Hungarian government out to smash
Bourgeois journalists are delighted to see public toilets being run as private businesses and small-capitalist bakeries and plumbing businesses.
Why should Laszlo Rajk and Miklos Haraszti be persecuted for producing a few type-written sheets that are hard to the dissident movement Police arrest Lazlo Rajk and Miklos Haraszti while distributing leaflets (DR) Kathia SCHRIEBER "Now they want to get rid of us once and for all and smash samizdat publishing." That was how Miklos Haraszti assessed the Budapest police's latest reprisals against the opposition.
Lazlo Rajk, son of the foreign minister executed under Rakoszi; and Gabor Demsky, an activist in the busy underground publishing house AB, were confronted by the police on April 7 and 8 with drawn pistols.
Pretending to be traffic cops, three carloads of policial police searched their car for manuscripts and held them overnight in the Second Precinct jail.
got no sleep the following The police searched his "so that you won't forget us,"
A week before, police had cleared out all six apartments in which samizdat publications were being openly sold.
apartments of Laszlo Rajk; Gabor Demsky; Ottilia Zsolt, the founder of Szeta, the Committee to Aid the Poor; Jeno Nagy, a collaborator of the AB publishing house; and of Miklos Haraszti and Forene Koszeg, editors of the Samizdat magazine Beszelo (Discussion).
In the first wave of arrests in December, the police released the people they picked up with warnings. But this time indictments were issued for violations of the press law. The charges carry penalties of up to 180,000 forints in fines or six months in prison. It is possible that the government will push for trials.
The opposition was hardest hit by the actions against the so-called "Shop,' 24 that is, the sale of samizdat books and periodicals every Tuesday evening in Laszlo Rajk's apartment.
In December, Rajk lost his apartment in central Budapest, and had to withdraw to a new building on the outskirts of the city.
Since then, every Tuesday more police gathered outside Rajk's home. As Haraszti put it: "Visits and ordinary passers by were checked, threatened, and pushed around so much that the Shop was in fact blocked off."
meaning of these actions was clear, Haraszti said: from the country's political leadership to put an end to samizdat, but without endangering the regime's liberal image in the West. So, they decided not to use the method of political trials but simply subject us to administrative harassment until we don't have a moment's peace.
applied systematically, it becomes a very effective form of repression."
In fact, more and more dissident intellectuals, even those who have not pubare reporting that they find themselves subjected to unusually identity checks on the street and to quite open police surveillance.
The contradiction between such state intimidation against the opposition and Hungary's well known liberal policy in the cultural sphere seems absurd to those who visit the country.
Leftists are astonished to see articles by Trotsky and an open discussion of Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks' policy in magazines published for social scientists.
read anyway, while Sandor Pal's out right revolutionary film about the 1956 uprisings, "The Fortunate Daniel," is playing in the Pushkin movie theater on Kossuth Street? Where is the logic?
In Sandor Pal's film, nothing is covered up. You see the self-sacrificing struggle of the youth, the savage brutality of the secret police, the hatred for the Soviet occupiers, and the massive emigration to escape the "normalization."
A contact in Hungary said: mood in the Writers Union now resembles the one that prevailed before 1956."
It is precisely this that Miklos Haraszti sees as the key to explaining the present wave of repression. The circulation of samizdat is limited to the urban intelligentsia. But it has a real influence.
About a thousand copies of Beszelo are produced, and each copy is read by twenty to thirty people. The new publication AB Tajekoztato (AB Information"), which is written in an agitational style, is supposed to have a circulation above a thousand.
"What we write," Haraszti said, not extremist. We only say openly what the entire reform intelligentsia thinks. Since samizdat has come into existence, the whole cultural area has become more and more uncontrollable for the government. Critical culture can no longer simply be wiped out, because its exponents, most of whom write for us under pseudonyms, would commit themselves to us fully or found new magazines. In order to promote the self-censorship of the 'legal intelligentsia' the police have to try to destroy the area of freedom that we represent."
Whether or not the "Shop" will be able to go on functioning is not yet decided. None of those involved wants to stop the production of samizdat, even if the conditions get more difficult.
Haraszti says: "We consider it a national achievement that there is a certain space for freedom of expression. We have started up discussion of a series of questions - the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Rumania and Czechoslovakia. as well as of the Gypsies, Slovaks, and Rumanians in Hungary; the poverty in which 20 percent of the population are languishing; and the treatment of political thinkers such as Istan Bibo, who has now become a symbol for the entire opposition.
"The more we can widen our area of freedom of thought, the bolder the official writers will become. All this helps to keep Hungary on the reforn course and to counterbalance the deep seated instinct of the government to us Stalinist methods to try to deal crises."