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No. 16 TRONDHEIM STUDIES on EAST EUROPEAN CULTURES & SOCIETIES No. 16 TRONDHEIM STUDIES ON EAST EUROPEAN CULTURES & SOCIETIES MUDDLING THROUGH IN THE LONG 1960S IDEAS AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN HIGH POLITICS AND THE LOWER CLASSES OF COMMUNIST HUNGARY Edited by Janos M. Rainer and György Péteri The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest Program on East European Cultures and Societies, Trondheim May 2005 © 2005 The Authors, the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest, and the Program on East European Cultures and Societies, a program of the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. ISSN 1501-6684 ISBN 82-995792-6-0 Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies Editors: György Péteri and Sabrina P. Ramet Editorial Board: Trond Berge, Tanja Ellingsen, Knut Andreas Grimstad, Arne Halvorsen, We encourage submissions to the Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies. Inclusion in the series will be based on anonymous review. Manuscripts are expected to be in English (exception is made for Norwegian 0DVWHU VDQG3K'WKHVHV DQGQRWWRH[FHHGGRXEOHVSDFHGSDJHV3RVWDO address for submissions: Editor, Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, Department of History, NTNU, NB7491 Trondheim, Norway. For more information regarding the Program on East European Cultures and Societies and our paper series, visit our WEB-site at: http://www.hf.ntnu.no/peecs/home/ TRONDHEIM STUDIES ON EAST EUROPEAN CULTURES & SOCIETIES No. 16 Muddling Through in the Long 1960s Ideas and Everyday Life in High Politics and the Lower Classes of Communist Hungary Edited by János M. Rainer and György Péteri Chapters 1-3 and 5-8 were translated from the Hungarian by Brian McLean The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest Program on East European Cultures and Societies, Trondheim May 2005 Preface The present publication is the fruit of joint efforts on the part of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest, and the Program on East European Cultures and Societies, Trondheim. The essays in our volume represent a selection from the papers written for the project “The 1960s in Hungary” organized by the 1956 Institute and sponsored by the National Program for Research and Development of Hungary. An earlier version of these essays were included, in Hungarian, in János M. Rainer, ed., “Hatvanas évek” Magyarországon. Tanulmányok (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2004). Since then all the essays have undergone a number of revisions on the basis of comments from the process of anonymous peer review, translation into English, and editing. We are grateful to all our colleagues who undertook to act as readers and helped us by their comments to improve the quality of our papers. Brian McLean’s careful and excellent work should be credited for the translation into English of all but one of our essays. As usual, his contribution has been more than simple translation – his questions and suggestions have helped us to produce greater clarity and precision in our texts. György Péteri and János M. Rainer Budapest and Trondheim, May 2005 2 Contents János Rainer The Sixties in Hungary—some historical and political approaches .................................4 Gábor Kovács Revolution, lifestyle, power and culture—features of political thought in the Sixties ...27 Melinda Kalmár An attempt at optimization. The reform model in culture, 1965–1973...........................53 György Péteri From Purge to Scandal: The MEGÉV-affair and the changing political style in communist Hungary.................83 Zsuzsanna Varga Questioning the Soviet economic model in the 1960s ..................................................109 Tibor Valuch From long house to square. Changing village living conditions in Sixties Hungary....135 Eszter Tóth Flats, gardens, oranges, Kennedy rings.........................................................................160 Sándor Horváth Hooligans, spivs and gangs. Youth subcultures in the 1960s .......................................199 Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................................224 3 János Rainer The Sixties in Hungary—some historical and political approaches The Sixties: East and West The concept of the Sixties in historical and political thinking appeared very early, almost in the decade itself. For the Sixties (in a broader sense than the period of the 1960s) were distinguished not just from events in a previous decade, but in a sense, from those of several previous decades. This applied primarily in America, which had emerged unscathed from the two world wars. But the decade had obvious special qualities in Europe as well, where the world wars were the main dividing lines of the modern period, while the post-Second World War period was marked by the conflicts and internal events of two great world systems. There is still contention about the character and substance of the Sixties, but its importance is scarcely questioned. The events in the political history of the Sixties— especially those of the Western Europeans and Americans—and the social movements, conflicts, clashes and ‘campus revolutions’ that culminated in 1968, have lost much of their significance, although there is still a literature dealing with them.1 Neo-Marxist movements in Western European and American universities, cults of Castro, Mao and Che Guevara, the ‘Renaissance’ of Marxism in that period—these were just fairground bustle, a colourful end to the sobering story of communism.2 After that, left-wing ‘critical’ thinking lost impetus, became empty and ‘turned primitive’.3 What really marks the decade a generation later is the change in way of life or lifestyle that took place in the Sixties—their revolution in values or cultural revolution. This is the principal meaning of ‘the Sixties’ in historical discourse today.4 The continuing influence of this is singled out by political scientists.5 Indeed, they may even see the Sixties as the decisive change in the 20th century: ‘If… the century is seen in terms of social history, we encounter a caesura that obviously divides the 20th century into two parts in a chronological sense, irrespective of where we set the beginning or the end. This caesura is formed by the Sixties, with the lifestyle changes that occurred—or if you like, accelerated—during them, and the ubiquitous generational revolution in related habits, 1 A recent general critical appraisal appears in Mausbach 2002. 2 Furet 2000, 819–49. 3 Rév 1998. 4 It features in this sense in university curricula in Europe and in America. 5 For instance by Gitlin 1996 in relation to US politics. 4 morals and all areas of culture.’6 The unprecedented prosperity caused by seemingly undisturbed economic growth and the specific reactions of an ensuing, younger generation to the boom did indeed change the complexion of the Western world.7 Beyond the United States and Western Europe, the Sixties take on a different, no less striking character. For Africa and parts of Asia, this period (starting in the mid-1950s or in some cases right after the Second World War) brought traditional colonial arrangements to an end, with no few accompanying dramatic and bloody events and conflicting processes of emancipation and reorientation. In the communist world system, the Sixties are significant above all in political history, as the years following Stalin, in which there were shifts away from the classical system of socialism in many places8 and talk of reforming socialism even in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile China, having adapted the Stalinist system in its own fashion, sought change through immutability when announcing its claim to lead the communist world and opposition to de-Stalinization. The historical recollection of this period of crumbling monolithic structures and incipient pluralism also seems varied and even self-contradictory. Late reform communism or reform socialism, that curious phenomenon of the twilight of communism (notably associated with the ‘death throes’ of the system-making dictator, i. e. the period after 1953 and 1961) portrayed the Sixties as some kind of Marxist renaissance, an appearance of socialism with a human face. This came closest to the truth in Czechoslovakia’s reform experiment, but such presentations of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union were not rare, even in the 1990s.9 According to other approaches, the changes in the Sixties derived mainly from partial insights into the crisis of the classical Stalinist model, but as soon as these reached the basic structures of the model, the political class closed ranks. In other words, the reforms were corrective in nature, serving to keep the system operable, and the prospects presented were only apparent ones.10 So although the concept of the Sixties exists, it is less clear and its significance less apparent in relation to the East than in relation to the West. In the West, the social, economic and mentality changes arrived as the resultant of some kind of ‘revolution’, whose political representation existed, but from which no political revolution emerged.11 In the East, on the other hand, the political change (obligatory revision after Stalin’s death) 6 Kende 2003, 275–6. 7 See Marwick 1998 and Kimball 2000. 8 For a theoretical model of the classical system and shifts from it, see Kornai 1993. 9 A basic work of the kind on the Prague Spring and events of August 1968 is Mlynár 1987, which mixes personal recollection with analysis. One such
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