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

ment was formed as a result of soviet pressure - in order to realise its own power interests - in which the Hungarian Communist Party achieved a defining role and space also given to the Social Democrats and the National Peasant Party. (At first the soviets had not wanted a coalition government, but a joint list; this however was frustrated by protests from the West and (with the exception of the communists) Hungarian political circles. As a compromise, a coalition government was announced prior to the election and regardless of the result.) On January 31, 1946, after long debating, the national assembly accepted the law that would create the Republic, the new state form. On February 1 PM Zoltán Tildy (Independent Smallholders) was elected President of the Republic by acclamation. His place was taken by Ferenc Nagy (1946-1947), one of the founders of the Smallholders in the 1930s, later its secretary-general, afterwards its chairman and at the time Speaker of the National Assembly, who considered the ideal parliamentary democracy to be one in which the landowning peasantry had the leading role. Radical reform of the political situation began after the elections with Soviet assistance and exploiting the Hungarian Communists in order to keep a firm hold on the Ministry of the Interior and the police force. In the absence of aid from the West, the non-communist parties were tilting at windmills against the key position-holding HCP, which swept all before it announcing through the messianic self-belief of its monopolistic propaganda machine that only the Soviet system could offer a viable alternative to the region's pre-war backwardness. Using so-called "salami tactics", they progressively sliced up the prevailing right wing of the coalition parties, dubbing them reactionary or anti-democratic. Opposition parties outside the coalition found themselves under a merciless crossfire attack. Alongside the demagogic propaganda campaign waged in the country under the slogan of the defence of democracy there was a wave of political cleansing and dismissals from workplaces: the objective of the so-called "B-Listing" was to "purify"