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PARTISAN REVIEW
Hungary needs political stability as well as guarantees that no crazy
left-wing government will suddenly nationalize private firms.
While the centrist Grosz believes this could happen without
risking the rule and power of the existing Communist Party, the
other reformers appear more sanguine and to understand that
they too might eventually have to relinquish their governing role.
But the opposition groups reject such an arrangement, and favor
creation of a genuine multiparty system that could result in the
eventual end of Communist one-party rule in a formerly Stalinist
adjunct of the Soviet Union.
However, even the threat alone of a deep rupture causes fear
on all sides that an excuse will be created for another 1956, in the
form of either a Soviet intervention or, more likely, a military coup
by hard-line Communists and their allies in the secret police and
military. Indeed, given the public meetings of Hungarian reform
Communists,
it
seems apparent that the old Communist party
might break up into different wings, with the reformers creating
their own party that will seek to ally with the still tiny but reformed
Social Democrats, who have but three hundred members in the
country. The Social Democrats, of course, had been one of those
parties forced to merge with the Stalinists-bence the official
name of the Communists is the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.
But now, seeking the alternative of a social democratic solution
rather than a cataclysmic revolution, some do hope for a coalition
in which the spirit of social democracy combines with the
discipline of the old Communists to Westernize Hungary. This
would be done in a fashion acceptable to the Soviet Union, with
whom the government would maintain solidly friendly relations.
Thus one Communist leader told Diana Johnstone of
In These
Times
that the reform Communists were "looking for ways to get
together" with the Social Democrats, and that they intended to "be
their socialist conscience [while the Social Democrats would] be
our democratic conscience."
Whether that scenario works out is an open question. Others,
like the Free Democrats and their intellectual spokesman Janos
Kis, hope that the end result in Hungary will be free markets and
political democracy. At any rate, as Jacques Rupnik recently
wrote in
The New Republic,
one can find the hallmarks of democ–
racy in both Poland and Hungary. These include freedom of the
