Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 20. The Rise and Fall of Communism (1945-1990). István Ihász

plan in the 1950s was the Stalin Ironworks industrial centre (coking, foundries, steelworks and rolling millworks) sited in the vicinity of Dunapentele. The settlement, renamed as Sztálinváros (Stalin Town) was built as the "first socialist town", and the propaganda depicted the massive concentration of the workforce in heroic verse. Recognising the mobilising power and the propagandistic opportunities of sport, a significant amount of the state budget was spent upon it. At the basic level, this was realised through the compulsory mass sport related to military preparedness within the MHK ("Prepared for Work and Battle") framework. The Prepared for Work and Battle sports movement, established on April 3, 1949, "wished to raise for popular democracy workers who were strong, healthy and courageous" in body and spirit. Competitive sport was carried out in reorganised sports clubs supported by ministries, industrial institutions and large factories. To turn into a sporting champion extended opportunities for a significant rise in material conditions, high wages, journeys abroad denied others and the contingent possibilities to do a little wheeling and dealing. The 16 gold medals won at the Helsinki Olympics were just as much a "triumph over capitalism" as the world-sized triumphant procession of football's "golden team", which set the entire country in a fever. The liquidation of the unique village way of life and of the peasant smallholder commenced toward the end of 1949 with the mass structuring of the kolkhoz-type agricultural cooperative. The volunteers came first of all from the ranks of the impoverished or the new farmers whose diminutive holdings had made survival impossible, while landowning farmers were cajoled into joining by making their burdens greater than their profits, forcing them into disadvantageous consolidation or simply through physical violence. In 1951, sugar and flour rationing was introduced: the well-to-do peasantry was blamed for supply difficulties and the clearing-out of lofts and silos put on the agenda in the search for corn and other crops secreted from state delivery. Apart from corn, producers were also obliged to sell to the state at a low price potatoes, pigs and poultry, eggs, milk, wine and hay. In 1949, Minister for Ingathering Imre Nagy (1 952-53) was to receive the Order of Merit (1st Class) for his earlier activities in land division (1945), Minister of the Interior (1946) and Speaker of the House (1948)