HUNGARY.

Hungarians—unlike Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs, for example—form a historical nation. For more than ten centuries, Hungary has had an almost continuous existence as a sovereign state. The upper classes, although ethnically mixed, proudly regarded themselves as Hungarians, possessed political rights, and exploited a multilingual peasantry. (In 1914, only about half of the population spoke Hungarian as a native language.) In the course of its thousand-year history, the country accumulated a rich and mixed tradition that included dark spots involving the repression of national minorities but also bright spots of liberalism and tolerance. Unlike Croatia and Slovakia, which before the 1990s had existed only as German satellites and were without democratic traditions, Hungary in the twentieth century could have built on a democratic heritage. Between 1867 and 1918, under the Habsburg Monarchy, the country enjoyed spectacular economic growth, although it remained primarily an agricultural nation. Advanced, industrial Budapest, then one of the fastest growing cities in the world, with its lively intellectual and artistic life, coexisted with a backward countryside where a multinational peasantry lived in material circumstances not much better than those of peasants the Russian Empire.

THE INTERWAR PERIOD

The years 1918 and 1919 were a great dividing line in Hungarian history. The Austro-Hungarian loss in World War I had more disastrous consequences for Hungary than for any other land. In October 1918 a revolution separated Hungary from the monarchy and created a republic, headed by Count Mihály Károlyi. This liberal government remained in office for less than five months. On 20 March 1919, the Entente made known its decision concerning the line of demarcation between the Hungarian and Romanian troops, implying a future territorial division. The next day, Károlyi was compelled to resign in favor of a Communist-Socialist coalition, in which the Communists played the dominant role. Károlyi's government could neither accept Allied demands nor successfully resist them. Ironically, it was only the nominally internationalist Communists who were willing to fight for the country's national interest, because they expected that Soviet Russia would come to their aid. The Hungarian Soviet Republic remained in existence for only 133 days, in the course of which it carried out a mindlessly radical policy with terror. By nationalizing rather than distributing land, it alienated the peasantry. Throughout its existence, the Soviet Republic fought Czechoslovak and Romanian armies. Ultimately it failed not because of domestic opposition, although a counterrevolution was gathering its strength, but because it was defeated militarily by armies supported by the Allies.

The treaty concluded with Hungary at Trianon in 1920 was part of the Versailles settlements. The country lost two-thirds of its territory and more than half of its population, leaving three million Hungarian speakers just beyond the newly drawn borders. It is indisputable that the terms of the treaty Hungary was forced to sign were not only unfair but also unwise. The desire to regain all or at least some of the lost territories came to dominate Hungarian politics. Ironically, Admiral Miklós Horthy, who became governor and regent in 1920 and pursued a nationalist policy, came to power with the aid of foreigners and was compelled to accept peace terms that the internationalist revolutionaries would not accept. The country remained a kingdom, but without a king. The surrounding countries, all of them beneficiaries of the Monarchy's collapse, would not accept a Habsburg restoration, and for the Hungarian political class a republic sounded too revolutionary.

Interwar Hungary was profoundly different from what it had been before 1914. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom of Hungary, which had its government in Budapest, had administered a country of more than eighteen million people, a number that was now reduced to less than eight million. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist and Hungary became the most ethnically homogeneous country in the area. The perceived injustice of the Treaty of Trianon determined the character of Hungarian politics in the interwar period. Revisionism alienated Hungary from its neighbors and justified a socially repressive policy in the name of national interest. A small landed aristocracy still possessed much of the land and controlled the government. After the war in eastern Europe, the new countries carried out meaningful land reform, but Hungary did not. Only about 8 percent of the land was distributed, and that in such small parcels that many of the new owners soon lost their land; consequently, in the 1920s and 1930s about a third of the peasantry was landless. The defeat of the Soviet Republic was followed by a White terror that claimed at least as many victims as the previous Red terror. In addition to Communists and left-wing Socialists, Jews in particular suffered in this second terror. Whereas prewar Hungary had made possible and even encouraged Jewish assimilation, in the changed circumstances a new Hungarian middle class resented Jewish domination in the nation's intellectual and economic lives. The disproportionate role that Jews had played in the Soviet Republic was used to justify a new wave of anti-Semitism.

During the interwar period, the left wing played only a small role in the nation's political life. The Social Democratic Party was allowed to organize workers but not landless peasants. The Communists had been compromised by the unhappy memory of the 1919 Soviet Republic and by association with the profoundly unpopular Soviet Union. Whatever opposition existed to the outdated social structure came from the ever-stronger radical right wing. The realistic choice for a politically minded Hungarian was between a government in the hands of conservatives, serving the interests of a landed aristocracy while retaining some of the restraints imposed by a certain type of liberalism, and a government of the extreme right, socially radical but very much attracted first to the example of Italian fascism and later to German National Socialism.

WORLD WAR II

That Hungary would end up on the German side in the developing international conflict was overdetermined. Nazi war plans promised to overthrow the Versailles settlement, something that Hungarians deeply desired. In addition, Hungary—like other countries in the region—was deeply hurt by the economic crisis and could be helped only by ties to the rapidly reviving German economy. Hungary needed the German market. Allied policies, as represented by the Munich agreement, made it clear to the people of Eastern Europe that they had no choice but to come to terms with a resurgent Germany. The Germans rewarded the Hungarians for their friendship, first by returning a part of Slovakia and in 1940 by giving back to Hungary the northern part of Transylvania.

Hungarian Prime Minister LászlóBárdossy declared war on the Soviet Union immediately after German troops crossed the Soviet border in June 1941. This war also turned out to be a disaster for the country. The 200,000-strong Second Hungarian Army was caught in the Stalingrad encirclement and destroyed in 1942. After it became clear that the Germans were unlikely to win, ruling circles under a new premier, Miklós Kállay, attempted by various means to contact the Allies in the hope that the country would be liberated by Anglo-American forces rather than by the Soviet Army. On 19 March 1944, the German army occupied Hungary, even though Hungary was an ally. The German High Command feared that Hungary might follow the Italian example and seek a separate peace, and such a development, if successful, would have had disastrous consequences for the German lines of communication. The occupiers forced Horthy to dismiss Kállay and replace him with the pro-Nazi Döme Sztojay. At this point, Hungarian Jews, who were the largest intact Jewish community in the German sphere of interest, began to be deported to Auschwitz.

As it became increasingly evident that the war was hopeless, Horthy made a clumsy last-minute effort to conclude a separate armistice with the Soviets. The Germans learned of the plan and responded by carrying out a coup. On 15 October 1944, they arrested Horthy, together with his close associates, and installed the leader of the Nyilas (Hungarian Nazi, or Arrow Cross) Party, Ferenc Szálasi. Although in the first two years of the war, the country, as opposed to the army, had not suffered much, the last year of the war was different. Germany invested major forces in the defense of Budapest. It was in the interest of the German High Command to keep the fighting away from German territory as long as possible, and Hungary was a war zone for eight months. As a consequence of the intense fighting, the country, and especially the capital, suffered dreadfully. The task of reconstruction would be long and difficult.

THE POSTWAR PERIOD

The period from 1945 to 1948 was at once hopeful and tragic. On the one hand, the semi-feudal socioeconomic system was finally destroyed. The old ruling class had been discredited by its cooperation with the Nazis and Hungary finally experienced a radical land reform. Many believed that the creation of a democratic system would now commence. On the other hand, the terms of the armistice obligated the Hungarians to pay heavy reparations and that, combined with the wartime destruction, imposed great suffering on the people. Worst of all, the Allied Control Commission was a tool of Soviet policy. Although it seems that at the outset the Soviets did not plan to impose a communist system on the country, as the Cold War developed it became increasingly clear that the country would be reduced to the status of a satellite.

In the first free elections the country ever experienced, in November 1945, the nonsocialist Smallholders' Party received 58 percent of the vote and the Communists got only 17 percent. The Communists could come to power only with outside help. In February 1946, Hungary finally became a republic and the Smallholder leader, Zoltán Tildy, became the first president, and Ferenc Nagy, from the same party, became premier. If the Hungarians had been left to their own devices, they could have established a fairly well functioning democratic polity, but this was not to be. The Communists, with the aid of Soviet occupying forces, pressured their political opponents into one concession after another.

In 1947, as the Cold War grew bitterer, the Soviet leadership decided that it was no longer in its interest to maintain coalition regimes in Eastern Europe. In Hungary the noncommunist parties were gradually eliminated and prominent opponents of the communist takeover were arrested on trumped-up charges. Prime Minister Nagy was forced into exile and the Social Democratic Party was incorporated into the Communist Party. By the end of 1948, communist domination was complete. The Communist Party, headed by Mátyás Rákosi, introduced Soviet-style institutions and terror. The peasants were forced into collective farms; the state pursued a policy of forced industrialization, which called for high investment in heavy industry and resulted in a dreadfully low standard of living; all independent voices were suppressed and hundreds of thousands of people arrested. The country experienced show trials that began in December 1948 with the trial of the most uncompromising enemy of the Communists, József Cardinal Mindszenty, who was charged with currency speculation. The next year it was the turn of Communist leaders, including László Rajk, the most prominent Communist who had not spent the war years in the Soviet Union.

The worst years of terror, from 1948 to 1953, coincided with Joseph Stalin's last years. After Stalin's death, in March 1953, the Soviet leaders introduced a "new course," which had immediate consequences in Hungarian politics. Under Soviet pressure, Rákosi, the most hated man in Hungary, gave up his job as head of the government, although he remained as leader of the party. The new premier was Imre Nagy, who had achieved a degree of popularity as the minister of agriculture and was responsible for the 1945 land reform. Also, unlike the other top leaders of the party, he was not Jewish. Nagy made attempts to raise the standard of living by paying more attention to the production of consumer goods and freed most of those who were in prison for political crimes. His tenure as premier, however, lasted for less then two years. He fell victim to the power struggle within the top leadership in the Soviet Union. When his mentor, Georgy Malenkov, was forced out as premier in Moscow, Rákosi was able to take advantage of the opportunity to have Nagy removed and replace him with his own man, András Hegedüs.

In retrospect, allowing Rákosi to become once again the dominant force in Hungary was a mistake on the Soviets' part. Nikita Khrushchev's attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, held in February 1956, undermined Rákosi's hold on power. On the one hand, Rákosi could not prevent the news of Stalin's crimes from becoming public, and on the other his own record as the perfect Stalinist was evident to all. It was this contradiction at the top that allowed Rákosi's methods to be denounced increasingly explicitly, even while he remained in control of the party until June 1956. Even at that time, he was replaced as first secretary of the Party by Ernö Gerö, a man equally unpopular and almost as responsible for the Stalin-era crimes as Rákosi himself.

The spark for the Hungarian Revolution was the news from Poland, where the Soviet authorities had been compelled by popular pressure to make concessions. A demonstration on 23 October 1956 was originally meant to express solidarity with the Poles, but once tens of thousands came to the streets it quickly turned into an anti-Soviet and anticommunist movement. Fighting started that very evening. Although as the demonstrators demanded, Imre Nagy was named premier on 24 October, he could not take control of the popular movement. Under pressure, he allowed the re-formation of political parties and formed a coalition government. On 1 November, Nagy declared Hungary's neutrality and its exit from the Soviet-organized Warsaw military pact. The Soviet leadership, after some hesitation, on 31 October decided to suppress the revolution, and on 4 November Soviet troops, which had never left Hungary, reentered Budapest. Within a week, the fighting ended. Approximately 1,500 people died and 200,000 fled to the West. The people who left were, by and large, younger and better educated and consequently the loss for the country was disproportionate; however, the departure of the most bitterly anticommunist element made stabilization easier. The revolution was the only event in twentieth-century Hungarian history that had worldwide significance: it demonstrated that a communist regime outside of the Soviet Union itself could maintain itself only by the force of arms. Communism never fully recovered from this blow. The suppression of the revolution was followed by a bloody terror. Approximately 16,000 people received prison sentences and 361 were hanged, including Nagy and his closest collaborators. Nagy could have saved his life by supporting the government headed by János Kádár, but he refused.

In the early 1960s, a remarkable transformation occurred. Kádár made a successful effort to gain a degree of popularity. In 1963 his government introduced amnesty for those tried for their involvement in the 1956 revolution; after recollectivizing the land, it gave substantial material support to the farms and raised the peasantry's standard of living; it allowed increased intellectual freedom; and at the end of the decade it introduced economic reforms that raised the standard of living of the entire country. The consolidation occurred because people came to believe that this was the best situation they could achieve in the prevailing circumstances. Hungary, which in the first few years after the revolution was the most repressive among the communist states, within ten years had become the most liberal. Kádár was transformed from one of the most hated men in Hungarian history into a person who if he was not exactly loved was accepted.

THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD

The end of the communist regime came as a result of forces over which Hungarians had no control. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed Hungary (and the other satellites) to regain its independence, was greeted with joy. However, within a short time it became clear that the transformation would be painful and that the burden would fall disproportionately on those who had no ties to the new business economy. The traditional markets for Hungarian agriculture and industry suddenly disappeared; switching to an economic system in which prices were determined by supply and demand resulted in a sudden burst of inflation. For a while, the gross national product declined, unprofitable factories were closed down, and most people's standard of living suffered. When the economy started to improve, at first only a minority benefited and the gap between the rich and the poor widened.

In spite of the difficulties, Hungary was more fortunate than other countries that went through the same process. The economic reforms introduced in the 1960s and 1970s made the shift to a capitalist system easier. For several years after 1991, Hungary received far more foreign investment per capita than any other country in the region, and this made economic recovery quicker there than elsewhere. Reform communists rather convincingly managed to turn themselves into social democrats. There was relatively little recrimination for the crimes of the communist regime and a reasonably mature political system emerged rather quickly. The moderate right won the first free elections, and after that in each election cycle the governing party was turned out of office. A multiparty system was quickly reduced to two major political forces: a moderate right-wing party (Fidesz) and a moderate left-wing Social Democratic Party. An extreme right-wing party does exist (MIEP) but in the elections of 2002 it failed to gain 5 percent of the vote and therefore did not achieve representation in the parliament.

Hungarians, with the exception of the extreme nationalist right, have been enthusiastic about joining a united Europe. Hungary's inclusion into NATO in 1999 had only symbolic significance, but the entrance into the European Union in May 2004 is expected to revitalize the economy and ultimately raise the standard of living.

See alsoBudapest; Communism; Fascism; Károlyi, Mihály; Munich Agreement; Nazism; Trianon, Treaty of; Versailles, Treaty of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kontler, László. A History of Hungary: Millennium in Central Europe. New York, 2002.

Macartney, C. A. October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945. Edinburgh, 1957.

Molnár, Miklós. A Concise History of Hungary. New York, 2001.

Romsics, Ignác. Magyarország Története a XX Században. Budapest, 1999.

Sinor, Denis. History of Hungary. New York, 1959.

Peter Kenez