THE
CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
79
Some days later, the Petofi Club, which is a Communist student
and intellectual group with headquarters in downtown Budapest, in–
vited several of the insurgent writers to give a public exposition of their
point of view. This proved a sure way of making their meetings a
success; they began to attract increasingly large audiences. During
this same period, the tone of the
Literary Gazette
was becoming bolder
every week. What assured the writers and their
Gazette
of a sympathetic
audience was not so much their theoretical affirmations of the utility–
for the Party--of "truth," or their denunciations of "socialist realism,"
now completely buried, but their courageous stand against the authori–
ties. Dery and his friends were in fact the first Hungarians for many
years to conduct themselves as though utterly unafraid, to
talk like
free men.
Yet Rakosi was still very much there, his police apparatus
was intact and under the direction of the torturer, Vladimir Farkas.
The "objective conditions" of fear were all still present. Dery and his
colleagues pretended to be unaware of their existence. Each new issue
of the
Literary Gazette
was in the nature of an event. Issue after issue
destroyed a taboo, demolished a prohibition. Reality had suddenly ceased
to be mute. The message of the writers: Speak! Do as we do, out with
it! Air your grievances!
reached ever wider areas among the
intelligentsia.
Toward the end of June, especially after the Poznan riots, the
Secretariat of the Party completely lost control over the Petofi Club,
where the regular debates were becoming increasingly more agitated.
One meeting of the Club, on the 27th of June, drew more than 6,000
people, who booed and threatened the representatives of the Party
Secretariat.
Mathias Rakosi then staged one last attempt to save his pos1t10n
and re-establish Party unity under his rule. He called a meeting of the
Central Committee and on the 30th of June had it adopt-in the face
of the reluctance and hostility of an increasing number of Committee
members-a motion of censure against the agitators. Two Union ring–
leaders, Dery and Tardos, were expelled from the Party; action against
the others was limited to severe disciplinary measures. Next, Rakosi's
emissaries descended on the Budapest factories and those of other
in–
dustrial centers in order to lay the sense of the June 30 resolution before
the workers. These emissaries tried to represent the rebellious writers
and intellectuals as "agents of the bourgeoisie" who were attempting
to restore capitalism. It was not the first time Rakosi had set about ex–
ploiting the traditional anti-intellectualism of the proletariat while repre-
