Source: Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 1998 (Hungarian statistical yearbook 1998). Budapest, 1999.

The transformation was far more complex on a micro level. The most conspicuous change was among the petty bourgeoisie, where the number of artisans and traders making a modest independent living was drastically reduced. Also conspicuous is the way the number of artisans immediately increased when restrictions were eased, for instance in 1953, while the first reaction to any worsening of the conditions was voluntary abandonment of self-employment. The formal conditions for a petty-bourgeois way of life became harder to discern, but as the socialist bureaucracy increased in size, so did the petty-official/clerical stratum. The transformation of the peasantry was also protracted. Land ownership remained an important stratifying factor among the peasantry in the 1945–60 period. After the collectivization campaigns that deprived them of their property, the significance of land ownership decreased, but it did not disappear, for instance because it affected a peasant’s position in the agricultural cooperative and prestige in local society. An essential change in the 1950s was that the awareness and identity of groups before the communist take-over was lost or greatly weakened, which blurred the dividing lines between social groups.

The mass changes of social position were imposed from outside, for almost purely political reasons, so that they were not integral to the processes of society. People did not move house or change jobs or social groups of their own free will. They were coerced—prevented from remaining in their accustomed jobs and way of life. This coercive process did much to weaken the group ties in society and disrupt orientations and values. The new paths and directions of mobility developed at the expense of the traditional ones, whose significance waned. For instance, the direction in which small-scale peasant farmers could move off the land in the 1950s, was no longer towards officialdom or self-employment as an artisan. The commonest course was towards skilled or unskilled work in the factories.

There were obviously several concurrent systems of behaviour and socialization existing and superimposed on one another in the 1950s. Factory workers, for example, would be strongly influenced by their environment. Those from traditional working-class families would see work as a virtue in itself, their toil as a kind of process of creation. The skilled workers, following petty-bourgeois patterns, represented something quite different from the new arrivals, forced into industry by circumstances beyond their control, and different again from the young skilled workers, whose socialization had taken place against the daily background of the socialist system.

The social stratification reflected in the 1949 census obviously still showed many marks of the pre-war period, but it was also influenced by the social changes since 1945. The most populous social group was made up of independent agricultural producers, whose average pre-war proportion of 30 per cent of the population had risen to 44 per cent in 1949. The proportion of farm workers and farm servants had fallen to a third, while that of day labourers had risen slightly. A decisive influence on all this had clearly been the land reform of 1945. Other groups to have increased were the various strata of industrial workers, while household servants had halved. The increase in working-class numbers was due largely to the industrialization, which had been more or less connected with post-war economic recovery.

However, the stratification of society in 1949 had not changed substantially on a macro level. More than half the earners and the population still lived by agriculture, and although the working class had increased, its absolute size was still small. So were the roughly equal proportions of the intelligentsia and professions, and those working in commerce and transport. In terms of mobility, peasant society was still relatively closed, with small proportions of entries and exits in the second half of the 1940s. For instance, 94 per cent of those living by agriculture came from peasant or (in a smaller proportion of cases) farm-labourer families. Among the agricultural labourers, a slightly smaller proportion had an agricultural background, with the working class and rural village artisan class as the reserve for recruitment. One of the main directions of exit from the peasantry was towards unskilled labour, but other sizeable segments became skilled workers or minor officials/office workers. However, private peasant farming retained and even increased its attraction, so that more than four-fifths of the sons of peasants with small or medium-sized holdings remained in agriculture (István Harcsa 1974).

The various strata of the working class were more mobile than the peasantry. Self-replacement was relatively low among the unskilled workers, and it became attractive to those working on the land to move to unskilled work in industry, commerce and transport instead, especially once landless peasants who had failed in their attempt to make a living from the land they had been allocated. Skilled work naturally had greater social prestige and attraction. The self-replacement rate was higher than among unskilled workers and there was a strong move to become skilled workers among families of self-employed artisans and traders. The proportion of self-recruitment among the self-employed was a little over a third. Most of the remaining two-thirds came from worker and peasant families, and a smaller proportion from those of non-manual employees. More than a quarter of the last came from families with a similar occupational status. The backgrounds of the remainder were more or less equally divided among the self-employed, the workers and the peasants.

Based on 1949 figures, the structural and mobility attributes showed Hungarian society to be in a state of transition. There had been an increase in the relative weight of the peasantry, which was numerically dominant. The working class showed a slow, but steady increase in numbers, while the intelligentsia and clerical strata stagnated and the self-employed artisans and traders grew slightly. Masses of farm labourers had become peasant farmers with small or tiny holdings, and the flow from the land to non-agricultural manual jobs had begun. The third line of mobility was from manual to non-manual occupations, which would increase assume mass proportions in the coming years. The structural elements of society changed in many ways in the post-war years, but most of the changes were integral in their nature. Thus Hungarian society between 1945 and 1949 showed its earlier bourgeois structure, although some of the disproportions of the pre-war Horthy period were being corrected, with many of the previous elite groups experiencing a change of status. The elite by virtue of birth had more or less vanished and the position of the elite by virtue of income and wealth had been undermined by the waves of nationalization and the egalitarian changes made in relative pay in 1946. There had been marked changes in the stratification of peasant society, with those farming 5–10 hectares and 10–15 hectares becoming the dominant groups in numerical terms. Inequalities had been reduced, especially in peasant society, and the chances of embourgeoisement had improved. The direction of social change was towards a more ‘democratic’, performance-based, more bourgeois society, although there were perceptible moves in 1947–8 towards the social policies of [?& Soviet-style state] socialism that the imminent regime change would bring.

Among the mobility trends and social changes in the period between 1944–5 and 1948 could be sensed a ‘liberation effect’—a faith in and determination to produce a new, post-war system in which social justice would prevail and inequalities be reduced significantly. The political transition of 1947–9 ended such hopes as Hungarian society underwent rapid and radical Sovietization. After the Soviet pattern, all spheres of society came under full political control. The channels of mobility were subordinated to the social objectives of communist policy and individual and collective repression became standard means of regulating such processes. Dividing lines between social groups were redrawn or reinvented, for instance between private farmers and peasants who had dutifully joined the agricultural cooperatives, or between the traditional intelligentsia and the new, so-called socialist intelligentsia. The desire for political and social stability so strong after the war was swamped after 1948.

One casualty was the embourgeoisement of peasant society that began with the land reform. This gave way to forcible collectivization and mass desertion of the land for new occupations and dwelling places. Altogether 360,000 people who earned their living from the land left agriculture between 1949 and 1954. Most of these became unskilled manual workers in industry, which usually meant that they became downwardly mobile and lost social status.

Almost half a million employees had to change jobs before the process of nationalization was completed. Owners of small and medium-sized businesses and self-employed artisans and traders (members of the earlier lower middle class and petty-bourgeois groups) lost their positions in huge numbers, bringing serious economic and cultural losses to society. It is worth viewing the changes after 1949 in terms not only of proletarianization, but of mobilization. Sociologist Antal Örkény sees mobilization as mobility processes imposed from above by means of power, so that mobility is not automatically a positive process. The value of the social movements is determined by their content. The strong, widespread mobility found in post-war Hungary and most other Eastern European countries differs from Western European patterns because it was induced by ‘a specific socialist model of economic and political modernization arriving from outside and embodying an exclusively political normative pattern.’ The historical continuity of society was therefore broken, or at least strongly sharply and temporarily diverted from its path of continuity. The sense of social dynamics was maintained by ‘pseudo-mobility paths’, and there was no way of maintaining social self-awareness. ‘In terms of personal motives for social mobility, individuals remained unable to respond to the underlying question about themselves: what they were capable of and what they would like to achieve.’ Real social integration and operable identification structures failed to emerge.

Most traditional, integral mobility paths were closed, while vast groups of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers, agricultural proletarians and poor peasants changed their social situations and became white-collar workers and managers. Meanwhile masses of people were moving from the land to unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in industry, and members of the pre-1949 managerial group and intelligentsia were losing their position and being forced onto the social sidelines. The formation of the new elite groups after 1947–9 involved radical replacement of the old intelligentsia and middle class, who were forced into losing their positions and becoming déclassé.

The imposition of all-powerful central planning and the campaign to replace the elite in the first half of the 1950s led to 40,000 top managers and about 100,000 middle-ranking cadres being appointed. About 50,000 worker-cadres were brought into the apparatus of state. These movements meant that 60 per cent of the heads of high national authorities and central offices changed after 1949. Often the appointees lacked the education and specialist qualifications for the job, which became a long-lasting source of conflicts. There was much fluctuation among the promoted cadres, so that a post was often held by six or seven people between 1949 and 1956.

The ruling communist party became a channel of mobility in its own right. Those seen as loyal and convinced communists who accepted unquestioningly the hierarchical spirit within the party apparatus and had an influential patron in a higher position could expect to rise sooner or later. The two possible channels of promotion became separate. For a long time, it was more important to secure immediate promotion to a leading position than to advance by the ‘official’ path of traditional education and training. On the other hand, there were on average twice as many newly promoted cadres in the direct management of production than there were at ministry level. Seventy per cent of them were under 40 years old and 95 per cent were members of the Hungarian Workers’ Party (MDP). Their mobility was largely within their generation, so that they became divorced from their native social environment.

The communist leadership after the turn to socialism managed for a time to mobilize society behind a new type of hierarchy, alien to the country’s traditions. Wide attempts were made to convince people that this imposed mobility would produce a more democratic system of distribution. In the event, it prevented normal social integration from developing. Indeed abolishing the earlier system of social integration brought processes of disintegration into society.

Having summarized the structural changes, let us look at changes of social structure in the long decade that followed the Second World War, by outlining what happened to the intelligentsia and clerical strata, the peasantry and the working class.

3. Intellectuals, professionals and clerical workers

The Second World War caused grave loss of life among the intelligentsia, affecting many outstanding people in Hungary’s intellectual life. There seemed in 1945–7 to be a realistic chance that a varied, multifarious cultural and intellectual life could develop.

The communist party, during its assumption of power, classified much of the intelligentsia as inimical, behaving with absurd suspicion even towards some who were committed members of the communist party. ‘A sizeable proportion of the communist intellectuals had sincere, blind faith in their party superiors. They suppressed their doubts, sacrificed their talents and abandoned their individuality. In return, they received administrative posts and small salaries, but in the hope of influential posts and high salaries in future… The old intelligentsia were humiliated and forced to bargain in the 1950s. The prestige of intellectual work was gravely undermined by want of social respect and drastically reduced pay… Teachers were probably in the hardest position, having to teach what they did not agree with, while constantly overburdened, monitored and regulated… Lawyers became executive bureaucrats. Scientists were divided from the West and ordered to adjust their work to officially endorsed Soviet scientific assumptions (such as the [erroneous] theories of [the biologist Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko). Opportunities for free artistic creation also disappeared in 1948.’ The years under the communists brought periodic bursts of antagonism towards the intelligentsia, fuelled partly by feelings of inferiority among the ill-educated new cadres in the apparatus. Manual work obtained great cachet in the 1950s for ideological reasons, and mental work was often compared with it unfavourably in official statements.

Public employees were paid in 1945–50 according to the salary scales of the pre-war Horthy period, calculated on a basic earnings figure that was centrally set. Relative proportions laid down during the financial stabilization caused steady erosion of the pay differentials between intellectuals and skilled workers. Indeed the average pay of skilled workers was higher than that of professionals by the end of the 1940s. The system of pay categories was abolished in 1950. After 1947–9, there were two main courses open to those who had been officials or intellectuals under the earlier regime. One was to retire, which in most cases was not done voluntary, and the other was to adapt to the changed conditions. Those who had been active before 1945, but assumed the stance of a ‘progressive intellectual’, managed in most cases to avoid any temporary or permanent loss of social position. Such ‘submission’ was often given an ambiguous assessment by the broader and closer social milieu, which was undergoing transition. Demonstrative abandonment of middle-class values could often cause a person’s system of connections to break down and even cause upheaval in family relations. Old-guard professionals, sometimes seen as ‘indispensable reactionaries’, lacked political clout and ties with the communist movement meant, so that especially in the early 1950s, that they seldom reach positions important in terms of political power and were often confined to the second or third level of seniority. The exceptions were some people who had ‘broken with their reactionary past’, joined the communist party in 1945, and managed to accumulate political capital in the battles of the coalition period. Career paths in this group were generally upward, with some fluctuations.

A curious situation developed in Hungary in the post-war years, in which the tasks of members of the intelligentsia were increasingly at variance with their ability to perform them. Loyalty and political reliability took precedence over expertise when intellectual appointments were made. The scope for professional self-employment was steadily reduced and state control imposed, so that those pursuing it had to become state employees instead if they wanted to remain in their profession. An essential element in the process was the abolition of autonomy and freedom of action. There hardly remained any field in which the rules of an expert, independent intelligentsia could still apply. Everything was subjected to norms and regulations that were centrally controlled. The decisive figure in cultural and intellectual policy in the decade after 1945 was József Révai. He, as one of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) and then the Hungarian Workers’ Party (MDP), set about eradicating bourgeois culture and striving to obtain a cultural monopoly for socialist realism, a set of styles and tenets devised and developed under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

However, the intelligentsia became one of the fastest-growing strata of post-war Hungarian society.

Those making it up in the late 1940s and early 1950s were heterogeneous in social background and qualifications. On the one hand, there remained, usually in lower positions, members of professional and intellectual families of several generations’ standing. On the other, there was a steady influx of cadre-intellectuals from working-class or peasant backgrounds, proliferating in absolute and relative terms.

Again, there was an interesting mechanism of socialization at work. Although the cadre-intelligentsia’s relatively less demanding system of norms was certainly present, in the longer term, the old norms, values, behavioural patterns and cultivation of the intelligentsia seem to have predominated, with the new intelligentsia adapting to them. Socialization played an important role in other respects as well. Understandably, the people who entered the intelligentsia in the early decades of the socialist period strove to impart to their children norms and behaviour that would point them towards white-collar careers.

Special concessions were made by the regime to encourage the development of its own intelligentsia. Early in the 1950s, the institution known as numerus politicus was introduced. Children of working-class and peasant families were given preference at university and college entrance examinations. Courses were offered leading to a vocational school-leaving certificate, to shorten the path to higher education.

Many groups of public employees had lost their jobs at the end of the war, partly through abolition and reorganization of institutions and partly through the screening committees and the B list. Other public employees made strong efforts to adapt, for instance by joining the communists or the Social Democratic Party (SZDP).

The number of people in public service in 1945 reached 300,000, of whom half had been joined since 1939. The screening procedures removed state employees who were proved to have taken part in war crimes or acts against the people. There were both economic and political reasons for placing people on the B list. The number of public employees did not fall in 1945, as those posted in the territories reannexed to neighbouring countries remained on the payroll, although they had no public service to perform. The screening process had been designed originally to reduce the number of public employees by a third to a quarter, back to what it had been in 1938, before the territorial acquisitions. In the event, the B-list process resulted in about 80,000–100,000 dismissals. It gave scope, of course, for pursuing various political purposes, which in some fields involved apportioning the posts among the adherents of the various coalition political parties. The repeated waves of personnel screening in 1945–6 caused uncertainty and insecurity among the civil servants and public employees. This contributed for a time to reducing the attractions of public employment. Partly for this reason, the influx of worker cadres was relatively small in the period up to 1948, when the increase in public employment was due mainly to nationalization of the banking, education (nationalization of schools) and local-government systems (councils). According to research by Mária M. Kovács, members of the earlier staff still made up almost two-thirds of the public employees at the end of the coalition period. Great attention was then paid, after the communist take-over, to political control of the administrative apparatus, largely through mass recruitment of worker cadres. The previously middle-class and lower middle-class character of the civil service underwent important changes at the turn of the 1950s, as did the social composition of the staff and those recruited to it. Meanwhile there was a strong decrease in clerical and managerial employment in the private sector.

The changes in the civil service and public employment can be divided into two periods. The 1940s and 1950s brought a sharp decline in the prestige and status of the occupations and trades, as educational and skill requirements fell and public employment ceased to ensure steady promotion and social advancement. When the system of councils was introduced in October 1950, there were sweeping changes in the executive and the administrative grades, coupled with a fundamental alteration in the character and operation of local and district government. The cadres recruited seldom acquired the necessary skills at the ‘janizary schools’ that were supposed to train them for various levels of public administration. There was a marked decline in bureaucratic efficiency. Kovács [?] remarks on ‘a staggering, if not incomprehensible decay in official literacy in the last years of the 1940s… The sudden decline in the style and orthography of documents to lower primary-school standards is direct evidence that the ‘new people’s cadres’ have taken up their posts.’ The strength of the apparatus of power increased from 180,000 to 262,000 between 1949 and 1953, while the decisive majority of those hitherto working in public administration were dismissed.

Each division of the apparatus proliferated. The number in public administration rose from 19,000 in 1930 to 59,000 in 1952. The officials and public employees in local government increased from 130,000 in 1950 to 194,000 in 1958. For a long time after 1950, those working in public administration were seen no longer as civil servants, but as cadres ‘fighting on the public administrative front’, their prime task to follow central instructions to the letter. The decline in status was due not just to poor education, low qualifications and negligible experience, but to the lowly, repetitive clerical tasks public officials had to perform.

4. Changes in peasant society

Several sources of tension in peasant society had developed and persisted in Hungary between the two world wars. The most important of all was the land question, which called for immediate action after 1945. Every political party included in its programme a land reform that would bring a radical change in land ownership by breaking up the great estates and distributing land widely among the poor and landless. Agriculture too had suffered great damage in the war. It was clear that the peasantry had to be given a stake in the reconstruction by spreading land ownership more widely.

The most radical of the major parties was the National Peasants’ Party (NPP), which sought full expropriation and redistribution of great estates over 1000 cadastral hold (570 ha), ‘noble’ (non-farming landowner) estates over 100 hold (57 ha) and peasant estates over 200 hold (114 ha). The NPP also proposed confiscating the land of former members of the Volksbund [?& (the fascist movement among the indigenous German population)] and of those convicted of war crimes and crimes against the people. This approach would have favoured the agricultural proletariat and poor peasantry. The land reform was to be implemented by those affected by it, with October 1, 1945 as the deadline for completion. The NPP proposals were largely endorsed, with minor differences, by the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP). The Social Democratic Party (SZDP), on the other hand, sought to confine expropriation to estates over 200 hold (114 ha) and thought it important to give compensation, although church lands and entailed estates were to be wholly expropriated without compensation. The strongest advocate of rational economic criteria in its plans for land reform was the Independent Smallholders’ Party (FKgP). It was keen to produce viable farms and a healthy ratio of small to medium-sized holdings. Expropriation was to be confined to estates of over 300–500 hold (171–285 ha) and those affected would be excluded from administering the reform. There were to be restrictions on grants of land to the landless, to prevent fragmentation of ownership—more would go to those who already owned some land. There were no plans to take over forestry concerns or agricultural works. Higher rates of compensation were proposed.

The land reform order of March 17, 1945 (No. 600/1945) largely followed the proposals of the National Peasants’ Party (NPP), but the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) gained a dominant influence over its implementation. The work was directed by the National Land Ownership Settlement Council, which also heard appeals. Settlement councils were formed in each of the country’s 25 counties, to act as primary-level authorities overseeing the reform. The execution was the task of 3165 village land-claimants’ committees. At this level, questions of entitlement were settled and all the other practical work was done, from surveying to distribution. There were a great many disputes, of course. It was by no means immaterial who qualified for a grant of land or how much land was given, when, in what part of the village, and in how many pieces. Naturally, the political parties forming at the time tried to use the land-distribution to increase their membership and support.

Those entitled to land were farm servants, agricultural workers, owners of ‘dwarf’ holdings, and married sons of peasants due to inherit less than 5 cadastral hold (2.9 ha). Preferences were given to those who were married, those with three or more children, wartime participants in the anti-fascist and partisan movements, and dependants of those who had died in action with the anti-fascist resistance. No claimant could be over 60 years old. The maximum grant of land under the reform was 15 hold (8.5 ha) and the minimum 3 hold (1.7 ha). The actual grant also depended on whether the claimant was landless or already possessed some land. The ‘dwarf-holders’ were required to pay as redemption a sum equal to a quarter of the market value of the land received within ten years (twenty years for the landless). During the reform, 75,500 estates were expropriated and 35 per cent of the country’s 16 million cadastral hold (9,120,000 ha) of farmland changed hands. The average size of grant was 5.1 hold (2.9 ha). Using the 1941 census returns, it can be established that 48 per cent of agricultural workers, 53 per cent of farm servants, 56 per cent of ‘dwarf-holders’ and 25 per cent of smallholders received grants of land. Some 750,000 applications were made and 663,000 allowed, while 642,342 actually received land; 350,000 people applied for house-building sites and 150,000 of them received plots of 1500–3000 sq. m.

The land reform mitigated the distortions in the distribution of land ownership, but it was not coupled with broader agricultural reform, so that the improvements were mainly social and political. The reform brought a marked change in the structure of peasant society. Compared with 1941 figures, the proportion of the agricultural population who were landless had fallen from 46 to 17 per cent, with the stratum of ‘dwarf-holders’ and smallholders rising from 47 to 80 per cent and the proportion of rich peasantry falling from 7 to 2.9 per cent. The ‘dwarf-holders’ and smallholders were now the dominant peasant stratum. The land reform had reinforced the sense of property in the peasantry, thereby giving credence to the prospect of a traditional peasant life, in which private ownership of the land was a decisive factor. Land ownership lent social rank and prestige in the Hungarian peasant society of the mid-20th century. It was the basis of the peasant livelihood and a pledge of independence and social advancement. This was appreciated by most observers at the time, including the historian and social scientist István Bibó: ‘The most decisive and irreversible consequence of the change in 1945 was the land reform,’ he wrote, mainly because it reduced the inequalities within peasant society and promoted the embourgeoisement of the peasantry. The reform indeed produced 400,000 new private landowners and extended 240,000 other holdings. By 1949, there were only 4000 farms in the country with an area of more than 100 cadastral hold (57 ha). On the other hand, many new farmers lacked the tools, expertise and capital for the task, so that they were incapable of farming on their own indefinitely. Under normal conditions, this would have been followed by an automatic correction to the structure of land ownership, but any such process was precluded legally by Act IX/1946, which was passed on May 3.

The change in the ownership structure can also be traced in the restructuring of peasant society. Such effects were already registered in the 1949 census, which also recorded the position just before the communists launched their collectivization campaign, designed to break up peasant society.

Under the conditions in Hungary at the end of the 1940s, any idea of establishing Soviet-style collective farms or agricultural cooperatives was far from popular in peasant society. Those who joined the cooperatives in the first wave of collectivization, beginning in 1948–9, were in fact people to whom it was immaterial where they worked as hired labourers. Most early members of the kolkhoz-type cooperatives were landless farm servants and labourers, or people who had failed at private farming since the land reform. The communist politicians strove by every available means to instil the idea of collective farming into peasant farmers who had just had their sense of private ownership reinforced by the land reform. The scale of persuasion applied ranged from an increasingly gruff tone in the press and the use of personal agitators to physical force and legal prosecutions. One serious burden on peasants was the system of compulsory produce deliveries to the state at prices below those on the free market. These quotas were steadily increased. Furthermore, the general taxes on the peasantry increased threefold between 1949 and 1955. These levies, which were practically impossible to meet, provided the pretext for introducing legal proceedings into agricultural policy. Over 400,000 peasants were convicted in 1949–55 of ‘endangering public supplies’, which in most cases meant they had not met their produce delivery quotas.

Rural life up to 1956 was strongly marked by a succession of political campaigns. Almost all activity took the form of a campaign, the main ones being about production and compulsory produce deliveries, and in an extension of the class struggle to the villages, against kulaks. All were classified as kulaks who farmed 25 or more cadastral hold (14.3 ha) or land rated at over 350 gold crowns, or owned a threshing machine or a tavern. It should be added that higher index numbers were used to grade more profitable land such as market gardens, orchards and vineyards, so that a peasant owning only 5–8 hold (2.9–4.6 ha) of orchard might be branded a kulak. Persecution of kulaks became almost boundless in the early 1950s, its purpose being intimidation and the break-up of the more successful, respected, influential stratum of peasantry. The numbers entered on the kulak list in the first third of the 1950s reached 60,000–70,000.

Much uncertainty was also created by repeated campaigns of consolidation of land holdings. As the agricultural cooperatives were formed, field boundaries were periodically altered to provide the cooperatives with contiguous lands. The 4215 land-consolidation procedures carried out in 2280 villages between 1949 and 1955 affected over 7.5 million cadastral hold (4,275,000 ha) of land. Despite many inconsistencies, inter-war rural conditions had embodied qualities of predictability and stability that were quite lost after 1949.

Formation of kolkhoz-type agricultural cooperatives began to speed up at the end of 1948. Many aspects of the cooperatives were regulated by a government order of December 1948, which graded them in three types. In Type 3, the most ‘developed’, not only the individual tasks were collectivized, but the land, the tools for tilling it, and the farm animals. Following the Soviet pattern, cooperatives did not own their own machines, which were operated by a specially established network of machinery depots. Collectivization, of course, was a centrally planned process of transformation, in which centrally set targets had to be met. Since the entrants in 1949 and 1950 had mainly been the village destitute, a campaign opened in 1951 to recruit the stratum with small and medium-sized landholdings. (The rich peasantry was still barred from membership.) As a result of the agitation, a third of the cooperative members had brought 7 cadastral hold (4 ha) or more of land into the collective by December 1952. However, the constant political and economic pressure on the peasantry led to mass flight from the land. Peasants left more than 1.5 million hold (855,000 ha) of land untilled or offered it to the state between 1948 and 1953. Between 1950 and 1953, the number of cooperative members rose from 120,000 to 376,000, but about 300,000 people left the land temporarily or permanently, most of them for industry. The changes undergone by peasant society in the early 1950s are apparent in the fact that the number of private farmers fell by 692,000 between 1949 and 1955, while state-farm employment increased by 230,000 and cooperative membership by 220,000.

The number of active earners in agriculture fell by 238,000 between 1948 and 1955. Ninety-six per cent of the 2,190,900 people earning their living by agriculture in 1949 had been in the private sector. The same applied to only 72 per cent of the 1,952,400 employed in agriculture in 1955. There were 1.66 million private farmers in 1949, only 1.27 million in 1953, but 1.51 million again in 1955. In 1949, there were still 47,200 farms with an area of 25 cadastral hold (14.3 ha) or more and the average size of these was 39 hold (22.2 ha). In 1955, there were only 7100 farms in that category, with an average size of 35 hold (20 ha). Some of the decrease arose, of course, from owners of large holdings dividing them up among family members, hoping to reduce their tax and compulsory produce delivery bills.

The pressure on peasant society was somewhat relieved between June 1953 and February 1955 during Imre Nagy’s first term as prime minister. Tax and compulsory produce delivery obligations were lowered and it became possible to withdraw from agricultural cooperatives, but more lasting changes came only in 1956. Central among the political demands made in the villages in October 1956, alongside the general and national demands, were remedies for the grievances of the period of anti-peasant agricultural policies and abolition of restrictions on private farm production.

5. Transformation of the working class

The working class increased in socio-political importance after the war. Proposals on employment policy and raising living and working conditions in industry featured in the manifestos of almost all political parties. Working-class interests were represented with varying efficiency by trade unions associated with the Social Democratic Party (SZDP), or in some cases the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP), while their room for political manoeuvre remained, but they lost all their original functions once the communists took power.

Initially, therefore, the employer-employee relationship remained largely within normal bounds, as the basic determinant of conditions of employment. [?& Where employees were unionized,] working conditions, wages, wage differentials, hours, the size of special allowances and bonuses for certain grades, and regulations governing overtime were all contained in negotiated collective agreements. The 48-hour working week in industry remained. In the textile industry, for instance, responsibilities were defined in the collective agreements in the post-war years: ‘The foremen managed the semi-skilled and skilled workers, and responsible maintenance and proper operation of the machines, supervising and training their subordinates. The assistant foremen, based on the foremen’s instructions, helped with maintaining the machines and managing the workers. The chief foremen (production managers) coordinated the activity of the foremen to ensure uniform management. Chief foremen were being paid hourly rates three to five times as high as workers were in 1946. Foremen and selected skilled workers received supplementary allowances on top of their pay, as well as working clothes and cloth of a designated quality for one suit.

A new system of national wage controls came into force in all industries on October 1, 1947. Thereafter, an increasingly decisive role in setting wage rates went to a National Pay Settlement Committee, which steadily came under communist control. Skilled workers were ranged in three categories and unskilled and skilled workers in six. Geographical pay differentiation, introduced in 1945, became more pronounced, so that there might be a pay difference of 15–20 per cent between workers in the same grade doing the same job, depending on where their factories were located.

Work contests were already being held in the reconstruction period immediately after World War II, but they were still mainly realistic in their targets, at least up to the end of 1947. The general objective was to restore the ruined country as soon as possible. ‘The purpose was not to carry out much more rapidly a quantity of work planned for a certain period, but extra accomplishment over a specified period, based on individual pledges. It was not about constant haste, but about tasks to be accomplished within a realistic time.’

A steady fall in the number of privately owned industrial plants can be seen from 1946 onwards. According to the 1949 census returns, 4049 of the 4695 manufacturing works in 1946 had been in private hands, while in 1949, after the centralization and reorganization associated with nationalization, there were only 1632 such factories recorded, of which 32 were in private hands. In other words, 86.2 per cent of manufacturing concerns were privately owned in 1946 and only 1.9 per cent in 1949.

The communist takeover did not merely alter the ownership relations in industry. There were significant changes in the structure of working-class society as well, as experienced skilled workers, production managers and charge hands were dismissed in huge numbers. It was a particular drawback in 1950–51 to have been a member of the Social Democratic Party (SZDP). These people were replaced by politically reliable, freshly promoted cadres instead. ‘Lackeys of the old system, petty bourgeois individuals, the majority not prepared to adopt a Marxist-Leninist view of the world’ were in better cases demoted and had their pay reduced, while in worse cases they were dismissed on a pretext of reorganization or not infrequently suffered internment or imprisonment. The scale of the replacement was immense: by the summer of 1951, only a quarter of about 3500 production managers in heavy industry had been in a similar job in 1945. Meanwhile the workers were organized into ‘socialist brigades’ with social and political, as well as work functions. Local management and responsibility for ensuring that plan targets were met passed formally to a threesome consisting of the party secretary, manager and union convenor in each factory.

Most workers in the 1945–9 period still worked for private industrial firms small or large, or local and centrally run public-service companies. Nationalization on a massive scale meant that the role of the private sector in employment was minimal by 1951. In 1949, there were still 78,000 people working in private small-scale industry, including construction, but in 1951, there were only 19,000. Meanwhile the number of workers in state-owned industrial and construction enterprises had risen from 468,000 to 729,000. By 1960, there were 1,079,000 workers in state-owned industry and construction and only 32,000 in the private sector.

Forced industrialization came to the fore after 1948, bringing with it a rapid rise in the size of the urban working class. The first five-year plan (central planning) envisaged creating more than 300,000 new industrial workers. The nature of the socialist economic system meant that the increase in industrial production was to be obtained by mass employment of ‘available’, cheap labour. However, this did not mean full employment or an end to unemployment. Many traditional farming areas far from the focuses of industrial development still had surplus labour, despite the internal migration. The ‘wave of rationalization’ after the political turning point of the New Course in 1953 and the 1956 revolution both generated waves of unemployment. (In the latter case, even unemployment benefit was introduced temporarily.) But the expansion of heavy industry and the boom in construction mopped up masses of ostensibly surplus labour from the villages.

Major changes also took place on the social-policy plane. According to the ideology of the time, the ‘socialist character’ of the classical socialist system would strengthen in line with an increase in the number of wage labourers, especially industrial workers in heavy industry. This line of argument led to the development of cultic places such as ‘Red Csepel’, Angyalföld in northern Budapest, and Sztálinváros (later Dunaújváros). Workers there came to be treated as the ideological, political, and not least, propaganda elite of the ‘socialist working class’. But although the workers were supposed to form the social basis for communist power, what they noticed in most cases was a steady decline in their living and working conditions, not the advantages that were supposed to accrue from ‘workers’ power and the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Believing that ‘the workers’ dreams’ were coming true must indeed have been hard for the foundry workers of Ózd, who found regularly in 1952–3 that ‘most of the sanitary equipment (changing rooms, washrooms) are out of order. Twenty-five per cent of the workers are provided with changing rooms and washrooms… The industrial railway workshop is the dirtiest place in our factory and there are 320 working in it. There is not even one decent washroom there where they could wash. There are two troughs in which they have to wash one after the other.’ It was not unusual to find that those living in town workers’ hostels, with inadequate washing facilities, toilets and electricity or completely lacking in them, had to take turns to sleep in the beds.

A curious ‘worker fetish’ developed in the 1950s, based on ideology and serving political and ideological purposes. Social objectives, at least verbally, were subordinated to ‘the interests of the working class’. However, the working class was understood almost exclusively as the workers in heavy industrial plants.

Work contests became an exceptionally important part of policy towards the workers during the period. Politically led rather than associated with any real interests, they were aimed at increasing output by setting usually unrealistic, practically unattainable targets. They were generally linked with some important event: ‘the 70th birthday of the Great Stalin’, ‘the birthday of Comrade Rákosi’, a forthcoming party congress, some political campaign ‘in honour of the anniversary of the birth of Comrade Lenin’, or ‘to assist the Korean people in their struggle against imperialist insurgents.’ Participation was in effect compulsory. The strong political, ideological and financial incentives in the first half of the 1950s led to successive triumphs being announced to the world—1000 per cent performance in a single shift, and so on. These in most cases were obviously impossible or relied by simply tricks of labour organization, for instance simplifying the manufacturing process being performed. In fact, it was not worth exceeding the work norm to any large extent, because that soon meant the norm was raised.

Another technique for increasing performance was the individual form of work contest known as the Stakhanovite movement, named after the Soviet coalminer A.G. Stakhanov and his legendary achievements. Hungarian Stakhanovites such as Ignác Pióker, Ede Horváth, Imre Muszka and János Deák—‘everyday heroes of the struggle on the work front’—were presented as paragons, whose superhuman achievements turned into celebrities. In 1953, Pióker, for instance, was already ‘struggling’ to fulfil the work target for 1956! Norm increases became regular in the early 1950s. For those on performance pay, they were actually concealed wage cuts. The biggest centrally controlled adjustment was carried out in April-May 1950, when the compulsory norms were raised by an average of 17 per cent. These policy tactics led to a marked decline in the previously high Hungarian standard of work. The natural reaction to official efforts to make boundless use of manpower was to hold back performance. Discipline at work became a constant problem. Absenteeism soared in 1950–51, especially during peak periods in farming. This would attract disciplinary proceedings or even dismissal. For the law became another weapon in organizing labour and raising performance, as the definition of sabotage widened with the introduction of the concept of a crime against the plan (Act IV/1950). It was decreed that imprisonment for up to five years could be imposed on those who ‘endanger the fulfilment of the people’s economic plan or any constituent plan… by performing work belatedly, defectively or incompletely… [or] carrying out production that entails groundless wastage of materials, energy or labour.’ It was also made a crime to leave a job spontaneously, and 15,000 people were charged with this in 1952–3. Despite the bans and restrictions, workers defended themselves from exploitation by the state in the 1950s mainly by changing jobs. In 1951, 92 per cent of the workers taking out a work-record document changed their place of work at least once during the year, and half of them did so four or more times. Another introduction at the beginning of the 1950s was a general obligation to work, with ‘work evasion dangerous to the public’ as a new crime. The legally stipulated 48-hour working week seldom applied before 1956, and overtime hours would not even be paid if they were associated with one of the various work contests or pledges for a party congress. A seven-day working week became standard in mining and construction. The nature of the regime prevented any organized unionism, but the tensions came to the surface in occasional attempts to organize strikes or longer or shorter stoppages. The income relations of the working class at the beginning of the 1950s were extremely even, at a low overall level. Among the best paid groups were coalminers, foundrymen and machinery makers in the munitions factories (officially disguised under the label medium engineering). But even some of the best paid miners considered in 1953, ‘You cannot earn the price of a kilogram of bacon in a day at the mine, so it’s not worth working.’

The accumulated social tensions obviously contributed, alongside the political conflicts, to the outbreak of the 1956 Revolution. The demands formulated by the workers in 1956 incorporated not only general political objectives, but earlier grievances—high norms, long hours, low pay, bad working and social conditions, and real union representation. Management of factories passed in the days of the revolution to workers’ councils. But the course of events did not allow any system of workers’ self-management to survive. The workers’ councils were gradually eliminated after the defeat of the revolution. Almost two-thirds of the victims of the reprisals meted out for participating in the revolution were workers, and skilled workers were prominent also among those who left the country in the surge of emigration in 1956–7.

The working class in the mid-20th century Hungary formed a closed stratum that was strongly differentiated internally. The workers of large and small-scale industry, especially the skilled workers, were quite well trained, with a very low rate of illiteracy among them. The dividing lines between worker groups were drawn to a lesser extent by origins and to a greater by differences of employment, income and culture. At the top of the hierarchy were skilled charge hands able to manage a work process. Their lifestyle and attitudes were strongly influenced by patterns of the petty bourgeoisie. The relatively closed nature of the working class began to break down at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. Essential changes appeared in the values and attitudes to work shown by various worker groups, with pride in achievement, love of their trade, pleasure in a job well done, respect for the working-class hierarchy and acceptance of its social norms breaking down.

The social composition of the industrial working class underwent marked changes in the early 1950s. Employment of women in industry became widespread. Those entering industry were mainly peasants from various strata, day labourers, agricultural proletarians, those new to peasant farming, and peasants fleeing from the land temporarily or permanently. They had great difficulty in adjusting to the new forms of work, fitting into the factory hierarchy, and learning the techniques of work, all the more because they were living in a time of hectic political and social relations. The conversion of peasants into workers as such was not a new phenomenon in 20th-century Hungarian history, but the scale of it was unprecedented.

The structure of worker qualifications deteriorated sharply in the early 1950s, although it became possible to obtain a skilled worker’s certificate after a retraining course lasting only a few months.

There was a marked change in the relative status of different occupations. Working on the railways, for instance, had been a prestige job before the Second World War and hard to get into. So had printing, which was a notably difficult skill. Such social rank was rapidly eroded in the socialist period. Nor was the prestige transferred to jobs such as mining and foundry working that the new regime preferred, despite the higher pay they commanded, mainly because of the high turnover in them.

Some strata of the urban working class shrank, altered or even disappeared. Official statistics recorded 176,897 domestic servants in 1930, 74,874 in 1949 and only 16,116 in 1960. The word servant itself became avoided as politically unacceptable in the socialist period. The decline in this strata (through domestic modernization, for instance) would have been slower under normal circumstances.

The complexity of the changes is demonstrated by a retrospective survey of social stratification taken in 1962–4, when 36 per cent of the skilled, 60 per cent of the semi-skilled and 68 per cent of the unskilled workers were found to be of peasant origin. This means that the majority of skilled workers in the 1950s came from the traditional working class. Sociological researches show that the towns were able to accommodate only a minority of those becoming workers in the 1950s. Furthermore, ‘a high proportion of those in towns consisted of poor and lumpenproletariat in very poor housing conditions, unable to better themselves for physical reasons (illness, drinking, several children etc.), hardly able to support themselves or their families, and passing their deprivation down to the next generation.’ It is worth noting that the proportion of urban workers of peasant origin decreases as qualifications increase: almost two-thirds of the unskilled, but less than half the skilled. ‘The families most likely to have broken with agriculture are those whose heads travel short daily distances into a town or industrialized village to work, making them capable of creating a family framework for an intermediate, “pre-worker” way of life. Workers with jobs in the villages have broken with peasant work only to a small extent, not least because such places of work have low levels of mechanization, a primitive production structure and a workforce mainly of peasant origin. In general, therefore, they mark an intermediate stage between agricultural and industrial work. By contrast, the “rootlessness” of those who live in urban hostels and travel home weekly or monthly leaves them incapable of settling down in industry and providing a [social] boost for their families, so that the process of becoming workers is arrested and their way of life conserves, so to speak, all the conflicts of this process.’

The social upheavals and rapid expansion of the working class at once enabled and impeded the development of a qualified, trainable, performance-driven worker stratum oriented towards large-scale industry and urban life, on which an industrialized society could be built. The new, first-generation working masses resulted from the extensive industrialization of the 1950s, which created in large numbers jobs that allowed the urban, proletarian situation of an unskilled, unschooled, unsettled mass of workers to become permanent.

Major differences of income, cultural background, housing conditions, social relations and mentality could develop between workers in equivalent job, with equivalent qualifications and positions in the division of labour. Among the skilled workers, for instance, there were big differences between miners, printers, technicians, bricklayers and foundry workers, especially in way of life and living conditions. Those who always lived in a village or a town had a quite different lifestyle from those who had moved from a village to a town. To some extent, the life of those living on a housing estate was governed by different norms from that of those living in a family house, emanating patterns that are more bourgeois. The worst conditions were suffered by those living in a workers’ hostel. Employers tried to sort out the accommodation problems of workers arriving in the towns by building hostels that were considered temporary. They were occupied by commuters, who went home about once a week, temporary residents, travelling home once a month or intermittently, and permanent residents, who practically never left. They were drawn mainly from those with low qualifications and educational attainments, working in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in industry and construction.

One important question is the extent to which the process of aculturalization contributed to the ‘political loyalty’ of those who became workers in the 1950s. Those arriving in new jobs and communities, under new living conditions, would obviously and inevitably be inclined to accept and adjust to the new situation. Their old social and cultural ties weakened or disappeared, but it took a long time to develop new relations and large groups failed to do so. Many people proved unable to adapt for an extended period. Their jobs were often temporary and frequently changing, so that they did not receive the steady income required to build up stable living conditions for themselves and their families. It was all too easy for impoverishment, marginalization and social decline to set in.

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This page was created: Friday, 5-Dec-2003
Last updated: Wednesday, 10-Dec-2003
Copyright © 2003 The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

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