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

ing the social justice of the age, political stability and loyalty to the Socialist Bloc, the "peace camp". The simultaneous increase in quick economic development and backwardness coupled with industrial growth based upon a faulty strategy conceived during preparation for the Cold War resulted in unrestrained social mobility; the cultural struggle caused the earlier bourgeois set of values to be torn apart; and antireactionism fired religious persecution and the elimination of old class structures. The State Security Authorities, the dreaded and almighty ÁVH terror organisation created out of the State Security Department of the Ministry of Defence, illegally made use of a wide range of violent methods (beatings, murder, show trials) in the destruction of its perceived enemies (already from January 1945!). They initiated procedures against - among others - religious leaders in the name of the ideological struggle (the militant anticommunist Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was dragged from the Primatial Palace in Esztergom at Christmas, 1948, and after being humiliated both in body and spirit and put to torture was sentenced in a show trial, after which he was placed under house arrest from which he only escaped in 1956), against the leaders of companies previously under foreign ownership in the name of nationalisation, and against the landowning peasantry (the "kulaks") in the interest of agricultural cooperatives created on the soviet kolkhoz model, which could be directed by the State. They also exploited the split between their southern neighbour, Tito-led Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in order to bring to book the "non-Muscovite" communists and those Social Democrats who had joined the HDP. Worldwide soviet propaganda was part of the biennially organised festival of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, where the young - for the most part anti-Western - people of the world could express their desire for peace. Budapest hosted the 2

nd World Festival of Youth and Students, in August 1949. The unsuspecting, misguided young people marched with shining faces past the building at 60, Andrássy Rd., where behind a window box of geraniums the physical and ideological preparations were already being made for the various trials. From the beginning of 1949 everyone was under suspicion who prior to the war had lived in the West or anywhere excepting the Soviet Union. The trial of the communist Rajk was conducted, along with the Hungarian interrogators, by General Bielkin of the Soviet KGB himself, and the trial was set up, citing the Party loyalty of the accused, as an important service to the international communist movement. What was being attempted was to explain away political and economic difficulties by tracing them back to activities by internal traitors, spies and saboteurs. The search for traitors, this psychosis of vigilance, spread to an activity embracing all society. In the course of the forced relocations, the reason for which was given as an increase in "tension fomented by imperialists", there were attempts to remove from the capital, industrial and border areas all unreliable elements, those members of the ruling class who had remained in Hungary, army officers, leading administrators, factory owners and landowners of the old regime. In this way in Budapest 5,300 apartments, villas and co-tenancies were vacated, afterwards to be occupied