Fraternity-Testvériség, 1962 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1962-04-01 / 4. szám
10 FRATERNITY on June 24, 1956: “The political and economic mistakes of the past seven or eight years, the fact that Marxism was paralyzed in the icy atmosphere of dogmatism and the personality cult had a disillusioning effect on intellectuals. Members of the Petőfi Circle are no longer passive observers, a group of yes-men . . . but people who have learned, who want to benefit from the grave mistakes of recent years. The Petőfi Circle is a valuable forum, and it would be well if our Party and Government leaders attended their discussions more often and participated in them.” The ferment, however, was still confined to the Communist Party, giving hopes to intellectuals, students and workers alike that a liberalization process would lead the Communist Party to a new path, to the abandonment of thought control, pplice power, the continuance of personal dictatorship or even the dictatorship of the Party oligarchy. Not expediency alone dictated the writers to emphasize their adherence to Marxist principles, but the conviction that if Communism would reform, it would offer the people the kind of life they, the writers, imagined would come about by the honest application of avowed Communist ideas. The mask of Communism still fascinated them. Mátyás Rákosi, the First Secretary of the Party, whose dictatorial powers were clipped by Moscow after the XXth Party Congress, fully realized the regime’s precarious situation. He decided to stop the ferment with his old, tried- out police methods. A list of four hundred people was prepared for the AYH to arrest them. The list contained the names of the leading Party intellectuals, whose ideological differences with the Party oligarchy came into the open. But at this point the Kremlin intervened. Learning of Rákosi’s plans, Anastas Mikoyan,
