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
there was a spread in the "second economy" and the private sector, making individual prosperity possible, making Hungary, as expressed in the West, the "merriest garrison in the socialist camp". In the 1980s the "entrepreneurial society" expanded: economic teams were permitted to operate within state plants, as were small cooperatives manufacturing consumer goods. In 1978 the American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance returned the Sacred Crown, symbol of Hungarian statehood, and the coronation jewels with all external pomp, from Fort Knox, where they had been preserved since "falling into captivity" in May, 1945. This was a gesture, a kind of recognition of the "welfare goulash communism" of Hungarian politics. Another triumph for the Hungarian media came when, in the person of Bertalan Farkas, a Hungarian spaceman was able to participate in one of the voyages of the Soyuz Soviet Space Programme (May 26-June 3, 1980) - primarily for propagandistic purposes among the socialist countries. For the Hungarian economy, the reorganisation of the world market caused by the new oil-price explosion of 1979 resulted in a "ripple effect and depreciation" from which it could not recover. To counter this, the country resorted to large foreign loans, in 1980, our gross debt (1 billion in 1970) rose to ten billion United States dollars. In the following year a payment crisis came about when foreign banks withdrew one billion dollars of deposits from the country. The inability to pay forced the country to join the International Monetary Fund (May 6, 1982) - a move unopposed by the changing post-Brezhnev Soviet foreign policy - and with it partial execution of western conditions (evaluation of currency, price rises). One external sign of rising inflation for the population was the issue in 1983 of the 1,000-forint bank note which featured Béla Bartók. New expressions and magical words - innovation, depreciation - appeared in public life, though they remained no more than catchphrases, like the somewhat profane yet practical extension of the poem by Attila József: "Work nicely and with exactitude".... "and make products that can be sold". An apathetic, prematurely ageing nation with a negative population growth, record suicide and alcoholism rates and heart attacks was ready for change; its economy, with its unsellable poor-quality goods reserved for the Eastern European market, proved that the "existing socialism" could not be reformed. Meanwhile the wider public remained uninformed of the period's most burning problem: a non-productive, slowing economy was being financed by easily-obtained Western loans - thereby prolonging the regime's agony by fifteen years - so that the population could be supplied by ungenerated products in the interests of the preservation of social peace in Kádár's "goulash communism", arming them in the proud though misplaced belief that we were the happiest, best-supplied, most