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
The old, experienced small and large landowners who possessed land covering an area exceeding 25 cadastral yokes (=35.5 acres) or worth more than 250 gold crowns were dubbed kulaks and, stamped the exploiters of the poor peasant, disinherited or ended up with urban evacuees around their necks. By 1953, 1.5 cadastral yokes (2,130,000 acres) of land had been "offered" to the state as the effect of forced consolidation with cooperatives and state deliveries. (The number of people wandering from the agricultural provinces into the industrial areas and the capital as involuntary proletarians approached 300,000.) The entire village peasantry, considered a "hotbed of clerical reaction", was anathemized in that until 1958 it could not participate in pension funds and only received a family allowance after the third child, while they were also excluded from the free health service. At the same time was born community education, which aimed at raising the cultural level of the millions of workers and peasants. Cultural homes and centres became the movement's characteristic form and space. They provided spaces for folk choirs, dance ensembles, libraries and acting groups, (humorous) verse performances and skits by brigades, the Attila József reading movement and other cultural contests. Another cultural triumph of 1951 was the decree regarding compulsory education, the eight-year elementary school and a free, basic, entirely state-run public education system. Since the turn of the 19 th-20 th century the social democratic workers' movement had been based upon the classic theses of the works of Marx and Engels. After 1948 this was connected with Leninism as the further development of Marxism and with the ideology propounding the principle of the dictatorial seizing of political power by the proletariat. The recapituiary work of the living Stalin was also slotted into these three classics. In 1950 departments of Marxism-Leninism were established in colleges and universities to teach this obligatory, ideological subject: they continued to exist under various names until 1990. Interior and weigh-house of an agricultural cooperative
