Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
Abstracts 513 war, and at was not until 1949 that the centre finally opened, taking its place in the official discourse as a “citadel of socialist culture”: And now, on 30 December, the pride of Angyalföld, a house of culture named after Mátyás Rákosi, is opening its doors. This beautiful and enormous building has reading rooms, lecture halls, a theatre and a projection room for the workers of Angyalföld. The house of culture is proof that the People’s Republic of Hungary intends to make culture the common property of the working masses. The Mátyás Rákosi House of Culture will be a citadel of socialist culture, one of the intellectual and cultural centres of Angyalföld. (Népszava, 30 December 1949). Within a short time, then, two personality cults - Horthy and Rákosi - had, at least in name, put their stamp on the district of Angyalföld. The house of culture embodied the socialist culture of a socialist city. Angyalföld was the model workers’ district of the socialist state, and the house of culture was its showpiece. This paper draws on contemporary reports and archive sources and on memories of local residents and former employees of the institution to give a view from behind the scenes of the face of the cultural policy of the Rákosi Era, and what lay behind it. PÁL BELUSZKY The granting of town status in Hungary after 1945 Before 1945, very few (52) towns in Hungary were officially classified as such, and consequently there were many “villages” with large populations. The radical political turn of 1948 (Communist takeover, single-party system, “state capitalism”, etc.) provided the government with the opportunity to steer the course of urbanisation. Industrial and mining towns embarked on rapid growth, and since towns were the locations of factories and the homes of the working classes, they had an ideological value too. Nonetheless, the granting of town status progressed only modestly between 1950 and 1970 (54 towns in 1950 and 73 in 1970). The reasons for this included the suppression of local interests and the lack of investment resources. Town status carried strict requirements - municipal institutions, urban infrastructure, a population of more than 8000, etc. The government made concessions on the grant of town status only to the “socialist towns” - workers’ housing estates built beside large
