influential ones.
Between 1960 and 1963, amnesty was granted to those who had taken part
in the revolution. By granting it the regime did not place the justification
for, or even the size of, the reprisals in doubt; it simply demonstrated
that it had become consolidated to the point where such means were no longer
necessary. It gave up forcing the people into a hypocritical imitation
of identification with the regime, and from that time on, neutral passivity,
the abandoning of acts of political opposition was regarded as a sufficient
measure of political loyalty. This was formulated by Kádár
in his famous slogan: "Who is not against us is with us". A potential
of force capable of oppressing the whole of society if need be, was maintained,
but after 1960 that force was never used for maximum oppression. The main
tool for sustaining power became the political neutralization of society.
In the terminology of political science, this meant a transition from a
totalitarian form of modern dictatorship to its paternalistic form. This
was what was called, in more popular terms, "soft dictatorship".
The Kádár regime refrained from interfering with people's
private life and even ensured that it remained undisturbed. No one was
expected to sing in a choir, collect scrap metal or take part in mass sports
after working hours.
With the completion of consolidation, the role of Aczél did not
diminish; on the contrary, it grew. His policy of cultural management took
on a doctrinal form that spelt out the essential principles of political
neutralization for the intelligentsia, the "3 T's" (after the
three Hungarian words támogatás [support], tûrés
[toleration] and tiltás [prohibition]). The "3 T's" meant
a relaxation of censorship, expressing a distinction between two types
of permission: "support", which was enjoyed by politically "functional"
works created in a spirit of identification with the regime, and "toleration".
The latter meant that works for which the regime had no direct use, but
which posed no threat either, were allowed to be published. Liberalism
for cultural policy was complemented by a declaration of the "guiding
principles for science and scholarship". This Party document declared
"freedom in research and responsibility in publication". The
cryptic slogan was meant to imply that politically sensitive things could
be included in research reports for internal use but the same things could
not be made public; it was up to the political control agency concerned
to decide on their publication. In reality, Aczél personally decided
which literary works and works of art could be regarded as politically
neutral and which scientific works would be allowed to be disseminated
in specialist circles, in a semi-public manner, without being permitted
to be properly published.
It was only one of the requirements of being ranked in the category
of the "second T" ("tolerated") that no political criticism
of the regime, even in a veiled form, should appear in the work in question.
For ensuring political neutrality it was equally important that a work
of art should by no means create any sense of "negative general mood,"
let alone malaise or debilitating decadence. Even the politically non-supporting
part of society was expected to feel relatively comfortably among the given
conditions, and that feeling of comfort would eventually culminate in a
"general feeling of well-being". Using his self-taught knowledge,
acquired largely in the 1930s, Aczél made genuine attempts to judge
what kind of impact a piece of non-conformist fiction or poetry would have
on its potential intellectual public in a given context. Would it strengthen
their political neutrality or have the effect of driving them out of that
position? He was moving on safe ground as long as he stayed in the world
of "realist" literature written in a transparent idiom and portraying
social situations relevant to political interpretation (social class differences,
poverty, etc.), but the world of modern art was alien to him. There he
vigilantly tried to size up how the "negative general mood" present
in the so-called avant-garde works, the artistic representation of a Weltgefühl
opposed to the feeling of comfort, or deliberately provocative, would affect
the general social mood. He was inclined to ban such works on the ground
that they were "alienated", and "their attitude to life
was not positive".
Softening "Kádárism" was received with hostility
by those Stalinists in the apparatus who had carried out the reprisals
and had a major part in the initial consolidation after 1956. There were
still a great many who would have liked to transform the system into a
tougher dictatorship, for which the models were Czechoslovakia under Novotny
and later Husak or Ulbricht's and later Honecker's GDR.
The main battleground was the "intellectual policy" now personified
by György Aczél. The party bureaucrats' resistance "movement"
made its attack over an issue which represented a genuine problem to Aczél
himself and the Kádárist "intellectual policy".
It had to be prevented that the dividing line between the two permissive
"T's" should become blurred. The fact that works not grounded
in the ideology of the regime were allowed to appear if they did not contain
any articulated criticism, not even in the form of hints, and if their
different mentality did not openly conflict with the power basis of the
regime, did not mean that the "supported" works were not expected
to express the ideological attitudes of the regime. The political advantage
of the publication of tolerated writings lay in strengthening the sense
of neutrality in the opinion-creating intellectuals, the segment of society
most receptive to dissident ideas. The "supported" works expressing
the ideology of the system had to be emphatic and carry sufficient weight.
The appearance had to be avoided that anything that was allowed to be published
automatically expressed the official view. Mind sets of a different kind,
even if not threatening the foundations of the regime, could not be allowed
to gradually replace the ideology of socialism. The official position could
not be "pluralized". Thus in the 1960s and 70s the position and
tasks of "Marxist criticism" became a central issue of literary
life. The official view, in the development of which Aczél played
a crucial role, was that the "tolerated" works should be subject
to rigorous criticism in literary reviews, picking out those features of
the "tolerated" work which were politically harmless but alien
to the official ideology.
This meant that the practice of the "3 T's" applied to works
of art only. In literary criticism there would be no room for anything
else but "supported" views. Aczél made yet another concession
by not excluding the publication of critical works taking a neutral position
if they were responded to by "Marxist criticism". Tolerat ed
but "not useful" ideas included "individualism", turning
away from public life, as well as the "esoteric cult of forms",
but also political ideas. First and foremost of these was nationalism,
which could apply to anybody in whose view the number one national problem
of Hungary was not its membership in the "camp of socialist countries
led by the Soviet Union", but the position and problems of the Hungarian
minorities living in the neighbouring countries, the threat of "national
death" due to the declining birth rate or the issue of national pride.
Aczél fought a running battle on "two fronts" for two
decades: on the one hand, against attempts to smuggle oppositionism into
"tolerated" works and, on the other, against the line, appearing
in the guise of "Marxist criticism", which denied the right of
the "tolerated" category to exist. The regime's policy vis à
vis the intellectuals could never develop a clear position for the treatment
of the problem that "Marxist criticism", being too liberal with
regard to the "tolerated" views could bear political risks, whereas
an eventual offensiveness on the side of "Marxist criticism"
may endanger the "sense of well-
being" of the authors of tolerated works, the very aim "toleration"
was created for.
Révész gives a fascinating account of the tricks and manipulations
by which Aczél tried to bring an intellectual élite, that
had played a crucial part in the political preparation for the 1956 Revolution,
closer to the regime, whose principle representative, as far as they were
concerned, was he himself. The methods cunningly employed by Aczél
are summed up by two terms: "policy of favours" and "informalizing".
Aczél did not manipulate by relying on general rules equally valid
for everyone but distributed favours tailored to individuals. In a broader
sense, this practice applies to the entire technique through which the
regime maintained power. Even during the Kádár regime, and
since then, by the relationship between people and establishment which
developed after the 1960-1963 amnesty launching a policy relying on neutralization
as against plain oppression, has often been described by many as a compromise,
and even likened to the historic compromise made in 1867 between Hungary
and the Habsburg Empire. A compromise, however, is an agreement between
active parties even if power relations between the parties are unequal
and unilateral advatanges are offered for one of the parties. In the case
of a favour, on the other hand, it is only the party handing out the favour
which is an active party. A favour does not result in guaranteed conditions.
It is something granted which the giver has the power to revoke. The more
relaxed conditions of the Kádár era, as compared to the Rákosi
re gime, or the other socialist countries, were experienced by Hungarians
as a package of favours, any of which could be withdrawn by a gust of wind
from Moscow. In literary life, Aczél tried to charm the most esteemed
figures and made it felt that the ground for the favour was the high literary
merit of the person favoured which, however, he subtly hinted, was not
enough in itself for winning the favour: a measure of loyalty must be made
explicit.
Aczél did the granting through "informalization", i.e.
personal contacts. He sought out the key intellectuals he thought worthy
of being won over, rang them up, invited them for supper to his home with
their spouses. This patriarchal, fraternizing procedure also signified
that the commissar of the regime's policies regarding intellectuals would
only try to win over people who were genuinely distinguished figures in
the country's intellectual life, and had no intention to make key people
out of second-rate writers just because they were willing to become loyal
servants. At the same time, he made it perfectly clear that he wanted to
turn the key characters of literary life into a stabilizing factor. Aczél
would only want to persuade his partners to take a position of neutrality,
not to any spectacular commitment to the regime or to its unequivocal support.
What he most of all wanted was to keep them separate from political opposition.
His objective was that all kinds of opposition become isolated from the
start by the authority and discreet loyalty of key people among the society
of writers. In these friendly talks Aczél, as a witty and bright
fellow-intellectual, a "colleague" as it were, made it felt that
this was the only way for sustaining a climate for genuine literary values
within the framework of the system. He did his best to make it fully clear
that, within the Party leadership, all this depended largely on his own
person, and if the key intellectuals concerned refused to act as his partners
in the game, the policy urging political loyalty might gain the upperhand
and become the only condition for the granting of favours. Such trifles
as artistic qualities would no longer matter.
Aczél took great care that, on the one hand, in the practice
of the handing out of favours, the granting of positions of privilege and
the hierarchy created by the favours should not become divorced from the
spontaneous, informal hierarchy among intellectuals based on genuine value,
and, on the other, that the development of the hierarchy created by real
privileges would be firmly under his control. By that method, the group
of elite intellectuals, which had made up the leadership of the intellectual
opposition after the fall of Imre Nagy's first government of 1953 -1954
and had rallied the rank and file of Hungarian literary life behind the
cause of the 1956 Revolution, was success fully integrated by Aczél
into the regime's practice of political neutralization. Aczél could
demonstrate to the higher powers that he was the man who had pacified this
revolutionary leadership in the sense that he succeeded in having the influential
intellectuals involved give up the rearguard action that it had fought
in the autumn of 1956 and the winter of 1957, reconciling themselves to
the fact that the Revolution had been ultimately defeated and that the
new situation required a new attitude toward the powers-that-be.
It remains undecided whether the main issue in judging Aczél's
activity should be his role in protecting the arts and preventing a policy
in which creative intellectuals are granted privileges solely on the basis
of the degree to which they are willing to be servants to the regime, or
the fact that, by offering protection, he managed to break the continuity
of political opposition. The new political opposition that later emerged
had little of the direct, lively heritage of the 1956 Revolution to rely
on.
This pacifying, neutralizing and integrating role of Aczél lasted
until 1968. The new, self-confident generation of writers appearing on
the scene in the wake of the Czechoslovak crisis wanted to establish its
own organizations outside the politically controlled structures of literary
life. Aczél had no recipe for handling this, nor were there routine
procedures available. The aspiration aimed seemingly at expanding the internal,
"professional" self-government in the arts was but a guise for
political opposition from the start. The Young Writers' Attila József
Circle (known by the acronym JAK), symbolizing by its very choice of name--the
name of a modern classic poet who had comitted suicide at a young age--that
major works could only be created on the grounds of "eternal opposition"
against all kinds of organized power, wanted to fight the same kind of
rearguard action for the suppressed cause of '68 that the earlier generation
of writers had fought for the Revolution of 1956. Their strategy was to
create, by establishing an organization for young writers, a counter-forum
opposed to the official, making the first move toward political pluralism
by pluralizing an area thus far under bureaucratic control.
Aczél's methods failed when he tried to exercise them on this
new generation of writers. They lacked the imprinted fear of their predecessors
that the possibility of literary creativity was in danger, and a compromise
must be made to save it. An informal, fraternizing personal relationship
with Aczél was repugnant to them. They wanted objective, institutional
contacts with the regime rather than informal, personal ones. They did
not regard informality in this sense as a kind of intimacy "humanizing"
the coldness of authority but as sheer humiliation, a charade in which
they were required to smile while being at the mercy of the force of authority.
The new generation of artists itself wanted to develop the hierarchy of
reputations based on artistic merit, and did not wish it to be recognized
by officialdom at the price of doing a service to the regime. They had
no intention to legitimize power by socializing with Aczél at his
dining table, thereby strengthening the stability of the régime.
They wanted publication abroad or the acceptance of foreign scholarships
to be recognized as rights, and not as favours granted to specific persons.
In the 1970s, Aczél was no longer a successful pacifier.
At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, as political opposition reappeared,
the very method of political neutralization as the predominant method of
maintaining the po wer of the Kádár regime became questionable.
The movement of intellectuals, collecting signatures for various protests,
maintaining samizdat periodicals and underground publishing houses and
organizing "counter"-universities in private homes, started out
as a civil rights movement in the mould of Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia
or KOR in Poland. It soon grew into a general political opposition movement
aiming at the assertion of civil liberties, the establishing of an economic
model based on the principles of market eco nomies and political pluralism.
The aspirations of the De mocratic Opposition advanced parallel with the
movement of the young writers and the two became increasingly interwoven.
The nationalist trend in literature also grew livelier. The Kádár
regime, one of whose most dangerous foes in 1956 had been the kind of nationalism
which wanted to put an end to the country's dependence on the Soviet Union,
did not develop an official nationalism of its own as some of the other
countries of the Soviet Bloc did. Hungary's official ideology was a sterile
and empty "internationalism", which avoided a noisy confrontation
with the Hungarian national tradition but also failed rather spectacularly
in its handling of it. The anti-Habsburg independence tradition, regarded
as the "progressive" line during the Rákosi regime, and
stylized into being a predecessor of the anti-fascism of the inter-war
years, was useless since it provided an opportunity for pro-1956 undertones,
whereas the Habsburg tradition was too "reactionary" for Communist
agit. prop. The minimum objective of the nationalist opposition was to
"normalize" the Kádár regime in this area and to
achieve a greater emphasis on national identity, similarly to that in the
Soviet Union or Romania. The maximum objective would have been to have
the regime react by open foreign policy moves to the violations of the
rights of the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries.
In the conflict-ridden eighties the man in charge of "intellectual
policy" had to decide what made it more likely that the neutrality
of the wider sphere of intellectuals would be preserved: if the opposition
were destroyed and the centres of rebellion eliminated, or if the centres
were merely isolated because the traumatic impact of elimination could
drive a wider circle of intellectuals out of the desired neutrality or
would, at least, do grave damage to their all-important "political
mood". The regime saw greater risks in the latter possibility, than
in allowing innocuous opposition groups to exist, and therefore it did
not bring itself to the point of taking police action to eliminate oppositionism.
It was thought to be enough to isolate them and to make them insignificant.
This went beyond "intellectual policies", still, Aczél
continued to play a key role in the new situation too. Still, the tolerance
shown with regard to the opposition was different from the tolerance of
the 1960-1963 amnesty. At that time it had been the power of the establishment
that was in evidence, the generosity stemming from a feeling of irreversible
victory. The tolerance of the 1980s, on the other hand, was a forced concession.
However weak that opposition was, its elimination by police power might
have moved the broader intellectual classes out of their position of neutrality.
This risk was increasingly sensed by wider and wider circles of people.
Neutralization had originally been meant as an ersatz and temporary solution
but the substitute had turned out to be better than what they had wanted
to use it as a substitute for. Tolerating a successfully isolated opposition
was out of the question. In this case the regime regarded as its objective
the withering away of opposition as soon as possible. The strategic objective
of the opposition, on the other hand, was to legalize itself, making thereby
the first move toward the pluralization of the system. Aczél, for
his part, insisted that the pressure of the opposition hindered Kádárism
from progressing toward less and less repressive forms. He continued to
see "Kádárism" threatened by those forces in the
party apparatus, who, as they had done after the amnesty, did not cease
to aspire to "normalize" the Kádár regime, which
they thought too lenient toward "petty bourgeois attitudes",
into a harder dictatorship on the Husak- Honecker model.
By the 1980s, Aczél reached the position where he realized that
"Kádárism" could only be made resistant to the
"normalizing" pressure if it became less repressive. Neutralization
was no longer sufficient. Aczél in effect tried to apply a somewhat
inarticulate theoretical construction of Marxist-Leninist theory concerning
the "withering away" of the state to the concrete situation.
According to its doctrines, following the solidification of the "dictatorship
of the proletariat", a transitional form on the way toward "stateless"
communism, the "repressive" function of the dictatorship of the
proletariat would become secondary and lose its edge as opposed to its
"economic organizing" and "cultural educating" role.
The autonomy of the various apparatuses performing specific functions would
increase, while the top power centre, which earlier had held them in thrall,
would become transformed into a "dispatching" service. Révész
reveals by means of subtle analyses how the "intellectual politician"
saw reform in asserting the supposed immanence of the system, and anti-reformism
in the opposition aspiring to transcendentalize the system. Aczél's
contorted ideas, estranged from real life, were no longer suitable for
the pacification of rebellious intellectuals, and their isolation was less
and less successful.
In the 1980s the Soviet-type system was in a crisis in the entire bloc.
The extremely high rate of accumulation maintained for eighty years with
barely any increase in productivity exhausted even the resources of the
Soviet Union, thought to be bottomless. In the case of Hungary, poor in
energy and highly indebted, (huge foreign loans were used to encourage
consumer ism--another method of neutralization and pacification) an especially
grave crisis was developing. The 1985 Party Congress was faced with the
seemingly insignificant task of re-formulating the evaluation of the 1956
Revolution for its 30th anniversary the following year. The implication,
however, was no less than the fact that Kádár's position
had become problematic, since the General Secretary was the very embodiment
of the crushing and the condemnation of the Revolution. In the course of
the crisis the "intellectual policy" ultimately lost its function.
Aczél fell also formally and he was replaced. His last attempt was
to organize, by the establishing of the New March Front, an intellectual
élite which might lead a flexibly executed changeover meant to salvage
the system. The re-evaluation of the Revolu tion involved a re-thinking
of the assessment of the execution of Imre Nagy, as well as facing what
had happened during the period of reprisals lasting until the amnesty.
The hard-liners, who also became more active during the crisis and rallied
mainly around János Berecz, the new ideological chief replacing
Aczél, wanted to abandon "Kádárism" and
return to the period of reprisals as the "pure well" from which
the regime, turned into "a lukewarm pool" by Kádárism,
could be revitalized. Regarding Aczél's position, one can only make
assumptions. For the sake of saving Kádárism, he would probably
have allowed a re-evaluation of the period of reprisals as a forced prolongation
of Stalinism. Such an assessment would have entailed the rehabilitation
of Imre Nagy or at least the admission that his execution had been unjustified.
The decision rested with Kádár who chose to step away from
his life work, "Kádárism", rather than be declared
responsible for the death of Imre Nagy.
The fall of Aczél was followed in 1988 by the voluntary surrender
of the regime. The changeover of 1988-1989 was a surreal story, neither
the first nor the last in Hungarian history. Those in power were fully
aware of the situation of the country, and of the fact that economic collapse
was imminent. The regime did not have the courage to wait for and assume
the role of "trustee" in the bankruptcy. It chose instead to
yield power to a weak and isolated opposition, which would never have had
the strength to force this power change.
It is to posterity to form a general judgement of the Kádár
years, for which an assessment of Aczél's policy may well provide
a yardstick. The main question is whether we see mainly the "value
saver" or the "pacifier" in him. In Hungary, there was only
political samizdat. As a general rule, works of literature were not pushed
into illegal publication, though some major authors--György Konrád,
Péter Nádas, István Eörsi, to name but a few--were
harrassed by constant suggestions for cuts and changes with publication
put off indefinitely. In the climate of the "three T's", the
traditional and prestigious role of Hungarian literature as "counter-publicity",
the "conscience of the nation" and a "substitute for a real
parliament", disappeared. The possibility of legal publication built
into Hungarian authors an extremely demoralizing self-censorship, limiting
not only the political message but in all likelihood artistic value as
well.
It is hard now to assess how a successful effort to make oppression
comfortable for the majority of the oppressed is to be judged. This was
done in a period when there could be no real hope for changing the regime,
and in such a situation stubborn mental resistance may prove either impossible
or downright debilitating from a psychological point of view as well. For
the "inheritors of the fallen regime" (to use Cardinal Mindszenty's
words of November 3, 1956), who tend to consider themselves former "reform-Communists"
today, the Kádár regime is a historical antecedent of the
changeover of 1989-1990, whose main strands paved the way to future democratization.
The emotionally overcharged type of anti-communism, however, does not differentiate
between "Stalinism" and "Kádárism", the
"hard" dictatorship before 1953 and the "soft" one
after 1963. The great merit of Révész's book is that it sketches
out a third possible evaluation, according to which "Kádárism"
was but the "specific Hungarian form" of the "stagnation"
of the Brezhnev era. The author of this fine book, while subtly describing
the two possibilities of interpretation, is more inclined to appreciate
Aczél, the saver of values, while the author of this review tends
to see Aczél's policy more as a peculiarly Hungarian, system-specific
form of policy vis à vis artists and intellectuals conforming to
the "stagnation" of the Brezhnev years.
The special interest of Aczél's character probably lies in the
fact that he used a great inventiveness to achieve a purpose for which
mere routine would have been quite sufficient. He may have been medio cre
but he was a "phenomenon", a figure not interchangeable with
just any other bu reaucrat. He played a barren and ominous role with considerable
sophistication.
Miklós Szabó
is a historian and a member of Parliament. He was instrumental in launching
the Flying University in 1978, an important centre for dissident activism
at the time.
