Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
From the Liberation to Greater Budapest (1945-1950)
in the person of József Kővágó, and the posts of deputy mayors were filled by representatives of the leading parties of the Coalition. The Smallholder leadership of the city was unable to change the tradition of shared control, and therefore tried to maintain the coalition. But at the same time, political developments in the country and the capital were increasingly unfavourable to the Smallholders who were more and more openly becoming representative of the capitalists. In 1945 the population of the capital faced an extraordinarily difficult winter. In the course of the autumn the reactionaries, encouraged by the results of the elections, began an attack on the economic front. There was a shortage of goods, speculation increased, and the pace of inflation quickened. In the Budapest Municipal Assembly the Smallholders dramatized the difficulties, claiming that one of the principal causes was the recent curtailment of the city autonomy. They also argued that the city could only be put on its feet with the help of foreign, i.e. Western capital. The left, and in the first place, the Communists, were for the reconstruction of the capital out of the city’s own resources, and recommended improvements in municipal management and rationalization of the administration to alleviate the existing difficulties. In the first period after the Liberation, there was far-reaching insistence on the autonomy of the capital. The National Committee of Budapest and the Provisional Municipal Assembly dealt with the affairs of Budapest with revolutionaryindependence.lt was the genuine supporters of the advance to democracy who, almost entirely, filled posts in the leading municipal bodies, as opposed to the Government, which represented a broader coalition. After the 1945 Parliament elections the situation changed. True, there was a Smallholder majority in the elections, but a clear swing to the left took place in the Government, as a result of the union of the two workers’ parties and the struggle of the masses—as opposed to the undoubted shift to the right that had occurred in the municipal leadership. The key post of the Minister of the Interior was held by a representative of the Communist Party, and the office of Secretary General of the Supreme Economic Council, which had been established at the beginning of 1946 to co-ordinate the work of the economic Ministries, was also filled by a delegate of the Communist Party. The Supreme Economic Council likewise exercised control over the finances of the capital. In this situation, insistence on the autonomy of the capital became a reclamation of Smallholder power. Representatives of the peasant masses of the Party were absent from the municipal caucus of the Smallholders. With the exception of a few members of genuinely progressive persuasion, the main role was played there by those who openly advocated right-wing views. The position of the left in the Municipal Assembly was weakened by the fact that from the second half of 1945 the work of the National Committees diminished considerably, and the National Committee of Budapest only rarely met. The district National Committees continued to function, but they found no real scope for activity. The decline of the National Committees undoubtedly gave greater influence to the conservative elements in the municipality, both in the central and in the district administrations. In the summer of 1945 the question of a Greater Budapest, which had been postponed just before the Second World War, arose once more. The development of the capital during the Second World War extended well beyond the existing municipal boundaries. From 1942 the various public utilities had been correspondingly extended beyond the fourteen districts, together with the police, transport, and so forth. In so far as the political parties were con-62
