Antal Tamás: A tanácsrendszer és jogintézményei Szegeden 1950-1990 - Dél-Alföldi évszázadok 26. (Szeged, 2009)

IDEGEN NYELVŰ ÖSSZEFOGLALÁSOK

the delegates, council committees, executive committee, specialist administrative organs and offices were examined separately. Having given an overview of the institutions, the author proceeded to discuss the — already historical — legal matter of some fields of the legal regulation, or rather the more characteristic parts thereof. The regulations of several social conditions e.g. housing management, maintenance of public places and markets, city policing were frequently arising issues in the legislative program of the council, thus several decrees or resolutions were passed in these fields. These truly reflect the social and living conditions of that period, too. It was also an important task to explore the relationship between the councils and other state or party-like organs. Probably this was the most difficult task as it was here that informal communication was of the greatest significance. Its documents mostly lie hidden or have not been researched into in the archives. At the same time institutional cooperation can be traced in various written and occasionally normative agreements; thus these served as the starting point. As far as the "cadre situation" and the specific personnel policy characteristic of the era are concerned, these were evaluated by the councils themselves from time to time. It was reasonable to approach the evaluation of the council system from two directions: partly from contemporary sources and studies, and partly on the basis of the retrospective judgement of posterity. The author consistently aimed at objectivity: the council era had to be judged professionally, with a view to authenticity and historical truth, and not from political or emotional aspects. The reasonable starting point was the statement according to which the political system of the socialist society — as opposed to the former (bourgeois) state-centred political system — was centred on and determined by the party. It was a state which was openly — and also legally — opposed to plurality, and in order to ensure that only one political interest was enforced both on the higher-middle and on the lower levels of administration, an institutional structure had to be set up with a double feature: as the UNO was founded in 1945 and Hungary — despite the disapproval of the United States — strove to be a member, the principles of its charter, including the requirement of a state institutional system respecting human rights, had to be adhered to. At the same time, the creators of people's democracy knew right from the beginning that they would wish to meet the democratic requirements only formally, in reality they intended to establish a left-wing, dictatorial (total) state. One single party, the Hungarian Workers' Party (Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1957) served as the theoretical basis thereof, which considered itself a public law factor outside the constitution and in practice it exercised direct control over the Presidential Council, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament, which had sessions only rarely. However, direct control mechanisms had to be organized right down to the level of local public administration in order to make sure that the system could reach and ultimately control each citizen as closely as possible. This was realized by democratic centralism, which carried out the tasks of regional public administration with the help of institutions which had local government effect but were under central control.