THE
CRISIS IN
COMMUNISM
73
The origin of the Hungarian writers' revolt goes back to June of
1953, to a time when the Hungarian Communist Party, under the
direction of Imre Nagy, had somewhat precipitately struck out on the
de-Stalinization path. On July 4, 1953, Imre Nagy drew up a balance
sheet of five years of terror, with a calm and ferocious precision that
left the Parliament breathless. He affirmed what everybody knew but
what nobody till then had dared breathe-that the governmental mech–
anism had jammed, that the Party was completely cut off from the
people, discredited even in the eyes of the working classes, to say noth–
ing of the peasantry and intelligentsia; that, moreover, the first, the
only thing to do under the circumstances,
if
one wished to avert up–
heavals "on the Berlin model" and win back the confidence of the
country, was to inaugurate a policy of reforms aimed at putting an
end to arbitrary restrictions and illegal acts on the part of the police,
improving the standard of living by applying the brake to super-indus–
trialization, and doing away with propaganda whose purpose was a
continuous and massive falsification of the truth.
Now, the effect of this amazing speech, this
mea culpa
of the Party
uttered by one of its chiefs (known within the Party, however, as a
long-time opponent of Rakosi's policies), was nowhere as electrifying
as among Communist and philo-Communist writers. It is easy to
see
why. These writers, among them some of the best in the country (Tibor
Dery, Jules Hay, Istvan Orkeny), had, during the years 1949-1952,
been subjected to rigorous indoctrination by the intellectual bosses of
the Party (notably the grand and inexorable inquisitor, that damned
soul, Joseph Revai) in an attempt to mold them to the Zhdanovian
norms of artistic creation. Most of them had been formed by a Marxism
impregnated with Western culture; though their party cards and con–
victions were Communist, their artistic temperaments were personalist
and somewhat anarchist, their minds analytical and critical. It was
almost asking the impossible to expect them to transform themselves
into Aragons or Fedines, to embrace, under coercion, that technique
which consists in telling the grossest lies in accents of the most ingenuous
truth, in throwing the mantle of "what is obvious" over what is
utterly unbelieva:ble, in accusing those known to be innocent while
defending forgers or monsters of criminality.
Their "schooling" had begun with the Rajk affair. The day after
the infamous verdict, which had stirred up Western opinion, Tamas
Nagy, a writer-functionary of the Central Committee, directed an ap–
peal to
the writers in the Szabad
Nep.
This
appeal had the ring of an
order:
"Fellow
Magyar
writers, let
us denounce Rajk
to
the
people
