THE
CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
75
mischievous. "You would have done the Party a greater service by
refusing to lie, by telling the truth, by not turning your backs on the
people," they were told. One can imagine the sickness and rage pro–
voked by these words of common sense.
Those who most quickly recovered their presence of mind were
the small opportunists, alert, cunning, facile of pen-they shall be name–
less. They entered upon a truth-telling race. So the Party wanted cri–
ticism! Why certainly, all it wanted. A competition began to see who
could hurl the greatest possible number of disagreeable truths at the
heads of the leaders, who appeared to be on their way out. Other,
better-informed, opportunists appealed for moderation, warning against
excesses in the "unfreezing" operation. They cocked a weather eye in
the direction of Russia where Ilya Ehrenbourg had just received a rap
on the knuckles for doing so much thinking.
Nevertheless "Operation Unfreeze" went on apace. Encouraged
by lmre Nagy, the writers went to the country, brought themselves up
to date on the situation, reported on it in verse, in newspaper articles,
and in fiction. Others rummaged through their desks for works written
during the Terror. Orkeny recovered his gusty satirical laughter of an
earlier day, Konya published his
On the Great Road,
a poem in which
he complained particularly about the Russians having carried off, with–
out · compensation, the aluminum wealth of the country (somewhat
original subject matter for poetry) .
Factions began to form : the Stalinists, headed by Sandor Gergely
and under Rakosi's protection, recovered, after some months of silence,
their aplomb; they were opposed by a more powerful group composed
of "reformist" Communists, backed by "Populists." The Party leader–
ship intervened several times in quarrels between these factions, preach–
ing a middle of-the-road policy for writers, and announcing its readiness
to grant them "a greater liberty" on condition that they did not impair
the prestige of the Party, but placed it in a perspective of "having
overcome its errors."
But how was this directive to be applied at the level of the par–
ticular, to each individual wcirk? How was the invincible march of
the Party toward glory to be shown, for example, in a love song or a
sob? "You can't substitute love for the class struggle," Revai had
written in 1952. Exactly. And if one suddenly felt like shedding a tear,
one ran the risk of being called a pessimist and a decadent bourgeois.
For the Party censors all personal emotion smacked suspiciously of devia–
tionism. The Party leadership might be induced by circumstances to ac–
cept "freedom" of literature in
theory,
but such freedom on the plane of
