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Goulash and solidarity
Zsuzsanna Clark compares growing up in communist
Hungary with life there, and in Britain, today
Zsuzsanna Clark
Saturday November 2, 2002
The Guardian
When people ask me what it was like growing up in
Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most expect to hear
tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty
manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are
invariably disappointed when I tell them that the
reality was quite different and that communist
Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact
rather a good place to live.
Victor Orban, the recently defeated rightwing
Hungarian prime minister, described my generation -
those whose fate was sealed by the "failure"
of the 1956 uprising - as "the lost
generation".
But Hungarians like myself, who grew up in the years
of "goulash communism", were actually the
lucky ones. The shockwaves of 1956 bought home to the
communist leadership that they could only consolidate
their position by making our lives more tolerable.
Stalinism was out and "Kadarism" - a unique
brand of liberal communism (named after its architect,
Janos Kadar) from which Mikhail Gorbachev would later
draw inspiration for perestroika - was in.
Instead of a list of achievements in health,
education, transport and welfare, let me offer some
personal observations on what living under goulash
communism was really like.
What I remember most was the overriding sense of
community and solidarity, a spirit I find totally
lacking in my adopted Britain and indeed whenever I go
back to Hungary today. With minimal differences in
income and material goods, people really were judged
on what they were like as individuals and not on what
they owned.
Western liberals may sneer at such movements as the
Young Pioneers, which sought to involve young people
in a wide range of community activities, but they
reflected an ambition to build a cohesive society - in
contrast to the atomisation of most
"advanced" nations today. I was proud to be
a Pioneer; contrary to popular belief, we did not
spend all our time sitting round campfires singing
songs in praise of Lenin, but instead learned valuable
life skills in social interraction and building
friendships.
I was also privileged to be bought up in a society
where the government understood the value of education
and culture. Before the war, in the Hungary idolised
by snobbish, reactionary writers like Sandor Marai,
secondary education was the preserve of the wealthy
classes. My mother and father had to leave school at
11; under the Kadar regime, they were given a second
chance to resume their studies as adults. Communism
opened up new opportunities for people of my
background and led to a huge increase in social
mobility.
A corollary of the government's education policy
was its commitment to the arts. Again, the emphasis
was on bringing the maximum benefit to the largest
number of people, and not just the wealthy in
Budapest. Theatres, opera houses and concert halls
were all heavily subsidised, bringing prices down to a
level everyone could afford. The government opened up
"cultural houses" in every town and village,
so that provincially based working class people, like
my parents, could have easy access to the arts.
Book publishing was similarly supported, so that
prices remained low and bookshops proliferated. With 1
forint (1.5p) editions of a wide range of classic
works available, reading became a national obsession.
For those who believe a rigorous censorship existed, I
can tell you that among the most popular published
foreign writers were PG Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley and W
Somerset Maugham, hardly Marxian propagandists.
Now, 13 years after "regime change", much of
this cultural heritage has been destroyed. Museums,
theatres and galleries have had to sink or swim in the
new economic "realism". As ticket subsidies
have been withdrawn, once again it is only the rich
(and German tourists) who can afford to go to the
opera. Hundreds of smaller art cinemas have been
forced to close, while the big Hollywood multiplexes
move in. Television has dramatically dumbed down, too.
When I was a teenager, Saturday night prime time meant
a Jules Verne adventure, a poetry recital and a
Chekhov drama; now it means the same dreary diet of
game shows and American action movies as in Britain.
Reform politicans sarcastically refer to Kadar's
"velvet prison", yet they have surely
created a prison of their own, where large sections of
the population have been sold to the foreign-owned
multinationals, which control 70% of the nation's
production and threaten to pull out of the country if
wages or workers' rights are improved. My best
friend's husband works for such a company, and
tells how visits to the toilet are strictly timed and
taking a full lunch break is seen as showing lack of
commitment to the firm. It's all a far cry from
the paternalistic state-owned companies of 20 years
ago, with their nurseries, subsidised canteens,
holiday homes and free sports facilities.
Communism in Hungary certainly had a downside. While
trips to other socialist countries were unrestricted,
travel to the west was problematic and only allowed
every second year. Few Hungarians (myself included)
enjoyed the compulsory Russian lessons. There were
petty restrictions and needless layers of bureaucracy
and, of course, we were living in a one-party system
where freedom to criticise the government was limited.
Yet despite all of this, I firmly believe that, taken
as a whole, the positives outweighed the negatives.
Today Hungarians have the theoretical right to travel
to the west whenever they like, yet the fall in real
wages has been so dramatic that few of them can now
afford even to go to Lake Balaton. The
"patriotic" politicans who shouted so loudly
about Hungary's "occupation" by a
foreign power under communism, are now strangely
silent when the country is effectively controlled by
New York financial institutions and unelected
bureaucrats in Brussels.
As a young adult in Hungary, I grew accustomed to a
diet of news stories about the "imperialist"
west and its wicked plans for global domination and
control of the world's resources. We were all
aware that this was the official party line and so its
effectiveness as propaganda was limited.
Now, more than 10 years on, with the US (and Germany)
having connived in the breakup of Yugoslavia,
colonised Afghanistan and now planning to invade Iraq
for control of the world's oil supply, it is
surely obvious that what we were told about western
intentions was true.
I have seen both communist and western news management
and know which is the more devious - and therefore the
more effective. I witnessed the way media manipulation
works in the "free world", when we were told
the Stop the War march I went on in London recently
was attended by just 150,000 people and in the
dismissive coverage Britain's biggest-ever peace
demonstration was given in most newspapers.
Education, or rather the denial of it, is the key to
all attempts at social control. Gorbachev said that
education, in his view the greatest achievement of 70
years of communism, also paradoxically helped bring
about its downfall. Put simply, the communist regimes
educated their people to such an extent that they
developed the critical faculty to challenge, and
eventually overthrew the system. After three years of
living in Britain, I see no danger of that happening
here.
Zsuzsanna Clark is writing a book on growing up under
communism in Hungary
zsuzsumush@bushinternet.com