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of their own independence. When the Turks were finally expelled in the late 17th century, they left behind a country devastated, depopulated, and quite unable to resist the dynastic ambitions of the Habsburgs, who reigned until the end of World War I despite flareups of Magyar nationalism, including the 1848 revolt, and extended periods of passive resistance.
In 1919, the nation briefly fell under the dictatorship of indigenous Communists led by Bela Kun. His attempts to force drastic social reforms a la Lenin gave communism a bad name. In 1920, stability of a sort came to Hungary with the advent of the heavily paternalistic, semifeudalistic regency of Admiral Miklos Horthy. Successive cabinets played on such themes as irredentism, anticommunism, and Hungarian nationalism; they grappled with a laggard economy and slowly steered the country into the orbit of newly arisen Nazi Germany. In 1940, lured by the promise of recovering historic Hungarian lands, Budapest allied itself formally with Berlin. Four years later advancing Soviet troops occupied the Hungarian capital.
As in other East European states after the war, Hungary was permitted a multiparty, quasi-democratic government for a short time. Soviet overlordship guaranteed that the Communists were to be the dominant factor. By the use of what party chief Matyas Rakosi called "salami tactics" the Communists sliced away at those institutions alien to their cause. In 1947, leaders of the "bourgeois" parties were hounded into submission or exile. In 1948, the Social Democrats were done in by a popular front merger, and the collectivization of agriculture and industry commenced. In 1949, Cardinal Prince Primate Mindszenty was given life imprisonment, ex-Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk—an example of an indigenous Communist—was given death, and the nation was given a Soviet-style constitution and a new name, the Hungarian People's Republic.
Secret police terror reigned, and adulation of Rakosi was required. The new party boss, the son of a poultry butcher, became the most brutal of the early satellite leaders. Touting himself as "Stalin's greatest Hungarian pupil," he tried to transform the nation into a Soviet Union in miniature. There were 150,000 political prisoners, and at least 2,000 others had been executed by the time of Stalin's death in 1953. Out of favor with the new Soviet leadership, Rakosi then found himself edged aside by more humane elements who sought to abate the terrible tensions that gripped Hungarian society, only to become victims of the ensuing explosion.
The seeds of the Hungarian revolt had germinated long prior to 1956. Hungarians were singularly unreceptive to a political system lacking a national foundation, particularly one that embodied an atheistic and alien dogma and was imposed by the Russians. More immediately, the populace was angered by the denial of individual liberty and alienated by the absence of material well-being. As a result, workers turned apathetic, the peasantry grew restless, and intellectuals became aroused. With an inevitability born of popular desperation, violence erupted in late October. Under the uncertain leadership of Imre Nagy Hungarian aspirations for a liberal-socialist-neutralist regime emerged—and within a fortnight were crushed under the tread of Soviet tanks. The revolt was over, but after this latest assertion of age-old Hungarian nationalism, life on the Danube would never be the same. The winds of domestic reform were sharpening and would have to be heeded, at some cost to Budapest's conformity to Soviet ways.
The task fell to Janos Kadar, a purported friend of the revolution, but, as it turned out, more of a political opportunist, to find a course between the rocks and shoals of rampant nationalism on the one hand and Stalin style communism on the other. At first it seemed that little had changed, as the regime restored order in the approved Communist fashion. Finally, in December 1961, Kadar set the stage for a time of domestic relaxation and popular reconciliation by declaring that if the Rakosi era motto had been "Those who are not with us are against us," then his should be "Those who are not against us are with us."
Still wary of its sullen citizenry, the government inched forward on two fronts: broadening the political system to give the individual a sense of participation, and liberalizing the economic system to permit the individual to share in the fruits of his labor. At the same time it compensated Moscow with almost slavish support of Soviet foreign policy. The regime was shaken by the Soviet move against Czechoslovakia in August 1968, seeing in it a possible indictment of its own reform program. With appropriate pauses, however, for soul-searching reevaluations, Kadar groped forward toward a position compatible with the popular mood and the demands of limited national sovereignty.
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