Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1981. július-december (35. évfolyam, 27-50. szám)
1981-12-10 / 47. szám
2 AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ Thursday, Dec. 10. 1981. Hungary emerges from the 'greyness' of socialism Excerpts from a report of Charles VanHecke on Hungary published in the Nov. 29. edition of the Manchester Guardian BUDAPEST — When I asked two Hungarians of different generations how they saw the events of 1956, the elder answered patly: “It was a counter-revolution!” A chunky-faced, well-meaning peasant who had always been a Communist Party worker, he was resorting to the terminology used officially to describe the rebellion that had shaken his country 25 years earlier. Indeed, he kept so close to party cliche that he even claimed the Soviet tanks had not entered Budapest to crush the rebels: "Far from it, the Russian soldiers wept when they saw the Hungarians salughtering each other!” The other answer I got — “1956 means nothing to me!” — came from someone who must have been 15 at the time. He was visibly proud of his blue-jeans and American jacket, his house, his furniture, his holidays abroad, and the 1001 ways he had found of emerging from “grey socialism” and of earning more than most of his fellow countrymen. He was much more interested in the government’s latest measures to open up private enterprise than in rattling old skeletons. There is no contradiction between the collectivised plains and the private kitchen gardens: they complement and even interpenetrate each other. The state- employed farm worker becomes a self-employed market gardener as soon as he gets home. This duality can be found across the spectrum of almost all Hungarian life: the Hungarians give part of themselves to the community, but devote most of their drive to a secondary, personal activity where they are free agents. Take the case Of István and his family, farmers in the north. Like half the population, they live in a village, in other words a community of less than 10,000. With its hipped roof, spotless rooms, and neatly arranged cushions, their house is no different from its neighbours. The streets are filled with horse-drawn carts, peasant women in headscarves, and weatherbeaten men whose Tyrolean-style hats are a reminder that Hungary once belonged to the Hapsburg empire. The onion.-domed church and the Party headquarters with its red star do not, as one might have expected, form the two poles of the community. Opposition to the regime has not crystallised around the state-supported Catholic priests, who only “talk of peace”, according to István, just like the officials who appear on television. István’s working day consists of eight to ten hours at the nearby cooperative, which produces com, milk, and sugar beet. His own team is in charge of com. As most of each man’s wage is geared to productivity, it is perfectly possible, says István, for a dairyman to earn more than an agronomist. Like his comrades, he owns a private plot within the collective area. He buys grain and fodder from the cooperative to feed his animals — cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, and rabbits which he breeds in hutches behind his house. For István life begins “for real” in his farmyard: what he is able to sell at market provides him with the largest slice of his income. The system is the same, with only slight differences, everywhere else. The peasant is provided with the feed and equipment he needs for his own farm by the state, whose employee he is. He also gets chicks and piglets which he later sells back to the state at a fixed price in the form of meat for slaughter. Everyone in Istvan’s household works. His wife sits in her Formica- covered kitchen making dresses to the sound of a cuckoo clock, while their two daughters are out on the verandah working the knitting machine for a craftsmen’s cooperative. When the girls have families, they will be able to stay at home for three years, the period during which mothers bringing up babies receive maternity benefits. The health service is free, at least in theory. Since last year, the retirement age has been 60 for men, and 55 for women. Further education is supported by state grants. All these factors explain why István sees no reason to change the system, and also why he describes 1956 as a “counter-revolution”. As the son of a farmhand, he was one of those who suffered most from the feudalistic structures of the old regime and therefore had the most to gain from communism. Yet István is not always the conformist he seems. He thinks, for istance, that “90 per cent of the news on television” is reliable, but that “it needs filling out”. And although he has his say in the running of the cooperative, “infringements of democratic procedure are common”. This feeling is echoed by the members of the Friendship with the Russian People Cooperative in the region of Cegled, south-east of Budapest. Over a dish of niutton with paprika, they explained to me why their chairman had been reelected every year since 1967: (“There was no one else”), why his decisions were never challenged (“Whatever he says goes”), why it was better not to grumble, and why the cooperative had to go along with him. Such explanations may seem grotesque, but they are understandable when you meet the chairman in question. Surrounded by pictures and books in his city flat, and dressed in a suit, the man could not be more remote from the unsophisticated agricultural world over which he presides. Yet it is university-trained agronomists like him, and not leaders who have risen from the ranks, who have revolutionised Hungarian agriculture and enabled it, through mechanisation, to achieve exceptional productivity levels for a socialist country. Some statistics were given to me at a model state farm by an agricultural engineer whose shelves displayed a fine collection of china dairy cows and portraits of Lenin: yields have doubled and sometimes even tripled over the last 15 years; wheat production, now between four and a half and five metric tons per hectare, is three times higher than in the Soviet Union. Technicians from the farm make regular visits to the West “to see what’s being done”. Hungary has nearly 11 million inhabitants but could feed 15 million: thus it is able to export part of its output. Another feátüre of rural areas is the merging of industrial and agricultural labour. Farm cooperatives have set up garment workshops and canning factories to soak up surplus labour created by mechanisation. The members of most rural families are active as farmers, workers, and craftsmen together. Many industrial workers have their own farming plots. “It’s meaningless to talk of workers and peasants as distinct categories,” says sociologist István Kémény. “They are state-employed people who also have a job on the side.” The so-called Hungarian “miracle” of plentiful and varied food supplies is often put down in Budapest to the intelligence of the country’s leaders and to the efficiency of a civil service designed by the Hapsburgs — in other words, “along Austrian, not Slav, lines”. Others see it as a consequence of 1956 and of what Kemeny calls the people’s “fierce and unceasing struggle” against an .absurd system. He says: “It was the failure of the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early ’60s that led the regime to encourage private production.” When the bureaucrats tried, ten years later, to penalise private plots by slapping a tax on them, they immediately had to backtrack: within a few weeks, the peasants had stopped taking their produce to market. During a visit to the plains of central Hungary, I met, successively, a wealthy restaurateur, a grocer who in the last year had bought himself a house and a car, and a private farmer who had just extended his activities from large- scale pig production to vines and sheep-rearing. I was told about young people who earn more force- feeding geese for three months than a university lecturer does in a year. Others were apparently making small fortunes cultivating mushrooms. Whenever I asked the question “Do you still feel you’re living under a socialist system,” the answer was always yes, though nobody actually explained what socialism meant. One person, however, did reply: “Socialist, yes, but with a tendency towards capitalism.” The case of Ferenc, a former electrician, is illuminating. He asked the village council for permission to set up on his own. He started by growing potatoes with the help of an old tractor which was above the statutory horsepower than permitted for private use. So he always kept 300 forints (about $9) in his pocket tó “grease the palm” of any policeman who might check up on him. Today, he still uses the same tractor to do contract work for other people. For five months of the year, he rears chickens, 24,000 of them, in a cramped bam near his home. His monthly earnings usually work out at 25,000 forints ($760), or six times the average wage of his fellow citizens; he has two houses, a truck, and a car, spends his holidays abroad, and gets together every evening with friends to work out how to earn even more money legally. The government recently decided to give free rein to individual initiative. Restaurateurs and shopkeepers can now obtain businesses through adjudication: in return for an annual state tax, they can run them as they please. The proportion of private trade (now 6 percent) will probably increase rapidly, as will the number of small industrial companies, in both the private and state sectors. Yet all that talk of still living under a socialist system is correct: “I realise I won’t be able to expand indefinitely,” the pig-breeder told me. Marton Tados, an economist with the Academy of Sciences, defines socialism as a system in which private capital exists, but “is not dominant”. Two economies exist within that system, one official, the other “parallel”, or unofficial. The great majority of Hungarians contrive to top up the income they get from their official jobs. It all begins with tipping, which is widespread, and extends to an equally common form of corruption. Yet few people would admit to the existence of such corruption. “It has become such an integral part of our lives that no one sees it for what it is any more,” says a respected journalist. “It may be no consolation, but things are worse in the Soviet Union. Here, at least, people recognise the problem, which is not the case there.” “Medical attention is free,” says István. “But each time the doctor comes round to the house we slip him 100 forints ($3). Officially he’s not allowed to accept any money, but he always leaves his bag or his overcoat pocket gaping.” A surgeon, being a civil servant, is poorly paid, so to be on the safe side, a patient will usually press something into his palm before having an operation. According to Kemeny, public housing is never quite cqmplete when handed over to tenants: in this way, construction workers can ask for a bit of extra cash to finish off the job. The state plumber also expects some sort of bonus when he visits a private home, otherwise he will discover that he has come without the right tools for the job. In shops, too, sales assistants often have to be tipped if you want to get the overcoat or pair of shoes you want. Official wages are so low that Hungarians find such practices normal. They re-establish, if you like, the market price. The skilled workman who earns 20 to 30 forints (60c to 90c) an hour in a factory will demand three times as much when he repairs a car or somebody’s bathroom plumbing after work. People with the right skills never have any difficulty in moonlighting (which is illegal, but tolerated). This is because the absolute imperative of socialist regimes — no unemployment — produces overstaffing and, as a result, a shortage of manual labour. Those who can work with their hands are therefore much sought-after. ZOLTÁN ZELK(b. 1906) The Way The way she told me about her home in Jászberény, about the kitchen, which was also a shoemaker’s shop, the way she spoke of her father who hammered away humming even when he had wooden nails in his mouth, the way she came to Pest, orphaned, unmarried, the way she once travelled to Paris, the way she climbed on a streetcar in the morning, the way she bought fresh peas in the market, the way she straightened her dress in the foyer of the theater, the way she woke beside me in bed, the way she stepped out, beautiful, from the bath, the way she stared after me through the window through fog for a thousand eight hundred miles, the way she watched my anguished feet while I dragged myself along the minefield, the way she covered my face with her hair so they could not see me, lifting me to her breast she ran with me through the burning night above burning walls, burning streets, the way, when she had to, she became a flame among flames, became a blade of grass, became shade, the way a closed mouth, a susurrus, the way Schubert’s Ave Maria when she sang it to me, the way she, squeezed within four boards, still managed to reach me through the wall of my cell, the way she entered my room this morning, with our dog at heel, who’s been dead for twenty years, because she knows where I walk, and where I live. translated by Barbara Howes AMERIKAI v MAGYAR SZO USPS 023-980 ISSN 0194-7990 Published weekly, exc. last week in July and 1st 2 weeks in August by Hungarian Word,Inc. 130 E 16 St. New York, N.Y. 10003, Ent. as 2nd Class Matter, Dec. 31. 1952 under the Act of «March 21.1879, at the P.O. of New York, N.Y. 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