New Course (Hungary, 1953–1955)

Warning signs (1952–1953)

The upward revision of the five-year plan in 1951 and the poor harvest of 1952 produced serious imbalances across the Hungarian economy. In the summer of 1952 the countryside saw the first mass resistance to compulsory deliveries: threshers' strikes, refusals to surrender quotas and even violence. The courts sentenced 72,300 people in 1949, 98,000 in 1950 and 120,000 in 1952. The signals piled up, but the crisis was acknowledged only in the early summer of 1953. Meanwhile Rákosi, imitating Stalin's last purge, announced to the Central Leadership at the end of February 1953 the arrest of Gábor Péter, head of the State Protection Authority (ÁVH).

The Kremlin talks (13–16 June 1953)

After a similar consultation with the East German leaders, the CPSU Presidium summoned eight Hungarian leaders, including Rákosi, Ernő Gerő, Imre Nagy, István Dobi and András Hegedüs. Malenkov said the Hungarian comrades were underestimating the shortcomings; Beria asked whether it was acceptable "in Hungary, with its population of 9,500,000, to have instituted proceedings against 1,500,000 people," and condemned Rákosi's personal direction of the ÁVH, including orders to use physical violence. Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan and Khrushchev in turn attacked forced industrialization, over-hasty collectivization, mass repression and Rákosi's concentration of power. The Soviet side proposed Nagy as prime minister, with Rákosi remaining party leader. On the second day Nagy's demand to abolish the kulak list became the only Hungarian proposal the Soviets accepted.

The June resolution and the programme of 4 July

On 27–28 June the party's Central Leadership adopted a four-part resolution. It dated the excessive industrialization to the "sectarian" policy followed since the second party congress of 1951, and put figures on the repression: 850,000 police sentences for petty offences between 1951 and 1 May 1953; 650,000 people before the courts and 387,000 sentenced between 1950 and the first quarter of 1953; almost 400 million forints exacted in mass fines for delivery failures. It blamed a "clique-like" leadership concentrated in Rákosi, Gerő, Farkas and Révai, and the party's takeover of state functions. The resolution was not published; the new direction was announced on 4 July in Parliament as Nagy's government programme. Nagy admitted that the plan targets "exceed our strength in many ways," and promised security for individual farmers, licences for private artisans, tolerance towards the intelligentsia and the churches, and legality. It has been called the first speech by a communist leader since 1945 with which most of the country agreed.

Implementation: three packages

The first package shifted part of the accumulation fund to consumption, cutting heavy-industrial investment in favour of agriculture, light industry, food processing and housing. The second raised the wages of 928,000 people by an average of just over 100 forints and returned about one billion forints to the public through price cuts in July and September. The third eased the burden on the peasantry: almost fifty government resolutions on agriculture were issued in the second half of 1953, arrears and levies were written off, and a new delivery system for 1954–6 brought significantly lower quotas.

Repression was eased as well. The amnesty of 24 July cancelled prison sentences of under two years and cut longer ones by a third, but excluded most political prisoners. Because it also covered those punished for delivery arrears, supply offences or "arbitrary departure" from work, and those expelled or interned, it amounted to a restricted political amnesty; a report of November 1953 counted almost 748,000 people affected (758,611 in the final tally). Of about 40,000 prisoners, 15,761 were released; of more than 5,000 held in the ÁVH camps at Recsk, Kistarcsa, Kazincbarcika and Tiszalök, 3,234 were freed by the end of October; and 7,281 deportees to Hortobágy regained their freedom. Artisans, 200,000 in 1949 and fewer than a quarter of that four years later, again exceeded 100,000 in 1954. Withdrawals from the collective farms followed the programme at once: of more than 5,000 cooperatives, 688 (12 per cent) were wound up by the end of 1953, and membership fell from 376,000 to 250,000.

Counterattack and defeat

Beria's fall in early July revived the believers in the old course. At a Budapest party activists' meeting on 11 July Rákosi played the change down, saying the old objectives and slogans were unchanged, and he used the Political Committee to slow implementation. Nagy went to Soviet Ambassador Kiselev on 16 July to report the resistance, and Malenkov's speech to the Supreme Soviet on 8 August shored up his position. In 1954 Nagy and the camp forming around him tried to turn correction into reform, but failed; in the spring of 1955 Nagy lost all his posts.

Significance

For János Rainer, the most important result of the period was that the self-confidence of Hungary's Stalinist leadership evaporated for good. Partial self-criticism and correction bred uncertainty and a propensity for revision among cadres and the party intelligentsia, and Nagy and "communism with a more human face" became the point of reference on which the mass movements of autumn 1956 could draw.