Mark Pittaway, "Rethinking the Hungarian Revolution: Industrial Workers, the Disintegration and Reconstruction of Socialism, 1953-1958"

The starting point for this paper is that fifteen years after the beginnings of Hungary’s transition to democracy the time has come to re-assess the immediate significance of the Hungarian Revolution. For most of the period since 1956 the historiography of the Revolution has been dominated by essentially political controversy over its nature, as politically interested scholars have sought to label it a national, democratic, anti-socialist, or even a counter-revolution. Since 1989 those who have studied it have sought to discern the roots of political change at the end of the 1980s in the events of the mid-1950s. Yet at the same time the empirical research that has become possible with Hungary’s transition to democracy has suggested the need to situate the events of October-November 1956, into the contexts of periods that immediately preceded and followed them – namely the period of halting reform after 1953, and the consolidation of the Kádár dictatorship during the late 1950s.

The role of industrial workers in the Revolution has, despite the work of Bill Lomax, and attempts to document the actions of the workers’ councils, has received less attention than it might have done. Industrial workers were nevertheless crucial to the events of the mid-1950s. The de-legitimation of the regime in Hungarian factories by 1953 created serious problems for the regime that to some extent helped to drive reform movements among intellectuals and the party. During October-November 1956 the participation of substantial sections of the industrial working class in the Revolution was fundamental to the course of events. At the same time, the archives reveal that the Kádár regime, despite the circumstances of its installation, had won a substantial degree of support of urban, industrial workers by 1958; a base of support that was almost certainly just as important as judicial retribution in its consolidation.

This paper explains why this was the case. It situates the events of the mid-1950s in the context of the social history of production relations in Hungarian factories since 1948, by arguing that the cuts in wages, intensification of production, growing foods and goods shortages combined with the use of repression shaped a marked lack of trust between the regime and workers during the mid-1950s. While workers took no direct leading role in the reform movements from 1953, the impact of reformist policies on the shop floor further weakened the authority of the party in the factories. Mounting working-class anger only exploded when the regime was challenged by students and intellectuals on the streets. Despite this anger the attitudes of many workers towards the demands of the Revolution was more ambivalent than many have previously argued, as workers were deeply divided, with younger workers being the most radical. The urban core of the working class concentrated far more on economic and workplace-related, than political demands. Kádár was thus able to buy this crucial section of the working class off in the two years after November 1956, by re-casting the identity of the ruling party as a much more “workerist” party than its Stalinist predecessor, whilst conceding many of the demands that related to social policy, wages and work-organization in the factories.