Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
FINAL THOUGHTS – TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS
FINAL THOUGHTS - TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS the hierarchies’ part to support the building of these networks, does this also mean that we should suspect a willing helping hand lent to spreading these networks behind Kádár ’ s so-called soft dictatorship’ or the policy of opening up to the West?511 In my opinion this is one of the key questions when it comes to making sense of the Kádár regime. 511 Building networks in the Kádár era is aptly illustrated by the cultural policy pursued by György Aczél, the unique methods of which clearly show the workings of goulash communism. Szekér 2017b. The 20th century shows an unmatched mesh of hierarchies and networks existing side by side. The ideology of Bolshevism was spreading in the world like a virus, so it was a network right until it built its own dictatorship in Soviet Russia. (The same applies, of course, to the ideology of fascism and national socialism, too.) In Stalin’s Soviet Union, building bottom-up and horizontally spreading networks of relationships was out of the question; networks could only be created by the informants and collaborators of state security obeying instructions issued centrally by the Party: the network therefore transformed itself into the strictest hierarchy possible. The Soviet-type dictatorship did not lock itself up behind its own walls. Instead, it was readying itself to go and conquer the world (again, not unique in the history of the world): It never lost sight of its intention to spread the global revolution. Between the two wars, Stalin put immense effort into winning over leftist intelligentsia, but in addition to influencing the like-minded it was also important to sensitise western societies. He was able to chalk up dramatic results in both areas, but this was only possible with an extensive network working behind the scenes to reach his goal. The professional work of the leftist movement, communist cover organisations and the Soviet secret services is not unknown to us, so it is safe to say that, whilst building a dictatorship in his country, Stalin made sure of the survival of the network that had helped the Bolshevik party take power, and that was intended to crumble western regimes from the inside, and even promoted its further development in western countries. This kind of internal disruptive work was inconceivable in reverse: the Soviet hierarchy did not provide any scope for systems of horizontal relationships to extend freely into Russia. 187
