Interview with a leader organizing committee a ten-person negotiated
Hungarian
Peace with the
Council over the time and the route of of the Hungarian the march.
From the very beginning, the Communist Youth Organization, the KISZ
(Magyar Kommunista Ifjusagi Szovetseg), peace movement strongly opposed this proposal, and planned a counterdemonstration for December 13. The secretary of the Peace Coun cil demanded on the spot that we take part in the official KISZ rally. Of course, we did not do that, and the independent
Although Hungary is the smallest of the Soviet-bloc states, and the one most isolated by its language, it has held a key political position since 1956.
be shaped profoundly by what was the first and still the only example of a mass nationwide uprising against the rule of the totalitarian bureaucracy.
The managerial and market reform advocated by the bureaucracies throughout
Eastern Europe has been much more widely implemented in Hungary than anywhere else, since the old system was thrown entirely into the melting pot by the
1956 revolution.
In the wake of the uprising and brief but massive resistance to the overwhelming Soviet interventionist forces, the new government installed by the Red Army accepted also an extensive compromise with the population.
toleration is much greater than in Eastern Europe.
has allowed Kremlin-style "Marxism" to wither away, to the point of becoming simply a thin veneer in official publications.
Hungary has been the laboratory for those elements in the Stalinist bureaucracies everywhere who are looking for ways to stabilize post-Stalin bureaucratic rule. These experiments now take on a greater importance since the new Kremlin chief, Yuri Andropov, masterminded the Soviet operation in Hungary (he was
Soviet ambassador at the time of the uprising and during the Stalinist reconsolida tion) and he continues to rely extensively on Hungarian experts trained in the
Kadar experiment.
Even in Hungary a chillier wind has been blowing since the Polish December. In recent months, unofficial publishing centers have been raided, athough they were more or less tolerated before. There are also signs of more independent activity, mainly around the peace movement that has developed in the last year. This is now the main example of a peace movement in Eastern Europe after the appearance of one in East Germany. And because of the relative freedom for discussion in Hungary, there seems to be more open political debate in and around the movement. That is reflected in the following interview, which offers some insight into the way opponents of bureaucratic rule view the question.
In general, it is notable that all the broad opposition movements that have developed in Eastern Europe and the USSR in recent years have been built around issues that cut against oppression both East and West and to which the bureaucratic regimes, because of their roots in the working-class movement and in the economic forms created by the overthrow of capitalism, were obliged to give lipservice.
That is true of the movement to support the Helsinki treaty on human rights, the
Polish workers fight for trade-union rights, and now for the movement against the threat of nuclear war.
The following interview is with Istan Szent-Ivanyi, one of the founders of the
Hungarian peace movement. It was done by Klaus Ehring, and published in the
October issue of the Vienna magazine Gegenstimmung. This monthly is devoted to the movement against bureaucratic rule in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Members of the Austrian section of the Fourth International actively promote it and collaborate with it.
Q. So, an independent peace movement has been formed recently in Hungary as well?
A. The attempts to build one are very recent. They go back perhaps a year. Before that, there was little in the way of peace activity, or at least we knew of very little. There were groups of Catholic believers that had been opposing military service for then years already. This movement functioned in a very conspiratorial fashion, and embraced perhaps two to three hundred young people. Those of them who refused the draft were sentenced to two to three years in prison.
The opposition peace movement first made its views public in September 1981. 16
The extent of At the same time, the regime Among others, the writer Gyorgy Konrad presented the position that it was important to gain a broad base for the Hungarian opposition. An independent peace movement could not be so easily anathematized by a government whose official peace and which constantly plays up the doings of the Western peace movement. His paper was essentially based on such considerations.
Within the opposition, there were big discussions about this. It was decided that independent peace actions should not be supported because they only served the interests of the Soviet Union both in the East and in the West.
peace demonstration at the university immediately dispersed
A similar thing had happened in April. A group of high-school students formed the Anti-Nuclear Campaign-Hungary. They planned a peace march for March 9 with their own slogans and placards, directed both against U.S. and Soviet armament. Naturally, the KISZ functionaries moved in quickly to help, so that when the demonstration finally took place, there was hardly anyone there but the "Young Guard," who browbeat the Antinuclear Committee activists.
After this demonstration, the Anti-nuclear Committee work with the KISZ anymore but to organize its own actions in the future. So, they printed their own leaflets, increased the number of their activists to 120, and planned to publish their own journal, which they were stopped from
You run into Antinuclear Committee activists all the time in the parks and street corners working to recruit to their group. Besides this small group, there was an even smaller one of sculptors and artists that formed a peace committee in March. They are planning a big peace exhibition in Budapest. We have good contacts with them,even if they are doing work that is not so politicized in the propagandistic sense.
Outside Budapest, there is also a peace group in Szeged at the university, which also wanted to hold a peace march last
Szeged, however, there is a very hard-nosed political leadership -we call them the Hungarian Pol Pot Clique - and so the members of the group there were interrogated by the police and harassed to the point that they had to give up the march.
Q. What does the peace committee at the University of Budapest plan to do
A. We are holding a peace congress this
This includes some lectures on the question of peace and, if possible, the passing of a motion that will not be aimed so much at the super powers as against our own government. This seems more sensible to me because the Hungarian government can be forced to make some changes in the relationships within the country, such as creating an alterna-
tive to military service. They might also be forced to move to reduce the military
Q. What's the starting point for your discussions about peace?
A. The first thing is the overall political question. This is precisely because the opposition does not want to get involved in the peace actions, since it thinks that they are in Moscow's interest. have rejected this approach. The discussion of what consequences the fight for peace will have on the internal structure of our own country has not yet been carried any further.
The internal militarization in Hungary is not so striking anymore. In recent years, Hungary has been largely pettybourgeoisified, liberalized, Westernized. This has also had an effect on the conciousness of people. The militarization of the society is more identifiable in the official declarations, both in what they say and the way they say it.
Q. Isn'l it also an element in the peace movement that those involved want to play down confrontation with their own state and therefore avoid questions that make this relationship unnecessarily dif-
A. That was a central concern in our and we agreed to differenpeace movement clearly from It wasn't so difficult, because the opposition does not want to work with us directly. In an essay in the new issue of Beszelo, called "Thoughts About the Immediate Future," Kis has presented the tasks of the opposition rather clearly. He points to three main tasks for the future:
- The creation of a new ideology for
- Deepening and strengthening oppositional activity.
- A thoroughgoing analysis of the Pol-
In this context, Kis sees the fight for peace as a very secondary question. The opposition's attitude to the peace movement is not hostile, but it is not sympa-
Q. What is your own view of this?
A. I also think that the peace movement is not a central arena. But I think that it is a good preparation for political commitment, can gain a broad mass base. ment is very popular, because everyone wants to live in peace, and it is not so dangerous as oppositional activity.