A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 24. 1997 (Debrecen, 1997)
Tanulmányok - Varga Zsuzsanna: A Hajdú-Bihar megyei mezőgazdasági termelőszövetkezetek érdekérvényesítési küzdelmei a korai Kádár-korszakban
267 hivatalos bevezetését két évvel megelőzve, a mezőgazdaság területén jelentős reformlépésekre került sor. CONDITIONS OF INTERESTEDNESS IN THE COUNTY HAJDÚ BIHAR IN THE FIRST THIRD OF THE 1960s Zuzsa Varga The conditions of interestedness of the agricultural co-operatives in Hajdú-Bihar County in the period between 1956 - 1963 are surveyed. The study focuses on one of the problems not properly dealt with so far in the literature of regional history. The present work traces the course of the assertion of interests, the conflicts and compromises between the co-operative farmers and the state power in the early Kádár Era. With the purpose of studying in detail the above-mentioned two sides and their mutual interactions, material collection was expanded, in addition to party and council documents on district and county level to documents created in national organisations, with special respect to those related to Hajdú-Bihar County. In the course of research in archives light was shed on the condition that the agricultural co-operatives continuing their operation after October 1956, availing themselves of the vacuum of power around them, drafted their operational and organisational statutes in a way different from the previous one, which copied the Soviet example. The present work examines primarily the initiatives taken by the co-operatives to enforce their own interests. Shared farming, the time-rate system of wages were capable of improving, in a short time, the labour organisation of the collective farms, although there were differences between the party and state leaderships in the assessment of the local solutions. From the spring of the year 1958 the actions of the party and state “hard-liners” became more aggressive: in parallel with the efforts to give preference to collectivisation, they tried to force the co-operatives to work within the confines of an obligatory pattern of statutes. By late autumn and early winter in 1959, the political leadership - due to worries about the newly-organised co-operatives and the trend to stabilise them - found itself in an emergency. Under such circumstances the method of handling problems with administrative measures, practised by the extremist leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture, lost credit, on the other hand, the forces aiming at the modification of co-operative policy used as an argument the experience gained from the initiatives in interest assertion between 1956-58. The 1960 changes in policies towards co-operatives, completely ignored so far by the specialist literature, implied that the top leaders of state administration adopted the style of managing problems in a way as it had proved useful at co-operative level, the essence of which was activation of material incentives. This change in direction was characteristic mainly of the highest state and party leadership, which also meant that in the implementation of the interestedness of co-operatives there often occurred collisions with the carping, fault-finding attitudes of district- or county-level party or state organs. Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár Évkönyve XXIV
