Apor, Péter. 2014. Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary – The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism. London: Anthem. 228 pp. Illus (Hungarian edition: Apor, Péter. 2014. Az elképzelt köztársaság. A Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság utóélete 1945–1989. ... (original) (raw)
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The Squaring of the Circle: The Reinvention of Hungarian History by the Communist Party in 1952
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2008
This article analyses a document, published by the Hungarian Academy of Science as a gift for the dictator Mátyás Rákosi's sixtieth birthday in 1952. The document tries to legitimate governance by the Communist Party, which emerged victorious from the political struggles in the post-war period (1945–1949). The Party had no tradition of public political life and its politics and ‘collective identity’ lacked national roots. For this reason, professional historians with leading positions in the Communist Party used raw material from Hungarian history in its attempt to achieve congruent communist and national traditions. They therefore introduced new heroes to the pantheon and removed others. This new narrative justified the elimination of potential enemies and promised a bright future for the nation. The article highlights the technique of realigning temporal references along a theoretical guideline, which is derived from a specific worldview, and examines the extent to which a new narrative can be successful when forced temporal references and the administrative creation of the past is too obvious. This article assumes that only closed societies enable such a ‘squaring of the circle’.
Revisiting Hungarian Stalinism
In Tismaneanu, Vladimir (ed.), Stalinism Revisited The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe. Budapest, 2009, CEU Press, 231-254. Paper begins by clarifying the meaning of two concepts in the context of this study: of Stalinism, and of Hungarian Stalinism. Then comes a word on three periods in the historiography of Hungarian Stalinism. The third part sets out to pinpoint the main historical problems raised by Hungarian Stalinism.
East Central Europe, 2017
By tracing the developments that led to a historical debate in 1950, this article questions some assumptions concerning the Stalinization of Hungarian history writing, in particular the notion of a predetermined continuity between the national-communist line followed by Hungarian communists before and after 1949. Contrary to the understanding of the Sovietization of historiography in Hungary as a straightforward process, guided by a firmly-established ideological line, this article shows that the period between early 1949 and 1950 was characterized by a certain level of uncertainty, caused, on the one hand, by the ideological and institutional changes brought about by Sovietization, and, on the other, by a temporary lack of firm interpretative guidance from the Party leadership. A closer look into the efforts to elaborate a new periodization of Hungarian history reveals not only the existence of competing Marxist interpretations (a “national” state-oriented and an “internationalist”...
Politics, Religion and Ideology 12 June 2011, 2011
Postwar Hungarian Communists wanted to construct the history of 1919 as an instance of a usable past and establish the First Hungarian Soviet Republic as the praefiguratio of their own regime. In this attempt they could benefit from previous Soviet exercises in historical typology, which identified episodes in the past as models for contemporary political action. Nonetheless, the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Bolshevik regime in 1919 was not only an occasion for creating a historical interpretation adequate for the objectives of Sovietization. The ceremonies did not merely aim at making their conception of history authentic, but also to induce a particular politicized relationship to historical time. Yet, the ceremonies Hungarian Communists carefully designed to disseminate their political agenda failed in fulfilling these goals. Their failure calls the attention to that the relationship of cautiously executed political rituals and the credibility of ideological messages is far from being unambiguous. The case of the thirtieth anniversary of First Hungarian Soviet Republic provides the opportunity to examine how historical festivals function and what are the criteria of successful political rituals.
Journal of Nationalism Memory & Language Politics, 2020
The year 2019 in Hungary was marked by the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 133-day rule of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The communist regime was established on March 21, 1919, and the news shook the victorious peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference, as it signaled the spread of the dreaded "bacilli" of Bolshevism from Russia to the West. The short-lived communist dictatorship left a lasting impact on the Hungarian collective memory that was first shaped by the memory politics of the interwar right-wing Horthy regime, which identified itself with the counterrevolution and painted the Soviet Republic and its leaders with the darkest colors. Following World War II, under Soviet occupation, the communist regimes in Hungary reversed the trend and identified the Hungarian Soviet Republic as the glorious precursor to the postwar Hungarian status quo. The collapse of communism, or state socialism, and the rise of western-type democratic governments in Hungary in 1989 indicated that an objective reexamination of 1919 by historians promised balanced interpretations and the shaping of memory history that did not reflect Manichean extremes. All these expectations changed with the rise of the authoritarian Orbán regime in 2010, which is identified with extreme right-wing policies. It shapes memory politics that aim to revive the cult of the authoritarian Regent Miklós Horthy and the denigration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The symbolic act of this policy during this anniversary year was the removal from Martyrs Square [Vértanúktere] the statue of the martyred prime minister, the communist Imre Nagy, of the ill-fated 1956 Hungarian revolution, and its replacement