János M. Rainer: Underground streams-the survival in Hungary

János M. Rainer: Underground streams-the survival in Hungary of conservativism and right-wing radicalism through the period the soviet-type system(Final Report of the Research Project Underground Streams and an Introduction of a Forthcoming Book – Excerpts)

This volume results from a strong, long-term experience felt by the editor’s generation. One of the strongest features of the first 25 years of democracy in Hungary was a rapid revival of Hungarian right-wing tradition. All right-wing strands of modern, twentieth-century Hungarian political thinking made their appearance, from conservatism to extreme-right radicalism, based on earlier traditions of these. Far less capable of penetrating were the various strands of modern Western conservatism, which had no significant traditions behind them in Hungary.

“Right-wing” (like “left-wing”) is among the most commonly used epithets in politics, including political thinking and political ideology. In the second of these, it is discussed in textbooks and summaries as a subdivision that spans its logical and its historical typologies. The phrase and concept derive from the division in the constituent national assembly of the French Revolution, where radical revolutionaries sat on the left-hand side of the chamber and the moderates on the right. Left-wingers in that case were anti-clerical republicans, and right-wingers believers in an “alliance of throne and altar.” This system of concepts, like modern political ideologies, is a creation (and tradition) of the nineteenth century. Left-wingers believed in sovereignty of the people and the ability of mankind to develop. They thought of institutions as reparable and of efforts to do so as progressive, and they proclaimed the past to be one of continual progress. The left believed as a political objective in the widest possible spread of civil freedom and equality (seen from various angles through various normative statements). This left-wing historical and anthropological optimism was not shared by the right (although they were not necessarily pessimistic in this respect). They tended to believe in and build on individual excellence and the values and force of tradition, above all those of religion (Christianity in Europe), and to accept inequality as a natural state. The political and ideological concept of left and right became imbued further in the latter half of the nineteenth century with economic content: the left argued for state control over the free market, state intervention, and protection of the interests of the lower “classes of people,” while the right sought economic freedom and a night-watchman’s role for the state.

Critics of this compartmentalization into left and right have rightly pointed out how this once roughly interpretable dichotomy broke down in the twentieth century, as political movements and ideas appeared that straddled both. Introducing historical criteria gives political ideologies the ability to present the political fields distinguished in several ways. For example, the logical axis of maximization and minimization of power yields six such fields: fascism, communism, conservatism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism. So there remain two: the ideology of conservatism and fascism.

The aim of this research project was clearly a historical one: to refine further the concept of the right and focus it onto the region and period examined here. Each participant in researching the Underground Streams project was able to choose an exact conceptual framework for the topic to be examined.
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The 1956 Institute community, with support from outside, decided to examine the following questions that came to a fresh light in the late 1990s and then in the first decade and a half of the new century. Most important of them was what happened to representatives of right-wing political thinking under the Soviet-type system. How was the Hungarian right-wing handled by the Stalinist and post-Stalinist elite and its specialist institutions, i. e. ideological inspectors and particularly, the political police. On the other hand, we also intended to research what kind of tacit or concealed discourses provided continuity for the various types of right-wing political thinking. All that was aimed at understanding better how traditional Hungarian right-wing political thinking reemerged and became embedded in the new Hungarian political spectrum after 1989.

Study of this problem called for primary research, above all precise definition of the framework of concepts and interpretation. The traditional archive documentation came from files in the ideological sections of the state party and from the state security organization. Important results may also come from analyzing relevant interview texts in the 1956 Institute’s Oral History Archive. Finally, it was essential to collate these with similar historical phenomena by surveying experiences in other countries under Soviet rule at the same time like Hungary. So approaches were made to colleagues and experts in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, with questions derived originally from the Hungarian case, as self-understanding seemed to be most viable through comparison.

The answers and proposals can be read in the first part of this book. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan Iacobexamined the process of cultural and ideological nationalization of the party?state, to show the type of legacies characteristically found in post-communism. The continual rehabilitation of some themes of the “Stalino-fascist baroque” in post-communism, and the constant fascination with the palingenetic ideas of local fascism can be explained by revealing the syncretic nature of “Romanian ideology.” The latter construct results from a gradual, but extensive symbiosis of traditions of cultural Narcissism and ethnocentrism with the Ceau?escu regime’s odd synthesis of isolationism (especially in the 1980s) and pericentrism (particularly from the 1960s until well into late 1970s). The communist experience in Romania was one cardinally marked by a massive process of symbolic and personnel appropriation of the pre-1945 past. The legacies of national-Stalinism in post-communist Romania can be separated into two categories. The first is the Stalino-fascist baroque, manifest both in politics and in cultural debates (especially in the 1990s, but well into the 2000s). The second is arguably more pervasive and potentially threatening: the obsession with uncritical appropriation of tradition to construct usable pasts.

Attila Simon in Chapter 2 feels that the influence of right-wing traditions in Slovakian politics after the change of system is hard to discern, mainly because the 1989 Velvet Revolution and ensuing change of system found Slovak society unprepared, after decades when right-wing values had almost vanished. The other important reason was an absence of factual, reusable traditions, partly due to the belated development of Slovak society. It had strong traditions only in nationalism, as Slovak society spent most of its modern history envisaging itself in terms of another nation – the Hungarians and later the Czechs. So despite the fact that this nationalism in the traditional sense was initially an ally of liberalism, modern Slovak conservatism was able to draw from it, through the idea of a nation-state.
Marek Kornat points out in Chapter 3 that the reality of communist captivity after, the stance vis-?-vis the communists and the Soviet domination, rather than the division between Right and Left, was the defining criterion in the Polish political spectrum. The matter is further complicated by the possibility of having a political program founded on classic right-of-centre values (social conservatism, affirmation of national identity, appreciation for the role of religion) and at the same time, on the social market economy inspired by the social teaching of the Catholic Church. Under the conditions of communism, the continuity of the nation’s political thinking could only survive in exile. The main ideas pursued by the political right in exile can be summarized in the priority of the struggle for the country’s independence and the need to defend Poland’s Catholic character, to which was added the return of individual property once the communist regime was removed. But the influence of the representatives of the inter-war Polish right over the fate of Poland after 1945 was rather limited. The totalitarian regime deprived Poles of all chances for political activity. The program of the democratic opposition – taking shape in Poland after 1976 – made no references to the ideals of the right, assuming a priori that it would be counter-effective. With clear declarations in that spirit lacking, the focus on human rights prevailed. Independence was unimaginable – the horizon of thinking was reached with references to “Finlandization.” The ideals of the right were taken forward by individuals. The Solidarność movement in 1980 was heterogeneous and pluralist, and its common basis lay in the emancipation of the civic society under the realities of the communist regime. The social and economic demands made by Solidarność were close to the non-communist left. Christian values, but not those of the traditional right, were exposed in the program of Solidarność.

András Schweitzer’s paper focuses on the twentieth-century relations between basic political ideologies in a Czech national context. Using a comparative approach, he examines the attributes and sources of the right-wing tradition also to answer the question of how it could become the dominant force in a society frequently characterized as essentially leftist. A dominant right after 1989 – but what a different this right than the others ? a pragmatic and liberal democratic political bloc that unambiguously advocated an open society and wide market-oriented reforms. The “rootless” post-1989 economic liberalism sprang from the modernist, receptive Czech mindset (its international openness), and the longue durée of swinging between the two main Czech ideological traditions: egalitarianism and liberalism. The difference between the Czech new right and that of other East-Central European countries lies less in the relative vigor of the liberal tradition, Schweitzer argues, than ina lack of the alternatives: nationalism, conservatism, or both these in conjunction, fortifying each other. Pre-1918 Czech nationalism was exceptional in the region in being strongly anti-nobility, anti-Habsburg, anti-Catholic – essentially: anti-conservative. So in the Czech context the main cleft is between an Eastward-oriented, nationalist-leaning egalitarianism and a Westward-looking, conservative-friendly liberalism.

On the contrary, in Hungary?s case (Chapter 5, by the editor of this volume), the most typical and longstanding ideological dividing line was an anti-conservative and anti-nationalist “alliance” vacillating between socialism and liberalism on the one hand, and an anti-modern, inward-looking conservative-nationalist camp on the other. This study covering the Hungarian right explores three questions. The intellectual content of the political ideology lies in a few basically negative theses like anti-Semitism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, anti-capitalism, and anti-modernism. Positively it was synthesized from strong etatism with certain redistributive tendencies on nationalist grounds. After 1945 the free discourse ended and the institutional background of the right disappeared. However, the institutional continuity of right-wing political thought did not succumb wholly with the communist takeover. There were still some illegal or semi-legal refuges from it, like underground forms of resistance, although they appeared only sporadically.The most important survival channel for the right’s political tradition that might be legalized lay within the populist ideological coalition and informal system, which extended also to the right. Hungarian populists (népiek) were recruited mainlyfrom the young intellectuals of the 1930s who tended to have a rural origin. Criticizing the social injustices of the Horthyera, especially the conditions in which the peasantry were living, the populists were formed into a genuine Hungarian left-wing opposition of that time. They tried to keep an equal distance from the Social Democrats and the moderate and radical right. By the early 1960s, the big issues and proposals of the populist ideological coalition had largely faded away. As they turned toward the nation’s problems, especially the fate of Hungarian minorities abroad, the populists became attractedto those preserving the Hungarian right’s traditions and found ideological refuge in their informal networks. The final part of the study outlines some hypotheses about the post-1945 position of the main social group to espouse the ideology?s system of values in their daily lives.

What follows thereafter is a series of case studies of Hungarian phenomena of underground streams, in two parts. There are two main kind of traces the right was able toleave in the communist period. Firstly, they had become targets of the surveillance, investigation and documentation of the political police. Certainly an obviously modified view of reality can be seen in this reflection of them – but with some features identifiable. Secondly, personal sources, memoirs and life stories were constructed by the former conservatives and other rightiststhemselves. Their approach also raises the issue of what knowledge can be gained from such personal accounts of past. Both documentation problems can be solved only by an equally emphatic and critical evaluation of such evidence.
So the first part, consisting of three studies, was inspired by the opportunities of the delayed Hungarian archival revolution. The files of the former state security organs were partly destroyed in 1989 (or earlier), partly taken over by new national security organs in early 1990, and partly retained in the Ministry of Interior. The interior minister in 1995 set up a committee of historians and archivists to assess his ministry’s records. This proposed transferring the documents to special archives, which was done two years later. At the turn of the millennium, the secret services slowly began to release the pre-1989 documents in their possession to this archive, and scholars were getting relative freedom to study the documents. The main question the authors of the first three case studies posed here was what we could learn about the Hungarian right after 1945 from such state security documentation.
Krisztián Ungvárysets out to present the treatment thatstate security meted out to the right, placing itfirst within the Kádár system’s overall view of the enemy. Of the groups hostile to the system, Ungváry argues, those easily classified as right-wing (principally those who considered themselves such, those who wished to follow the traditions of the pre-1945 right or could be associated with them personally, and those who saw the West European right as a model) were the most fragmentary. There is a widely exploited statistical database on state security activitythatdemonstrates how hard it is to define what counted as “right-wing” activity in the Kádár period. The kind of system of political ideas called right-wing today hardly showed anysign of life in the last twenty years of the party?state. Kadarite state security, however, was working with a wide scope of target enemies, considering all them right-wing, except two narrow groups, of hard-core Stalinist veterans on the one hand and of young Maoist intellectuals on the other. Even the reform-minded communist supporters of Imre Nagy were handled as right-wing revisionists and so traitors to Marxism-Leninism.

Gábor Tabajdi’s contribution targets one of the genuine conservative factions of Hungarian political life, the Christian Democrats. Their representatives were initially critics of the authoritarian Horthy regime, then contributors to wartime resistance, then condoned opposition politicians in the transition period, and finally branded, persecuted ex-politicians whom the Kádárites sought to neutralize, win over, or manipulate. As the regime steadily gained Western acceptance, even Christian Democrat émigrés ceased to be a serious problem to the state party – only a handful of ex-politicians remained of interest in the context of church policy. Most sought a modus vivendi with the Kádár regime, a way of agreeing with the authorities on applying their ideas, argues Tabajdi, and not surprisingly they found some. Apart from promoting human rights (above all freedom of worship), former Christian democratic politicians who remained in Hungary and expressed political opinions were sensitive primarily to issues of social justice and welfare. This led them to a more positive assessment than the one held by expelled or émigré groups. Members of the DNP, when expressing their world views, dissociated themselves from the conservatives and the extreme right-wing anti-communists. Yet the persecution lent Hungarian Christian democracy enough anti-communist content to appear as a right-wing political tradition during and after 1989.
Like Ungváry and Tabajdi, András Lénárt and Rudolf Paksa, authors of the analysis of former Hungarian Nazis, checked mostly the files of former political police. Right-wing extremism – and the Arrow-Cross (nyilaskeresztes or simply nyilas) parties were really extremist in deeds, not just in words, as they demonstrated in a bloody dictatorship in late 1944, when Ferenc Szálasi took over – seems logically as the most obvious counterpart of the communist regime. But the communists were guided by political pragmatism rather than consistent principle in this respect. Their policy would be dramatic condemnation of well-known Arrow-Cross leaders and their opinions, but a blind eye to “petty” rank-and-file members (more than 100,000 voters in 1939) who had committed no serious war crimes. The Hungarian Communist Party informally supported integration of former “petty” Arrow-Cross and did not object to their joining it (at least until 1949). As regards the leading personalities of the Arrow-Cross movement, the prominent war criminals up to 1951, including four-fifths of the Szálasi government staff were caught, sentenced and executed. The same happened to the second rank, with fewer death penalties. From 1950 up to the late 1960s, the secret police tried to keepthe remaining rank-and-file extremist activists under surveillance. But they were not really in the firing line of state security in the 1950–56 period.

Last section of this book concerns the memories and strategies of the former Christian middle class in post-1945 Hungary. First contribution is an analysis by Zsuzsanna Kőrösi of a lengthy oral-history life story (The interview is one of an about 1100 records of 1956 Institute’s Oral History Archive, Budapest) from Tibor Pákh, a graduate of law who was in a Soviet POW camp in 1945?48 and took part in the 1956 Revolution. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1961, he was released ten years later but kept under police surveillance. He was prevented from taking a regular job and lived by occasional translating work. In the 1980s, he regularly joined opposition events, where he stated his views and was arrested several times. Among other demands, he called for the rehabilitation of József Mindszenty, prince-primate of the Hungarian Catholic Church, for the withdrawal of Soviet occupation troops from the country, and remedies for various acts of injustice. Kőrösi sets out to discover what system of values appears in the life interview and how it conflicts with the official value system of the post-1945 period, what schemes of ideas and topoi are expressed, what identities the subject constructed, and what strategies he followed when his privileged prewar status became one of victimized discrimination and persecution. Religious faith, she emphasizes, was a vital element in Pákh’s identity, who retained his faith in adult life and practiced his religion with deep conviction. This ties in closely with his relation to church authority. József Mindszenty appears many times in his narrative, and throughout as an unquestionable leader. Another major side to his identity was being middle class, an expression he uses of himself usually for a lifestyle and standard of living, above all for the family, which gave him a firm financial basis (at least up to the war), a fine home, an estate, servants, a governess, social life, and access to the arts. Particularly important to him was acquisition of knowledge. Learning as an integral family value was built into his strategy in life and remained a priority even under the altered political conditions.
Pákh was born in 1924, so that he was very young when the system changed in Hungary in 1945. The central figure of the next chapter, Miklós Mester, was about forty at that time, and unlike Pákh, had something of a professional and political career in interwar Hungary. He was an MP from the late 1930s, then nominated to state secretary of religion and public education in the pro-German Sztójay cabinet after the German occupation of the country on 19 March 1944. But Mester, as reliable personalities witnessed after 1945, tried to do his best to save the Jewish community. He succeeded in escaping punishment as a war criminal, but he was exiled from Budapest to a small village in southeast Hungary in 1950?53. He did not participate in the 1956 events and remained marginalized throughout his life. (He died in 1989.) Katalin Somlai’s contribution sets out to sum up the values Mester lived by, or more precisely, the values he maintained as central in his memoirs, which he wrote in the 1980s. In this volume, published long after his death, he traced his commitment to democracy and humanism back to the early 1930s. Democracy was a guiding light in his outlook and the starting point for all his other aims, economic or social. National interest, nationalism and ties to Hungarian historical traditions and culture were not relegated either. He pressed ever more openly for restoring his country’s independence and improving the rights and living conditions of Hungarians beyond the country’s borders. It was national interest that caused further conflict between him and the prevalent communist system. Over the Kádár period, Mester turned from being an anti-Semitic nationalist into a believer in radical national ideas about democracy. But despite revising his political views and personal contacts, he was still an advocate of what he described in Endre Ady’s line as “Hungarian midst harried Hungarians,” which harked back to his nationalism, the prime political feature of Mester’s life.

The last chapter of this book, Iván Szegő’s study in Béla Csikós-Nagy examines a rather exceptional life-course and political career in the twentieth-century Hungary. Csikós-Nagy in 1942–44 acted as adviser to Finance Minister Lajos Reményi-Schneller, a Nazi collaborator executed as a war criminal in 1946. He was then cabinet vice-minister in 1952–55 to the Stalinist party general secretary and prime minister, Mátyás Rákosi, and to Imre Nagy, when he became premier in 1953. Finally under Kádár, longest serving of all communist leaders, Csikós-Nagy presided over the Price Control Office for 27 years, from 1957 to 1984. With Hungary as an ally of Hitler’s Germany in World War II, Csikós-Nagy in 1943 gave an anti-liberal response to the German Wilhelm Röpke, a critic of collectivism. He became, paradoxically, an authority on competition policy during the reforms of the 1960s. Before his death he returned to defensible parts of his philosophical tenets, on which his Austro-Fascist,National Socialist ideas had been based. He relativized Marxism and the “Western” liberal economics in crisis. His prewar views, albeit shorn of their racist logic, reappeared in 1999. In line with the criteria of the Underground Streams research project, Szegő examines how the etatist, anti-liberal extreme rightism of Csikós-Nagy, with its antagonism for banks, speculation, competition and the market, became submerged in 1945 and how they revived after 1990. Despite his survival techniques, his underground rightist stream can be revealed. He opposed autarky and championed the national interest within economic integration. As a young man he opposed a currency union based on the German mark; at the end of his life he was a Euroskeptic opposed to the IMF.
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Budapest, June 2015