THE
CRISIS IN
COMMUNISM
81
be similarly revoked provided the "blameworthy" ones, like Dery or
Tardos, would make some gesture acknowledging that they had "sinned
against Party discipline." Other concessions were dangled before the
Union's eyes: authorization to publish three new reviews (of which
one was to be on aesthetics, under Lukacs), increased emoluments, and
grants for study abroad. On the other hand, Kallai called their atten–
tion to that "error" which consisted in going beyond the Party to appeal
to a kind of national consensus. "National union, as well as unification
of literature, can only be based on the strength and indestructible unity
of the Party." Which meant: discipline first, democracy later.
The spokesman for the writers, while paying homage to the "good
intentions of the new Communist leadership," went on in his answer
to Kallai to uphold uncompromisingly their demand for absolute free–
dom of intellectual life, for autonomy for the Writers' Union. As we
have seen, the ·action taken by the Congress was in that direction.
However paradoxical this whole experience (and however lasting),
the Union of Hungarian Writers after its Congress constituted a state
within the State. Not only its literary but also its political and ideological
activities were free of all direction from the Party. In fact, the writers,
whose audience kept growing (the
Literary Gazette
is the most widely
read journal in the country, and
Ludas Matyi-the
Hungarian
Canard
Enchaine-which
is equally a spokesman for "de-Stalinization" has a cir–
culation of 410,000 copies, an impressive figure in a country of ten million
people ),
were
that "second party" which the Party refused to authorize.
Although the Communist file leaders in the Union considered themselves,
perhaps sincerely, the "marching," the Leninist wing of the Party, the
Union itself was a National Front in miniature, an assemblage that re–
flected far more faithfully than the different factitious mass organiza–
tions created by the Party (Peace Movement, Patriotic Popular Front,
etc.) the
real country,
this new Hungary which is working-class, intel–
lectual, and peasant, without capitalists, without big land owners but
to which the intelligentsia gives its tone.
Hungarian writers at that point spoke to their rulers on a footing of
equality.
If
the organ of the Central Committee,
Szabad Nep,
ventured
to reproach them, they rejected the reproaches with a disdain founded
on certainty: the people are with us. The Party leadership was as though
mesmerized by this unexpected opposition. We have here a new
social
fact which, as such, deserves to be noted. To be sure, the tendency
to "artistic" or intellectual autonomy has never been totally absent
from the Communist world ; but this tendency for the first time,
in
Hungary, took the form of an organized rebellion with considerable
propaganda means at its disposal: press, radio, Petofi Club, etc.
