From Courtship till the Morning After: The Role of Family, Kin and Friends in the Marriages of László Székely*

Andrea Fehér
Babeş-Bolyai University
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This study presents the different stages of the eighteenth-century Transylvanian marriage rituals, from betrothal, wedding ceremony, and bedding until the morning after. It also examines the roles played in this process by the “kinship-family.” The study draws on a wide range of published and unpublished biographical works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among these diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs written by members of the political elite, the unpublished autobiography of Count László Székely stands out, as it provides a considerable amount of data regarding some customs and traditions related to Transylvanian marriages and marriage rituals. Building on the count’s very personal and emotional narratives, we offer a sketch of the ways in which Transylvanians entered into marriage. We consider marriage a long process rather than a single act, in which family, friends, and kin played a significant role.

Keywords: kinship-family, marriage, betrothal, nuptials, László Székely, eighteenth-century Transylvania

Introductory Considerations

Over the course of the past half-century, research regarding family history, either from demographic or emotional perspectives, has become very popular, and as time has passed, studies on the subject flooded both sides of the so-called Hajnal line with contradictory results. Arguments which seem to have been shaped largely by the source types suggested either that the history of emotional ties in families should be understood as a long and ever changing process determined by social norms or just the opposite, that it should be seen as a process marked largely by continuity.1 In the debates concerning the Early Modern and Modern family, the supporters of the continuity interpretation came out victorious. However, more recent research has suggested that there is good reason to be more skeptical of the notion of motherly, fatherly, and marital love that lasts through the ages (or at least through an adult lifetime).2 Therefore, regarding the nature of our sources and the available analogies, the most promising approach would probably be to consider the subject from the perspective of emotions, but we will refer to the emotional communities in which the marriages came into being only to a very limited extent. In this study, the primary focus will not be on the question of whether marriages between people belonging to the nobility in eighteenth-century Transylvania were based on love, the will of parents, or personal sympathy, but rather on how the marriages came into being (from the first encounter to the wedding ceremony), who were the people involved, and what roles these people played in the conventional stages according to which courtship was structured and what functions they performed during the wedding ceremonies. By analyzing the autobiography of László Székely (1716–1772),3 the study offers insights into the customs involved among Transylvanians who were choosing a marriage partner and the nuptial regulations. It sketches the stages of the long process during which a marriage came into being. We also reflect on the marriage customs in Transylvania by presenting the earlier marriages in the Székely family, in part simply because we have an abundance of data concerning the three individuals who fulfilled the family’s marriage goals (László Székely the Elder [1644–1692], Ádám Székely the Elder [1679–1730], and László Székely the Younger). Our paper is based entirely on retrospective personal narratives, such as memoirs, autobiographies, and histories, as it was in these sources that we found many relevant analogies.4

Székelys Seeking Marriage Partners

Transylvanian narrative sources repeatedly emphasize the importance of the harmonic coexistence of husband and wife, and the sources suggest that the authors themselves also sought successful marriages. Reading the literary works of the period, one might think that with the exception of Péter Apor (1676–1752),5 everyone lived in a happy marriage6 and got married according to his or her wishes, as in the century we study (at least according to the literature), the marriages were loving.7 Of course, reality is much more nuanced. Memoirs also tell of tragedies, divorces, and spouses chosen by kin. Memoir writers, however, also looked at arranged marriages with disapproval,8 and so did the Church, which tried to emphasize the role of free will in the nuptial ceremonies.9

The sources, however, suggest that numerous factors influenced the expectations of kin, and this is how László Székely the Elder managed to gain the hand of Sára Bulcsesdi (ca.1656–1708), who was a member of a prominent family, against a number of aspirants who were better off and were from families with more distinguished lineages. The autobiography of Miklós Bethlen (1642–1716)10 contains information concerning the antecedents to the marriage, as Sára Bulcsesdi had originally been promised to Bethlen’s younger brother, Pál Bethlen (1648–1686). To the astonishment of Transylvanian society, however, the engagement was broken off because of the stepmother of the Bethlen sons, Klára Fekete. After this, Miklós Bethlen visited Sára Bulcsesdi once more to propose a match. This time, he tried to win her hand for Boldizsár Macskási (ca. 1650–ca. 1700). His reasoning followed the traditional view of the Transylvanian nobility: “I found the opportunity of saying, among other things, to István Jósika, her stepfather that I would rather give my daughter to a true-blue nobleman of ancient lineage than to a postmaster.”11 The courter, however, did not succeed. One might think that László Székely the Elder’s promising political career and the significant wealth he had accumulated in a short period of time overwritten the social rigidity and seclusion of his contemporaries.12 This is not so obvious, however. Transylvanian society still regarded the homines novi with a certain disdain, and therefore it is no surprise that almost every personal narrative from this century mentions the fortunate marriage of László Székely the Elder.

According to historical studies of the modern marriage market, the first-generation marriages were the most important ones, as they laid the foundation for the future of family members who have not had a grant of arms before and they paved the way to better and better marriages (from the perspective of social prestige and security).13 In the case of the Székely family, this can be best seen in the case of the son Ádám, who announced his desire to marry into one of the most influential Transylvanian families with his freshly granted countship (1700). However, his marriage to Anna Bánffy (1686–1704), the daughter of governor György Bánffy (ca.1660–1708), was soon brought to an end by Anna’s death. Ádám Székely then proposed to Sára Naláczy (ca. 1670–1760), whom she later divorced. This was followed by his marriage to Katalin Rhédey (1700–1729), from which the autobiographer was born. Ádám Székely developed a very good kinship network, friendships, and ties which would be important to the course of his life even years later. For instance, he had good relationships with the family of his first wife, as indicated by the fact that at his second wedding ceremony his former brothers in law stood by him in the roles usually filled by close kin.14 István Wesselényi (1673–1734)15 was groomsman and Dénes Bánffy (1688–1709) was bridesman.

The situation is entirely different in the case of László Székely, who thanks to the estate acquisitions of his grandfather accumulated significant financial capital and thanks to the marriages of his father gained important social capital. He did not have to demonstrate anything with his marriages, since by the time he chose a partner he had been orphaned and therefore was left to decide for himself.16 However, he also strove to create new ties, to some extent with the same families. This is why, as had been true in the case of his father, his first choice fell on a member of the Bánffy family, the niece of the first wife of his father, Kata Bánffy (1724–1745), who by then had also been orphaned.

Kata Bánffy (who as the dates given above indicate died quite young) embodied the ideal wife, so it is no surprise her place proved extremely difficult to fill. According to his own testimony, László Székely was averse to the idea of remarrying. As he wrote in his autobiography, “nuptiae secundae raro secundae,” or second marriages are rarely lucky.17 However, as his brother Ádám Székely the Younger (1724–1789) did not want to wed, the 32 year-old László had to ensure the survival of the family. Trusting himself to the grace of God, he started to seek a wife who could fill traditional female roles and embody traditional female virtues, i.e. chastity, religiosity, and good housekeeping. When writing on his second marriage, Székely also discusses the question of rearing girls. More precisely, he disapproved of the fact that the abovementioned traditional roles and virtues had come to be seen as dated by the middle of the eighteenth century.18 By then, balls, card games, and salons had become fashionable. In a word, noble women became more worldly. Young women were not very fond of reading, perhaps with the exception of romantic novels. Ecclesiastical literature was perceived as boring, and such reading was considered useless for a qualified lady. The long moralizing part of the autobiography regarding the ideal wife almost seems humorous if one thinks of the life Zsuzsánna Toroczkay (1733–1788), László Székely’s second wife, led in Szeben (Sibiu/Hermannstadt). She entered into the memoir-literature because of her lifestyle, which shocked many.19

The Visit

The first step to take to enter into marriage was the visit. According to the autobiography of László Székely, this was not preceded by any great preparations on the part of the bride’s family, nor did it involve a large entourage, as Péter Apor’s20 nostalgic description of the customs of Transylvania, Metamorphosis Transylvaniae, indicates. Rather, the arrangements were made mostly with the help of young bachelors and friends,21 as is confirmed by earlier Transylvanian memoirs.22 It is clear from the memoirs that the choice, even if it required the consultation of kin, was made first and foremost by the prospective bride and groom, as were the arrangements concerning the visit paid on the girl and the assistance in courting her, since courtship was a collaborative enterprise. László Székely got to know his first wife, the orphan Kata Bánffy, with the assistance of the sons of her foster parents, Ádám (1719–1772) and Gábor Bethlen (1712–1768). However, the first visit did not go perfectly, as Székely, who had no intention to marry, got confused by the responsibility he had to overtake. The Hungarian term used for the official bride-visit is watching or seeing. If the autobiography is reliable on this point, watching or seeing did not even mean what the words imply, as the two young people, raised to be chaste, did not even look at each other, but rather chatted with other members of the household. The tradition required that the visiting bachelor be induced to stay for dinner, where the prospective pair sat facing each other so that they could indeed observe each other.23

The situation was obviously different in the case of a second marriage. The people who advised the girl were again friends. During a hunt, Farkas Kun praised the Toroczkay daughters (who had come of age), especially the personality and beauty of the younger, Zsuzsánna Toroczkay. The visit was organized by the ex-brother-in-law Dénes Bánffy (1723–1780) in Szeben, where he invited the Toroczkay family, who were at that time residing in town, to his garden for dinner, where after some time László Székely also showed up. Székely, who by this time was somewhat more courageous and in the third year of his widowhood, was no longer a chaste observer, and the event did not remain in the control of the girl’s house, because a third party organized it. Both visits were followed by a conversation. In the case of his first marriage, Székely was interrogated about the girl by the two Bethlen boys, and with regard to his view of the Toroczkay girl, it was Dénes Bánffy who asked his opinion on the match and also offered his services to his former brother-in-law.

From Proposal until Answer

After the visit, Székely first went to see his otherwise not terribly beloved guardian, Dániel Jósika, as the tradition required that under the circumstances the most powerful member of the kinship network negotiate the marriage.24 Székely had put aside his childhood prejudices when he visited Jósika again, who proposed to Kata Bánffy for him. The answer, however, was delayed by four months. Finally, it was Farkas Bánffy (1701–1761) a relative of the fiancée, who urged things forward at the girl’s house and appeared for the engagement gifts (a ring and 200 gold coins) on January 2, 1741.

The second marriage faced challenges from the outset. The reason was simple: the mediator, Dénes Bánffy, in his thoughts already preparing for widowhood, had begun to like the younger Toroczkay girl himself, so he did not try to initiate negotiations with the girl’s parents on the subject of the marriage intentions of his ex-brother-in-law.25 László Székely finally got unexpected help from his former college mate, András Barabás, who at the time was in the service of the Toroczkay family, and in the end it was Barabás who brought the good news to Székely. The exchange of the engagement gifts again took place without the presence of the prospective bride and groom. The Toroczkays in this matter were represented by the fiancée’s sister, Klára Toroczkay (died 1753), wife of Ádám Teleki. The exchange of gifts in the case of both parties was done with the help of an intermediary.26

The autobiography does not present the sequence of proposals exclusively from the point of view of the bachelor. László Székely also discusses in detail instances in which his friends could approach a girl’s house with his help and mediation. He proposed to Klára Bánffy, the sister of his first wife, on behalf of Sámuel Szentkereszti, and he had to win the hand of Kata Toroczkay (†1788), the sister of his second wife, for István Radák (†1773). Each of these cases involved undesired complications, as Szentkereszti changed his mind twice after the proposal, while Radák’s proposal was overshadowed by the romantic feelings of Kata Toroczkay for Miklós Kemény (1723–1775). In the end, commonsense prevailed. In the first case, both the Szentkereszti and the Bethlen families (the guardians of the Bánffy daughters) tried to put pressure on the irresponsible bachelor. In order to save the reputation of the two families, the two young people were married in the end. The Toroczkay family chose security over uncertainty, as Kemény never took any concrete steps towards Kata Toroczkay.27

The cases discussed above show that in numerous instances the people who influenced a marriage were not necessarily members of the biological family, but rather of the extended kinship-family, or they were friends, mostly because in the contemporary society the “fictive kinship network,” i.e. a network based on sentimental relationships and economic or intellectual attachments, played a more significant role in everyday life.28

Proposals, however, did not always work out the way they were planned. As we have seen, in a number of cases, sending a bachelor or a widower (or a person who was about to be widowed) to a girl’s house might actually pose a threat to the envisioned union, and the reputation of the negotiators was also exposed to dangers because of irresponsible young people. The rather long waiting times after the proposals were meant both to provide time for the consideration of the social, financial, and moral background of the bachelors and to resolve these uncertainties. At first, the proposal of the bachelor was considered by the head of the kinship network, certainly the more powerful men, but as is also clear from the autobiography, the opinions of the women were also taken into consideration. How much parents or foster parents could influence their (foster)children (especially their daughters) in their choice of partners still remains an open question among historians who are dealing with families.29 It is clear that in case of members of the nobility or within the royal elite the influence of the parents was much more decisive.30 Still, with only a few exceptions, the final decision was made by the prospective bride and groom, at least based on the information found in the memoir-literature.31

Betrothal, Vows

The visit and the proposal—if met with a yes—were followed by the exchange of engagement gifts.32 This in many cases meant the exchange of the rings themselves, but in Calvinist communities this lacked liturgical functions, since the ring had only a symbolic value and was considered rather a gift. This was followed by the vows. László Székely, as already noted, held to the Transylvanian traditions. He admired families which raised their daughters in this spirit, though he disapproved of the rigidity of the moral strictures according to which the wife of Ádám Bethlen (1691–1748), Klára Bánffy (1693–1767), raised her foster daughter.33 For instance, following the exchange of gifts, according to Hungarian customs, Székely could neither see nor talk to his bride for three months, and subsequent meetings, at least at the beginning, were kept under strict supervision. Even the first conversation took place only after a couple of months, and at least according to the account in the memoir, with considerable difficulty. The vow was delayed until May 12, 1741, almost six months after the proposal had been accepted. The event took place in the fiancée’s family home in the presence of the near kin.34 The exchange of vows was preceded by a church service, and this is where a sort of exchange-of-vows carpet, recurrently mentioned in the Metamorphosis, was used. So the betrothal was the symbol of the commitment to marry, which like every event of extraordinary importance was followed by a lunch or a dinner in the presence of the near kin.35 Székely departed on the third day under very strict instructions, as the family insisted that he would not ask the wedding being held for another year.36 So the process dragged on, as the wedding had to wait until August 7, 1742. His second betrothal was somewhat faster, as after clearing up the complications caused by Dénes Bánffy, the exchange of the rings and gifts took place in July and the exchange of vows was again held in the presence of the near kin in October.

The autobiography highlights a number of significant details, for instance, that the wows and even the mere promise carried huge importance.37 The exchange of vows had legal weight, and not just in Transylvania, and even after the exchange of the gifts it was improper (and quite complicated) to break off an engagement.38 For the latter, the Church’s consent was necessary.39 There are, however, a few examples of instances when the people involved did not adhere strictly to tradition or expectation, for instance, the broken off betrothal of Székely’s grandmother, Sára Bulcsesdi.

The Church attempted to make the exchange of vows a ceremony held within a physical church itself, but László Székely and his father Ádám made their vows at their fiancées houses with the involvement of the priest, mostly in the morning (in part to ensure that the people taking part in the ceremony would remain sober).40 Székely did not have conversations with either of his wives between the exchange of gifts and vows. The prospective bride and groom said only had a couple of words during the lunch which followed.41 So with the exchange of rings or gifts, which was not the same as the exchange of vows, the period of betrothal began.42 We know numerous of examples when the members of the Transylvanian or Hungarian aristocracy waited one or even two years before the wedding was held in the case of a first marriage. This period may have been somewhat shorter in the case of a second marriage. Neither Ádám Székely, László Székely’s father, nor his son waited a full year (his son organized his wedding after only six months had passed since the proposal).

On a Memorable Wedding

The preparations for László Székely’s first wedding can be compared to his father’s wedding, which thanks to Péter Apor probably is one of the best-known weddings to have taken place in Early Modern Transylvania. László looked on it with a sense of nostalgia, and he thought that no other weddings had been organized similar to the one in Bonchida (Bonţida), as by then the Transylvanian nobility held their wedding ceremonies according to German tradition, namely in towns.43

This part of the autobiography begins with a description of local customs, i.e. a description of wreath running. Several versions of this nuptial game are mentioned in Apor’s Metamorphosis, and the ring running ritual is also one of these customs, as was fir climbing, mentioned in the context of Ádám Székely’s wedding ceremony.44

As the bachelor’s house was in Zsuk (Jucu) and the girl’s was in Bonchida (two settlements which were relatively close to each other), in order to have a bigger parade the wedding guests took a detour through Válaszút (Răscruci) to get to the site of the wedding ceremony. Only the bearer of the good news, Sámuel Szentkereszti (1721–1772) and Pál Rhédey (1716–1764), who were friends of László’s, went directly to Bonchida.45 The detour to Válaszút also had to be thrown in because of the wreath running ceremony. The highly spectacular competition was followed attentively by both groups of wedding guests. The running had a master of ceremony, in this case Imre Bethlen (1698–1765), who summoned the 24 mounted bachelors, 12 from the side of the groom and 12 from the side of the bride. The prize (an embroidered handkerchief, a ring, and money) was held by a horseman in the middle, at an equal distance from the two groups of wedding guests. The competition, to the great chagrin of the bride’s household, ended with victory by one of the groom’s men, Mihály Vásárhelyi. The competition seems to have been taken seriously by both houses.46 In the weeks preceding the wedding, the newly acquired horses were given a try on the spot. They were foddered, and they competed against each other. The seriousness of the competition is also reflected by the watchers placed on haystacks erected at the meadow next to Bonchida. If the horsemen of the bride had won the competition, the groom would have been mocked by goats dressed up in comic attire. After the competition, both cohorts set out for Bonchida separately. The bachelor’s procession was led by the horseman who had won the bridal wreath.

The seriousness of the ritual is also indicated by the fact that the bride’s family, upset at having lost the bridal wreath, forgot about the groom’s wedding guests, and to the amusement of the village, numerous horsemen and chariots were impatiently waiting in the streets of Bonchida. Because of the unpreparedness of the master in charge of the lodgings, there was no time left for changing clothes. Only a few of the women changed attire, and most of the guests attended the wedding in more comfortable but less elegant garb.

The description of the wedding procession and its reception is mostly identical to the descriptions in the Metamorphosis, so there is no need to go into it in detail. The request for the bride at her family home caused a bit of confusion, as the head of the house, according to old Hungarian customs, should have delayed the ceremony of delivering the bride with jokes and other tricks. However, to the indignation of the members of the bride’s household, László Bánffy (1671–after 1755), who by then was rather old, turned the bride over without any test or game.47 Following this, the lady of honor led the bride to the groom’s table.

Of the old customs, the only thing missing was the ritual washing of hands. The food was brought in by 12 men belonging to Székely’s entourage, but it was Farkas Kun (the captain of Székely’s men) who placed the platters on the table. The couple was dressed in white and the bride’s hair was let down and was bejeweled with pearls. In accordance with the old traditions, the bride did not eat.48 After the groom had drained three cups behind the bride’s foster parents, the wedding tables were packed up and the room was emptied and under the lead of the dance-master the guests started to dance. The bride was an exception. As had been the case during the feast, she also did not take part in the dance. The dance was started by the groomsman, the lady of honor, the bridesman, and the maid of honor. The order of the dances never changed. They were performed in the same order at the wedding of Ádám Székely as they were at the wedding of his son the Polish switching dance in Hungarian style, followed by the hat dance, and, finally, the scapular dance, which if one can believe István Wesselényi caused the dancers back pain even days after.49 Musicians took care of the music; separate musicians were hired by the bride’s and the groom’s household. Along with Saxon musicians, Gypsy musicians were also present, even at weddings held according to German customs, since the former did not know the Hungarian melodies.50

The ritual of stealing the bride was also held during the dances. The bridesman and the maid of honor would lead the ride to the groom’s bedroom. After the bride had been stolen, it was the duty of one of the men from the bride’s household to accompany the groom to the bedroom. In Székely’s case, there were complications, as it seems that everyone was at his or her proper place except for the groom. On the side of the bride, the ceremony masters were chosen from the Bánffy family, except for János Toroczkay (died in 1745), whose task would have been to lead the groom to the bedroom. However, as he had feelings of antipathy for László Székely, he did not take him to the room, thus the groom was late for the significant ritual. The problem was finally solved by Zsigmond Bánffy. The bride was led to the bedchamber by the maid of honor, who took the bridal wreath from her head, undressed her, and finally blessed her. Instead of the wreath decorated with pearl, a wreath with flowers was given to the bridesman, Ádám Székely, the younger brother of the groom. After sticking it on his sword, Ádám presented it to the wedding guests and then danced with the maid of honor.51

This is the moment where the narratives usually end. Although the sources usually mention the “theft” of the bride, they contain nothing concerning the consummation of the marriages.52 Székely, however, takes the reader into the bedroom. In the room appointed for the consummation of the marriage, two beds were placed. One was an ordinary bed, the other was lavishly decorated with pillows and fine cloths. The two beds were made up so that the young couple would not have to sleep together, but the groom did not want to postpone the consummation.53 Klára Bánffy, the foster mother of the bride, tried to hinder the actual consummation of the marriage. She even ensured that the bride would have a guardian, but the handmaid whom she sent was thrown out of the room by the groom, and then his men chased her from the doorstep, where they told her to remain to guard the door. So from the perspective of its furnishings, the room was reminiscent of the formal traditions surrounding the consummation of a marriage, but the furnishings also reflected Székely’s reasoning, according to which this act had fallen out of fashion. Consummation, that being symbolic or actual in all circumstances had to take place at the nuptials.54

The next morning, the room was crowded with women, who under the guidance of the lady of honor dressed Kata Bánffy up in the clothes she had received from László Székely as gifts.55 The groom also dressed up in new clothes which had been made for him by the family of the bride.

The next day of the wedding was spent with dancing and feasting. The two groups of guests had breakfast separately and then continued dancing together. This was followed by the lunch and the symbolical pie-breaking ceremony, which was considered the highlight of the day. This could pose major difficulties for an inexperienced bridesman, as, according to the autobiography, Ádám Székely was. In order to avoid humiliating his brother, Székely spent some money on the game, trying to bribe the baker to give some sign indicating which pie he had baked the cloths, wires, and horseshoes in.56 Apart from the dancing of the wreath, this was the main duty of the bridesmen. The secondary literature contains the persistent claim that when a widower wedded, there was no need for a groomsman or bridesman.57 The Székely marriages, however, contradict the account given in Miklós Bethlen’s autobiography, as there was both a groomsman and a bridesman at the wedding of Ádám Székely and Sára Naláczy, while at the second wedding of László Székely there was only a groomsman and not a bridesman, as there was no plan to steal the bride. Thus, the bridesman, apart from but connected to the wreath-dancing and the pie-breaking ceremonies, had an actual role in the stealing of the bride.

In the presence of witnesses, the dowry of the bride was also transferred at the end of the second day. In the description of his first marriage, Székely referred to the third day as the bun-combing day, although in the description of his second marriage he placed it on the second day, as other sources indicate. The bride certainly said goodbye to her foster parents on the third day and went to the house of the groom, where the celebration continued.

This time, they approached Zsuk not via the detour, but by the shortest possible route. The related literature frequently indicates that the ceremony masters of the bride and the groom had to be from different kinship networks. That this was indeed the tradition is confirmed by the griping of the bride’s family, who resented the fact that a number of masters from Bonchida who played the same roles were present in Zsuk. Although a representative of the emperor did not make it to the wedding at Zsuk (unlike in the case of the wedding of Ádám Székely, which was attended by a representative of the emperor), the gubernator did. Of course, he spent the night in the most beautifully carpeted room and took a place at the table laid with silverware.58 As at the bride’s house, the celebration lasted three days at the groom’s house, and members of his kinship network extended the celebrations by a week.

The description of the second wedding is rather succinct; indeed, one could say that it is fully in accordance with the expectations one would have regarding Transylvanian memoirs, as it is restricted to a short list of the guests, kin with more important tasks, and friends. The consummation here is only a blurred biographical experience, as the author chastely remains silent about the bedroom, bringing up only the connected child births. The laconic narration of the second marriage can be understood structurally as well. While the description of the first marriage follows the so-to-say usual scheme of framed narratives, in which the different biographical moments are given their own titles as chapters, the second marriage unfolds as an ongoing experience which unfolds day by day.

Instead of Conclusions

In this study, we presented the stages of the long process during the course of which a marriage came into being. In this process, alongside the close kin, a significant role was played by more distant kin and friends, who with their advice and arrangements helped the prospective bride and groom.

The investigation also addressed the clearly identifiable moments which preceded the wedding, such as the visit paid on the girl, the proposal, and the exchange of vows. Based on the text we investigated, the proposal, the exchange of gifts, and the exchange of vows were the three defining moments that set the stage for the wedding. Of these, the last was of primary significance, because of the church ceremony and because it could happen years before the wedding ceremony, which involved the consummation. The betrothal was the symbol of commitment to marriage, which like every event of extraordinary importance, was followed by a lunch or dinner with the close kin. Weddings which required major pomp and preparations and which lasted days, however, took place with major publicity. Different representational elements and regional traditions had their roles and served to ensure the participants would be entertained. They also clearly reflected the rivalry between the two households whether in ceremonies like the wreath-running or through the gifts that were exchanged, the fine dresses, and the variety of food.

In choosing his mate, László Székely, who had often suffered disdain because of his origins, tried to catch up with the old Transylvanian families. He aimed to adapt to the related values in the decisions he made concerning his private life and to pass on these values to subsequent generations in his autobiographical work. This explains the elaborateness of the description of his first marriage and the related ceremonies. In this nostalgic remembrance, he seems to have been motivated by the same thoughts as Péter Apor. They both tried to contribute, by recording their own life experiences, to the reconstruction of a world that was about to fade.

Archival Sources

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Kézirattára [Széchényi National Library Manuscript Collection] (OSZK)

Quart. Hung. 4312.

Bibliography

Printed sources

Apor, Péter. Metamorphosis Transylvaniae. Translated by Bernard Adams. London: Kegan Paul, 2010.

Bethlen, Miklós. The Autobiography of Miklós Bethlen. Translated by Bernard Adams. London: Kegan Paul, 2004.

Cserei, Farkas. A magyar és székely asszonyok törvénye [The Statute of Hungarian and Székely Women]. Kolozsvár, 1800.

Rettegi, György. Emlékezetre méltó dolgok [Things Worthy of Remembrance]. Edited by Zsigmond Jakó. Bukarest: Kriterion, 1970.

Wesselényi, István. Sanyarú világ: Napló 1703–1708 [Wretched World. Diary: 1703–1708]. Edited by András Magyari. Bukarest: Kriterion, 1983.

 

Secondary literature

Badinter, Élisabeth. The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct. London: Souvenir Press, 1981.

Bárth, Dániel. Esküvő, keresztelő, avatás: Egyház és népi kultúra a kora újkori Magyarországon [Wedding, Baptism and Initiation: Church and Popular Culture in Early Modern Hungary]. Budapest: MTA and ELTE, 2005.

Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightment. Translated by William Doyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Dekker, M. Rudolf, ed. Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context Since the Middle Ages. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij, 2002.

Dekker, M. Rudolf. “Sexuality, Elites, and Court Life in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Diaries of Constantijn Huygens, jr.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 3 (1999): 94–109.

Dülmen, Richard, van. Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit. Vol. 1, Das Haus und seine Menschen 16.−18. Jahrhundert. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005.

Fehér, Andrea. “Lakodalmak a Székely-családban: Adalékok a 18. századi erdélyi házassági szokásokról” [Weddings in the Székely Family: Contributions to the Eighteenth-Century Wedding Customs in Transylvania]. Erdélyi Múzeum 79, no. 1 (2017): 118–29.

Fehér, Andrea. Sensibilitate şi identitate în izvoarele narative maghiare din secolul al XVIII-lea [Sensitivity and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Transylvanian Narrative Sources]. Argonaut and Mega: Cluj-Napoca, 2012.

Kiss, Réka. “Matrimoniális causák a küküllői református egyházmegye jegyzőkönyveiben: Házasság, válás egy 17. századi erdélyi egyházmegyében” [Matrimonial Causes in the Protocols of the Protestant Church of Küküllő: Marriage and Divorce in a Seventeenth-Century Bishopric of Transylvania]. In Fiatal Egyháztörténészek Kollokviuma [The Colloquium of Young Church Historians]. Budapest: ELTE, 1999.

Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen, 1965.

Macfarlane, Alain. The Family Life of Raph Josselin, a Seveteenth-Century Clergyman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Mihalik, Béla Vilmos. “...‘nemcsak anya, hanem atyai gondjukat is viselvén:’ Anyák és fiaik egy kora újkori erdélyi nemesi családban” [“...taking care of them not only mothers but also fathers:” Mothers and their Sons in an Early Modern Transylvanian Noble Family]. Sic Itur ad Astra 64 (2015): 95–115.

O’Hara, Diana. Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Olsen, Kristin. Daily Life in 18th-Century England. London: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Ozment, Steven. Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Péter, Katalin. Házasság a régi Magyarországon, 16–17. század [Marriage in Old Hungary, Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries]. Budapest: L’ Harmattan, 2008.

Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Radvánszky, Béla. “Lakodalmak a XVI–XVII. században” [Weddings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]. Századok 17, no. 3 (1883): 223–42.

Sárdi, Margit. “Leánykérés, házasság, szerelem” [Proposal, Marriage, Love]. In Ámor, álom és mámor: A szerelem a régi magyar irodalomban és a szerelem ezredéves hazai kultúrtörténete [Cupid, Dream, and Lust: Love in Old Hungarian Literature and the Millennial Hungarian Cultural History of Love], edited by Géza Szentmártoni Szabó, 49–65. Budapest: Universitas, 2002.

Shorter, Edward. The Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York, Harper&Row, 1977.

Szabó, András Péter. “Betrothal and Wedding, Church Wedding and Nuptials: Reflections on the System of Marriages in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Hungary.” Hungarian Historical Review 3, no. 1 (2014): 3–31.

Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press, 1978.

1956 and the Collapse of Stalinist Politics of History: Forgetting and Remembering the 1942 Újvidék/Novi Sad Massacre and the 1944/45 Partisan Retaliations in Hungary and Yugoslavia (1950s–1960s)*

Árpád von Klimó

The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC

 

Two acts of mass violence that occurred during World War II have strained relations between Hungarians and Serbs for decades: the murder of several thousand civilians in Novi Sad (Újvidék) and the surrounding villages in January 1942, committed by the Hungarian army and gendarmerie, and Tito’s partisan army’s mass killings and incarceration of tens of thousands civilians, most of them Hungarians, at the end of the war. Remembering these atrocities has always been difficult and strongly politicized, but this was particularly the case when the Communist regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia based the legitimation of their authority on anti-Fascist narratives and interpretations of the war. The conflict between Stalin and Tito, and the anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956 made it even more difficult to propagate the original Stalinist narrative about the war, which stood in ever starker contrast to everyday realities. When Kádár began to revise the political justification of his regime with a narrative that was both anti-Fascist and (moderately) critical of Stalinism in the 1960s, the remembrance of the 1942 massacre changed. In Yugoslavia, the weakening of the central government in the 1960s contributed to a local re-appropriation of the memory of 1942, while the 1944 killings remained a strict taboo until 1989.

Keywords: Stalinism, memory, Word War II, anti-Fascist narrative, war criminals, partisans, Tito, Kádár, 1956

 

Recently, representatives of the Hungarian and the Serbian states expressed their regret for atrocities committed against each other’s nation during World War II.1 The most notorious of these acts of mass violence was the infamous mass murder in the course of anti-partisan raids in the region of Bačka (Bácska) in January 1942, when the Hungarian army and gendarmerie killed about 3,300 civilians, mostly Serbs and Jews, between 900 and 1,300 of whom were killed in Novi Sad (Újvidék). Less than two years later, Yugoslav partisans drove out Hungarian and German troops. Over the course of the fall and winter of 1944/45, the partisans killed thousands of civilians (exact numbers are still not available), not exclusively of Hungarian and German background, but also real and alleged “collaborating” Serbs, Croats, and others. Some of the atrocities were “justified” as measures of retaliation for the massacres committed by the Hungarian authorities in 1942.2

While the Novi Sad massacre was discussed internationally and nationally roughly since the moment it was committed and then more intensively after World War II and again in the 1960s (and, most recently, in 2011, during the trial of Sándor Képíró, a gendarmerie officer involved in the massacre), the atrocities committed by the Yugoslav army in 1944/45 were an absolute taboo in Yugoslavia and Hungary until the end of Communism.3 The reasons for this discrepancy will become clearer in the course of this study.

In the Communist period, these acts of mass violence represented challenging events for the historical representation of World War II for both regimes. Their legitimacy rested on anti-Fascist narratives of the war and the heroic struggle of Communist resistance and national liberation, particularly in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In these narratives, anti-Semitic or interethnic motivations of mass violence played minor roles.4 The conflict between Stalin and Tito added further complexity to the official attempts to deal with the difficult chapters in the history of World War II. After the outbreak of the 1956 revolution and the temporary collapse of the Stalinist system, it finally became impossible to return to this master narrative of World War II. Once Kádár had taken complete control after the brutal suppression of the opposition in the late 1950s, a new, more flexible interpretation of World War II had to be provided.

In the following, I will first describe how the Hungarian and Yugoslav government tried to monitor the memories of the 1942 atrocities and the 1944/45 retaliations immediately after World War II. At the time, most of the commanding officers responsible for the 1942 massacre were put on trial and executed at a time when war criminals were being punished all over Europe. In this context, the atrocities that partisans had committed against Hungarians, Germans, and others at the end of the war in Yugoslavia in 1944/45 were given a completely different meaning and status than the massacre of 1942. In contrast to the Novi Sad massacre, which was broadly covered by the press during the trials and a constituted topic of publications in both countries, even the survivors and family members of the victims of the atrocities were not allowed to speak about them.

The next part of this article analyzes how the Stalinist regime in Hungary and Titoism in Yugoslavia dealt with the memories of the war atrocities between 1949 and 1953, in a period of open conflict between Stalin and Tito. It also briefly describes the erection of a monument dedicated to the victims of the 1942 massacre in Novi Sad in the context of the Yugoslav rift with Stalin at a time when the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary had become mostly the “private” affair of a small minority.

I then look into the changes related to representations of the 1942 massacre in the years immediately following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in an attempt to analyze how the dramatic events and the experiences of revolution and military intervention influenced the commemorations of World War II. Finally, I will briefly look into the changes in policies in both countries, which were results of de-Stalinization and international events, such as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem or the crisis of the Yugoslavian federal system in the 1960s.

My intention is to shed light on the complex entanglement of world war memories in Hungary and Yugoslavia by focusing on two acts of mass violence, one in 1942 and one in 1944/45. The 1942 Novi Sad massacre was, to some extent, related to the Holocaust in Hungary and similar atrocities all over German-dominated Eastern Europe, especially the nearby Independent Croatian State, the German-occupied Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and other parts of the Soviet Union attacked by Germany and its allies. The retaliations of Tito’s partisans which occurred in 1944/45 against Hungarians, Germans, and others, on the other hand, were bloody reactions to war crimes committed by Hungarian and German troops after the collapse and occupation of Yugoslavia. In part, they were also motivated by the wish to create an ethnic South Slavic majority and thus a continuation of the inner-Yugoslav civil war. The fact that Hungary had lost the war while Yugoslavia was among the victorious allies also had a strong impact on the memory/forgetting of both events. As such, they have been treated completely separately from the 1942 massacre. But as I will argue here, these crimes were related to each other, and they are still related in the memories of Hungarians and Serbs today.

Another problem related to this topic is the fact that little study has been devoted to the memory of the atrocities. As of now, there are no studies on the memory of 1942 in Novi Sad, and there are very few on the memory of World War II and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia.5 While the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary has been studied more often, almost all studies complain that there is a lack of secondary literature on the topic.6

Trials and Executions. The Immediate Post-War Years 1945–49

At the end of 1946, the commanding officers of the 1942 raid, together with representatives of the local Hungarian elites, were executed in Novi Sad and nearby locations.7 After these executions, diplomats from both countries worked on improving relations between the two states. However, the Hungarian government’s hope that the demonstrative punishment of war criminals and the gesture of cooperation with Yugoslav authorities could result in more benign treatment of Hungary at the Paris peace negotiations turned out to be too optimistic. The Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 basically reestablished the borders of Trianon.

The war crimes trials related to the 1942 raids, which were held at the People’s Courts in Budapest and in Yugoslavia, made extensive use of the materials that had been collected by the Military Court at the Chief of Staff in the months after the massacre in 1942.8 At the time, these legal proceedings and the indictment against General Feketehalmy-Czeydner and 14 other officers had been a provocation for Hitler, who granted political asylum to the four main defendants shortly before the occupation of Hungary in March 1944.9 The people’s court trials were thus a continuation of these proceedings, in contrast to other post-war war crime trials.

The propaganda that accompanied the war crime trials demonized the suspects as “Fascist thugs,” “psychopathic,” “sadistic” “criminals,” and it highlighted a few facts and witness accounts.10 The massacre of 1942 was used in a number of war crime trials because a great deal was known about it on the basis of the thorough investigations that had occurred under Horthy in the spring of 1942. During the trials, the judges and the political representatives also used the characterization of the “psychopathic” war criminal in order to proclaim that the real victim of the war was the “Hungarian people.” In the trial against General Feketehalmy-Czeydner, the commander of the operation in Novi Sad in 1942, the political people’s prosecutor, György Marosán, a Social-democratic politician, interpreted the Novi Sad massacre as a “defeat of the Hungarian nation,” which had lost “more than a war; … its honor and reputation.”11 According to Marosán, the “true accused” were not Feketehalmy-Czeydner or Grassy, but the whole system and the elite of the Horthy regime, the “noble gang,” which had suppressed and betrayed the innocent Hungarian people.

In the context of the post-war trials, Tito had asked for the extradition of the officers responsible for the Novi Sad massacre. His request was granted by the Hungarian government. However, he also requested that Horthy himself be handed over. In this case, Stalin vetoed his demand.12 A public trial of Horthy in Yugoslavia would have strengthened Tito’s reputation as the leader of the most successful European partisan movement of World War II. Stalin was becoming increasingly suspicious of Tito’s political ambitions.

The 1945/46 war crimes trials therefore had different functions in Hungary and in Yugoslavia. The Hungarian government wanted to demonstrate that the country had become a democracy and that it wanted to break away from its Fascist past. In Yugoslavia, World War II had a different character. It had been not simply a heroic fight led by Tito’s partisans against the occupying powers under German leadership, but also a bloody civil and ethnic war between Croatian, Serbian, and other nationalists. Therefore, the war crimes trials were supposed to show the triumph of a unified, multi-ethnic partisan movement against foreign occupiers who had victimized the Yugoslav people and against inner enemies and traitors. The new Yugoslav regime, so the promise went, would overcome all ethnic tensions and conflicts. In this context, any talk of the atrocities committed by the partisans against Hungarian and other civilians in the aftermath of the collapse of the occupation had to be silenced.

“Fascists” on Both Sides of the Border: Stalinism and Politics of History and Memory in Hungary and Yugoslavia at the Height of the Stalin–Tito Conflict

While establishing one-party dictatorships in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Hungarian and the Yugoslavian Communist leaderships established historical narratives of World War II which were supposed to stabilize and legitimize the new regimes and, at the same time, direct the focus of society towards the socialist future. The preamble of Hungary’s constitution of 1949 (its first written constitution) was based on an absolute dichotomy between the “reactionary past” and the “progressive socialist future,” and it declared that the future was only safeguarded by submission to the hegemony of the Soviet Union:

 

The armed forces of the great Soviet Union freed our country from the yoke of German fascism, crushed the infamous power of the landowners and wealthy capitalists, and forged the path of democratic progress for our working people. In hard battles with the masters of the old order and their defenders, the Hungarian working class came to power and rebuilt our war-torn country in alliance with the working peasants, and all with the selfless support of the Soviet Union.13

Instead of stability, the Stalinist years in Hungary were marked by a latent civil war, for the radical attempt to transform society along Soviet lines could only be implemented through the destruction of political, social, and cultural institutions, ideas and mentalities that had characterized the country before 1945. The Stalinist constitution of 1949 can thus be seen as a kind of utopian social blueprint that had to be forced through owing to social resistance. The Constitution of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia of 1946, radically amended in 1953 and replaced by a new constitution in 1963, was similarly based on Stalin’s constitution of 1936.14 Unlike the Hungarian constitution, it did not contain any reference to the war or the Soviet Union, in part because Tito and the partisans had won the war mostly independently and had enjoyed strong support from a large part of the population, in contrast to the Hungarian Communist Party. However, the 1946 Constitution declared that it was the “expression of the unanimous will of all the peoples of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia,” reflecting the principle of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo-jedinstvo) that Tito had proclaimed in order to solve or just cover up ethnic tensions and conflicts.15

In both cases, the memory of the war (the ritualized and rhetorical forms of this memory) was strongly oriented towards the future of the socialist state.16 The 1942 raid in Novi Sad and some of the surrounding villages and the 1944/45 retaliations in particular represented complicated, delicate topics. On the one hand, both regimes could refer to the 1942 massacre as an example of “Horthy Fascist” brutality, and both could relate the perpetrators to the broader context of Nazi (and capitalist) imperialism. Some of the Hungarians who had, in 1942, protested against the massacre together with the heroic Communist partisans were now celebrated as examples of the good, progressive forces of history.17 Thus, the most prominent anti-Fascist Hungarian hero in both countries became Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky of the Independent Smallholders Party, who had publicly protested against the 1942 massacre and had demanded that the commanders be punished.18 A few weeks after his protest, the Novi Sad massacre became widely known internationally.19 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky was arrested immediately after the German occupation of Hungary and later hanged by the Arrow Cross government.20

All of the Communist Parties in Europe (including Western Europe) propagated historical narratives of World War II, representing it as a struggle between the good popular forces of anti-Fascism against evil Fascism defined “as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”21 This ideological perspective on history made it difficult to discuss openly the role played by nationalism and racism during World War II. This partly explains why, beginning in 1949, the Holocaust slowly began to disappear from public discourse.22 Antisemitism was just a minor, if detestable, ideology of this brand of Fascism, but it was not really seen or cast as central. The Hungarian people, like the Communists, were victims of “Horthy-Fascism.”23 Furthermore, as Judit Pihurik has observed, for Hungary—in contrast with Yugoslavia—the fact that the country had participated in the war against the Soviet Union as “Hitler’s last ally” was the “original sin” of the Horthy era, and the Communists used this fact of history to fashion enemies.24

In this context, the White Terror of 1919–20 during the rise to power of the Horthy-regime was merged with the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II in order to create a continuous “Fascist” period. In a book published in 1951, two leading communist historians emphasized this continuity:

 

Thus, in 1919 and 1920, it was not merely the seeds of fascism which appeared in Hungary, but rather fascism itself. In the Hungarian fascism of the twenties and forties, not only the fundamental idea but even the participants were the same. In 1919 in Orgovány and in 1942 at the massacre in Újvidék the same Horthy stood at the helm; … . The same people, the same crimes: from 1920 to 1944, our history has a direct road to the reign of terror of the Arrow Cross hordes.25

At the same time, the people’s courts, which had been officially established in order to put war criminals on trial, were closed. On April 1, 1950, the People’s Court in Szeged, the last functioning people’s court, ceased its activities, after 15 courts had already been terminated in 1948. Although the regime continued to initiate trials against less prominent war criminals, some of which were related to the Novi Sad massacre, these trials did not get much media attention, and in many cases took place in secret. These mostly secret legal proceedings were part of the routine of the Stalinist suppression, which during the period between 1949 and 1953 affected tens of thousands of Hungarians in various ways.

Also, some of the officers involved in the 1942 raids had escaped. Sándor Képíró, one of the patrol commanders during the 1942 raid, began a new life in Argentina.26 Gusztáv Korompay, who had admitted during the military trial of 1943/44 that he was involved in mass shootings of civilians for which he was not punished, escaped and probably went into hiding in West Germany.27 Less fortunate were those gendarmes who had been caught by the Red Army at the end of the war, or handed over to the Soviet Union by the US Army. They spent mostly between five and ten years in various Soviet labor camps, and, when they returned to Hungary after Stalin’s death, the Hungarian State Security Authority imprisoned them again in camps or put them in jail.28 While the regimes suppressed all kinds of real and imagined opposition, many war criminals were integrated into the Stalinist system. The murder of half a million Hungarian Jews and the suffering of other groups during the war were mostly silenced. The 1950s were marked in all countries—in Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, and elsewhere—by a new phase of forgetting the war and the Holocaust.29 Everywhere the rebuilding of society, the creating of families, and economic and social questions gained precedence. In this new phase, gendarmes and soldiers who were not put under observation by the State Security or arrested, as well as Jewish survivors and the large part of Hungarian society were seeking to integrate into society. In other words, they were seeking a new beginning.

Communist propaganda now targeted new types of enemies, which were also indiscriminately defamed as “Fascists.”30 After the wave of revenge and retaliation in the immediate post-war years, accompanied by the practice of the Communist party of integrating into its institutions of power a large number of “little” Arrow Cross Party members, some of whom became active in the secret police, new repression campaigns began in the late 1940s in a context of a hysterical war paranoia.

The split between Stalin and Tito, who had been close allies at least until 1947 and who shared ideological convictions, was provoked by Tito’s expansionist policies towards Albania and by his reluctance to accept Stalin’s idea of a close, centralized structure of the Communist camp in Eastern Europe, dominated by Moscow.31 A few months later, the US government decided to support Tito against Stalin.32 For Stalin’s followers in Eastern Europe, this was treason, and it could only mean that Tito had always been an enemy, a secret supporter of imperialism and even of fascism, who had hitherto only hidden his “true face.”

Instead of war criminals, it was now communist leaders who sat in the docks of courts. Even those who had worked tirelessly for the Stalinist cause, such as the former minister of the interior, László Rajk, who was responsible for the killing, torture, and imprisonment of thousands of enemies of the regime, was now an “enemy.” In order to “prove” the connection between Rajk, “Titoism” and “Horthy Fascism,” the State Security unit which organized the show trial arrested, among many others, a former gendarmerie officer who had been working against the Germans at the end of the war, accusing him of organizing the alleged coup d’état against the communist regime.33 The judge at the trial was the same person who had previously led the proceedings against officers and administrators charged with organizing the deportations of Jews, a fact that shows how radically the priorities of the Hungarian law enforcement authorities had changed in only two years’ time.34 Party leader and strongman Mátyás Rákosi clarified in Szabad Nép on June 8, 1949: “Today’s Yugoslavia is a typical police state in which the Trotskyite clique keeps its grip on power through Gestapo methods and with the help of their Gestapo agents. … At every turn we will unmask the Tito gang as traitors and agents of imperialism.” Just as Stalin was a symbol of the Eastern Bloc’s unity in the minds of the respective national party elites, Tito now embodied the enemy. He was cast as a man who consorted with “imperialists” and “fascist powers.”

The conflict between Stalin and Tito and Rákosi’s strong engagement in it created a difficult situation for the remaining Hungarian minority in Novi Sad and the Vojvodina, as well as for the South Slavic minority in Hungary. On November 29, 1949, a new Hungarian radio program was inaugurated, Újvidéki Rádio, broadcasting from Novi Sad.35 The new radio program got immediately involved in this ugly propaganda war, fighting against the “lies” of the Hungarian State Radio Kossuth, which had begun to attack Tito vigorously in the context of the show trial against László Rajk in the summer of 1949. Radio Kossuth had already introduced or extended programs in Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian. While the Yugoslavian leadership was concerned about “Cominformists” among the Hungarian minority, which numbered roughly half a million people, the Hungarian authorities on the other side of the border were afraid of Yugoslavian agents, especially among the small South Slavic minorities.36 Because of these concerns, a group of Yugoslav Hungarian communists were arrested and put on trial in Novi Sad as spies in April 1949.37 Tensions between armed units rose at the border, and there were numerous incidents involving Hungarian and Yugoslav border guards.38

The mistrust and animosity between the two communist regimes had a strong influence on how they dealt with problems deriving from the past, and the past itself became a subject of dispute. In 1950, Moša Pijade (1890–1957),39 one of Tito’s closest collaborators and a leading figure in postwar Yugoslavia, tried to convince the Hungarian minority that the Yugoslav Communist Party had been benevolent from the outset:

 

I still remember our difficult situation at the end of the war and the beginning of our immediate final liberation. There were people then who thought that we should treat the Hungarian national minority harshly. However, my fellow Yugoslavians, we had from the first moment on the strong conviction that we have to fight against any symptom of nationalism. …. Therefore, my fellow Yugoslavians, when those who are under the command of Moscow outside our borders try to defame us by claiming that we suppress the national minorities and that we don’t give them rights, schools, nothing, it is the usual defamations of chauvinists who want to inflame chauvinism among the national minorities.40

 

However, those who had not forgotten the atrocities committed by the partisans may well have understood this statement to have meant something resembling the following: let us forget what happened at the end of the war and focus instead on the principles of our minority policies, because the Stalinists in Hungary only want to undermine the new beginning, which brought better minority rights for you. Consequently, the massacre of 1942 was also not mentioned in the publications of the Hungarian minority. The mass violence of the war could not be incorporated into the new narrative of Brotherhood and Unity.

The task of fostering and shaping the memory of the war lay in the hands of partisan and veterans’ organizations.41 Although they produced politically controlled narratives of the “people’s war of liberation” or of the “socialist revolution” which represented the main foundation for the legitimation of the regime, Heike Karge distinguishes these narratives from the “diverse social practices of communicating and performing the past of the war in society” on the local level.42 The Federation of Fighters of the war of the People’s Liberation in Yugoslavia (SUBNORJ), the official representative body of the partisans, was closely linked to the communist party. The organization concentrated on the erection of monuments and offered different forms of remembering: as mourning of deaths, mostly in local settings, but also as (tourism) business, artistic engagement, social commitment, or, rather dominantly, as pedagogical mission. The social practices of arranging memory excluded many surviving victims of the war from public support who could not be classified as “fighting partisans,” especially members of the Jewish population. Since the late 1950s, however, the category “participant in the people’s war of liberation” was extended to victims who were not “stained” by collaboration, still excluding the Hungarian victims, but including the shrinking Jewish community.43

The politics of remembering also mirrored the ideological clash with Stalin. In 1952, a new board was founded, responsible for the “identification and restoration of historical sites of the people’s war of liberation.” This led to the erection of the Tito monument at Titovo Užice.44 This could be understood, at least to some extent, as a reaction to the huge statue of Stalin built in Budapest on the occasion of Stalin’s 70th birthday in 1949. At the moment when the Communist leadership declared that the Soviet leader was “the greatest Hungarian” the Stalin cult reached its peak.45 As a consequence, the toppling of the huge statue became the most important act of symbolic liberation from the tyrant during the days of triumph of the Hungarian revolution in late October, 1956. The Yugoslav Communist party journal Borba mocked the elevation of Stalin into the pantheon of Hungarian history, and this was noticed by the temporary Hungarian chargé d’affaires in Belgrade, József Kovács.46 Reporting to the Foreign Ministry in Budapest, Kovács complained about “infamous attacks” in the Hungarian-language press against the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies, and he claimed to have seen the growing influence of US imperialism in the socialist country. Kovács went so far as to accuse the Titoist “Fascists” of continuing to commit atrocities against the Hungarian minority, referring to the murderous acts at the end of the war. In a report dated April 17, 1952, Kovács compared the situation at the time with the situation at the end of the war:

 

The Yugoslav Communist Party under Titoist control never fought to realize the Leninist idea of the nationalities policy, neither during the war nor after the war. Immediately after liberation, when the Soviet liberating troops continued to chase the Fascists, the invading Yugoslav partisans carried out huge ‘cleansing’ operations among the minority population in the entire Vojvodina. They were not at all driven by the class standpoint when, for example, they dragged off hundreds or thousands of Hungarians from their houses, drove them out of their businesses, locked them up in internment camps where many died, and even shot many before they had even arrived at the internment camps. [...] We can see all of this again today. […] The Hungarian minority schools suffer from a terrible lack of school books.47

The hysterical clash between the two communist propaganda machines reached a new climax in the summer of 1952, when Borba claimed in an article that the Hungarian authorities would carry out “genocide” against members of the South Slavic minorities in the border areas with Austria and Yugoslavia, hinting at atrocities committed during the occupation.48 The journal opined that:

 

Rákosi’s agents have, with regard to their anti-national crimes, already exceeded long ago the Horthy feudalists and the Szálasi Fascist gendarmes. The national Yugoslav minority in Hungary has become a defenseless target of Stalinist-type genocide. An example is the gradual and systematic resettlement and extermination of seven thousand Slovenes who live in the areas near the Austrian–Yugoslav–Hungarian border.

The quotations above demonstrate that terms like “Fascism” and “genocide” had become almost completely meaningless in the Stalinist language in both countries in the propaganda referring to the crimes committed during the war.

At the same time, in 1952, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the massacre, its public commemoration in Novi Sad entered a new stage with the erection of a monument in the Jewish cemetery, not far away from the center of the town. The cenotaph in Novi Sad was one of five new monuments built to commemorate the Jewish victims of World War II, initiated and organized by the Federation of Jewish Communities and supported by the federal government in Belgrade.49 All five monuments were situated inside Jewish cemeteries, not in public locations. The ceremonies in Novi Sad lasted for two full weeks, and they were attended by Yugoslav state and Party officials and Israeli and U. S. Jewish delegates. They were also fully covered by the Yugoslav mass media. A year later, Andreja Deak (1889–1980), a Yugoslav military doctor of Hungarian–Jewish background and a Communist since 1919 who had barely survived the 1942 massacre, published a short story about the raid.50

The ceremonies and the press coverage in Novi Sad marked a difference compared to the dwindling presence of any ritualized expressions of the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary at the time. Representatives of the Hungarian state tended to eschew those events.51 While in 1948 a representative of the president of the state, even if not a prominent one, was still present during the inauguration of the memorial to the martyrs in the Jewish part of the new central cemetery in Budapest, in 1954/55 not one state official showed up for the commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the German occupation and the deportations of the Hungarian Jewry. Such ceremonies had become “private” events.52

In Yugoslavia, the official support for the commemorations and the invitation of representatives from Israel and the United States were related to Tito’s attempt to establish a place for the country within a broader international context that included capitalist countries.53 At the same time, this act of commemoration of 1942 was only possible because the Jewish victims’ story had been included in the foundational myth of Titoist Yugoslavia, according to which all ethnic groups had turned into “martyrs of the war of liberation,” with no specific indication of the circumstances under which this had taken place or the people who had committed the killings. This was necessary in order to gloss over the fact that many of the victims of the war had been killed because of ethnic or political conflicts between the various Yugoslav factions. The fact that, in the meantime, the Jewish population of Novi Sad had shrunk stood in stark contrast to the public inauguration and the presence of international guests and the media during the erection of the monument. After hundreds had emigrated to Israel, there were only 372 Jews left in 1950, compared to more than 4,000 living in the town before 1941.54

After Revolution: A “Fascist Plot” or Rákosi’s Failure?

After the crushing of the 1956 revolution, the most immediate problem for the new Communist leadership under János Kádár was to gain acceptance as the legitimate government inside and outside the country. The fact that its power was based on invading Soviet troops weighed heavily on it. One way to reacquire credibility, at least from the perspective of the Hungarian Communist government, lay in the denunciation of the uprising as a “Fascist” plot, supported by imperialist powers in the West. This was, at least among some circles inside the country but also for some orthodox Communists outside its borders (who feared a return of the “most reactionary forces”), a plausible explanation and justification of the unrestricted use of force against any opposition. In this context, the labelling of the “enemy” as “Fascist” was supposed to justify the exclusion and, in many cases, the execution or incarceration of people identified as real or potential enemies, since these “elements” were regarded as a threat to human society that had to be destroyed. This changed only slowly, with the amnesties in the early 1960s, which were, in part, related to a compromise with the United States that was reached with the hope of bringing an end to the country’s diplomatic isolation.55

Before that, the Kádár regime staged a number of trials against members of the former gendarmerie and army officers based on the Stalinist construct of a continuity of “Fascist” crimes between 1919 and 1956.56 As of 1958, some 22,000 persons had been arrested, 229 of whom were condemned to death. About 200,000 people had left the country for the West. It was only in 1963, when a general amnesty was proclaimed, that the situation in the country finally settled down. By then, 367 persons had been executed.57 Especially in the trials against former gendarmes, the judges made an attempt to put an ugly “Fascist” face on the narrative of the “counterrevolution.” About 140 former officers were indicted and sentenced during this period.58 Among them, the former army officer János Nagy was put on a list of “Fascist Terrorists, Arrow-Cross Men, War Criminals, Robbers and Murderers Let Loose on the Country” in 1956.59 Nagy was identified as “a leading figure of the massacre which took place at Újvidék in 1942,” without any mention of the fact that a People’s Court had already sentenced him in 1948 for this act.60 When he was released in 1956, he had already served almost eight years in prison. Nothing was said about the specific crimes he had allegedly committed in 1956 except the fact that he had come out of prison. The connection between the “Fascists,” “War criminals,” and those who had been active during the revolution of 1956 was in most cases only suggested, not proven. However, in most cases it was very difficult to link the persons and deeds committed during the Horthy period or in World War II to activities related to the revolution of 1956.61 Until 1961, 33 former gendarmes were executed, 26 of whom had been convicted first and foremost for “crimes” allegedly committed in 1956.62 The Ministry of the Interior supported the judicial campaign by collecting a 17-volume-strong “documentation” that was supposed to prove that numerous “Fascist” groups had been active between 1945 and 1956.63 In this context, references to the 1942 Novi Sad massacre could be integrated into the narrative because the judges could make use of the substantial investigation files produced by the military court in the Horthy period.

Kádár and his supporters, however, did not just want to go back to the Stalinist regime. Rather, they attempted to create a new socialist dictatorship, which was distancing itself from both “Fascism” and Stalinism. Kádár himself had been a victim of Stalinism, it was claimed, because he had been arrested and sentenced in a show trial.64 The Kádár regime also applied this double-strategy to the question of war criminals by blaming Rákosi for having failed to punish them. In 1959, the Supreme Military Prosecutor announced in a “top secret” report that a series of proceedings would be initiated against former gendarmerie detectives, emphasizing that the “punishment policy and results of the years after the Liberation had been incorrect because numerous gendarmes and detectives who had committed serious war crimes had remained undetected and unpunished.”65 The Military Prosecutor also complained that some of the sentences issued by the People’s Courts had been revised and often mitigated.

Ervin Hollós, who had worked in the unit in the Ministry of the Interior responsible for the fight against the “inner reaction,” wrote that under Rákosi many “counterrevolutionaries, terrorists, and members of the suppressive Horthy organs with blood on their hands lived in Hungary and had managed to avoid being held responsible. … It was Rákosi’s immeasurable crime that he not only threw many excellent fighters of the labor movement into prison but also allowed a large segment of the bloody gendarmerie detectives to live free and undisturbed.”66

By combining the anti-Stalinist with the anti-Fascist narratives, Kádár managed to create the idea that the judicial campaign against real and alleged “Fascists” and “war criminals” which accompanied the suppression of the revolution was in reality a major effort to deal finally with the problem of Hungary’s Fascist past and its representatives, who had haunted the innocent Hungarian people from 1919 to 1956. Another target of Communist propaganda after 1956—and not only in Hungary—was West Germany, which was attacked by East Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries as a place where former Nazis had made careers and were even dominating the institutions of the Federal Republic.67 In the 1960s, this new double-strategy of the Kádár regime would allow it to modify the politics of remembering the events of 1942.

The 1956 revolution also put Tito in a difficult position.68 After Stalin’s death in 1953, both the Soviets and the Yugoslav leaders were keen to come to a rapprochement. In this situation, Hungary played a key role, because Rákosi had been at the forefront of the anti-Titoist campaign. Rákosi’s return to the head of the Hungarian Communist party in 1955 was therefore seen as a major obstacle for Yugoslav–Soviet reconciliation. Tito also demanded the full rehabilitation of László Rajk (since he had been accused of being the head of a “Titoist” conspiracy), improvements in the conditions of the South Slavic minorities in Hungary, and reparations. Since his first term as Prime Minister, Imre Nagy had had the support of Belgrade because the Yugoslav Communists hoped that a reform of the Stalinist system would lead to a socialist dictatorship not unlike the one Tito was trying to establish.

On the other hand, the Yugoslav leadership was also wary of a weakening of communism and a return of Hungarian nationalism and revisionism. Nikita Khrushchev even tried to spread rumors about the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina. Additionally, Tito must have feared a spread of revolutionary ideas in October 1956. Tito had sympathies for Nagy, but the Yugoslav leadership was shocked by the collapse of communism and feared a restoration of the Horthy regime if the revolution were to get completely out of control.69 This was the main reason why Tito regarded military intervention as “essential,” as he stated in a meeting with Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov on the island of Brioni on November 2, 1956, just two days before the Soviet invasion.70 Later, Tito and Kádár would clash because of the execution of Nagy in 1958, a step that put the Yugoslav leader in a bad light because he had tried to protect Nagy. Both sides, and also the Soviets, had no interest in an intensification of the conflict. This explains why the mutual accusations of being “Fascist” from the Stalinist period did not surface again. Instead, the language in which both camps criticized each other was becoming remarkably moderate.71 In the United Nations, where the Hungarian government was chastised for the persecution of the opposition, the Yugoslavs defended Budapest.72

During the dramatic days in the fall of 1956, the Hungarian-language press in Yugoslavia reported from Hungary with a certain distance, highlighting the chaos and disruption of everyday life and emphasizing that the refugees from the conflict were treated well in Yugoslavia.73 During these moments of upheaval and uncertainty, the fraught memory of World War II was mostly absent from public discourse in Yugoslavia.

After Eichmann: New Trends in the Commemoration of the Massacre of 1942 in Hungary and Yugoslavia during the 1960s

There were at least two international events which contributed to a change in the way communists and Hungarian society discussed the 1942 incidents after 1961. The first was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, which revived the debate about the Holocaust, which had been essentially abandoned at the end of the 1940s. As Kata Bohus notes, this debate was revived against and in spite of Kádár’s intentions.74 Another event, which was not directly related to the topic of World War II and Holocaust remembrance, was the breakup of Hungarian international isolation at the end of 1962, when the United Nations decided to take 1956 off of the agenda.75

Even before the Eichmann-trial, in 1959, the Hungarian Communist Party had adopted a new concept that rejected Hungarian “bourgeois nationalism” and nationalist tendencies which had, according to some historians, influenced some of the Stalinist narratives of history based on the idea of a 400 year-long “national liberation struggle.”76 Hungarian historians now could, for the first time since 1949, smell Western air and read Western books.77 In this context, a few authors began to reevaluate World War II and the murder of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. Looking back, György Száraz wrote that he began to be involved in the process that “could be called historical self-examination or, preferably, taking possession of the whole of our history. It began in earnest in the early 1960s—in close connection with the broadening of the mass basis of the regime.”78 In 1963, János Buzásy, a young archivist who had just finished his studies at ELTE University in Budapest, wrote the first academic monograph on the 1942 massacres.79 A year later, Tibor Cseres published Hideg napok (“Cold Days”), a novel that would make the 1942 raid known again in Hungary and throughout the world.80 A movie by András Kovács based on Cseres’ novel was released in 1966 with the same title. It was a huge national success, with 600,000 viewers in the first three weeks.81 Outside of Hungary, the film was shown in various cities in Yugoslavia, as well as in Paris, New York, Moscow, and other places, but its biggest success was the Second Prize at the 1st International Film Festival of Karlovy Váry in Czechoslovakia. It also garnered some praise at the Venice Film Festival of 1966. Tibor Cseres and András Kovács, who were engaged in numerous discussions with the public about the film as part of a new effort to study the effects the film had had on “the masses,” regarded the film as a “progressive” message.82 Kovács also claimed that Fascism was not a Hungarian specialty and was not restricted to the past, because Vietnam showed that similar crimes were still happening. Instead, he suggested, the film should be understood as an educational tool which could help overcome the nationalist relics and the “exaggerations” of Stalinism and foster a truly “socialist patriotism.”83 What had mostly changed at this moment was the idea of the “enemy.” In the book and film, the Hungarian soldiers who participated in the Novi Sad raid, even those who evinced Fascist leanings, were characterized as complex human beings, not simple “Fascist thugs,” as they had been dubbed during the Stalinist period.

Others celebrated Cseres’ book as an example of the renewal of Hungarian socialist literature and as an example of Hungarian Vergangenheitsbewältigung.84 Georg Lukács contended that the film approached the reality and truth of history, presenting a “new, disillusioned national self-image.”85 In her memoirs, Ágnes Heller remembered that, after the movie, “Hungarians for the first time since the end of the war spoke about the Jews as victims. Before it, there had been only Fascists and Communists.”86

Either way, by the late 1960s the Cold Days of 1942 had become a Hungarian lieu de mémoire. This had also an effect on Yugoslavia. As point out above, at first the 1956 revolution did not result in a change in the conception of Yugoslav politics of memory. Rather, it made functionaries in Belgrade and in the states and provinces more alert about possible nationalism among different ethnic groups.

Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, as a result of the international trends in Holocaust remembrance and the debates initiated by the book and film “Cold Days” the city of Novi Sad began to publicly commemorate the 1942 massacre.87 The first official act of commemoration in the town that was not restricted to the Jewish community (as the one in 1952 had been), but rather encompassed the whole local community, was a ceremony on the Danube promenade near the city center in 1967. These commemorations in Novi Sad could also be understood in the wider political context of the deep constitutional crisis of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which resulted in the weakening of the central government in Belgrade and a strengthening of the political forces on the periphery. Remembrance of the events that had taken place in and around Novi Sad in 1942 was related to the idea of Serbian victimhood in the war.

Conclusion

When the Stalinist system collapsed in Hungary in the aftermath of the revolution, the narrative of the war as a fight of the Hungarian people against its Fascist oppressors, supported by the glorious Soviet army, also faltered. The invading Soviet tanks and the brutal fighting in the streets of Budapest, followed by massive violence against any form of opposition, forced the restored Communist regime to modify its interpretation of World War II. Kádár’s attempt to portray his regime as both anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist allowed reinterpretations after the amnesties of the early 1960s and the tentative opening of the country to Western ideas. The Hungarian people remained the main victim of the war, but Hungarian soldiers could now also be represented as complex personalities, not only as Fascist thugs. The character of the Horthy regime and a critique of nationalism and of the failure of Rákosi to deal with war criminals were also more openly discussed. The memory of the 1942 massacre in Novi Sad was one of the newly debated events of World War II, and these debates also had an impact on Yugoslavia. There, in the context of the political and constitutional crisis of Yugoslavism, local memory of the massacre, beginning in 1967 (on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the raid), opened a new chapter in the interpretation of the war, while the atrocities committed by partisans at the end of the war remained a taboo until the fall of the regime.

 

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Szerbhorváth, György. “A jugoszláviai holokauszt emlékezete Szerbiában – irodalmi és tudományos igényü könyvek tükrében” [Holocaust memory in Serbia – literary and scholarly books]. Regio 23, no. 1 (2015): 152–66.

Varga, László. »Forradalmi törvényesség.«: Jogszolgáltatás 1945 után Magyarországon” [Revolutionary law. The practice of justice in Hungary after 1945]. Beszélő  4, no. 11. Accessed January 9, 2016. http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/%E2%80%9Eforradalmi-torvenyesseg%E2%80%9D.

Vígh, Károly. “Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky.” In Hungarian Statesmen of Destiny, 1860–1960, edited by Pál Bödy, 155–68. Boulder, CO: Social Sciences Monographs, 1989.

Zétényi, Zsolt. A Képíró-ügy: Tanulmány és dokumentumközlés [The Képíró case: Study and documenation]. Debrecen: Kairosz Kiadó, 2013.

Zinner, Tibor, and Péter Róna. Szálasiék bilincsben [Szálasi and his followers in chains]. Vol. 1. Budapest: Lapkiadó vállalat, 1986.

Rokossowski Coming Home: The Making and Breaking of an (Inter-)national Hero in Stalinist Poland (1949–1956)

Jan C. Behrends

Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam

 

At the beginning was the Great Terror of 1937/38. It meant both the arrest of a Soviet officer of Polish origin, Konstantin Rokossowski, and the destruction of interwar Polish communism.1 While Rokossowski was freed before the German invasion and survived to serve as a distinguished commander in World War II, Polish communism did not recover from Stalin’s onslaught. It had to be reinvented and rebuilt during the war, and it underwent nationalization, Stalinization, and de-Stalinization in the period between 1941 and 1956. This essay uses the tenure of Rokossowski as Polish Minister of Defense between 1949 and 1956 to shed light on the tension between nationalist rhetoric and Sovietization and the ways in which Polish society and popular opinion reacted to these processes.

Keywords: Stalinization, nationalism, internationalism, ethnicities, Polish–Soviet relations, Stalinist Slavism

 

The Communist Party of Poland (KPP) was a stronghold of internationalism during the interwar years, and it paid dearly for this position, which fed into its unpopularity at home and contributed to the downfall of the the Party in Moscow.2 The KPP presented the ethnic diversity of interwar Poland; minorities were overrepresented in its ranks. The party’s internationalism meant it promoted the establishment of a Polish Soviet Republic as well as a revision of the Western border in favor of Germany. Clearly, these were untenable positions that were not acceptable in Polish society. Polish–Soviet relations had been hostile from the beginning, and neither side had forgotten the war fought in 1920. Still, the 1930s saw a further deterioration of relations. Being associated with anything Polish, even Polish communism, could well be a death sentence in Stalin’s Russia. In 1938, the Comintern officially dissolved what was left of the Polish Communist Party. To the USSR, Poland had become an enemy nation in a much broader sense. Beginning in 1937, Soviet citizens with Polish ties or of Polish ethnicity were victims of “mass operations.”3 After the annexation of Eastern Poland, the kresy, in 1939, excessive anti-Polish policies continued; thousands of ethnic Poles and other people from the region were deported to Central Asia and Siberia.4 The Polish elites were the main targets of these repressive measures; the massacre of Katyń stands out as the apogee of these violent policies. Surprisingly, in the midst of this terror, Comintern chieftain Georgi Dimitrov reflected on the revival of Polish communism.

In May 1941, Stalin and Dimitrov proposed the reestablishment of a Polish party. After the German invasion, this matter gained additional urgency. In August 1941, Moscow determined the format of the new organization. It would be called a “worker’s party,” and its program would be similar to the programs of European labor parties.5 The new party was to abstain from internationalist rhetoric, hold a distance from the USSR, and avoid Marxist ideology. Still, the events of recent years and the traditional hostility between Poles and Russians would weigh heavy on any relaunch of Polish communism. However, with the support of Dimitrov’s apparatus and of a few committed Polish exiles who had survived the terror, the new party was founded. In accordance with Stalin’s ideas it was named Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPR). One of its Polish founders, veteran communist Alfred Lampe, expressed his doubts about the new mission. He understood that anti-Soviet consensus was the foundation of Polish politics, and he found it hard to imagine a Poland that was not anti-Soviet. The Polish raison d’état would have to change. He warned against violent Sovietization: “The way that Russia went in 1917 is not the way Poland should go in 1943.”6

The founding document of the PPR appealed to the national sentiments of the Polish population.7 It called for the establishment of a “national front” against the German occupation and advocated an alliance with the Soviet Union. Yet the PPR was officially in favor of Polish sovereignty; an expansion of the USSR was no longer advocated. Rather, the promise was made that a new Poland would be established with new borders, a nation-state that would be closely allied with the USSR. Thus, Stalin and Dimitrov created a new type of communist statehood: not a universal communist federation like the USSR that could potentially serve as the nucleus of a global communist order, but rather a communist nation-state, founded on and bound by ethnicity, not ideology.

Nation-State Building and Stalinist Slavism

The communist nation-state under Soviet patronage was founded in Lublin in July 1944. The Lublin manifesto reflected both the nationalism and the limited internationalism of the times: it combined the PPR’s national front rhetoric with the pan-Slavism that had been characteristic of the Soviet war effort.8 The history of the Warsaw Uprising, which began shortly after the proclamation of Lublin in order to prevent Sovietization, deepened the divide in Polish society: clearly the sacrifice of members of the AK (Armia Krajowa – Home Army) and Stalin’s unwillingness to support their struggle marked yet another point of contention.

The establishment of communist rule in Poland was violent and repressive.9 In contrast to neighboring Czechoslovakia and Tito’s Yugoslavia, there were neither pan-Slavic nor Russophile traditions on which the communist party could build.10 While the opposition and the remnants of the Polish Underground State were being suppressed with the help of the Soviet security apparatus, the PPR began to establish its propaganda machine.11 From 1944 to 1947, the party made an effort to convince primarily the Polish elites, the inteligencja, of the importance of an alliance with the USSR. Slavic committees and a society for friendship with the USSR were established in 1944 to spread the Slavic message.12 Stalin’s persona soon became a prominent figure in postwar Poland; the nation’s gratitude to him for the liberation of the country was emphasized.13 All of this took place within the discursive frame of a pan-Slavism that allowed for a limited internationalism from Warsaw to Prague and Belgrade, dominated by Moscow. Initially, the postwar Soviet empire rested on the foundation of shared enmity with Germany, gratitude to the Red Army for the liberation of Central Europe, and the promise of national sovereignty within the Soviet sphere of influence. The tension between nation and empire, between sovereignty and dependence, soon came to haunt Stalin’s postwar order.14 By embracing nationalist rhetoric and bringing local traditions back into the picture, Moscow thought it could combine Lenin-style control with Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination. In the long run, this proved to be one of the fault-lines of the Yalta order.

In 1945, the party leadership understood the limits of its legitimacy. During a Central Committee plenum in April, the functionaries came to a mixed assessment of their strategy. Jakub Berman, the éminence grise, called the propaganda “weak.”15 In May 1945, Władysław Gomułka, the PPR’s general secretary, complained that the Polish people were not ready for the limited Slavic internationalism represented by the regime: “Many see in Russia just a continuation of the old Russia—and the legacy of the old Russia, war, centuries of repression undermine the psychology of the nation. The restructuring of these attitudes will take a long time.” Gomułka’s main point was the failure of the PPR to convince the populace of its national credentials. The PPR was still seen as a foreign agent, something its leader desperately tried to change: “The masses should see us as a Polish Party, they should attack us as Polish communists, not as an agent [of the USSR].”16 Gomułka almost certainly expressed the mood of broad segments of the population. His view corresponded with a popular joke of the times that offered an alternative reading of the acronym PPR: Płatne Pachołki Rosji – “paid servants of Russia.” The regime found it hard to gain legitimacy; even after the war was over, a sense of uncertainty remained.17 During these years, many continued to believe that the nationalist propaganda was merely a cover for the “internationalist” solution to come: the incorporation of Poland into the USSR as its “17th republic.” Both underground publications and reports in the party-state archive point in this direction.18

Clearly, Moscow’s idea of combining nationalism and communism had its limits. It could not—even if this was Moscow’s intention—break the chains of popular memory. The history of Polish–Russian relations, the history of communism after 1917, and the events of the Katyń massacre constantly undermined the official narrative. In Poznań in 1945, people could choose on the first anniversary of the regime whether they wanted to attend the official celebration or an open air mass with Cardinal Hlond, the Primate of Poland. While 3,000 people attended the official celebration, some 30,000 joined Hlond in prayer.19 Almost a year later, on May 3 1946 in Krakow, the regime’s supremacy in the public space was tested again. The city’s population, including many university students, intended to celebrate the anniversary of the Polish constitution of 1791, a date of long-standing national significance and a public holiday with an anti-Russian flavor. The regime, on the other hand, tried to establish May 1 as a new Soviet-style celebration throughout Poland. This competition led to a confrontation in Krakow after the regime banned the public celebration of constitution day. Police clashed with demonstrators and cleared the public arena by force.20 Traditional Polish nationalism was no longer tolerated, and instead of May 3, May 1 was introduced as an obligatory holiday.21 The regime was willing to fight for cultural supremacy on the streets.

Accelerated Sovietization: 1947

The onset of the Cold War and the firm hold on power of the party ended the more pragmatic approach that the regime had taken since 1944. It gave way to the utopian vision of a fully Sovietized Poland.22 As had been the case in Stalinist Russia, the Polish regime now tried to mobilize the entire body politic. The official culture was supposed to penetrate all layers of society.

An early example of the regime’s new offensive was the first national convention of the Polish–Soviet Friendship Society (TPPR), held on June 1–3, 1946 in Warsaw. Here, the official new blend of nationalism and internationalism was presented to the Polish public. 2,500 delegates from all over the country assembled in the capital to present the official doctrine of “friendship with the Soviet Union.” Henryk Świątkowski, the TPPR chairman, underlined that friendship with the USSR was not limited to Polish communists. Rather, it was the task and the desire of the entire nation. Friendship with Moscow was more than a mere slogan. It had to become a “movement” that united the entire Polish public behind this cause.23 Józef Cyrankiewicz, minister and PPS politician, declared friendship with the USSR to be part of Poland’s raison d’état. Clearly, this new urgency was partially due to the Cold War, which left its mark on internal Polish politics. The party-state needed to show its readiness to act and its firm ties to the Soviet camp.. But there is another way of looking at the changing face of repressive politics in postwar Poland. The mobilization campaigns that started in 1947 can also be interpreted as a sign of strength of the party-state. With the armed insurgency put down, the new borders more or less under control, and the legal opposition beheaded, the Polish regime could use its resources for an extensive propaganda campaign. In May 1947, the Central Committee decided to give the friendship propaganda even higher priority.24 This decision, however, was not implemented until October. As a consequence, every party member was supposed to become an agitator for friendship with the USSR.25 Even remote parts of Poland and hostile segments of the populace were now to be reached. Essentially, national mobilization for the internationalist cause was supposed to be unlimited. The next goal of the propaganda apparatus was the celebration of the October Revolution. The festivities were not merely political education. An internal document states that one of the purposes of the events was to deepen “the feeling of cordial friendship with the USSR and the understanding of Soviet cultural achievements, and [make clear] the lasting and decisive importance of the USSR for a sovereign life.”26 The Stalinist state aimed to establish strong emotional bonds with its eastern neighbor. Czesław Miłosz would write in 1951 that there was a certain point when the propaganda for Russia turned into worship of the Soviet Union.27 1947 was the point when a more pragmatic mode of Sovietization was abandoned for a more radical version with utopian undertones.

The first highlight of the Stalinist radicalization was the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution in the autumn of 1947. The campaign strove to mobilize all of Polish society: on the anniversary of the revolution, there were to be lectures in all Polish cities and towns, down to the level of villages.28 The festivities were intended to teach Poles that the October revolution—not independence—had freed them from “hundreds of years of slavery.”29 At the end of 1947, TPPR chairman Henryk Światkowski emphasized his belief that most of the reeducation had already been accomplished.30 He expected that the remnants of distrust that dated back to the era of Czarism would be overcome in 1948. In the period of High Stalinism, the functionaries of the party-state were supposed to express their unlimited trust in their own propaganda. Światkowski serves as a good example; he set the utopian goal of turning the Polish population into a community of supporters of the USSR within before the end of the following year.

In 1948, the new Stalinist course targeted not only the population. PPR secretary Władysław Gomułka, who had spoken in favor of a “Polish road to socialism,” (which at the time was the official line of all parties), was purged in 1948. He was condemned for allegedly having shown “mistrust towards the USSR.”31 From then on, state and party needed to be represented by leaders who stood for the great friendship between the two states. Mieczysław Moczar expressed the new credo for all party members: “The Soviet Union is not only our ally, that is a slogan for the people. For us, comrades, the Soviet Union is our fatherland [nasza Ojczyzna], and I cannot define its borders, today they might be behind Berlin, tomorrow already at Gibraltar.”32 The Soviets, however, remained skeptical of the Polish efforts. The Sovinformburo criticized the Polish party for its tolerance of “nationalism” in the population. They felt that propaganda for the USSR should be intensified.33 In August 1949, the Kominform demanded a concerted effort in Poland against Anglo-American propaganda.34

Rokossowski’s Homecoming: The November Campaign of 1949

According to Boris Sokolov , Joseph Stalin chose to make Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossowski Polish Defense Minister in order to have trusted eyes and ears in Warsaw. Stalin invited Rokossowski, who had served as commander of Soviet Army group North in Poland since 1945, to his dacha and made him an offer he could not refuse.35 The decision was delivered to Warsaw on October 27.36 The conflict with Tito had reminded Stalin how fragile his power abroad could be. The appointment could be read as a sign of Stalin’s distrust towards the Polish party and its leadership, of course. But there were certainly more aspects to the decision: Moscow clearly craved control of the Polish Army. It wanted to ensure that the second largest army in the empire would be modernized, loyal, and battle-ready if the Cold War turned hot. The scenario in Asia, with the military victory of the Chinese communists and the Korean War, suggested that military conflict might flare up again in Europe. Rokossowski could exercise control over the Armed Forces and report to Stalin on the party. And through his public position, Rokossowski would serve as a constant reminder of the limited sovereignty of communist nation-states. The army, traditionally viewed as the core of independent Polish statehood, was put firmly under Soviet control. Yet, publicly, a different story was told: the tale of the Marshal’s homecoming.

Even before being appointed Minister of Defense, the Soviet Marshal was a well-known figure in the communist-controlled People’s Republic of Poland. He had liberated the northern part of the country during World War II, and he had remained in Poland to command Red Army troops who remained stationed in Silesia. As Supreme Soviet Commander in Poland, he had been turned into one of the symbols of Polish–Soviet friendship. Loyalty to the USSR manifested itself in carefully stage-managed gestures of the population towards him. During the winter of 1949, several Polish towns made him an honorary citizen.37 Polish delegations visited him to show their gratitude for the liberation.38 During the autumn of 1949, Stalinist Poland once again was dominated by the annual friendship campaign, the “month of Polish–Soviet friendship.” The population was encouraged to familiarize itself with and embrace Soviet culture. Literature, the arts, film, and political education sensu strictu played an important role during these weeks. It was to be a special year because the campaign would last even longer than it had in previous years: after the month of friendship, which officially ended on November 7, the celebrations of Stalin’s 70th birthday would begin.39 Thus, the autumn of 1949 would be one of constant mobilization around the USSR and its leader. Rokossowski’s appointment as Minister of Defense and Marshal of Poland was announced on the final day of the friendship campaign, right before the anniversary of the October Revolution.40 This was no coincidence. The scheduled date in the regime’s calendar signified the importance of the event. Furthermore, the news could be spread in the controlled setting of the October celebrations. The propaganda and the security apparatus would be on the alert, and this would reduce the risk of spontaneous protests or rioting. The official appointment was not made until November, giving the party-state a few weeks to prepare the event. The campaign around Rokossowski focused on reinventing his public persona and his vita and welcoming him home as a Polish Patriot. On the day of his inauguration into office three short biographies were distributed: one was issued by the state publishing house, one by the youth organization and one by the Ministry of Defense. The party’s publishing house Ksiazka i Wiedza even polonized his name on the cover: in accordance with Polish orthography they spelled his name Rokosowski instead of Rokossowski.41

All three officially released biographies constructed a contrast between his vita and the fate of the Polish nation. Rokossowski could be a communist patriot because he had not played any role in the ill-fated interwar Polish republic. Instead, he had chosen the Soviet side in 1917, defended Soviet power during the Civil War in Russia, and risen in the ranks of the Red Army. According to this leitmotif, he had had to abandon his nation because it had chosen the wrong path. A nation that had erred had lost its son, who had only been able to come home because the nation had returned to the right path of history. It was now the lost son’s duty to guide his country further along the right track. According to the official narrative, it was beneficial to have chosen the Soviet side as early as possible; it was also important to emphasize this because so many Poles had suffered under Soviet rule.

According to the official narrative, Rokossowski was born in Warsaw, the son of a railway worker.42 As a youth in Warsaw, he had become part of the Polish workers’ movement. During World War I, he was drafted into the Imperial Army, and he left his homeland during the retreat to the east. In Russia, he sided with the revolution, defending it in the civil war and, through determination and hard work, rising to the position of general. Rokossowski’s exemplary heroism during World War I resulted from his closeness to both Stalin and common soldiers on the frontline. Furthermore, he had decisively intervened in the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. His participation in the liberation of Poland was emphasized, as was his urge to help the uprising in Warsaw, which was sabotaged by the leadership of the Armia Krajowa. His vita was constructed along similar lines in all three biographies.

The texts were also garnished with anecdotes which were supposed to convey his Polishness. Poles meet him during the war and they are drawn to him because they recognize him as a compatriot, even before he speaks and despite his Soviet uniform. One story has Rokossowski correct a translator, which prompts a Polish lady to shout: “How well he speaks our tongue [jak fajnie po naszemu gada],” while another one claims: “I am sure, yes, he is a Pole, one of our workers from Warsaw.”43 The inhabitants of eastern Poland were said to be proud that a Pole had led the armies that liberated them. On the way to Berlin, the friendship between the Polish people and their lost son strengthened. Because of his heroic deeds, the biographers insisted, Marshall Rokossowski represented the best traditions of Polish freedom fighters. He was portrayed as continuing the national struggle that had started centuries ago. He was the embodiment of the “most sacred traditions of the Polish struggle for freedom,” fought under the battle-cry “for our freedom and yours [za naszą i waszą wolność].” The Polish nation saw in him “the proud traditions of Tadeusz Kościuszkos, Henryk Dąbrowskis [...] Karol Świerczewski-Walter, and many other great Poles [...].”44

The biographies demanded a warm welcome for Rokossowski by the Polish public: “With pride, joy and trust, the Polish nation gives the leadership of the armed forces of our country into the hands of Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski, the great Pole, the glowing patriot and revolutionary, the faithful son of Warsaw’s working class, the servant and citizen of People’s Poland.”45 The Central Committee issued an instruction to agitators that informed them of the official line: The Polish nation and the working class were urged to welcome the appointment as a strengthening of Poland’s security and its borders.46 It was argued that Rokossowski would work to strengthen Polish sovereignty because he would ensure an even tougher defense against “German chauvinists.” It was the task of the agitators in the field to counter the smear campaign against Rokossowski advanced by Voice of America and radio stations in London, Madrid, Hamburg, and Belgrade. Rokossowski was a national leader carrying “the Polish eagle on his hat […] to the great joy of the Polish soldiers, who are proud of such a leader.” Rokossowski would make the “peace camp” even stronger, “from Peking to Berlin.”47 Thus, the national was intertwined with the international dimension of the event: the stronger defense of Communist Poland meant the strengthening of the whole Eurasian Soviet Empire.

In addition to the party and the TPPR, other mass-organizations were involved in the campaign. Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (ZMP), the party-state’s youth organization, told its members to attend local meetings, where Rokossowski’s biography would be studied. The result of these meetings was supposed to be a discussion which would lead to telegrams from all parts of the country in support of the Marshal.48 These instructions show how carefully the party-state intended to build up support for Rokossowski. The stage-management of public approval was part of the larger mobilization campaign to celebrate the October anniversary. It was part of an effort to form opinion, contain resistance and expressions of disapproval, and exhibit public enthusiasm.

Nationalism and Internationalism: Some Excerpts from Official Reports

The population in communist Poland was faced with a fait accompli. Moscow had decided to impose its will, and the Polish party-state used the means at its disposal to ensure popular support for the decision. It is, of course, tempting to try to look behind the façade of the stage-managed public sphere.49 Clearly, the great shows of harmony and enthusiasm which have been so carefully orchestrated and controlled by modern dictatorships convey little about the mood of their populations.50 Similarly, the mass-media offers little useful information in this regard. They were more part of the show than a reliable source.51 The sources that historians are left with are either ego-documents, such as letters and diaries in which individuals recorded their thoughts and the views of other citizens, or the internal reports from various sources of the party-state. Clearly, each of these two kinds of sources is problematic in many ways. Neither can be used as a substitute for modern opinion polling, which was introduced in the twentieth century in liberal democracies.

The internal reports of the communist party-state constitute a specific genre. The people who wrote them (whether party members, functionaries of the security apparatus, or members of the mass-organizations) were not free to express their opinions. On the contrary, conventionally, reports alleged overwhelming support for the policies of the party-state. Like the mass-media, internal reports praised the leadership for its wise decisions. Still, internal reports would usually also refer to problems that had arisen, “misunderstandings,” and rumors or the activities of enemies of the people.52 Usually, they would highlight that the critics held a minority position, and the reports portrayed critics as backwards or alien to society. The language of the reports is as stereotypical as that used in the media. Even internally, discursive rules applied. Despite these limitations, internal reports can be a useful source that furthers an understanding of popular reactions in certain situations. While we should not read them as scientific surveys of the public mood, we can use them to extract certain (more or less random) sound bites from society. This allows us to venture hypotheses concerning which parts of the propaganda narrative were picked up, criticized, or ridiculed, both in private and in such public spaces, such as the streets, the workplace, or public transportation.

The Poles were not the only people monitoring the situation in the autumn of 1949. Soviet agencies observed the mood of the populace carefully. They noted that the appointment of Rokossowski as Minister of Defense revived fears among many Poles that they would be annexed and incorporated into the USSR. These anxieties surfaced in the persistent idea that Poland would become the “17th republic” of the USSR.53 This subject was also raised in a report of the Cominform to the Soviet Central Committee.54 The report included impressions from across Poland: it claimed that in the voivodship of Poznań many people were afraid that the rise of Rokossowski would mark the beginning of renewed mass deportations to Siberia. Obviously, the repressions of 1939/40 were still remembered. Two students in Lublin spread the rumor that Rokossowski had been deployed to quell a “mutiny” [bunt] in the Polish Army. People in the town in eastern Poland were certain that in a short time “all power” in Poland would belong “to the Soviets.” Even party members saw the appointment as the complete and final loss of sovereignty. A communist from Warsaw noted: “The goal behind the appointment of Rokossowski is the Russification and Bolshevization of the Polish Armed Forces.” According to the report, such fears were also widespread in other state institutions. Postal workers were speculating that their offices would soon be placed under Soviet control. Other citizens interpreted Rokossowski’s rise as preparation for war. Many feared that the outbreak of hostilities was imminent. Despite these findings, the author lauded the PZPR for its effective propaganda, and he or she characteristically concluded that the majority of the Polish working class supported Rokossowski’s new role.

The reports in the Polish archives also indicate that Rokossowski’s appointment came as a shock for many. Although these reports also stereotypically attest that Rokossowski enjoyed great support among the population, much of their content hints at people’s anger, fear, and confusion. People instantly started to prepare for war and crisis. Throughout Warsaw and the surrounding districts, women were buying basic commodities and foodstuff from local stores. They wanted to be ready in case of war and annexation by the USSR.55 Other citizens of Warsaw discussed the question of whether the Marshal was a Soviet or a Polish citizen. A resident of Lublin (which before 1918 had been a city in the Russian Empire) interpreted Rokossowski’s nomination historically: “Our little father the Czar gave his Prince Konstantin, and Stalin sent us Konstantin Rokossowski” [Car batiuszka dał nam księcia Konstantego, a Stalin przysłał Konstantego Rokossowskiego]. Officers from the interwar era suspected a purge of the Polish Army. From Szczecin, the party reported that the workers had reacted positively to the news, but whether the Marshal was a Pole or a Russian was a topic of discussion. They also believed that Poland would soon become the “17th republic.” A Pomeranian worker called the appointment of a foreigner as Minister of Defense a “parody.” Another citizen quipped: “There seems to be no post that a Russian cannot hold. I cannot grasp how a foreign citizen can become Marshal of Poland.”56 The narrative about the “son of Warsaw’s working class” did not convince everybody.

On November 10, the party reported from Rzeszów that people there had started to buy basic goods to ensure that they would be ready in case of war. Citizens of Krakow were sure that a Soviet ambassador had taken over power in Warsaw. They compared the situation with Western Europe: “France is ruled by the Americans and we are ruled by the USSR.”57 The Polishness of Rokossowski, which was one of the main claims of the party-state, was questioned. A former party member asked: “What kind of Pole spent his whole life in the USSR?” At Warsaw University and the capital’s Polytechnic School oppositional graffiti could be found: “Down with the usurper, down with Rokossowski!”58 A report from Wrocław stated that, while most comrades were in favor of the decision, doubts remained.59

A party report from the beginning of December attempted to summarize popular sentiment in Silesia. People there believed “a) Poland will become the 17th republic, b) Poland will be sold.”60 According to the report, the agitators were trying to instill calm. People in the Silesian town of Ratibor were worried that they would be forced to move: “The rumor is spreading that the whole area will be occupied by Soviet forces and the population will have to leave their homes.”61 Finally, the party committee from Opole, Silesia remarked that, “in conjunction with the appointment of Marshal Rokossowski, those opposed to our system and to the alliance with the Soviet Union spread the propaganda according to which the USSR has forced a Marshal upon us whose heritage and biography have [deliberately] been obscured.”62

The internal party documents and the Soviet reports from Poland show that the official biographies written before the nomination of Rokossowski anticipated when the decisive point would come: given the effects of many years of nationalist propaganda and the attachment of the population to national sentiments dating back to the times of the partition, the notion of sovereignty in Poland was crucial. The appearance of a Soviet Marshal in the Polish government undermined the government’s claim of independence from the USSR. In November 1949, the regime tried to master the propaganda battle by claiming that the Marshal was both a Pole and a Soviet internationalist; this position, however, did not convince many skeptics. The internationalist friendship propaganda had always preached Poland’s alliance with the USSR as a guarantee of national sovereignty. Segments of the population were inclined to interpret Rokossowski’s rise to power as a return to the communist internationalism of the interwar period. Back then, the Polish Communist Party advocated the country’s inclusion in the Soviet Union. It seemed plausible that the party could return to the policies of the 1920s. Additionally, Poles had centuries of experience with Russian imperialism. To many Poles, Bolshevik internationalism had seemed like little more than another metamorphosis of the Russian empire.

The Polish Troika and the Downfall of the Soviet Marshal in 1956

From the end of 1949 until his downfall during the “Polish October” of 1956, Marshal Rokossowski held a prominent position in the public culture of Stalinist Poland. After Stalin’s 70th birthday in December 1949, the Stalinist leadership cult grew to almost Soviet proportions.63 But in Poland, the cult of the Soviet leader was supplemented with local cults. The propaganda placed the Polish party leader Bierut and Marshal Rokossowski to the right and left of “Poland’s unbending friend.” This troika came to represent Polish statehood during the years of High Stalinism. On many occasions, pictures of the troika would appear on public buildings or at meetings and conferences.64 The chant “Stalin-Bierut-Rokossowski” echoed through many conventions of Stalinist Poland. The regime cultivated the Soviet Marshal as a symbol of its power, and he certainly served as a marker of loyalty to the USSR.

The troika represented the hybridity of the Polish state during Stalinism. It was not a Soviet republic, but it was also not a sovereign nation-state. It existed between nationalist rhetoric and Soviet domination.65 The invented biography of Rokossowski was a Polish version of Stalinist internationalism. It was a narrative designed to ensure Soviet domination. The plausibility of the narrative suffered from the gap between nationalism and internationalism, which could never be bridged. It had to be accepted, because in Stalinist culture such contradictions could not be discussed.

Recent research has shown that the military man Rokossowski was a rather poor politician. He quickly managed to isolate himself within the Polish leadership.66 His strength lay, rather, in the reorganizing and purging the Polish forces.67 Apparently, he was one of the initiators of the campaign against communists with Jewish backgrounds in the Politburo. Yet, this did not prevent him from falling from grace together with them in the autumn of 1956. Post-Stalin national communism had no place for the hybridity that he represented between Soviet and Polish identity. When the Stalinist narratives were questioned following Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” Rokossowski found himself at the center of popular criticism. In the spring of 1956, Poles began to be able to voice their concerns in public.68 The anti-Soviet mood on Polish streets could clearly be heard. The Marshal was seen as a symbol of Soviet domination over Polish matters. The internationalist campaign of 1949 and the years of promoting the Soviet Marshal in Poland backfired. The end of the Stalin cult also threw into question the role of Rokossowski in Poland. The symbolic death of the leader’s persona also left a mark on those associated with him. Political turbulence soon led to political turmoil behind the scenes in the party-state.69 Rokossowski was clearly associated with the Moscovite (“Natolin”) faction in this struggle. Yet, perhaps as important as the internal showdown was the destruction of his image on the Polish streets in 1956.

The party-state tried in vain to limit public discussion to the “secret speech” and certain crimes of Stalin and his entourage. As the year progressed, it became obvious that this attempt to control public discourse was failing. The dynamics of the discussion proved impossible to control, and in the spring and early summer the legitimacy of the entire postwar order in Poland began to crumble. Many former Stalinists in the party and inteligencja changed sides and repositioned themselves as reform socialists or national communists.70 In March 1956, the party organs in the provinces reported “sharp discussions” to Warsaw.71 Neither the massacre at Katyń nor 1939 was considered a taboo anymore. Workers in Stalinogród, the former Katowice, were demanding the removal of Stalin portraits and declared “Stalin is an enemy of the people.”72 The official discourse was turned against those who had long represented absolute power. In April of 1956, internal discussion of the PZPR and in major enterprises centered on subjects such as the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and the possibility of comparing Stalin and Hitler.73 Soviet-style mass-organizations, like the communist youth ZMP and the TPPR, began to disintegrate.74

In June 1956, Poland was rocked by the violent uprising of workers in the western city of Poznań.75 Strikes and economic protests had quickly turned national and distinctly anti-Soviet. The local party headquarters was stormed by protesters, and Soviet insignia were destroyed and replaced by Polish symbols. The iconoclasm lasted through the morning and has been described as a “festival of liberation” by Paweł Machcewicz.76 The prison, the courts, and the local police came under attack, and the party-state began to lose control of the city. Demonstrators began to besiege the local representatives of the secret police as well. Policemen were denounced as “SS” or “Gestapo”; some were convinced they were “Russians in Polish uniforms.”77 From midday onwards, the party-state mobilized the Army in order to crush the insurgency with the use of violence. Clearly, as commander of the Army, Rokossowski bore responsibility for the use of force. The fighting, which lasted until the next morning, claimed more than 90 lives. 10,000 soldiers and several hundred tanks were needed to pacify the city. The escalation of the Poznań uprising shows how deeply unpopular the Soviet symbolism—the imperial discourse of Stalinist internationalism—was in postwar Poland. Poles were willing to risk their lives for the destruction of the symbols of Soviet domination.

The summer of 1956 remained turbulent in Poland. Regime change at the 8th plenum of the Central Committee in October brought Władysław Gomułka to power and marked the beginning of national communism in Poland. His rise was accompanied by mass rallies on the streets of Warsaw and the downfall of Marshall Rokossowski. While the masses chanted traditional patriotic songs and hailed the new general secretary, who profited from his anti-Soviet charisma, they demanded the immediate resignation of the Minister of Defense. The anti-Soviet mood of the public led to a new, unprecedented wave of iconoclasm. Portraits of Rokosswoski were among the symbols of power that were publicly burned. Among the slogans of the demonstrators were “Rokossowski go home,” “Rokossowski to the kolkhoz,” and “Rokossowski to Siberia.”78 All over the country Soviet symbols and TPPR propaganda were destroyed. The official universe of Polish Stalinism, carefully built between 1947 and 1949, was dismantled within a few days. The nationalist mood persisted through the winter and led to occasional attacks on Soviet barracks and other remaining symbols of the despised empire. Still, Gomułka decreed in the winter of 1956 that Polish–Soviet friendship was here to stay, but not in the Stalinist version and without its most prominent personification.79

Epilogue

The second attempt at national communism in Poland left neither room for Jewish communists in the party leadership nor for Polish–Soviet hybridity. The Polishness of the new leadership had to be beyond any doubt. In 1956, Communist nationalism swept away what was left of the notion of Stalinism’s friendship of the people in Poland. Gomułka returned to power riding a wave of national sentiment.

Decades later, during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet officers were allowed to publish their memoirs. Given the cult of the “Great Patriotic War,” which was initiated by the party-state, these texts were, of course, strictly censored. Konstantin Rokossowski found a way to avoid mention of the ambivalent Polish episode of his life. In his official autobiography he did not raise the subject of the turmoil of postwar Stalinism; rather, he concentrated on his participation in the defeat of Nazi Germany.80 The Polish marshal with Soviet origins, his meteoric rise in 1949, and his downfall in the turbulent year 1956 were not to be remembered in Brezhnev’s USSR. Stalinism and its aftermath in Central Europe had become an embarrassment which should not contaminate the biography of a Soviet hero of the “Great Fatherland War.”

 

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In the Pull of the West: Resistance, Concessions and Showing off from the Stalinist Practice in Hungarian culture after 19561

Róbert Takács

Institute of Political History, Budapest

 

The article explores the representation of Western culture in Hungarian journalism, print media, and public life in the months following the 1956 revolution, when the party lost its strict control over Hungarian society and only gradually was able to reassert its dominance in all spheres of life. Did representations of Western culture really constitute a kind of resistance, or should they perhaps be understood as concessions to prevalent public opinion? Or did they in fact harmonize in some way with the actual intentions of the people who crafted cultural policy? How did the content of newspapers begin to change in November 1956, clashing with the earlier “socialist cultural canon” by presenting formerly censured or anathematized Western cultural products and actors? How was the supply of movies adjusted to public opinion and then slowly readjusted to correspond to former norms? How did theater programs and plans for book publishing reflect the uncertainty of the period, resulting in the publication of works and performance of productions later criticized for bringing values to the stage that were contrary to the spirit of socialism? In this paper, I analyze a provisional period in which earlier norms of journalism, print media, and cultural life were partially suspended and the party made little or no real attempts to reassert Stalinist norms. Moreover, in this period the party did not deny or bring a stop to the de-Stalinization of cultural life, although it did repress open forms of cultural resistance to the Kádár-government.

Keywords: communist media, journalism, cultural transfers, cultural policy, de-Stalinization, resistance, revolution

 

Soon a ‘new voice’ joined the buzz of the different languages. Jazz music rang out, and the dance started. First a black pair in white pullovers and britches started to follow the sound of the music with a miraculous sense of rhythm. In a little while, other dancers joined them... People laughed when a black fellow invited a Soviet girl to dance boogie-woogie. The Soviet girl, however hard she tried, could not follow her partner.2

This is how the daily Népszabadság reported the rest-day of the summer Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956. This coverage was the first in Hungary to mention the Western fashion frenzy, boogie (and rock and roll), in a positive way since 1948, only a few weeks after the violent suppression of the revolution. But it harmonized well with the policy of peaceful coexistence of the Khrushchev regime. This short report was also the first occasion when Népszabadság came out from behind the closed world of politics (strikes, declarations, condemnations of resistance) and slowly started to act like a newspaper again instead of a political fly-bill.

The report was printed at a moment when the Kádár government gave up its last efforts to try to find a compromise with the representatives of the workers and intellectuals and was about to finalize its resolution of December 4.3 The forums of publicity were narrow: only a few editorships were functioning, and the re-launch of any newspaper had to be allowed by the leading bodies of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party.4 The book publishing industry was paralyzed, and cinemas and theaters were closed for weeks, and later only opened in the afternoon because of the curfew, which lasted until April of the following year.

There were spectacular and well-explored cases of open resistance, from the “not a single word to Kádár” strike led by journalists5 to the production of illegal newspapers and leaflets.6 Even the central organ of the party tried to protest against defining the relationship between party leadership and communist journalists in a pre-1953 way. Others drew back into passive resistance and refused to publish. The Hungarian Writers’ Association and the Association of Hungarian Journalists became important bases of resistance until the suspension of their autonomy, while their representatives also parleyed with the government.7

After November 4, Hungarian intellectuals followed a variety of trajectories and adopted an array of attitudes towards the government. Some left the country and continued to fight from abroad. Some undertook open resistance, risking imprisonment or even the death penalty. Others tried to cooperate with the new regime, hoping to preserve some of the achievements of 1956 and the de-Stalinization process, while many people decided to fall silent as a form of passive resistance. There were also intellectuals who cooperated with Kádár, whether wholeheartedly or striving for position and influence, or convincing themselves they were more useful to the people in these positions than others would be.

In this article I explore a particular way of assuming distance from official ideological framings and expressing criticism: the reception of Western pop-culture in post-1956 Hungarian public life. I examine Western pop-culture (i.e. what was characterized as “bourgeois” culture) in the Hungarian media and the debates to which it gave rise. Did it really constitute a kind of resistance, or could it rather be understood as a series of concessions to public opinion? Or did it actually help the regime achieve the goals of its cultural policy? In fact, all of these interpretations are valid. First, the references to Western culture in the early press of the Kádár era were intended to create distance from the cultural policy of Hungarian Stalinism, which Kádár’s propaganda tried to dismiss as hopelessly and unnecessarily orthodox and dictatorial. However, the re-importation of images from Western popular culture into official socialist debates created new ways of developing criticism and critical attitudes towards Kádár’s cultural policy too. I explore this double reception in thematic order by focusing on commercial culture, film, theater, literature, jazz, and art in two of the most important newspapers of the time: the party daily Népszabadság and the official youth magazine Magyar Ifjúság.

Western Commercial Culture in the Press

Népszabadság sarcastically noted the shift that took place between November 1956 and February 1957: “Nobody was enthusiastic about the gray journals of the Rákosi regime, while—lo!—the new, democratic press is received with such huge interest. Recently, they were burning newspapers on the streets, but now they keep queuing.”8 The author pointed out that the popularity of the youth weekly Magyar Ifjúság was not based on cultural value. (Magyar Ifjúság was allegedly so popular that it was sold on the streets in record time and after that one could get it only from under the counter, when buying an issue of the official party paper Népszabadság or the trade union paper Népakarat).

What was the secret of Magyar Ifjúság? The first issue of the paper was released on January 5 1957, at a time when there were still many youth organizations and the Hungarian Communist Youth League, which later came to own the paper, had not yet been founded. On the front, children sleighing and Miss France were smiling at the reader. A genre that had previously been rebuked as the quintessence of American trash culture returned. The first comic strip in Magyar Ifjúság was a French translation (Misi and Döme Meet the Dragon), but in the second issue Hungarian characters appeared: The Adventures of the Dogs Blöki and Csöpi.9 This constituted a surprising concession, since even in 1954 official cultural policy labelled comics as a tool that had been used to teach violence and condition people for war: “These books contain depictions of murders, sadistic stories, terrifying adventures, cruelty and bloodcurdling horror, and they are illustrated”. They were even associated with fascism: “Many of these adventures are based on one single supernatural hero, who—as fascists suggested—is the only one able to save the crowd from their troubled situation by using power.”10

Among the novelties of Magyar Ifjúság was a Tarzan serial, which was also banned after 1948 as inferior American mass culture. “Tarzan Wins” was published as a promotion of the newly launched Tarzan series of Kossuth Publishing House. The first part, Tarzan of the Apes, had already been published in late 1956 by Budapest Press, and was continued by the party publishing house in 1957.11 Further Tarzan volumes only arrived in the mid-1960s. The plans of Európa Publishing House for 1957 included the crime stories of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Európa planned to print open-end crime stories following Western patterns: “In other countries, separate clubs are organized to solve such books, so we can hope that this idea will be welcome here, too,” heralded the youth paper.12

The first issue also introduced Gina Lollobrigida and Luis Procuna, a Mexican actor-toreador. With this, an avalanche of Western stars began.13 Over the course of the upcoming weeks, people were able to read about the cultic James Dean, the rock and roll icon Elvis Presley, actresses Elisabeth Taylor and Marylin Monroe (who in November 1964 could only be seen on the silver screen in The Misfits). Népszabadság tried to catch up with this tempo: in early 1957, it portrayed Kim Novak besides Monroe and Taylor.

The January 5 issue of Magyar Ifjúság also launched a column on world fashion, and it included an interview with András Bágya, head of department of light music at Magyar Rádió, about jazz.14 Even stranger things happened: sexuality was seen as one of the opiates of the decadent West, but not reporting on it. “Wow, how pretty,” proclaimed the Christmas edition of Népszabadság in a caption above a picture of Miss France in a bikini. The typist from Nice greeted the Hungarian readers from the back of a donkey.15 Magyar Ifjúság also captured the attention of its readership with a beauty queen in issue one, and it continued with a portrait of actress Francoise Arnoul in a bikini and a handsome French in tabloid style.16 Allegedly “decadent” and “commercial” Western habits also penetrated the Hungarian environment: the weekly showed the winner of the beauty contest of the National Association of Hungarian Students.17 However, a month later the same newspaper condemned “bourgeois hypocrisy” for surrounding beauty contests with fame and glitter while the winner could be rejected as a teacher in FRG.18 A national beauty contest was not held again until 1985.

Kádár himself spoke highly critically of the work of Népszabadság on the session of the Budapest party activists on January 16 1957:

 

But it is inequitable for the central organ of the party to report murder cases with mighty letters on the front page and [spice up] the article, which is of theoretical importance, with a picture of a half-naked dancer, while they move the important declarations of the party and the government and the important manifestations of the international workers’ movement to different pages so that you can’t find the sequel.19

 

We can surely add the report from Paris to the “bourgeois tendencies.” The report invited Hungarian readers to popular striptease bars like Foliés Bergére and Venus to offer accounts of “colourful” shows and dancers covered by fig-leaves. However, for the sake of order, the report added that a French worker cannot afford such fun (“my friend, Beuval, earns this money [the price of 3 bottles of champagne] for a week’s worth of work at Renault”), and it made specific mention of homeless people lying under newspapers by the Seine River.20

At the end of January, the Provisional Executive Committee of Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) discussed the work of Népszabadság and Magyar Ifjúság and concluded that, though their work was not flawless, they could be regarded as supportive of the government, unlike the Hungarian News Agency and Népakarat.21 It was not easy to achieve a balance: people who wanted to make a newspaper different from Stalinist times had to follow the expectations of the party and the audience at the same time, the majority of which would not bother listening to talk of any of the outstanding Soviet achievements, but rather thirsted for news and information about the West. It seemed that interesting journals could only be edited with Western star-portraits, technical novelties, and a pinch of eroticism in the first months of 1957. However, even after this, exprobatory path-seeking efforts were paved with some piquant circuits. What else could have explained the fact that two months later the notion of the lascivious nightlife of the West was again “debunked” in a lengthy article. The journalist (a protocol guest of the newly launched Budapest–Brussels flight) balanced his report on Boeuf sur le Toit club by visiting an anti-fascist place of memory, the fortress of Brendonk.22

Concessions and Renewed Cultural Policy: Ideology Disappears

Kádár also accused the editors of Népszabadság of smuggling a characterization of the West as the “greater world” into the newspaper.23 Nevertheless, the government assumed that there were anti-Soviet emotions among the population, which is best illustrated by the films that were offered after November 1956. Soviet films disappeared for months: they were cautiously reintroduced beginning in February 1957 by local movie companies. Népszabadság printed the first cinema program on November 29, when cinemas were open between 11am and 4pm, according to the curfew. The selection of films was based on the 169 films confirmed by the General Directorate for Films: 29 Hungarian, 33 from socialist countries, and the rest (107 films, i.e. 63% percent, well over half) were from Western countries. Felszabadulás played Fan-Fan the Tulip, Csillag played The Red and the Black, Tinódi played the comedy Papa, Mama, My Woman and Me (presented for the French Film Days in 1956), and Toldi opted for The Thief of Bagdad. The list of licensed Soviet films was compiled only in January “with the political caution justified by the political atmosphere.” Salaries for employees in the movie theaters depended in part on the number of people who actually came to see the movies. However, this factor was no longer taken into consideration in the case of Soviet films.24

The audiences for Western films, in contrast, were huge in 1957. The share of the viewers of Soviet films fell back significantly, even compared to 1956, when this tendency had begun. In 1957, every second cinema-goer opted for a Western film, while the number of Soviet films did not reach 10 percent of the total.

	Hungarian	Soviet	Socialist	Other	Mixed
1956	18	19	18	42	3
1957	22	9	13	52	4

 

Chart 1. Distribution of Hungarian audience by the place of origin of films in 1957
(Source: Hungarian National Archives (MNL OL) – The report of the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Council on the operation of cinemas)25

 

As the General Directorate for Films put it: “we strove to restore the tranquility of mind of the audience with films.” In the name of tranquility, 40 films were presented from capitalist countries, along with 12 Hungarian and 63 socialist films. The composition of the 98 films of the previous year was the following: 9 Hungarian, 59 socialist, and 31 Western. In 1958, 33.3 percent and in 1959 28.4 percent of the film premiers were imported from the non-socialist countries, so opening to Western cultural products had begun earlier, actually as early as 1954. In 1956/57, the proportion of the films from socialist countries dropped temporarily. 26 Magyar Ifjúság reported that the negotiations would begin with the Motion Picture Export Company in Paris at the end of January 1957.27 Moreover, the negotiations were successful, and three films were accepted in 1957.28 The first one was the most commercial: Trapeze, starring Gina Lollobrigida, Tony Curtis, and Burt Lancaster. So Hollywood returned to Hungary a year after the fall of the revolution with a spectacular feature film.

Nagyvilág, the Hungarian journal for international literature, which had been founded on the model of the Soviet Inostrannaya Literatura, underwent a similar shift. Its first issue was published in October 1956, and its programmatic editorial was written by György Lukács, who had been marginalized under the policy of Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov known as Zhdanovism, according to which the government should exert strict control over cultural policy and foster extreme anti-Western bias. The philosopher-aesthete emphasized that the seclusion after 1948 was the continuation of earlier Hungarian provincialism and was a consequence of weakness and uncertainty, both under Horthy and Rákosi: “Only one kind of struggle can be effective against provincialism: real, first-hand knowledge about the real state of the world, and the evaluation and of the present phenomena and streams of literature based on the autonomous procession and sophisticated arrangement of the seriously collected store of learning.”29 The journal was not abolished, but it was relaunched in the spring of 1957. Of course, the editorial in the April issue was not written by Lukács, who was being held in Snagov as a member of the Imre Nagy group, but by László Kardos, the leader of the Department of World Literature at University of Budapest. However, the program remained unaltered: “The literature that secludes itself from the inspirations, lessons, and experience of the brotherly beauty of contemporary world literature is threatened by the danger of withering, dehumanization, graying, and monotony. Wide-open windows all around are a precondition of the real development of our national culture.”30

At the same time, the programs of the theaters were similar to those of the cinemas. The spring program had already been decided before the revolution. The new performances continued the de-Stalinization line. Soviet plays were not performed. Theaters were just as eager as cinemas to avoid sparking public protests. In the spring of 1957, Népszabadság summarized the mentality of the months after the suppression of the revolution as the negative culmination of the process started in 1953: “slowly they ‘adjusted’ the ‘old, good, certain-success’ operettas, appealing classics, and in the best case new Hungarian slapstick comedies, which are evasive in content and low-grade in performance.” After November, “the shudder from the messages (even progressive bourgeois messages!) and the service of philistine illusions and lies” were palpable.31

The tendencies were similar in theaters and cinemas: Soviet plays disappeared, earlier Hungarian “blockbusters,” classical plays, and several Western light comedies appeared. József Révai, the ideologist in charge of cultural affairs during the Rákosi era in his notorious March article attacked “ideological clarity” in theater life through a revival of the plays of Ferenc Molnár and Ferenc Herczeg.32

What was playing in the theaters on that day? In addition to three classical plays (Victor Hugo: Ruy Blas; G. B. Shaw: Mrs Warren’s Profession and You Can Never Tell), there were also two post-World War I Italian comedies: one by Dario Niccodemi and Pirandello’s unconventional Six Characters in Search of an Author. The latter was premiered in 1957. According to a critic writing for Nők Lapja, an illustrated weekly, the director highlighted Pirandello’s playfulness and subdued his philosophical turbidity.33 Four of the remaining five productions were operettas: three Hungarian plays (Nuptials of Ipafa; Legend of Tabán; Graf of Luxembourg) and one Austrian play (Benatzky: The King with the Umbrella). The fifth was Olympia by Ferenc Molnár. So the offer was restricted to comedies and light musical performances, complemented with two operas (Bánk bán, Don Juan). László Németh’s Galilei and two social critical comedies (a contemporary French satire in crime-story form by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and a Yugoslav comedy by Branislav Nušić), which were first performed before the revolution, had been cancelled since January.

According to a March 15 article in Élet és Irodalom demanding order in culture, the situation at the houses of culture was even worse:

 

In the Young Guard Cultural Home One Kiss and Nothing Else is played. Danuvia Cultural Home plays the comedy by László Fodor. The István Pataki House of Culture plays The Moonlight Groom. MOM House of Culture plays Let’s Dance Mambo, the Zsigmond Móricz House of Culture plays Drum Duel and Rock and Roll, and the House of Culture of the Duna Shoe Factory played a comedy entitled Bubus by Gábor Vaszary.34

In the subsequent months the popular French playwright, Jean Anouilh, also known in Hungary between 1945 and 1948, returned to the stage with Eurydice and Rendezvous in Senlis, along with other entertaining plays, such as Dario Niccodemi’s Morning, Noon and Night, which the reviewer of Népszabadság found a “real Italian orange juice, does not bemuse, does not intoxicate, does not have strength or alcoholic content, but is bland and refreshing.”35

In the case of theaters, there was no such central body as for film import decisions: theaters as creative workshops composed their own yearly plans and submitted them to the Ministry of Culture. Of course, they paid regard to proportions, and the necessity of including an appropriate number of contemporary Hungarian, Soviet, socialist, and classical plays in their programs. These program plans were discussed by the leaders of the Ministry of Culture in the second half of 1957, and plays were accepted which later caused the biggest problems. However, the conference emphasized that the number of Soviet and socialist plays should be raised and propagated more intensely (Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s Optimist Tragedy was the core drama in that year), and plans were also made to cut back the number of “products of low-level bourgeois literature.” They also criticized theaters for trying to win over audiences by compromising principles: “theater directors in the capital have been fighting for a recent Western play for weeks.” Nevertheless, after the revolution theaters could not help offering numerous foreign plays: most of the writers did not write, so there were not enough new contemporary Hungarian plays. The theater with the worst proportion offered 11 premiers of which only 2 were Hungarian. 36

In 1957, the inclusion of earlier discredited leftist authors was continued with Frederico Garcia Lorca. In April, the National Theater in Budapest showed Blood Wedding, in the autumn the National Theater of Miskolc opted for The House of Bernarda Alba. Several theaters included Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck and Before Sunset by Gerhart Hauptmann. The Attila József Theater selected an Italian play by Gian Paolo Callegari (The Girls Who Burned out Early), which reflected on the so called Montesi-scandal. Some other plays added to the Western socially critical pieces (The Little Foxes by Lilian Hellmann and The Diary of Anne Frank), while Naples Millionaire by Eduardo di Filippo and a comedy by Victorien Sardou represented the lighter line.

The two problematic plays might have passed as critical plays by Western authors, one targeting the circumstances in capitalist society and the other slamming the American occupation of Japan. As reviews make clear, the cultural watchdogs only attacked these plays after they had been brought to the stage. The Egg by Félicien Marceau was heralded as a drama unveiling the lies of “bourgeois society,” in which one must sacrifice all moral values in order to prosper.37 However, cultural policy makers and critics soon realized that it represented Existentialism, which was only tolerated in very small doses after 1953.38 Later criticism tried to insist that the drama was harmful since it allegedly propagated nihilism and cynicism, and the way it typified “petty bourgeois points of views” as characteristic of all mankind and gave up hope for change was not acceptable.39As a critic writing for Népszabadság contended,

 

[t]his writer’s approach does not know humanity, benignity, or moral sense, he does not believe in anything anymore. Its ideal is the perspective of a wood louse, where nothing but instincts remain, you do not have to care for anything, you must not think... This is the denial of everything that is human, this is animal life, it reveals the last moments of a culture. That is why this anti-human art is unacceptable to us, even if it draws a harsh picture of the gray petty bourgeois soul and offers several well-crafted characters. It is unacceptable because it reflects the anarchist worldview against which we are fighting a hard, passionate, and enduring struggle.40

 

Theater critic Ferenc Gy. Simon directly blamed the actors and actresses for elevating such an equivocal play by doing an outstanding performance with great enthusiasm.41

The other play in the crossfire was an American one depicting life in occupied Japan after 1945 with a sense of irony. Some theater experts thought it was appropriate,42 but partisan critics found The Teahouse of the August Moon too “back-slapping.” Indeed, in their contention it is embodied the propagation of the American occupation: “the holder of the Pulitzer Prize and the voluntary PR-manager of the US Army makes very tricky propaganda about the humanitarian goodness of the occupying army of imperialism.”43

Book publishing was similar in its practices and the shifts it underwent. The medium-term plans of workshops were accepted by a central body. One can observe the rise of commercial culture here, too, i.e. the influence of considerations of profitability and public demand. However, the plans were compiled in a situation of unrest, and the Ministry of Culture could only discuss the quarterly plans of the publishing houses as of the second half of 1957.44 It was too late, however, to make significant changes. The plans of Európa Kiadó, the publishing house with the profile of world literature, had 28 foreign operas for the third quarter of 1957: six Soviet, eight “socialist,” and fourteen “Western” works. The five volumes of “contemporary” “people’s democratic” literature included Franz Kafka and Bertold Brecht. However, the Ministry intervened in the first case. Kafka only began to become acceptable to the cultural organs of the regime in the mid-1960s, as was signaled by a Kafka-study and the publication of one of his novels.45 The long-time “exiled” Brecht was permitted to return with the Threepenny novel, and in April The Good Person of Szechwan was staged in the József Katona Theater,46 followed by further Brecht plays in 1958. Among the fourteen Western authors, six were contemporary. The Hungarian audience may well have remembered Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, W. Somerset Maugham, and Jean Cocteau from before 1948, while novels by the Indian Mulk Raj Anand had been published under Rákosi, too. The first Hungarian translation by Alberto Moravia (The Roman Stories) was published in 1957, but the real sensation was the publication of the novel by Françoise Sagan. Her first novel, Hello Sadness, was a strange composition even in the French cultural landscape at the time, so its Hungarian publication was really surprising, though Polish audiences had been able to read it since 1956. Nevertheless, it had become common practice by then for publishers to bring out works from the West that were questionable according to the ideology of the regime, although these works were only available to small readership because of issues of circulation. Sagan, who introduced her readers to the world of rebel teenagers, was usually labelled an existentialist, but her book was much better received than the two abovementioned plays. Its novelty, strange honesty, and credible reportage could be emphasized, and this constituted an advantage. It could be characterized as a presentation of “the whole disturbing and mysterious field, about which we only know the outbursts: from rock and roll to the matricides, patricides, and infanticides committed out of boredom”.47 However, the publication of Sagan was not the general rule, but rather the exception, a kind of peculiarity which was much desired by the intellectuals to satisfy rather than whet the appetite. As László Kardos put it when writing about the treatment of the new phenomena of Western literature in earlier years, “curiosity slowly distorted into actual thirst, and thirst spelled illusions about value for the thirsty which were not proportional to the real values of Western literature.”48

The Return of Banned Genres

Official cultural policy made its first timid steps toward the acceptance of jazz after Stalin’s death. This tendency continued after 1956, although it did not lead to the support of “decent” jazz smoothly. Jazz and other practically banned forms, genres, and products of Western culture were regarded as destructive and decadent. As a consequence of the anti-jazz campaign, which began as early as 1946 in the Soviet Union, many jazz musicians were sent to labor camps. Jazz was condemned as a tool of dehumanization, the very opposite of a form of art that was culturally valuable, and even a weapon of American imperialism, since it allegedly killed human feelings and thoughts therefore turned the individual into a cog-wheel of American war machinery. In Hungary, popular jazz melodies did not entirely disappear. Some of them were still played at bars. A circular letter of the Union of Working Youth (Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, or DISZ) proves that even the communist youth organization had to make concessions to the interests of youngsters: some American songs (“In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”) were even accepted in DISZ clubs.49

The shift in jazz policy in the Soviet bloc began in 1953. Jazz was also included in radio programs, and more and more jazz hits were played in bars and clubs. New ideological explanations were given: the roots of the genre allegedly were found in folk music, jazz was understood as the music of the American black population, so it was the music of the oppressed.50 Jazz of course remained part of the cultural palate after 1956. The magazine Rádióújság recommended the music of the American Gerry Mulligan sextet for listeners who “had been denied the opportunity to form their own opinions,” and it criticized the earlier “narrow-minded” and “hard-shell” cultural policy.51 However, jazz had deeper roots—and larger audiences—in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Jazz bands from these two countries took part in some of the biggest jazz concerts of 1957, too. In July, Polish Hot Jazz performed in Budapest, followed by the Karel Vlach Orchestra from Prague in September and the American Hot Shots in January 1958.52

When Népszabadság emphasized that Elisabeth Charles, the Scottish singer of Hot Jazz, was an extraordinary example of “true jazz singing without unnecessary writhing or false, external tools,” it targeted some spontaneous tendencies in Budapest bars. A phenomenon that the Metropolitan Council had already detected between 1953 and 1955 began to return to the places of entertainment: “The bands, seeing the lack of orientation, thought everything is possible, and they can smuggle American songs into their shows without any restriction. Moreover, they tried to score and perform the Hungarian songs in Western styles.”53 “Wildings,” as this performance style was called, also appeared after 1956, although cultural policy demanded an aesthetic jazz style without wild improvisation. The embrace of official jazz was set back by the events of the international jazz festival in Budapest in the summer of 1958, when some of the groups and members of the audience did a “dervish St. Vitus’s dance’: “some of the youngsters in the hall forgot themselves, and forgot about their fellows, and they improvised a turbulent, wild fury under the rock and roll music,” lamented the party daily, rebuking both the participants and the organizers.54

Rock, or as it was often called beat, was only fostered by the Hungarian Young Communist League (Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség, KISZ) around 1964, after a comprehensive survey on youth pastimes. From this point on, efforts were made to shepherd the “guitar bands” within the walls of KISZ clubs and houses of culture. However, 1956/57 was still a time of reluctance, even in the West. In addition to generational conflicts, this reluctance was nourished by the century-long opposition of highbrow and lowbrow culture,55 and also the averseness of European elites to Americanization.56 Nonetheless, in Western Europe Bill Haley’s and Elvis Presley’s music made its way through, while cultural mass production quickly exploited the new craze in the pursuit of its material interests. Expresso Bongo, a 1958 musical by Wolf Mankowitz (which was also performed in Hungary in 1963), showed this process from a critical perspective, though it was in fact a successful part of the same music industry at the time.

At the level of official cultural policy, in the mid-1950s the typical attitude toward rock and roll music was rigid rejection, so it was rather surprising that rock and roll was mentioned in a relatively gentle, almost positive context after November 1956. In January 1957, Hungarian journalists started to introduce the greatest Western stars to the Hungarian public, and they left behind the usual pejorative insinuations. József Vető’s report from Vienna described the so-called “Halbstarke” (rock hooligans) almost as waggish music fans, who were called “jampec” in Hungary, which meant a kind of swaggering dandy. Vető emphasized the irresistible ancient power of the music, a notion that would only return in the second half of the 1960s: “Even if I do think hard, I cannot remember a tune, one cannot memorize even a tune from this music, but one still feels saturated with it, and one feels that one must follow the astoundingly inflammatory rhythm.”57 He even wrote appreciatively of how the Austrian audience of the Bill Haley film Rock Around the Clock had stomped, clapped, whistled, and stood up to dance in the projection room. After the film, he was not looking for broken shop windows, but rather noticed that “cheerfulness rings through the neighborhood around the cinema, hundreds, even thousands of people came out dancing in the streets.”58 Magyar Ifjúság also described rock and roll as “thrilling” music in its portrait of Elvis Presley. However, the article downgraded the music of the American idol. The author was rather sympathetic with the enthusiastic youth, and he reminded members of the older generations that they had had their own craze, which also had been intolerable as far as their parents had been concerned.59 Moreover, the rhythms of Elvis also could be heard on the radio thanks to the journalist Kitty Havas, who did reports during the New York trip of the Hungarian UN-delegation and purchased some trendy records, among them Elvis and Harry Belafonte, to be broadcast over the Hungarian Radio in June.60

In addition to popular music, genres of the visual arts that had long disappeared from public spaces were also revived. In the spring of 1957, the lovers of fine arts (some 71,000 people),61 could enjoy a peculiar experience. After eight years, works of abstract art were displayed again in an exhibition called the Spring Salon. Officially it was not organized by the ministry, and four juries of artists made selections from the materials that had been submitted. One of the juries was assigned to assess abstract works by artists led by Dezső Korniss, who had been expelled from the university in 1948 and had worked with little hope of ever having any public exposure until 1956. A separate room was arranged for abstract pieces, among them Miska, a painting by Korniss. It depicted a Hungarian peasant constructed out of geometric shapes. It was not a non-figurative painting in the narrow sense, much like those of Picasso, but the vision of the half and full oval and round plane figures was met with such aversion that Péter Rényi, deputy editor-in-chief at Népszabadság could quote disparaging remarks from the guest book: “If artistic freedom means Miska and co., then Révai was right.”62

Most critics welcomed the initiative, but did not argue in favor of the equality of abstract or “naturalist” styles. Rather, they espoused the idea also prevalent in other cultural spheres like literature and book publishing, according to which any denial of exposure to the public will only lead to overvaluation of undesirable tendencies.

However, even those who were receptive to the exhibition and its aims could not help noticing that politics—and “socialist realism”—had almost disappeared. Anna Oelmacher wrote on behalf of those criticizing the government from the left in Élet és Irodalom. This group held the plethora of neutral topics and the absolute lack of political commitment as the greatest problem. But from Oelmacher’s view, it was seen as anti-socialism, revisionism, and conscious resistance. “The Spring Salon is a manifestation of petty bourgeois revisionism in the fine arts. [It is an expression of] anarchist freedom that claims independence from the foundations and motion of society.”63

She also played the “national card,” underscoring that deniers of forced Sovietization were adopting foreign (Western) patterns: “But today people claim to be modern who operate with esoteric shapes. And people who kept inciting against Soviet patterns, why have not they turned to our lively and still vibrant traditions, and why make our ‘most modern’ ones outworn Bauhaus art, French surrealism, Dutch constructivism, etc.?” The author representing the platform of Révai jumped to general conclusions from the return of “withered streams”: the call for freedom in art is the denial of party control and socialist cultural policy. In this debate, both sides often referred to the Hundred Flowers Campaign of Mao Zedong, launched in May 1956. It could serve as an argument for openness; it was the idea behind the decisions of the four juries of the Spring Salon, which embraced the idea of separate salons for different streams. And this was the formula used by the leftist equation of artistic freedom with libertinage, denial of party control as an outcry against resistance and revisionism. In their metaphors, they referred to gardens instead of meadows of wildflowers: “Let it be ten or twenty salons, flowers would grow wild without a careful gardener.”64 Or as Károly Kiss, secretary of the Central Committee of the HSWP put it in the parliament: “Now they say we should let all flowers bloom and all birds sing, following the example of our Chinese comrades. Our party agrees with the Chinese comrades that all nice, useful, and odorous flowers can bloom, except for poppy flowers. And our party is supportive if all songbirds with a good voice sing, but harmony demands the silencing of ‘good-birds.’”65 Journalist and former minister of information Ernő Mihályfi, summarizing the debate in Élet és Irodalom, suggested that the policies that might be appropriate in Chinese environment were not applicable in post-(counter)revolutionary Hungary, because the Spring Salon had dredged up streams of thought and art that had already been transcended: “So it is not about deciding the future of newly emerging streams and styles, but tested and well-known old weeds had come to light.”66

However, the standpoint of the government remained unclear for contemporary actors. The hardline supporters of the government would have expected greater severity and ideological consistency. However, the cultural policy of the post-1956 communist government directed by György Aczél opted for a more open cultural life and the continuation of the de-Stalinization policies in culture. Paradoxically, the goal of this cultural opening up was to reestablish and strengthen the party’s authority and position in cultural life. This complicated situation provided the background for the relaunch of the monthly literary journal Nagyvilág which mediated contemporary Western high culture, as well as for the successful negotiations with Hollywood and the approval of Spring Salon, the forum in which contemporary Western-influenced works of the fine arts were exhibited. In this regard, even official cultural policy tried to represent itself as resistance to the former Stalinist practices. Promoting the transfer of Western culture could be understood as a defense of the de-Stalinization process in culture.

Decision makers on the intermediary levels (at editorial boards, theater offices, organizing committees etc.) found themselves in a situation in which they could try to shape the cultural processes in Hungary. Their contributions were inevitable in the selection, promotion, and publishing of works of Western arts and culture. However, while on the one hand accepting one of these roles after November 1956 was tantamount to an acknowledgement of the Kádár government, on the other hand the people who were in these positions were able to work to ensure the survival of the de-Stalinization tendency and the preservation of some degree of openness. This was important, since it was not clear at all whether or not the Kádár regime would (be able to) continue in this direction. Many of them were against a re-Stalinization process in culture and resisted a supposed move away from the result of de-Stalinization. In other words, they worked against attempts by the regime to slow the relatively still narrow process of cultural openness.

In this mix-up, earlier displaced and allegedly “transcended” contents returned, both from the “bourgeois past” of national culture and the “bourgeois present” of the West. In this regard, Western culture, which was to some extent readmitted after 1953 and then not rejected by the Kádár government, could serve a different role from the place it had been given as a subservient form of culture in the controlled de-Stalinization process. What was received from Western culture was far from being entirely “progressive.” Re-opened channels of transfer created a situation in which some kinds of counterculture could be nourished. This counterculture included ideological and artistic streams alien to Marxism, such as existentialism and abstract art, as well as the spread of popular mass culture.

 

Bibliography

Brugge, Peter. “Swinging Sixties Made in Czechoslovakia: The Adaptation of Western Impulses in Czechoslovak Youth Culture.” In 1968: České křižovatky evropských dějin, edited by Ivan Šedivý, Jan Němeček, Jiří Kocian, and Oldřich Tůma, 143–55. Prague: ÚSD, 2011.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan, a dzsungel fia [Tarzan of the Apes]. Budapest: Budapesti Lapnyomda, 1956.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan visszatérése [The Return of Tarzan]. Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó, 1957.

Cseh, Gergő Bendegúz, Melinda Kalmár, and Edit Pór, eds. Zárt, bizalmas, számozott: Tájékoztatáspolitika és cenzúra 1956–1963 [Closed, confidential, numbered: information policy and censorship 1956–1963]. Budapest: Osiris, 1999.

Kardos, László. “Vihar után” [After the storm]. Nagyvilág 2, no. 1 (1957): 3–4.

Kafka, Franz. A kastély [The castle]. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1964.

Lukács, György. “Magyar irodalom – világirodalom” [Hungarian literature – World literature]. Nagyvilág 1, no. 1 (1956): 3–5.

Magyar Statisztikai Évkönyv 1954–1960. [Hungarian statistical yearbook 1954–1960].

Murányi, Gábor. “A magyar sajtó története 1948-tól 1988-ig” [The history of the Hungarian press from 1948 to 1988]. In György Kókay, Géza Buzinkay, and Gábor Murányi. A magyar sajtó története [The history of the Hungarian press], 201–29. Budapest: MÚOSZ, 1994.

Némethné Vágyi, Karola, and Károly Urbán, eds. A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt ideiglenes vezető testületeinek jegyzőkönyvei II [Records of the temporary leading bodies of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party II]. Budapest: InteraRt., 1993.

Poiger, Uta G. “Rock ’n’ Roll, Female Sexuality and the Cold War Battle over German Identites.” The Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (1996): 579–83.

Révész, Sándor. Egyetlen élet: Gimes Miklós története [One single life: The story of Miklós Gimes]. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet–Sík Kiadó, 1999.

Ryback, Timothy W. Rock around the Block: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Sipos, Levente. “A Népszabadság letiltott cikke 1956 novemberében” [The banned article of Népszabadság in November 1956]. Múltunk 4, no. 1 (1992): 131–44.

Standeisky, Éva. Az írók és a hatalom 1956–1963 [The writers and the power 1956–1963]. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1996.

Szigethy, Gábor. “Vilcsi” [Vilcsi]. Kortárs 4 (2014). Accessed June 6, 2016. http://www.kortarsonline.hu/2014/04/arch-vilcsi/23285.

Szobotka, Tibor. “Kafka kettős világa” [The dual world of Kafka]. Filozófiai közlemények 1–2 (1963): 87–112.

 

Phantom Voices from the Past: Memory of the 1956 Revolution and Hungarian Audiences of Radio Free Europe

Gábor Danyi

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

 

Following the short period of consolidation under János Kádár in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 revolution, expressions of the legacy and memory of the uprising were no longer permitted in the public sphere and had to be confined to the private sphere. The activity of émigré actors and institutions, including the broadcasts of Western radio stations, played a crucial role in sustaining the memory and the mentality of the revolution. In 1986, thirty years after the national trauma of 1956, Radio Free Europe broadcasted an array of programs commemorating the revolution, while the official socialist media in Hungary contended again that what had happened in 1956 had been a counterrevolution. This study primarily investigates two questions. Firstly, it casts light on the importance of the RFE’s archival machinery, which recorded on magnetic tape the broadcasts of the Hungarian radio stations during the revolution in 1956. Sharing these audio-documents with audiences 30 years later, RFE could replay the revolution, significantly strengthening the interpretation of the events as a revolution. The idiosyncratic voices of the key figures of the revolution guaranteed the authenticity of the commemoration programs even for members of the younger generation among the audiences. Secondly, this study sheds light on the counter-cultural practices through which listeners tried to reconstruct the “body” of the “specters” of the suppressed cultural heritage and eliminate the asymmetry between the radio’s accessible voice and its non-accessible physical vehicle.

Keywords: communist historical representation, documentary programs, authenticity, “presence effects,” samizdat, radizdat, magnitizdat, counter-cultural practices

 

“October 23 passed in such utter silence that people did not even dare mention the date,”1 wrote a listener to Radio Free Europe on the 10th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. According to this source, all traces of the “experience of togetherness forged by the revolution had been broken by then.”2 This was one of the consequences of the brutally violent policies carried out by János Kádár’s new regime, which imposed the Party’s official interpretation of counterrevolution on society following intervention by Soviet forces on November 4th. Expressions of the suppressed memory and mentality of the 1956 Revolution were no longer possible in the public sphere and had to be confined to the private sphere, creating a kind of “widespread national oblivion.”3 Three decades later, however, expressions of an enduring collective memory of the revolution began to appear, and they came to play an important role in undermining the legitimacy of the one-party state.

While the narrative of the “counterrevolution” served as a means of legitimizing Kádár’s regime, any attempt to cultivate the memory of the 1956 Revolution belonged to the history of resistance. This history of political or artistic resistance not only included sporadic domestic manifestations originating from personal memory, but also the activity of the democratic opposition, present as of the late 1970s. The activity of émigré actors and institutions―including broadcasts from Western radio stations and émigré newspapers published abroad, but still resonating in Hungary―should also be taken into account, as they played a crucial role in counterbalancing the predominance of socialist propaganda by presenting an interpretation of the October events as a revolution.4

In the West, stations such as Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the BBC regularly commemorated the revolution in Hungarian-language broadcasts transmitted from the far side of the Iron Curtain. “Even as we keep trying to forget the October events, we were pleased to listen to a proper commemoration of this national event,”5 wrote the previously cited listener to RFE in 1966. Twenty years later, on the 30th anniversary, between July 1 and December 31, 1986 a wide repertoire of commemorative programs was broadcast concerning the background, the events, and the aftermath of the 1956 Revolution.6

Naturally, RFE’s commemorative programs ran parallel to those aired in the socialist mass media, so listeners had no choice but to question the authenticity of these contradictory sources. In 1986, authenticity was a crucial question, because the audiences for all of these commemorations included not only the generation which witnessed the events, but members of younger generations as well, i.e. people with no personal memories of 1956. This study investigates the struggle over interpretations of 1956’s meaning within the framework of the attempts made by the two most important agents, the socialist mass media and RFE, to establish the authenticity of their own commemorations.

By the time of the 30th anniversary of 1956 in 1986, a struggle had begun for Kádár’s position as general secretary, and a period of economic stagnation was engendering increased expectations by society at large. In this regard, how the past surrounding 1956 was treated became a kind of “litmus test”7 for the Party’s ability to change and provide effective reforms. The question of whether 1956 could be given a new, official interpretation therefore became a key issue in Hungary.

“History belongs entirely to us”: The 30th Anniversary of 1956 in Official Socialist Media

While in the autumn of 1985 it may have seemed that the official interpretation of 1956 had shifted just in time for the 30th anniversary,8 events actually took another direction. At the 13th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP), János Berecz was appointed Secretary of the Central Committee and Chief of the Agitprop Committee. The neo-dogmatic cultural policies of Berecz, who had been one of the major voices in the counterrevolutionary narrative,9 left their mark on the commemoration activities surrounding the 30th anniversary.

The aim to represent and again retell what had happened in the dramatic days of late October was motivated by at least two factors. Firstly, Berecz was attempting to gain power by extending Kádár’s offer one more time. This offer to Hungarian society was a promise to raise the standards of living in exchange for acceptance of the communist political system. Secondly, the socialist organs were conscious of the increase in activity by émigré organizations and their intensive relationships with Hungary’s internal opposition, which was eager to rehabilitate 1956 as a revolution. The Agitprop Committee therefore decided to counterbalance the effects of Western “propaganda” and unveil its alleged falsifications by cementing the official counterrevolutionary narrative. Thus, Hungary’s official commemoration of the revolution’s 30th anniversary resulted in propaganda activity that was more dogmatic in approach compared to that experienced five years before.

According to a statement by the Agitprop Committee made in March, 1986, “the propaganda connected to the 30th anniversary [had to] emphasize the unchanged, constant interpretation.”10 On November 4, 1986, at the “great celebration” of both the crushed counterrevolution and the establishment of Kádár’s counter-government, Berecz made the following statement in his speech: “Today there is no need to evaluate the events of 1956 and the processes that led to it in any other way than we did then, at the end of 1956.”11

Berecz was referring to the party resolution issued on December 5, 1956, according to which the October events could only be classified as a total “counterrevolution.”12 The resolution confirmed that the counterrevolutionary forces had consisted of reactionaries―former land-owners, Horthy-fascists, etc.―aiming to crush socialist achievements and restore the partially capitalist, partially feudal system of an earlier era. The resolution stated that even if the majority of those who participated in the events had been honest socialist patriots, they inevitably had aided the counterrevolution. This was the authoritative interpretation held by the ideology of the Kádár regime over the course of the next three decades.

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary, in the official socialist media dominated by this neo-dogmatic cultural policy, several programs, articles, and reminiscences focused on the October events. Of these, the documentary series entitled Velünk élő történelem [Our living history], the chief editor of which was Berecz, reached the widest audience.13 The series was evidence of a search for a new narrative form and technological pathways that would convince society of the regime’s interpretation of 1956. On the one hand, the first three episodes each had the same form. Specifically, they all conjured the history of the counterrevolution by means of “talking-head” interviews with witnesses of the events at the time. The series therefore opened up the emotional dimensions of the counterrevolution by presenting personal testimonies.

The six episodes of Velünk élő történelem were aired on Hungarian Television beginning in the middle of October.14 On the day after the airing of the first episode, Pál Geszti, the cultural editor of the daily newspaper Magyar Hírlap, published an article about the series. This article’s aim was to smooth out the dissimilarities between this official representation of events and personal experiences of the history itself. For Geszti, it was clear that the experiences witnessed by the generation of the time did not correspond to the meanings fashioned in the official representations. “Yesterday evening,” he wrote, “the first episode shown on television certainly generated as many reactions, questions, memories, and emotions as there were viewers.” Geszti attempted to eliminate contradictions surrounding the episode’s reception by comparing a “complex, scientific, essential” representation of history to the contingency of lived history and personal experiences. “The individual experience is always contingent and depends on chance.” Therefore, “there is no certainty that what was lived by XY as a witness or a participant really represented (some kind of) truth.”15 Velünk élő történelem had to base its authenticity on the relationship between the official truth of the counterrevolution and a minority of thoroughly sifted, personal memories.

The director of the series, Mihály Mátray, divided the roughly one hundred individuals appearing on screen into two groups: the first included witnesses and 1956 participants, and the second consisted of historians presenting nothing beyond the results of their historical research.16 Berecz was part of this latter group, in the role of historian. Ervin Hollós, the most qualified expert on the counterrevolution and the author of several propaganda books, was also featured. Hollós’s objectivity, however, can be seriously questioned. As of April, 1957, in his role as deputy head and then chief of the sub-department for counterintelligence against internal reaction in the Ministry of Interior, Hollós took an active part in the retaliatory measures taken against alleged participants in the revolution.17 The backbone of the narratives consisted of reminiscences by the political elite of the Kádár regime. The reflections uttered by Antal Apró, György Marosán, Valéria Benke, and Béla Biszku smoothly fitted into the “complex, scientific” picture of the counterrevolution, since these agents were among those who actively shaped the official genesis myth of the Kádár era. By simultaneously presenting reminiscences of others, including radio operators, workers’ militiamen, and university students, the series aimed to demonstrate that the counterrevolutionary narrative created and nurtured by a narrow political elite was actually “true” on the level of widespread social experience.

The first three episodes of Velünk élő történelem primarily illustrated the course of counterrevolutionary violence, depicting the process leading from the peaceful demonstration on October 23 to the siege of the headquarters of the Hungarian Radio and the tumultuous brutality committed by the counterrevolutionary rabble on Köztársaság [Republic] Square on October 30. When depicting how events unfolded at Köztársaság Square, the tale of violence came to a crescendo. From as early as November, 1956, the tragic and undoubtedly brutally violent siege of the Party house formed the hub of the image projected by the Kádár-regime concerning how events had occurred.18 Köztársaság Square was used as the most obvious evidence in support of the official characterization of events as an example of a counterrevolution and raging white terror. László Laboda, a member of Workers’ Council in Diósgyőr, offered the following recollection:

 

Another trauma in my life was that […] next to the town hall of Ózd two men were hanging upside down, they had been… brutally stabbed with a pitchfork or I don’t know what kind of tool, their clothes had been torn off, they were hanging, covered in blood. It is not possible to forget that, even if one were to live a hundred years.19

 

The dramatic atmosphere of this scene was guaranteed by the piercing sounds of a violin in the background and the sharply-focused camera shot which closed in on Laboda’s face while he was relaying the bloody details.

According to Velünk élő történelem, in contrast to the “passive route” taken by Imre Nagy in stemming the tide of the brutal counterrevolution, the members of the Kádárist political elite had been actively searching for the right solution. György Marosán repeatedly swore that—had it been given in time—the command to fire would have crushed the counterrevolution. This particular opinion from the dogmatic politician, however, was not his reminiscence of the past so much as it was a revitalization of the offer of the Kádár regime and a justification of the brutal retaliations. According to the documentary series, Kádár’s counter-government, which was set up on November 4, provided the “real turn.” The last two episodes related the story of how society’s trust had been gained by the Revolutionary Workers’ Peasants’ Government and how socialist Hungary had been renewed.

In the actual political context of 1986, the configurations of “continuity” and “resumption” gained new meaning. In one of his articles, Berecz underscored the notion that, “as a consequence of the traditions of the Hungarian revolutionary labor movement, by necessity there were people who have accepted the break with the mistakes of the previous years, and meanwhile the continuity and the renewal in socialism.”20 Berecz summoned the last two nouns as a means of mobilizing the Party’s potential to resolve the actual upcoming problems. “Our Party has already many times given examples of this renewal”; “this time, the task ahead of us is to find new and necessary answers for any new and unresolved problems in society.”21 Continuity―in the sense of expropriating the meaning of history―had to express the absolute right to do this: “the character of continuity is that history belongs entirely to us, together with its successes, its failures, and their lessons.”22

The makers of the series did not properly assess the risks involved in demonstrating this absolute control over history by means of presenting the personal memories of the political elite. In Velünk élő történelem, the October events were represented within the framework of personal recollections, thereby implying that the reminiscences of the political elite were comparable to the memories of the television audiences. Velünk élő történelem definitely met with resistance on the part of viewers who remembered the events of 1956 differently. Imprisoned for counterrevolutionary activity at the end of 1956, Imre Simonyi listened to RFE’s commemorative programs while also viewing Velünk élő történelem. While Simonyi rated the RFE programs as “incredibly good,” the performance given by Marosán on television had him alternating between wild laughter and gripping the arms of his chair until his knuckles turned white.23

Thus, Velünk élő történelem was not received entirely according to the official plan. This counter-productivity was due not only to the propagandistic nature of the series. In this period of increasing political-economic crisis and an emerging discussion among different dissident groups in Hungary, the reiteration of the old offer of the Kádár regime came off as anachronistic. Furthermore, if the issue of 1956 was the “litmus test” of the Party’s ability to change, this dogmatic restoration of the official interpretation of 1956 partially undermined any attempt by the Party to project an image of reform. The events held in memory of the 30th anniversary completely disappointed a society eagerly awaiting comprehensive reforms that were expected to offer a way out of a stagnating situation. In consequence, many people began looking for alternative ideas and information, while many more became interested in learning more about what had actually happened in 1956.24

Radio Free Europe and Warrants of Authenticity

In the aftermath of the 1956 Revolution, socialist propaganda made serious accusations against RFE, essentially laying blame for the tragic events on the radio station. These charges included statements that―among other transgressions―RFE had urged Hungarians to fight the Soviet army, promised Western assistance, and provoked Soviet intervention.25 While admittedly overestimating the radio’s role, socialist propaganda indirectly suggested that Western assistance was a vain hope and communism was there to stay. At the same time, “these historic events made clear both the importance and the responsibility of [RFE], and also proved that this venture would not be merely a temporary one.”26 Consequentially, RFE was forced to analyze and reorganize its attitudes concerning both program policies and its practices of information acquisition, including research and archival work.27 After 1956, RFE also undertook the mission of preserving the memory of the revolution, and during the decades of the Kádár regime it regularly broadcasted programs commemorating 1956.

Considering the reception of these programs, very limited feedback is available in the so-called “Information Items” gathered at RFE’s Munich headquarters as a means of reducing the state of isolation in which the radio station found itself regarding information coming from the Eastern bloc. These documents were generally based on correspondence conducted with anonymous sources located within the bloc or interviews provided by Eastern emigrants and defectors. Their reliability and credibility were carefully checked by various filtering systems. Even if the items “later proved to be reliable historical data,” they nonetheless must be interpreted with a due degree of circumspection, since they may be the products of an interview situation filled with suspicion and ruled by certain sets of presumptions.28 Concerning feedback provided by listeners on the RFE commemorative programs, another source of evidence is also available: the transcripts of messages recorded by the radio’s answering machine in the second half of the 1980s.

Set up in 1985, the answering machine29 was intended to modernize the communication channel between RFE and its audiences, while also replacing correspondence. The answering machine recorded listeners’ calls and messages in two-minute intervals, around the clock, 24 hours a day. While transcripts of the calls were handed to editors, the most important and relevant messages and questions were answered every week during a ten-minute long program entitled Hallgatók Fóruma [Listeners’ forum].30 In comparison to the items, these telephone call transcripts have three advantages. Firstly, listeners called the answering machine of their own volition, hence the suspicion and presumptions that could eventually pervade interview situations31 were lacking. Secondly, the transcripts―appended with additional comments only in extreme cases―preserved the listeners’ views without any kind of distortion or condensing. Finally, in contrast to the anonymous reports found in the Items, in certain and limited cases it was possible to identify the callers; it is, however, true, that those contacting the RFE from within the bloc characteristically used code names.

Hungarian listeners usually called the answering machine service in order to comment on the programs, request that broadcasts be repeated, complain about the signal’s frequently bad quality, share jokes on the current political situation, etc. In the case of important public affairs―such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, demonstrations against the Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros Waterworks, and the soccer match loss of 6:0 against the Soviets at the 1986 World Cup―the number of calls increased. In autumn, 1986, many callers discussed the merits of RFE programs commemorating the Hungarian revolution: “Great work, boys, great work, girls. I cannot say anything else. I haven’t heard for 30 years […] such a beautiful and touching […] commemoration. If the Hungarian soccer team had played like this, the net of the Soviets would have been worn out.”32

Another listener left the following message:

 

First of all, I would like to say thank you for the carefully compiled documentary program which was broadcast these days on the occasion of the freedom fight. I myself, who am over 60 years old, took part in the 1956 events, and I can testify that the documentary is trustworthy down to its smallest detail.33

Naturally, one could cite additional examples of this kind of feedback. In these comments, of the RFE’s rich selection of commemorative programs, the documentary programs edited by László Kasza (entitled Thirteen Days of the Revolution and Freedom Fight and The Decline of Freedom: The History of Twelve Days) was mentioned the most frequently. Following in the footsteps of previous RFE broadcasts,34 these two programs contained a chronological examination of the events leading to the victory of the revolution, piecing this historical episode together day by day. This was then followed by the history of the fight for freedom against Soviet intervention. These programs generally consisted of a well-edited montage of audio-recordings dating from the period of the revolution, as well as recollections by witnesses.

As a very characteristic feature of the feedback, listeners emphasized the role of the original audio-documents. “I spoke of this program to several acquaintances, and it was the general opinion that such programs are very necessary―with the help of original sound recordings―to refute the official lies that distort the past.”35 In 1986, in the Hallgatók Fóruma, some opinions were broadcast which, like the denouncements made by socialist propaganda, accused the radio of vulgar rabble-rousing. On the following day, many listeners called the answering machine to deny these charges indignantly. One such caller offered the following argument:

 

Did these listeners actually listen to the documentary serial or are they deaf? All right, if we want, we can give credence to László Kasza, if we don’t want to, we don’t have to. But I must ask whether these 50-minute programs consisted of only the voice of László Kasza? Like hell! They were filled with conclusive evidence, since they evoked programs broadcast at the time by Radio Free Kossuth.36

 

It is worth noting that RFE possessed the most complete archival collection of broadcasts made in Hungary at the time of the revolution. In addition to other techniques used to acquire information, RFE “closely followed the events in the so-called ‘target-countries’ by listening to and recording the official radio broadcasts coming through the air from the communist world.”37 During the revolution, the Hungarian Desk’s attention was focused entirely on the events unfolding in Hungary. At the time, Radio (Free) Kossuth and an increasing number of amateur, independent radio stations served as the main source of information. Throughout each day of the revolution, their broadcasts were being recorded on magnetic tape by RFE’s archival machinery. As a result, a unique collection of historical archives was created that served as a source of original audio-documents to be broadcast again and again into Hungary during Kádár’s regime.

To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, the various types of technological apparatuses used to record, store and replay sound allow phantoms from the past to come back and haunt us,38 thereby making an apparently absent entity present again. “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture,”39 writes Friedrich Kittler. When replayed thirty years later, the audio-inserts originally recorded in 1956 resulted in the resurrection of both the martyrs of the revolution and the apparently dead revolution. When mapping this resurrection, this study turns to the thesis of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, an author mostly interested in the “presentification of past worlds, that is the techniques that produce the impression (or, rather, the illusion) that worlds of the past can become tangible again.”40 Gumbrecht―while “challeng[ing] a broadly institutionalized tradition according to which interpretations, that is, the identification and/or attribution of meaning, is […] the exclusive core practice […] of the humanities”41―suggests that we “conceive of aesthetic experience as an oscillation (and sometimes as an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’.”42 When discussing the “production of presence,” Gumbrecht focuses on the materialities of communication. According to his definition, “to speak of ‘the production of presence’ implies that the (spatial) tangibility effect coming from the communication media is subjected, in space, to movement of greater or lesser proximity, and of greater or lesser intensity.”43 When transmitting the memory of the revolution, the replayed original audio-recordings brought about these “presence effects,” thereby guaranteeing a high level of proximity and intensity, i.e., the “touching on the bodies” of listeners. Thus, the semantics of the RFE commemorative programs originated from the physical effects generating the illusion of presence. Divided by the generation gap into either witnesses or people with no personal memories of the revolution, listener groups perceived the “presence effects” according to different constellations.

First of all, throughout the 1986 commemorative programs, the “scene of radio listening”44 from 1956 was repeated, though it transmitted a different experience. In the 1950s, listeners had to become accustomed to the jamming against “enemy radio stations.” Jamming, however―as István Rév described the situation―“did not simply aim to make the enemy broadcasts inaudible.” Rather, “the noise also established and confirmed the presence of the Communist authorities in the air, and thus in the private sphere [...] constantly remind[ing] the listener of the continuous surveillance.”45 When all jamming facilities were closed down on October 24, 1956, the lack of the deliberately generated noise transmitted a clear message: “We [the West] are here, and they [the Communists or the Soviets] have gone.”46 In this historic moment, media technology supported the collective imagination in the face of mere reality. Thirty years later, when listening to the original recordings, the same voices emerged from the same “box.” Conversely, in contrast to the original “scene of listening,” the replayed recordings came to represent quite the opposite meaning. On the one hand, the shredded, bad quality of the recordings underscored the fragility of traces of memory concerning the revolution. On the other hand, the majority of listeners―as a consequence of their social conditioning―attributed the bad reception not to atmospheric noise, but to the jamming that had actually been halted in 1972.47 Thus, the bad quality of the commemorative programs broadcasting original recordings once again signaled the presence of the repressive Communist authorities, albeit inadvertently.

Secondly, “reviving the already dim recollection with original recordings”48 also meant that the “scene of radio listening” was once more occupied by the main players in the revolution, brought back to life both through recordings and personal recollections. The interconnection between the replayed recordings and the stimulated development of memories offered the experience of reliving the events of the revolution all over again. One person, who accepted the broadcast programs as representations of her own memories, left the following message:

 

In 1956, I was a student in my first year at the University of Horticulture. On [October] 23, I was present at the general assembly at the Technical University, and afterward I was everywhere, wherever it was possible, until November 4. Now, as I listen to your reminiscences, I am reliving those minutes again and [I testify to] the credibility of the witness, declaring with absolute faith that everything happened exactly the way it was related. God bless you for these true words and for keeping the memory of the revolution alive.49

 

The program’s authenticity was based on the relationship between personal recollection and original recordings, which mutually legitimized each other. The “credibility of the witness” included the compatibility between these different perspectives: “those who listened to it were convinced that it was arranged by an editor who had been an eye-witness of the events in 1956.”50

In the case of the younger generation, the authenticity of these programs was established through recognition of the idiosyncratic nature of the recorded voices. Here, the reception process was situated within an acousmatic situation, since the proper source of the sound coming from the radio remained unseen.51 Listeners were therefore forced to confront both the phantom character of the voice as well as the unlocalizable character of the missing body. Consequently, the problem of identifying the two also arose. The rupture resulting from the separation of the voice from the body, however, was not complete, even in the cases of voices replayed in several transposals. The tone, the pitch and the volume of the speech sound attests to the build of the body which becomes the “organon” of the announcement.52 Following this train of thought, the speech sound of the revolutionary players―after being separated onto storage devices and transmission media―gave the impression that it was still permeated by the traces of the body. In other words, the recordings allowed listeners to recognize idiosyncratic voices belonging to identifiable bodies.

A listener who at the time of the revolution was eighteen months old referred to the idiosyncrasy of the voices coming from the radio. In certain cases―such as that of the well-known voice of the Communist Secretary―he could identify the speech sound based on his own experiences: “The audio-documents resembled a real experience for me, like the radio speeches of Imre Nagy or the radio speech of János Kádár, with the promises that he has not kept. If I had not heard it from his own mouth, I would have not believed it, really.”53 For the younger generation, this type of identification could verify the authenticity of other documents as well.

This authenticity was crucial since the RFE commemorative programs drew on many historical sources that had been silenced by the one-party state system. In April, 1986, a listener thought it high time to wash Kádár’s dirty linen in public, especially for the sake of the younger generation.54 This listener’s request was granted.55 In Kasza’s program, Kádár’s speech―originally broadcast on November 1, 1956 by Radio Free Kossuth―was replayed. While also informing the public of the establishment of the new party, MSZMP, this speech included Kádár’s statement describing the events as “the people’s glorious uprising.”56 This document, which contradicted the official stance later adopted by Kádár as the head of the regime and thus raised significant questions concerning his character, was fully reviewed in the program.

The bad quality of the recording, however, meant that only a limited part of the tape could actually be replayed; the rest of the speech had to be read aloud.57 This excerpt was only a few seconds long and unfortunately did not contain the words “glorious uprising.” In spite of this technical difficulty, the recording still possessed the power to authenticate the essential standpoint of the program. The recording itself can be compared with an earlier published version of the speech found in the émigré journal Magyar Füzetek in 1981.58 The transcript of the speech was accompanied by the reproduced title page of Népszabadság―the newspaper in which the speech was originally published―bearing the date November 2, 1956. This reproduction served as a trace of the primary inscription of the actual events, a small, but significant detail that escaped the purges of the memory policies of the Kádár regime. The mere presence of the otherwise illegible reproduction was to verify the entire transcript of the text. This case of “iconic verification” can be compared to the “acoustic verification” accomplished through the partial replay of a recording that created an aura of authenticity for the entire broadcast. Thus, “presence effects” worked to strengthen “meaning effects” in the sense that perception of the physical characteristics of the original documents pervaded the semantic dimension of their reception.

Listeners could not avoid the influence of the intense interplay between “presence effects” and “meaning effects.” One of them swore never to forget the recording of Rákóczi Station broadcasting from the city of Sztálinváros59 in the days of Soviet intervention. In his call to the answering machine he retold what he had heard: “»This is Rákóczi Station, Hungary, this is Rákóczi Station, Hungary! Free Europe, Munich, Free Europe, Munich! Help us, help us! Soviets have marched into Dunapentele. They are firing on our city. We beg you, help us, help us!« Believe me, I am not a sentimental man, but my eyes filled with tears.”60

In the case of both generations, the narratives of the revolution were created according to the listeners’ own past, “from within, not imported or imposed from without.”61 There was ample evidence attesting to their experiences of the revolution, which for them was historically verifiable and possessed great power to inspire.62 This was also reflected in the counter-cultural practices which accompanied the act of listening to Western radio stations, which from the socialist perspective represented the “enemy.”

The Phantom Voice and the Body of the Text

In October, 1985, an elderly woman left a message on the RFE’s answering machine. Her story was both typical and yet unique.

 

Good evening. Actually, I have been listening to the program by György Faludy on the radio. It recalls very, very beautiful memories of mine, because when I was young, we typed his poems and gave them to one another as a big, big present… […] I had quite a huge collection, but unfortunately my whole apartment burned down in 1956. I lived at the corner of Ferenc Avenue and Üllői Street. […] Well, these treasures of mine ceased to exist. How could I get access to the entire book?63

It was unusual that a listener shared her personal story in such an open and direct tone while also relating details concerning the cultural resistance of the 1950s. Her description of collecting, typing and disseminating texts by a poet interned in 1949 serves as a very early example of samizdat literature circulating beyond the bounds of censorship in Hungary.64

The localization of the apartment and the date of its destruction make it likely that this private samizdat collection disappeared during the Soviet intervention, in the course of the intense fighting that took place in the area around Corvin köz, not far from her apartment. This background information reveals the fragility of samizdat materials, showing that often it was difficult or impossible to preserve them for longer periods of time.

On the other hand, this story is also very characteristic in that it draws attention to the important role RFE played in transmitting cultural products that remained out of reach during the decades of communism. The radio station, however, could make these cultural products available through its “phantom voice,” which―like sound itself―“is more flux and fluid than material.”65 The dissolving, vanishing body of the radio’s phantom voice urged listeners to reconstruct this body physically, to transform the fluid voice into some form of hard copy. In the case of the RFE’s commemorative programs, generally three counter-cultural practices―recording or transcribing broadcasts (the phenomenon of so-called “radizdat” or “magnitizdat”),66 buying materials in the West, or acquiring samizdat texts from local sources―came into play.

Under the name “Hungarian October,” one of the most significant samizdat publishers during the 1980s, György Krassó published a 90-minute long audiocassette entitled The Voice of the Hungarian Revolution as a means of marking the 26th anniversary of the revolution.67 The cassette included recordings of broadcasts by Western radios. Since only a few hundred copies were made, the cassette soon became inaccessible, in spite of the fact that private exchanges obviously added to the number of copies that were made.

It therefore comes as no surprise that in 1986 many listeners made sure to record the commemorative programs. “On behalf of a small group of listeners, I turn to you with the following request. While we succeeded in recording the commemorative program, the jamming sometimes was so extensive that important parts were incomprehensible.”68 The members of this “small group” requesting that the programs edited by Kasza be repeated were most likely working together to copy and share materials among one another.

In 1987, another message providing evidence of one unique case of “radizdat” made its way to RFE’s answering machine. The listener―who was from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, judging from the fact that he used a pseudonym―happily reported that on the occasion of the 31st anniversary of the revolution, a 500-paged typewritten book had been prepared bearing the title, The Hungarian Revolution, 1956: Commemorative Radio Programs and Historical Series.69 The ability to prepare such a typewritten book meant previous broadcasts had to have been recorded on magnetic tape. The whole year that passed between the recording process and the completion of the typewritten product shows the enormous effort made to create a hard copy of the “phantom voice.”

Including callers from both sides of the Iron Curtain, the largest number of messages was left for RFE by people who wanted to buy the commemorative programs in cassette form. While the radio workers felt it impossible to publish the programs in cassette form,70 the overwhelming interest and large number of requests eventually convinced them to publish the commemorative programs in book form. Published at the beginning of 1988, the book At the Doorstep of Freedom could be ordered from France for 24 German marks.71 In September, 1988, during the program Hallgatók Fóruma, Júlia Lángh was able to point callers interested in the 1986 commemorative programs to Hungarian bookstores located in the West.72

This RFE publication came to Krassó’s attention. Before his brother living in London died, Krassó was finally able to get a Western passport. In 1986 he established the “Hungarian October” independent news agency in London, although this did not mean that he abandoned his samizdat publication activities, especially in respect to the widespread practice of reprinting Western publications in samizdat form. After RFE’s book was published,73 Krassó organized its samizdat reprint in Hungary, including the original typeset and the logo of “Hungarian October” Publishing House. In this version, however, the paper displayed the poor quality and brown-black colors typical of samizdat editions.74 Thanks to the original and samizdat edition, the book At the Doorstep of Freedom was available both in Hungary and the in West.

As a consequence of counter-cultural practices that arose as a result of the act of listening to radio broadcasts, materials concerning the Hungarian revolution were first stored and then broadcast by the radio stations, later entering the listeners’ private archives in some kind of a hard copy form. During this process, the materials that had been broadcasted changed their form and sometimes their media as well (e.g. from magnetic tape to another magnetic tape or a typescript, or from magnetic tape to a book, and then a samizdat reprint). Through these practices, listeners attempted to transform a past that they recognized as authentic into physical materials that were available within arm’s reach and beyond the limits imposed by time. Accompanied by an audio recording, a samizdat edition or book published in the West guaranteed that personal recollections could be revived, thereby allowing people to experience the events of the revolution again and again. The externalization of the memory of the revolution and the dissemination of the vessels in which this memory was preserved created little pockets of resistance to the memory politics of the Kádár regime.

Conclusion

While a vigorous attempt was made to reassert the legitimacy of the official assessment of the 1956 Revolution and the rhetoric of the official depictions of the events during the commemoration of its 30th anniversary, RFE’s commemorative programs broadcast from the West offered an alternative narrative that was accessible to a significant segment of Hungarian society. Velünk élő történelem, a re-projection of the counterrevolution rhetoric used by the political elite of the Kádár regime, exemplified and brought to the fore the profound discrepancies between the official historical abstraction and people’s personal memories. In the end, this official interpretation proved counterproductive. In contrast, RFE commemorative programs were successful in their presentation of the past on the basis of personal recollections, based in part on the approach according to which “understanding the past as history primarily happens in the course of memory, before historical abstraction can settle over it, generously obscuring the fact of this genesis.”75

Within the process of these documentary strategies, the issue of authenticity underlies the question of how to create a representation of the historical events of 1956. In the case of RFE, the Gumbrechtian “presence effects” played an important role in creating a kind of authenticity rooted in archival practices and information acquisition, the media-technological conditions of recording and replaying human voices, as well as the listeners’ social conditioning and personal recollections. Last but not least, the programs’ narrative structure provided the appropriate vehicle for this process. The special configuration of these elements guaranteed the programs’ effectiveness, reviving memories of the revolution from the chronological distance of three decades. While in the case of Velünk élő történelem archival documents functioned only as illustrations of narrative, archival recordings took on lives of their own in the RFE broadcasts, serving as “presence effects.” From this perspective, it can be argued that the “practices of reconstructing” the “phantom voice” were motivated not only by the fluidity of the voice, but also by its “presence effects.” In other words, this phenomenon was influenced by the ephemeral character of the presence, i.e. the feeling “that we cannot hold on to those presence effects, that they […] are ephemeral.”76

In the three-decade-long struggle over interpretations of 1956, the year 1986 brought a significant change. This change was brought about by the fact that RFE’s commemorative programs―in comparison to the influence of opposition groups active as of the late 1970s―created a far wider social basis for the interpretation according to which the October events constituted a revolution, not a counterrevolution.77 If “the first victory of the Kádár era was the successful transformation of shared silence into social oblivion,”78 RFE deserves credit for reviving and replaying the revolution in 1986, while attacking the Kádár regime at its weakest point: its genesis myth. By making voices travel through both time and space, RFE could bridge the gap between past and present, between different agents and distant parts of a divided Europe, obliterating the amnesia of the Kádár era, which had hampered listeners’ efforts to maintain their own personal recollections.

 

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Socialist-Era New Yugoslav Feminism between “Mainstreaming” and “Disengagement”: The Possibilities for Resistance, Critical Opposition and Dissent1

Zsófia Lóránd

Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen

 

Through a focus on early publications by feminist intellectuals in Yugoslavia during the 1970s, this paper aims to demonstrate methods of feminist critique of the theory and practice of women’s emancipation in the context of a state socialist (in this case self-managing socialist) country in East Central Europe. After a brief overview of feminist organizing in Yugoslavia until the late 1980s, this paper looks at conferences and journal publications, which also provides the opportunity to better understand the workings of the Yugoslav public space and publishing processes. The text, written with a conceptual and intellectual historical focus, analyzes the discursive interventions and reformulations of matters related to women’s emancipation. The new Yugoslav feminist approaches rethought and reformulated the “women’s question.” Reading the prevailing currents of feminism in North America and Western Europe, feminists in Yugoslavia searched for ways to reframe this question into a critique that was constructive as well as innovative in its own context.

Keywords: Feminism, dissent, socialism, women’s question, Marxism, sisterhood.

 

“Criticism of the family and marriage […] is already the criticism of the state itself,” wrote Rada Iveković in 1981.2 This sentence reveals the essential role of feminism in post-Second World War East Europea[n socialist states, which, however, was an underrepresented discourse amid the variety of dissent, dissidence and countercultural criticism. The close reading of the work of feminists during the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia, where feminism reappeared in a semi-organized form and with a wide range of activities—from intellectual discussion through artwork to explicit political activism—tells us a lot about the potential critiques of state-socialist women’s emancipation in general and thus it is relevant for the region of state-socialist Eastern Europe, while it also allows us to understand the specificities of self-managing Yugoslavia. In this paper, I focus on the early, mostly academic, publications by feminists in Yugoslavia in order to show some of the possibilities and actual meanings of feminist opposition in the context of a socialist state. I argue that their activity is somewhere in between the two ends of the scale that Linda Briskin calls “mainstreaming” and “disengagement,” between trying to negotiate their agenda into the official policies and self-organizing critical, external discourses and actions.3

My approach comes from intellectual and conceptual history. While conceptual history focuses on the meanings of the texts through a contextual reading, for feminist historiography, there is always an explicit political stake in recovering events of the past. In my reading, the two support each other in the sense that it is in the interest of feminist historiography to have meanings of concepts central to certain recovered ideologies, while the contextualism of intellectual history implicitly and often even explicitly subscribes to the importance of the personal within the political. The strategies behind feminist movements always necessarily involve an intervention with language and a struggle for meanings, the reconstruction of which is the primary aim of conceptual and intellectual history—which at the very same time respects the importance of the role of the personal and the individual as well.

The interpretative techniques I employ here focus on written sources, published (articles in newspapers, magazines, journals, as well as books) and unpublished (primarily archival documentation of activist work), artworks and videos, and also oral history interviews with the participants of the feminist groups. I base my analysis on the work and discourse of the members of feminist groups called Žena i društvo [Woman and Society] and their allies. I call the phenomenon in focus new Yugoslav feminism. Some publications and some members of the Žena i društvo use the term “neofeminizam,” that is “new feminism”—a name that not all participants, however, acknowledged. “New feminism” is also a general name widely used to describe that version of feminism, which in its diversity emerges in the 1960s in Western Europe and North America. This is what is mostly known today as the “second wave,” another problematic term I will try to avoid using, because it blends an at least 100-year-long complex history of feminist movements and discourses into one “wave.”4 However, for the Yugoslav feminists of the 1970s, the designation “new” refers to the pre-Second World War feminist history of the country, and this conscious admittance of continuity is important to highlight. The women and few men active in and around the Žena i društvo groups in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb were not a fixed and coherent group throughout the almost 20 years in focus in this paper. The individual stakes and life trajectories, the different intellectual approaches, the inherent differences within the local scenes intellectually and in the actual infrastructures make this a loose network, connected, however, by the shared fascination of a feminist critique of socialism in Yugoslavia.

The Return of Feminism

The story begins in the early 1970s: at this time, what we find in the open is journal publications and what we find backstage is a handful of young women and a few university professors. As we can see from the interviews and from their biographies, these women came from a rather homogeneous social background and, with two exceptions, were from the same generation. This generation was born after the Second World War to mothers who had a first-hand war experience and were themselves very often active participants of the partisan movement. Unlike their mothers, they were puzzled by the contradiction between the promise of the regime and their own experience of their own emancipation. They were also critical of the idea that their mothers had equality with men: the way they saw it, these women were far from having equal rights and status.5 Academia seemed to be a relatively safe space for the first tentative publications about “what is happening to American women.”6 The interest, of course, was not only in women in the United States: Europe and the “Third World” were on the radar too, especially Italy, England, France, Germany and India.

The new feminists in Yugoslavia could explore the possibilities of a feminist critique of state socialism in the space between the official and the unofficial.7 They started with meetings in each other’s homes, which later moved to the student centers and research institutes until they formed their own semi-institutions with the foundation of the SOS helplines and the shelters. There is a difference between the activities in the three major cities in which the Žena i društvo groups were organized. University seminars or talks took place mostly in Ljubljana and Zagreb, where the groups called Žena i društvo were part of post-secondary sociology departments. In Ljubljana, the ŠKUC, i.e., the Študentski kulturno-umetniški center [Students’ Cultural and Art Center], was an equally important venue at which the feminists shared the space with other countercultural and political groups, such the punk and green movements. The most important feature of the Ljubljana group was that lesbian women and straight or still closeted lesbian women worked together in the same group from the beginning. In the mid-1980s, the lesbian members played an increasingly defining role in Belgrade too. In Belgrade, the most important stronghold of new feminism was the SKC, the Students’ Cultural Center, where the director of the Gallery of the SKC, later the director of the whole institution, was Dunja Blažević. Under the auspices of the SKC, the first international feminist conference in Yugoslavia took place in 1978. Many women joined the feminist circles after attending this conference called Drug-ca žena: Novi pristup [Comrade-ess Woman: a New Approach].

This famous and canonical conference, however, was preceded by many publications (already in 1972)8 and a lot of brainstorming, even feminist presentations at the conferences organized by the state women’s organization, the Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena [Conference for the Social Participation of Women], that is, KDAŽ, first in 1976 in Portorož.9 In Belgrade, the SKC offered a series of discussions, the tribine. The conferences (the 1978 international one in Belgrade, and then the Yugoslav feminist conferences in 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990) and the summer schools at the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik beginning in 1987 were attracting the largest audiences and opened up to women who would otherwise not have attended the feminist meetings. After 1985, the small group meetings returned: these were a space in which personal experiences were emphasized (very similar to the consciousness-raising groups elsewhere) and the training groups for the SOS helplines for abused women and victims of domestic violence required the closed format. At the same time, because of the SOS helpline and the activities around it, the feminists reached a much wider audience, which could have even served as a basis for a wider grassroots movement had the war not broken out. The women and few men in the three cities cooperated very closely in the creation of these helplines, sharing knowledge and experience.

During the early phase that is the focus of this paper, journal publications were of crucial importance. Because of the influence of some professors and the openness of some women officials in the KDAŽ, some of the young women and men could participate in the conferences and editorial work of the journal Žena [Woman]. As we shall see and as research shows, some of the women indeed were dedicated to the betterment of women’s position in society, to such an extent that they were willing to give space to the feminist ideas of young women—ideas with which they themselves did not agree. This makes Žena an interesting case study of inter-generational and inter-ideological encounters.

Meanwhile, the array of journals accepting feminist articles was extended relatively quickly. From 1975 on, it included social science and humanities journals such as Pitanja [Questions], Naše teme [Our topics], Argumenti [Arguments], Ideje [Ideas], Socijalizam u svetu [Socialism in the World], Republika [Republic], etc., and in the 1980s Problemi [Problems] in Slovenia. The student journals Mladina in Ljubljana and Student and Vidici [Views] in Belgrade also provided important forums for new feminist discussions, which is not by accident: the youth organizations enjoyed relative freedom from state control in their activities.10 With time, the feminist articles reached a wider audience through newspapers and weeklies, such as Danas [Today] and Start, as well as women’s magazines, such as Bazar published in Belgrade, Svijet [World] in Zagreb and Jana in Ljubljana.11 Naša žena [Our women], another print medium in Ljubljana, was a magazine situated on the spectrum between the more serious Žena, which still followed the party lines regarding the women’s question, and the popular women’s magazines (some of which, such as Bazar and Svijet, occasionally did publish feminist articles). The full picture of the feminist discussions, however, includes art, literature, as well as literary and art theory, besides the academic discussions and the activist work. Because of the curators at the SKC, art and literature were extensively present in the feminist programs, including the flourishing artists from Zagreb such as Sanja Iveković. Possibilities for feminist writing were presented and discussed through the work of Irena Vrkjlan, Dubravka Ugrešić and Biljana Jovanović, among others.

The history of the new Yugoslav feminism has its own periodization, while it was running parallel with the new or second wave feminisms in the “West” after the beginnings in the early 1970s, which was characterised by private (kitchen table) conversations and academic publishing, there was a turn around the years 1985–86, called a “second wave” by many, when group members wanted a change in the work of the groups that would serve to focus more on activism and consciousness-raising in small, women-only groups. The next phase in their story started around 1990, when more and more new and much more diverse groups were born out of the Žena i društvo circles and went in different directions. These directions ranged from political and anti-war activism through a more spelled-out LGBTQ activism to anti-violence activism and institutionalization of feminist knowledge through the creation of women’s studies or gender studies centers and departments at universities or parallel to them.12

The type of critique the feminists in Yugoslavia articulated towards the system is hard to compare to any other form of opposition in the region at the time. While there is a temptation to attribute the phenomenon to the exceptionality of Yugoslav self-managing socialism,13 the situation is more complex than that. Due to the organization of the state, the KDAŽ, the student centers as well as the journals and magazines (those in various constellations) were working under the umbrella of the SSRNJ [Socijalistički savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije – Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia].14 This, as I explain later in this paper was, however, far from a complete freedom of the press, but there were just enough cracks in the wall that a wide selection ideas, including feminist ones, could reach the public. In addition to the legal and infrastructural circumstances, there is a crucial source of historical inspiration that is also part of the explanation: the large numbers of women involved in the partisan movement,15 their active participation in the National Liberation Struggle and the basis this gave to the extensive emancipation of women after the Second World War, which indeed did entail substantial societal change.16 (Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, there is important current research on the state violence exerted against women in Yugoslavia in addition to the literature on women’s emancipation.)17 Besides these two factors, I would emphasize the importance of contingency: that these women in the Žena i društvo groups met, decided to like each other, decided to focus on feminism, decided to organize the women-only discussion forums and made smaller- and larger-scale decisions that subsequently defined their path. It was the path to feminism, instead of liberalism, deconstruction, Marxist revisionism, nationalism, to mention a few schools that did flourish at the time in the other socialist countries in the region despite the prevailing censorship, despite the lack of a partisan tradition and despite the closed borders.18

Dissent, Resistance, Mainstreaming and Disengagement

The new Yugoslav feminists held a position vis-à-vis the state that was between opposition and inner critique. The entire post-socialist master narrative deserves a more refined approach in order that they not “implicitly and explicitly reproduce binary categories of the Cold War and the opposition between ‘first world’ and ‘second world’,” thus ignoring the ethical and aesthetic complexities of socialist life.19 For various reasons, new Yugoslav feminism is a case par excellence of the productive encounter of discourses. Engaging in a dialogue with the state, building on its promise of gender equality, the new Yugoslav feminists do not directly oppose the Yugoslav state, but see the place of women there as constant opposition. The disappointment of this new generation of young women is similar to the experience of the feminists in the United States and Western Europe and this aspect should be constantly kept in mind when we discuss the difference between the so-called East and the so-called West. Despite the differences in the economic and political systems, the new feminist movement and ideology was born out of a disappointment with the promises of left politics, that is, with the socialist regime in Yugoslavia and the new left, the civil rights movements and the anti-war movements in Western Europe and North America.20

The new Yugoslav feminists learned about the situation of women in the West and the criticism of existing democracies through the inner, feminist dissidence,21 thus they were inspired and critical of Western capitalist democracies at the same time, unlike, for example, the liberal dissident groups in Central Europe. The new Yugoslav feminism, as we shall see, voiced strict criticism through pointing out the systemic nature of the oppression of women, thematizing women’s sexuality and, most importantly, being the first to thematize the violence that women endure without the intervention of the system. Their claim is that the state did not change the status quo, one of their conclusions being that once the regime was built on patriarchy it became ideologically impossible for women to achieve real equality.

I call the new feminist discourse in Yugoslavia a critical one, more similar in its attempt to engage the state in a dialogue than refusing it per se as most dissidence does. In the meantime, it makes sense to look at this new feminism in light of dissenting discourses because of the dissenting status of feminism elsewhere and because of the windows the dissidents themselves offer for this.22 The new feminists in Yugoslavia did not publish in samizdat nor were they imprisoned for their writings. However, they were in search of critical or oppositional positions within the state’s mainstream. They created a micro space in which nonconformist ideas could be discussed and critical thoughts disseminated outside the official classroom space and in which new research was done despite the resistance of the institutions.

Sharon Zukin, looking at “possibilities of dissent” in Yugoslavia, argues that “[i]n states that claim to operate on the basis of a Marxist ideology, there is an enormous vulnerability to dissent because of the gap between theory and practice. In capitalist states, dissent arises in more limited institutional contexts, notably over the excesses of administrative agencies or the dishonesty of executive authorities.”23 Zukin claims that due to the framework, the activity of Đilas or the Praxis group is closer to “whistle-blowing” in the United States than to East European dissidence. In the meantime, she also debates the “liberalism” of the Yugoslav state, suggesting rather discussing different strategies of control, such as creating a controlled space within the state: “neither self-management nor market socialism is as central to Yugoslav development as the relatively non-coercive strategies of labor mobilization and capital accumulation that the leadership established in response to internal and external pressures beginning in 1947 and 1948. And it is wrong to characterize these strategies as liberalism.”24 Even for critical intellectual positions, a publication in a scholarly journal or in the form of poetry could entail severe consequences.25 Editors of journals could also be dismissed by the “publisher” of the journal, i.e., the associations, companies, social, political, educational and other specialized professional institutions26 that were working under the umbrella of the SSRNJ.27

Besides the organizational aspect, according to the data provided by Pedro (Sabrina) Ramet, 80 per cent of journalists were party members and the information published about politics and the economy was acquired mostly via governmental channels. Robinson confirms Ramet’s thesis: based on research regarding “freedom of criticism in various Yugoslav elites,” journalists tend to be less critical than other groups of the Yugoslav decision-making élite.28 Part of the explanation for this tendency lies in the highly political process of their selection. Furthermore, there were annual reviews of the media products and the supervising body, like the publisher’s councils under the authority of the SSRNJ, which could issue warnings, impose penalties on editors, or even dismiss them and the journalists who wrote articles the council found unacceptable. In some cases, issues of journals or newspapers could be banned or confiscated. In the case of those newspapers, journals or magazines that were funded by the SKJ or the SSRNJ, the end of funding meant the end of the medium as well, the most famous example being the journal Praxis.29

The new Yugoslav feminists, therefore, did not face the same level of persecution that the dissidents of Central European countries or the Soviet Union did.30 On the other hand, there is barely any talk about the situation of women in the work of dissidence in Central Europe and the Soviet Union: they overlook the shortcomings of state socialism in this regard, which largely defines the possibilities of thinking about feminism in their discourse after 1989. The difficulties of developing a feminist movement in the new democracies in East Central Europe have been raised by many authors.31 In countries that offer a rich and compelling discussion of human rights, freedom of speech and social justice, the violation of women in the private sphere and exclusion of women from the public gets little attention, an issue that, with few exceptions, has not been examined by existing scholarship until very recently. The new Yugoslav feminist criticism of the state, although it was not a dissident group per se, but something between cooperation and dissidence, helps us to understand what would have been the opportunities in other East European countries to develop a feminist dissidence. The case of new Yugoslav feminism explains to us how the ambivalent emancipation offered by the state socialist regimes made it impossible for dissidents who by the 1980s almost entirely gave up on Marxism to relate to a feminism that had to at least partly acknowledge some of the improvements in the situation of women in socialist countries.32

Investigating Possibilities of a Feminist Critique of Marxian Thought and Yugoslav Socialism

Through their textual interventions, the new Yugoslav feminists not only opposed the state, they also stretched the boundaries of the ways academia thinks of itself and the ways the state presents the position of women in Yugoslavia. Through the reading of new feminist texts from the United States and Western Europe as well as critical Marxist texts from different schools of thought and sometimes even through philosophy from India, the new feminist discourse in Yugoslavia attributes new meanings to the concept of feminism itself. Their political action in academic discussions is rather a discursive one: balancing between disengagement and mainstreaming,33 they try to create a new language to talk about women’s emancipation and the relations between men and women. This involves not only redefining what feminism means, but also the reconceptualization of consciousness, women’s universal experience, patriarchy, family, work, “homosexuality,”34 the relationship between the private and the public as well as the introduction of the concept of gender.

The theme of the relations between the communists and the women’s movement is paradigmatic for the focus of the discourse, inasmuch that leftist, Marxist and socialist feminisms from all over the world prevail in the new Yugoslav feminist intertexts. This always linked the feminist discussions to the broader frame of Yugoslav state socialist ideology. Both the context and the audience, i.e., the community of the text’s implied readers (including the fellow authors in this very issue of the journal Dometi [Throw], mostly from the Žena i društvo group), support this interpretation. There is a debate about a new approach (novi pristup) to the women’s question (žensko pitanje) in Yugoslavia, which for the protagonists of my text is more or less explicitly the new feminism, neofeminizam. In several introductions of journal special issues, the editors openly admit that their quest aims to learn from the feminists elsewhere—the difference is in the scale of how many positive elements they find and to what extent is it the negative examples that teach about paths not to be taken. Therefore, it is not only Žarana Papić in the more independent youth journal Student in 1976 (cf. below), but also several articles in Žena and other journals, such as Argumenti (publishing a documentation of the legendary 1978 Drug-ca žena conference) that give voice to the opinion framed by Mirjana Oklobdžija in Dometi “that even today, in all societies to a smaller or greater extent, women are ‘second rate citizens.’”35

Instead of the state-offered discourse on the women’s question (žensko pitanje), investigations of the ideas of the new feminism bring along a conceptual replacement of the former with the latter. Texts started to emerge only in the early 1970s: reports on the new feminist movement in the United States and various countries of Western Europe, from time to time even South America and Asia, were also published. In reflection on the proclaimed success of women’s emancipation in Yugoslavia, there are at least two parallel stories about feminisms “elsewhere” with emphasis on the “new feminism.” Telling the story of new feminisms in the world involves evaluation and therefore reveals the opinion of the authors, in the manner of which these can be read as manifestos on behalf of the authors. Especially in case of those Yugoslav new feminists who, either as young scholars, like Rada Iveković or Žarana Papić, or as established professors, like Blaženka Despot or Gordana Bosanac, were attempting to introduce a new, competing ideology for which the innocent-looking informative introductions to the currents of “new feminism” in other countries proved to be a good strategy.

In exploring the different strategies aimed at gaining a place in the discourse for new feminism through transfers and translations, I read Rada Iveković’s review on Italian feminism as an implicit programmatic text for the new feminism in Yugoslavia. The article was published almost ten years after the first endeavors to understand the new feminist phenomena, the time being mature enough for making explicit claims of themes and concepts. In Iveković’s article,36 feminism is presented through the history of the Italian communists, which bears many similarities to the history of Yugoslav communists. What makes the text programmatic is the way the author makes an attempt to reconcile the relationship between the women’s movement and the communists – in Italy. The story Iveković presents can be read as an implicit parabolic tale for how the relationship of feminism and the communist party should take shape in Yugoslavia. It does tell the story without explicitly pointing out the similarities, though these similarities nevertheless stand out.

The article begins with the emphasis on the proletarian roots of the women’s movement, which outweigh the traditions of the civil-rights-based bourgeois roots. Iveković discusses in detail the situation and its consequences when the more radical and revolutionary women at the fin-de-siècle joined the Socialist Party of Italy (SPI), which in 1911 severed the ties with the bourgeois women’s groups that were demanding franchise for women. This meant the “liquidation of the women’s question,” with the elimination of the claim for suffrage, which was otherwise also supported by the revolutionary feminists. The SPI’s argument was that this issue did not concern either the class struggle or the working class and thus the paths of the communists and the women’s movement parted for a lengthy period of time. According to Iveković, the interwar period brought along the recognition that there was need for a separate proletarian women’s movement, because the working class is ruled by conservative prejudice against women. However, not much changed in the interwar period, when the major issue was the struggle against fascism and women’s emancipation was present only as a remnant from the previous century (“instead of the swing of the revolutionary flame”).

After the overview of the changes after the Second World War, including the guarantee of the franchise for women, Iveković summarizes the conclusion for the new Italian feminists: despite the normative questions being solved and the laws having been changed “in bourgeois society,” the patriarchal mentality prevailed, proving to be the main barrier to women’s liberation (37). This conclusion is followed by a positive evaluation of the appearance of neofeminizam in Italy in the years 1968–69, which stemmed from the new left movements and student protests, from the experience that even within the student movement women face the same marginalization and discrimination. Feminism in Italy, Iveković concludes, is “without doubt an oppositional movement in relation to the existing social order” as “masses of women, mostly young ones, cannot identify with a single existing political party, not even in the left” (39, emphasis mine). Besides this left-wing feminism, Iveković mentions “that other feminism,” “bourgeois and sexist, which identifies men as the enemy” This idea comes up in other texts I analyze below, addressing the juxtaposition of “good” and “bad” feminisms.

The importance and specificity of neofeminizam in Italy lay in highlighting various topics, which repeatedly return as central concepts of the new Yugoslav feminist discourse: women’s creativity in the arts and the humanities, the debates about sexuality (in Italy mostly with regard to the right to contraception and abortion), consciousness-raising – and through this, the relations between the public and the private, domestic violence and sexual violence. The article ends with the optimistic conclusion: “It is encouraging [to see] that all women with a leftist orientation in Italy are in accord in their struggle, regardless of whether they belong or do not belong to regular parties. Because they all belong to the women’s movement in a broad sense. This way, today even communist women proudly announce that they are also feminists (44).” The story Iveković tells, with the closure about the success of the feminists, makes the reader think of this as a path to follow.

The implied conclusions for the new Yugoslav feminism are manifold. The argument that the roots of the women’s movement, both in the late nineteenth century—fin-de-siècle (first wave) and in the 1960s (second wave), are deeper in the worker’s movement and the in the political left in general addresses both the state establishment and those who want to join the new groups and share the ideas. Further elements of the analysis, which can be directly translated into the current Yugoslav context, are those of the relations between the SPI and the women’s movements in the interwar period and during the Second World War, highlighting the parallel between the NOB (Narodna oslobodilačka borba – People’s Liberation Struggle) and the Alijansa ženskih pokreta [Alliance of the Women’s Movements] and the feminist examination of the reasons for which women’s equality had not been achieved despite the new post-Second World War legislation meant to ensure equality. The ambiguous relationship between the SPI and the women’s movement as allies and rivals of each other is clarified when Iveković points out the oppositional nature of the movement.

The closure of the article is of major significance from a terminological perspective: whereas Iveković does not differentiate between the use of the terms women’s movement and feminism throughout the article, here she makes a distinction. To her, the two concepts are synonymous—women’s movements are based on feminist ideology—and it is a significant development in the Italian context that communist women support feminism. In the meantime, Iveković clarifies the agenda and therefore the meaning of new feminism, which is defined along themes and concepts that are recurrently present in the Yugoslav case as well.

The recognition of different women’s movements and, therefore, feminisms leads to the description of the different currents of feminism through opposing pairs in the early Yugoslav publications. These texts categorize feminism according to the distinction between radical revolutionary women’s movements (Marxist) and bourgeois movements, on the one hand, and extremist (radical, hyper-feminist) movements as opposed to the moderate (socialist, Marxist) movements on the other hand. The two oppositions are clearly contradict one another and represent a certain socialist conservatism when it comes to self-expression.

Silva Mežnarić, a sociologist and editor of the journal Žena who lived both in Zagreb and Ljubljana and was a member of the KDAŽ Croatia in 1972 and joined the feminist group Žena i društvo, initiated a series of articles introducing American feminism. The “series” ended after two articles and feminism as a topic returns on the pages of Žena only in 1975 with the United Nations’ “Year of Women” in 1975, which was followed by the “Decade of Women”, lasting until 1985. Mežnarić’s first article in 1972 bears the investigative title “What is Happening to the American Woman?”37 Her claim is that she wants to demystify the way this “socially-ideationally relevant phenomenon” (57) had been presented in the media up to then. She emphasizes that new feminism is not only relevant in the society in which it originates, alluding to the Yugoslav situation, and adds that her aim is not to judge, rather to represent based on the work of other researchers. Using analyses from economics and sociology, the author shows the economic and social problems American women face, including employment and reproduction. Mežnarić’s conclusion is that the situation of women in both communist and capitalist modernized societies legitimizes feminist claims.

A few years later, in 1976 in Portorož, at the first official conference about women in which the new Yugoslav feminists participated, Gordana Cerjan-Letica mentioned the problem of the lack of knowledge of and limited access to information about new feminism in Yugoslavia. To her, this is the reason for “so many non-objective and scholarly non-justifiable criticism by us against the feminist movement.”38 In this other publication from the same year, Cerjan-Letica prepared an overview of feminism that discussed the issues of radicalism in feminism.39 Summarizing the past ten years of American new feminism, she noticed that radical feminists “in the track of the sensibility of the New Left” politicize “the most human and most hidden spheres of human life–such as the family, marriage, sexuality”(8).

Other authors approached American radical feminists with much more caution. A selection of texts by the members of the Žena i društvo group was published in a 1978 issue of Pitanja entitled “Women, or about Freedom.” The issue claims to be about the žensko pitanje and not feminism, while most of the inspiring and quoted texts and the questions posed are those of new feminism. The Sarajevo-based social scientist, Nada Ler-Sofronić, provided a thought-provoking new theoretical-methodological framework based on a critical reading of new feminist theory from the West for dealing with women’s inequality in Yugoslavia. The selection of authors is colorful and while she is dismissive of Shulamith Firestone for her “extremeness,” “overvaluation of women’s characteristics” and for overemphasizing “women’s nature,”40 she is appreciative of Betty Friedan. Whereas Friedan is often criticized by left-wing feminists both in the United States and elsewhere for her bourgeois lens of analysis, Ler-Sofronić realises that Friedan criticizes bourgeois values when speaking of the lives of bourgeois women. She finds the idealization of women by the radical feminist Firestone more problematic: authors like Firestone are “mistakenly” called “radical,” reclaiming “radicalism” as a synonym for “revolutionary” (21).

Jasna Tkalec also welcomed “radical legislative change,” in this case in France. She embraced the French “new feminism” born in the aftermath of May 1968, which had a radical agenda with “the radical demands for the equality of sexual morals for men and women, loudly seeking rehabilitation from a Freudian position of women’s erotica, the sexuality of children and adolescents and even of homosexuality.”41 This text, inspired by Edgar Morin’s essay in the volume La Femme majeure42 interprets the new French feminism as a human-rights movement (1162), whereas it realizes that, despite the similarities between the feminist discourse and those of Marxism and “decolonialism,” women cannot be treated either as a class or as an ethnic group. Tkalec suggests looking at women as a “bio-social class” and valorizes the potential of the radical demands within the women’s movement (i.e., new feminism), which introduces a specific culture of revolution to the West (1167). The radical demand of the new feminism involves “a reanalysis of the entire social system with regard to the past and future as well. This research raises and actualizes fundamental social and scientific problems and rephrases them in a completely new way” (1167).

A colorful image of feminism unfolds from this range of highly different texts. Revolution in feminism has the appreciation of the authors, while radicalism is already ambiguous. The attributed meanings vary from positive, for example in the sense of “revolutionary,” to problematic as much as it is “bourgeois.” Bourgeois feminism is unanimously criticized by all authors. Another characteristic of the early steps the new feminists in Yugoslavia took is the strategy of suggesting that at the new manifestations of feminism be regarded as relevant due to the “universal experience” of women from the perspective of the ideas presented and from the perspective of “our still patriarchal environment.”43 Universality is useful not only as a “disguise” of the dissenting ideas, but as a category countering the idea that the solution to the class questions is a solution to the women’s question as well.

One of the early examples appears in an issue of Student, edited by Žarana Papić and Ivan Vejvoda in 1976 (a rare case in which only foreign material is presented in translation). It includes texts from Robin Morgan’s edited volume Sisterhood is Powerful by Zoe Moss and Pat Mainardi (from the Redstockings group, which belongs to the above- mentioned “radical” Women’s Liberation groups), an interview with Luce Irigaray by Cathèrine Clément that appeared originally in La Nouvelle Critique, one text by Marie-Thérèse Baudrillard from Politique Hebdo and an excerpt from Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. What they state in the introduction may not look extremely complicated:

It is interesting to get acquainted with insights of the new thinking of the “problem” of women, her speech (govor), agency (delanje) and living (življenje), and this through a mosaic of broad elements, from analytical-theoretical approaches to personal statements. Though here it is seemingly only about “foreign experience,” a lot of this experience of women is universal.44

 

The introduction does not identify the selection of texts as feminist, but it also avoids the term žensko pitanje through use of “the ‘problem’ of women,” where the quotation marks distance the authors from identifying with those who consider women a “problem.” The terms agency and speech point toward the language of the new feminism as does the selection from the more avant-garde or radical texts, which, by other authors in the Yugoslav publications, are dismissed for various reasons. The reasons for this can be well organized around the evaluation of and reservation to a stream of feminism as radical, revolutionary or extremist on the one hand, and reactionary-bourgeois on the other hand. The identification or appreciation of these varieties of feminism is rather divergent and needs to be treated in the “revolutionary Yugoslav” context.

The choices of Papić and Vejvoda reflect an appreciation of the radical stream of American feminism as well as of the more theoretical, but rather avant-garde, French wave. The tendency to affiliate oneself with the socialist Western feminists and thus legitimate the introduction of these ideas into the local context prevails in the Yugoslav new feminist context, however, in this case there is also an attempt to reconcile the complex theoretical approach of Irigaray (and elsewhere, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva) with an expectation that writing about society serves the revolutionary change in that very society. The cross-reading of radical feminism with French post-structuralism is an “invention” of the Yugoslav feminists and here is made explicit by the choice of an interview with Irigaray, conducted by Catherine Clément, instead of an excerpt from her Speculum de l’autre femme45 with regard to which the interview was made.46 For discussing the social use of theories, writings and artworks, Clément returns to the concept of struggle (borba in Serbo-Croatian and lutte/combat in French). Clément’s choice of the word has a new relevance in the new context of the space defined by the success ideology of the NOB. This was followed by smaller-scale “struggles” for the fulfilment of the aims of self-managing socialism.

Clément contextualizes Irigaray within 1968 as a movement: “Where, what kind of a relation do you think you have with women’s struggle? The question is all the more important since your book was not a book which we would usually call as one designed for struggles?”47 Irigaray explains her position, which she begins with the assertion that to her, all philosophical discussions have political implications:

 

Maybe we should go that far that we say there is no “politics” of women that does not take shape either in the form of apolitical statements or disavowal of the political, this is already a demand (zahtjev) which must be fulfilled. [...] In the meantime, if the starting point of women’s struggle (borba) is simply to get to the steering wheel of power, then women wanted what they don’t [want] to be subordinated to the phallic order. […] However, we need to be constantly and without mistakes alert. Phallocracy most probably still has not exhausted all its resources. Are we not witnesses to how today men overtake the women’s question (žensko pitanje)? It is important for them to be able to keep the initiative within the[ir] discourse.48

 

What Irigaray does in her Speculum is political and radical. Her radicalism is read into a Yugoslav context in which radicalism is read as revolutionary struggle. Through this reading in Student, Irigaray is brought into a dialogue with American second-wave radicalism (even though radicalism assumes different meanings in the original contexts of French theory and the U.S. movement) as she identifies the need for radical (down to the roots) change in the discourse conveying power relations. Getting positions in the existing phallic [phallogocentric] order does not change the discourse and the place of women within that discourse. The “women’s question” gets appropriated by male political actors and immersed into the existing order; Irigaray does not spell it out here, however—her train of thought reminds of the dichotomy between the use of the concept of the “women’s question” and the use of the concept “feminism”, with the underlying political and strategic implications. As feminism takes the women’s question out of the patriarchal context, it means taking the initiative and means intervention into the discourse.

Radicalism, and in relation to that, revolution and the revolutionary nature of an ideology or movement, is a recurrent theme in the new Yugoslav feminist writings of the 1970s and early 1980s and is a crucial factor in their self-positioning within the Yugoslav discursive space, simultaneously adjusting to and challenging the status quo. As we have seen above, Iveković, for example, based on Anna Maria Mazzoni’s classification, identifies the revolutionary branch of Italian feminism as progressive and points it out as exemplary; however, she refrains from calling it “radical.” One of the articles in the hereby analyzed issue of Student, from Sisterhood is Powerful by Pat Mainardi, discusses the “politics of housework,” which is not only relevant from the point of the relations between the private and the public, but also for a statement that identifies the “women’s liberation movement” as “revolution.”49 Here we find a conceptually fascinating distinction between radical revolutionary women’s movements and bourgeois women’s movements, on the one hand, and extremist (radical) ones as opposed to the moderate (socialist) ones on the other.

In Catherine Clément’s previously analyzed interview with Luce Irigaray, Clément and Irigaray agree on the need for a radical change of discourse and then they go even further via Irigaray’s answer to Cléments’s question of whether she thinks the “class struggle” would sufficiently describe these power relations. Irigaray points out that this is exactly the reason for which radical change is needed: men “overtake the women’s question.” Irigaray turns the question around and suggests that class be translated into “men and women” and then adds: “Or, we should admit that today’s praxis of Marxism is not willing to acknowledge this difference and this exploitation of women.”50 This takes us to another crucial question dividing the state discourse and the new feminist discourse, considering whether solving the class question automatically solves gender equality and makes women’s oppression disappear. Irigaray resists this idea by emphasizing that Marxism, at its present stage, is not sufficient. This is in contrast with the claims of the KDAŽ, even with regard to the International Year of Women, when the problems women faced were thematized, or the introductions in books like Đorđević’s Žensko pitanje, which treat the work of Marx, Engels and the early Marxists as not very detailed, but in principle authoritative with regard to the women’s question and which persistently take the žensko pitanje back to the realization of općeljudske emancipacije.

Whereas in the local feminist mythology the 1976 Portorož conference does not hold the same place as 1978, looking at the documentation of the debate we find most of the most important ideas of the new Yugoslav feminists there.51 At this time, Gordana Bosanac and Anđelka Milić were members of the editorial board of the journal and Lydia Sklevický, Vesna Pusić, Nadežda Čačinovič-Puhovski, Silva Mežnarić and Gordana Cerjan-Letica all participated in the conference. Members of the editorial board apparently had to explain themselves for the appearance of the feministička grupacija at the meeting, offering a variety of understandings of what feminism is: “it is important to differentiate between the feminist movement in its basic starting point and of a provocation for a fight against the male sex and the […] progressive movement of women who search for a way for their own action […] for the political, economic, cultural and other forms of development in their own country.”52 The introduction, however, emphasizes the importance of the Marxist stakes in the issue of women and the family, especially the contributions of Vranicki and Šoljan to the conference. So does the closing speech by Breda Pavlić, with the usual conclusion that, on the one hand, many of the demands of the Western feminists have been provided to women in Yugoslavia and, on the other hand, that if feminists want to achieve their goals, they have to return to Marx.53 This happens only to a certain extent: there is a left-wing, most often Marxist, inclination in the feminist theories written by the new Yugoslav feminists, but they almost unanimously refuse to subsume women’s equality to the class question.

Despite the editorial board’s gesture to diminish the significance of the feminist participants, they claim the legitimacy of new feminism. Sklevický, in highlighting the importance of the “history of forgotten sisters,” describes the transition from the “old” feminism to the new wave, which realizes that basic rights do not ensure real gender equality, and therefore demands a liberation from gender roles through various actions.54 The English-language new or second-wave canon was introduced by Gordana Cerjan-Letica, for instance, Firestone; Friedan; Greer; Millett; Margaret Dixon; and Margaret Benston. Cerjan-Letica argued for the alignment of feminism with socialism: “the goal of a non-repressive civilization is there within all heterogeneous left-wing movements,” while refusing to treat women as a class.55 This, in her reading, makes feminism more radical in its demands for equality. Vesna Pusić addresses the anti-, or rather, post-feminist arguments: at first feminism may appear aggressive or explosive—it may even be accused of theoretical incoherence; “however, if we approach it as a manifestation of one broad, global theory, we will much more easily get the dimension of the universality it contains. In other words, even if it is not a theory in itself, it presents a manifestation and is integral part of one broad theory of social change and dialectical development of society.”56

By the time the 1978 conference took place in Belgrade, the new Yugoslav feminists became more and more conscious of radical feminism being closer to their own vision of feminism, revaluation what “radical” and “military” means, with reference to the revolutionary partisan tradition as a source of legitimacy. An effective strategy of Vesna Kesić in the magazine Start is to compare the feminist movement to the workers’ movement. The comparison is triggered by Kesić’s annoyance with the “militant” epitheton ornans of all feminisms in all times, also present in the state representatives’ discussion of feminism. While it is hard to see what it means, writes Kesić, “this is as if the workers on strike would be advised not to choose such a ‘militant’ way of fighting,” and “fighting” here is a “re-vindication of one’s rights.”57 Clearly, a political system supporting the workers in all places to stand up for their rights and heralding the workers being self-managers of their lives in Yugoslavia as well as women’s equality cannot afford labelling women voicing the exact same “militant” demands. In the very same magazine, Slavenka Drakulić reflects at length on the role and challenges of feminism “as a revolutionary movement.”58 Nada Ler-Sofronić even reclaims “radical” for those revolutionary leftist ideas she agrees with: due to its essentialism, she suggests that Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex from 1970 is incorrectly categorized as “radical” and that it is rather “extreme” feminism.59

Conclusion

The quest for meanings of feminism and the possibilities to employ feminist ideas for change—slow and transitional or radical change—in the position of women in Yugoslavia lies behind the early intellectual endeavors of the new Yugoslav feminists. Whether looking at Italian feminism in historical perspective or investigating recent feminist theories and movements, the aim is always to see the relevance of these for the Yugoslav case. The theoretical criticisms shed light on the contradictions within the emancipation project promised by the socialist state and its implementation. It is, however, this promise on behalf of the state that makes the relationship with the feminist groups multi-layered and instead of being dissident (which many radical feminist groups become in other countries),60 the position of the new Yugoslav feminists vis-à-vis the state is critical or dissenting. This position is made easier by the flexibilities within the Yugoslav regime as much as the access to institutions and publication possibilities is concerned. The systematic reading of theories, especially their discussion and their publication, was made possible at least in part by these infrastructures and the discursive practices and linguistic interventions paved the way for activism. They formulated a critique of the socialist regimes that no other opposition group could. Thus they reformulated the relevance of feminism in the region and by challenging the policies and institutions introduced by the socialist governments to achieve the equality of women and men, they offer a different vision of women’s emancipation and gender equality.

 

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