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state. While the nonconformist may expect less in the way of favors from the system, he otherwise is likely to be left alone. To conformists, the regime holds out the lure of membership in its new elite of professionals, intellectuals, technocrats, and managers. Many accept, but their loyalty is largely superficial and opportunistic. To the common man, the regime poses as a partner in the appreciation of things Hungarian. It has joined the effort to preserve ancient folkways; rehabilitated national monuments such as the royal palace in Buda; and promoted excellence in such sports as fencing, soccer, water polo, swimming, boxing, and wrestling. Still, most Hungarians see the regime heavily mortgaged to the Soviet will rather than committed to Hungarian fortunes, and Kadar, try as he may, cannot wash that stain from the record.
In a variety of ways—by themselves unspectacular, but in total significant—the people have made manifest a lack of "oneness" with the system. At bottom, Hungarians collectively have declined to meet the official standard of a burgeoning nation of uncommon character. The birth rate and growth rate of the population are lower in Hungary than in any other state in the Communist bloc. The suicide rate is the highest and the divorce rate the third highest in the world. In practical terms, this erosion of the human spirit portends an increasingly aged population and a stagnating labor force. More immediately, other indications of individual alienation suggest that a social crisis of considerable dimensions may be brewing. Alcoholism is widespread, and prostitution flourishes. Psychiatric disorders appear to be growing, and a minor drug culture may be forming. Crime is on the rise, and special appeals to help curb it have met with public apathy. Juvenile delinquency and youth offenses are particularly mortifying to a regime that bases its future on a younger generation indoctrinated in the puritanical morality of state socialism.
If anything, Hungarian youth seems more dispirited than the older population. The regime has bestowed unique favors on the young in terms of better educational opportunities, better health care, better recreation areas, and improved social facilities. Such heartily despised features of education as compulsory technical and Russian language training may soon be alleviated by a contemplated "NEM of the classroom" that would provide greater local autonomy at the universities, wider latitude for the individual in choosing a profession, and increased opportunity for academics to indulge in self-expression. Still, youth continues to view itself as a submerged, underprivileged, and somewhat forlorn minority in a small-time Communist state. The failure of any appreciable numbers of the under-35 generation to advance to leading positions in the system is accepted as a sign that the ingrained paternalism of Hungary's past still holds. Apathy is the result, as even the low level of political commitment found in neighboring Communist countries is not met here.
Compared with youth, Hungary's writer-intellectual caste represents a potentially far more subversive element in the eyes of the regime. Historically, men of the arts and letters have raised the torch of freedom during Hungary's many dark hours. Whether poet or politician or both in the same person, they have transcended the barriers to understanding and evoked the essence of Magyar nationalism as rooted in the common man. Especially have they idealized Hungary as an outpost of Christian-Western civilization holding against the alien hordes of the east. This conception, while it borders on national conceit, nonetheless is easily understood both as it applies to Constantinople in the past or to Moscow today.
It is small wonder, then, that the Communist regime from its inception sought to strap its most creative people into the intellectual straitjacket of "socialist realism." After long periods of greater or lesser repression, Kadar finally chose as part of his liberalization program in the early 1960's to relax the death grip on dissident cultural expression. Since then, bureaucrats and intellectuals have observed an uneasy truce, with the former largely abandoning overt censorship and the latter venturing only very tentatively into the no-man's land of antiregime criticism. Occasional skirmishes still occur at the frontier of misunderstanding, however, and it is clear that the amount of trust felt on both sides could be measured by the thimbleful. Meanwhile, a pall still hovers over intellectual output, and it seems evident that outright genius, as exemplified by recent musical greats Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, is unlikely to blossom in the Philistine setting of Kadarland.
A third factor which has left the Communists' governing equation somewhat unbalanced is the church. Christianity came to Hungary shortly after its founding as a state, and over the centuries entered into the lifeblood of the nation. The dominant Catholic Church (representing two-thirds of
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