The region of the Carpathian basin known as Hungary (Magyarország) changed hands many times before the Magyars arrived here at the end of the ninth century, and its history is marked by migrations, invasions and drastic changes, as Asia and Europe have clashed and blended. Over the centuries, borders have shifted considerably, so geographical limits as well as historical epochs are somewhat arbitrary. Transylvania, an integral part of Hungary for hundreds of years, was lost to Romania in 1920, and the plight of its Magyar minority remains a contentious issue, while the situation of ethnic Hungarians in Serbia and Slovakia is also a cause for national concern.
Although recorded history of the area now covered by Hungary begins with the arrival of the Romans, archeological evidence of Stone Age (30,000–8000 BC) humans has been found in the Istállóskő and Pilisszántó caves in northern Hungary, suggesting that the earliest inhabitants lived by gathering fruit and hunting reindeer and mammoths. The end of the Ice Age created favourable conditions for the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals, which spread up through the Balkans in the Neolithic era, and was characteristic of the Kőrös culture (5500–3400 BC): clans living alongside the River Tisza, herding sheep and goats and worshipping fertility goddesses. As humans became more settled and spread into Transdanubia, evidence survives of mounds (tell) full of artefacts, apparently leading towards the rise of the Lengyel culture around Lake Balaton.
During the Bronze Age (2000–800 BC), warlike tribes arrived from the Balkans and steppes, introducing cattle and horses. Subsequent migrants brought new technology – iron came with the Cimmerians, and the Asiatic Scythians (500–250 BC) brought the potter’s wheel and manufactured goods from Greek traders on the Black Sea coast – while the Celts, who superseded them in the early third century BC, introduced glassblowing and left mournful sculptures and superb jewellery (most notably the gold treasures of Szárazd-Regöly), before being subdued by the Romans.
The Roman conquest was initiated by Augustus at the beginning of the Christian era, primarily to create a buffer zone in Pannonia between the empire and the barbarians to the east. By the middle of the first century AD, Roman rule extended throughout Transdanubia, from the Sava to the Danube; fortified with castra, the river formed the limes or military frontier. Trade, administration and culture grew up around the garrison towns and spread along the roads constructed to link the imperial heartland with the far-flung colonies in Dacia (Romania) and Dalmatia (Yugoslavia). Pécs, Sopron, Szombathely and Buda were all Roman towns, as archeological finds have revealed. Some of the best-preserved Roman remains are found in these towns, including Buda’s amphitheatre and baths, the ruins of Gorsium near Székesfehérvár, and Szombathely’s Temple of Isis.
During the fourth century the Romans began to withdraw from Pannonia, handing over its defence to the Vandals and Jazygians who lived beyond the Danube. In 430 these people fell under the invading Huns, whose empire reached its zenith and then fragmented with the death of Attila in 453. Other warring tribes – Ostrogoths, Gepidae and Langobards – occupied the region for the next 150 years, before being swept aside by the Avars, whose empire survived until the beginning of the eighth century, when the region once again came up for grabs for any determined invader.
The Magyars’ origins lie in the Finno-Ugric peoples who dwelt in the snowy forests between the Baltic and the middle Urals. Around the first century AD, some of these tribes migrated south across the Bashkiran steppes and fell under the influence of Turkic and Persian culture, gradually becoming tent-dwelling nomadic herders who lived on a diet of mare’s milk, horse flesh, fish and berries. Some archeologists believe that they mingled with the ancient Bulgars north of the Caspian Sea (in a land known as “Magna Bulgaria”), before the majority fled from marauding Petchenegs in about 750 and moved westwards to settle on the far bank of the River Don in the so-called Etelköz region, around the year 830. Ties with the Huns and Avars have been postulated, including a common language, but there’s more evidence to link the seven original Magyar tribes with three Kavar tribes, known collectively as the Onogur, or “Ten Arrows”.
Overpopulation and Petcheneg attacks forced the Onogur to move westwards in 889, and tradition has it that the seven Magyar chieftains elected Árpád as their leader, pledging fealty to his heirs with a blood oath. Accompanied by smaller Kun (or Cuman) tribes, the Onogur entered the Carpathian basin in 896, and began the “land-taking” (honfoglalás) or conquest of the region. Six Magyar tribes settled west of the Danube and in the upper Tisza region, the seventh took the approaches to Transylvania, while the lower Tisza and the northern fringes of the Plain went to the Kuns and Kavars. The Magyars continued to raid for the next seventy years, striking terror as far afield as Constantinople and Orleans (where people thought them to be Huns), until a series of defeats persuaded them to settle for assimilating their gains.
Civilization developed gradually, after Árpád’s great-grandson Prince Géza established links with Bavaria and invited Catholic missionaries to Hungary. His son Stephen (István) took the decisive step of applying to Pope Sylvester for recognition, and on Christmas Day in the year 1000 was crowned as a Christian king and began converting his pagan subjects with the help of Bishop Gellért. Royal authority was extended over the non-tribal lands by means of the megye (county) system, and defended by fortified vár (castles); artisans and priests were imported to spread skills and the new religion; and tribal rebellions were crushed. Stephen was subsequently credited with the foundation of Hungary and canonized after his death in 1038. His mummified hand and the Crown of St Stephen have since been revered as both holy and national relics.
Succession struggles raged for decades following Stephen’s death, and of the sixteen kings who preceded Andrew II (1205–35) only the humane László I (also canonized), Kálmán “the Booklover” and Béla III contributed anything significant to Hungary’s development. Fortunately, invasions were few during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and German and Slovak immigrants helped double the population to about two million by 1200. Parts of Transylvania were settled by the Magyars and Székely, perhaps before the second half of the eleventh century, when the “lands of St Stephen” were extended to include Slavonia (between the Sava and Drava rivers) and the unwillingly “associated” state of Croatia. The growth in royal power caused tribal leaders to rebel in 1222, when Andrew II was forced to recognize the “noble” status and rights of the Natio – landed freemen exempt from taxation – in the “Golden Bull”, a kind of Hungarian Magna Carta.
Andrew’s son Béla IV was trying to restore royal authority when disaster struck from the east – the Mongol invasion of 1241, which devastated Hungary. Hundreds of towns and villages were sacked; refugees fled to the swamps and forests; crops were burned or left unharvested; and famine and plague followed. Population losses ranged from sixty to one hundred percent on the Plain and twenty percent in Transdanubia, and after the Mongol withdrawal a year later (prompted by the timely death of the Khan) Hungary faced a mammoth task of reconstruction – the chief achievement of Béla’s reign, to which foreign settlers made a large contribution. Renewed domestic feuding (complicated by foreign intervention and the arrival of more Cuman tribes) dogged the reign of Andrew III, and worsened when he died heirless in 1301, marking the end of the Árpád dynasty.
Foreign powers advanced their own claimants, and for a while there were three competing kings, all duly crowned. Charles Robert of the French Angevin (or Anjou) dynasty eventually triumphed in 1310, when his rivals went home in disgust; and despite colonial skirmishes with Venice, Serbia and Wallachia, Hungary itself enjoyed a period of peace, while the Mongols and other great powers were occupied elsewhere. Gold mines in Transylvania and northern Hungary – the richest in Europe – stabilized state finances and the currency. Charles’s son Louis the Great reigned (1342–82) during a period of expansion, when the population rose to three million; and by war and dynastic aggrandizement crown territory grew to include Dalmatia, the Banat, Galicia and (in theory) Poland. Louis, however, sired only daughters, so that after his demise another foreigner ascended the throne in 1395 – Sigismund of Luxembourg, Prince of Bohemia, whom the nobles despised as the “Czech swine”. His extravagant follies and campaigns abroad were notorious, and while Sigismund recognized the growing threat of the Turks he failed to prevent their advance up through the Balkans.
During the fourteenth century, the realm contained 49 boroughs, about 500 market towns and 26,000 villages. Everyone benefited from peace and expanded trade, but the rewards weren’t shared evenly, for the Angevins favoured towns and guilds, and, most of all, the top stratum of the Natio, on whom they depended for troops (banderia) when war posed a threat. The burden fell upon the peasantry, who lacked “free” status and were compelled to pay porta (gate tax) to the state, tithes to the church, and one ninth of their produce to the landlords – plus extra taxes and obligations during times of war, or to finance new royal palaces.
Sigismund died in 1447 leaving one daughter, Elizabeth, just as the Turks were poised to invade and succession struggles seemed inevitable. The Turks might have taken Hungary then, but for a series of stunning defeats inflicted upon them by János Hunyadi, a Transylvanian warlord of Vlach (Romanian) origin. The lifting of the siege of Nándorfehérervár (Belgrade) in 1456 checked the Turkish advance and caused rejoicing throughout Christendom – the ringing of church bells at noon was decreed by the pope to mark this victory – while Hunyadi rose to be Voivode or Prince of Transylvania, and later regent for the boy king László. Following Hunyadi’s death, László’s early demise, and much skulduggery, Mihály Szilágyi staged a coup and put his nephew Mátyás (Matthias), Hunyadi’s son, on the throne in 1458.
Mátyás Corvinus is remembered as the “Renaissance King” for his statecraft and multiple talents (including astrology), while his second wife Beatrice of Naples lured humanists and artists from Italy to add lustre to their palaces at Buda and Visegrád (of which some remains survive). Mátyás was an enlightened despot renowned for his fairness: “King Mátyás is dead, justice is departed”, people mourned. By taxing the nobles (against every precedent) he raised a standing force of 30,000 mercenaries called the Black Army, which secured the realm and made Hungary one of Central Europe’s leading powers. However, when he died in 1490 leaving no legitimate heir, the nobles looked for a king “whose plaits they could hold in their fists”.
Such a man was Ulászló II (whose habit of assenting to any proposal earned him the nickname “King Okay”). Under his rule the Black Army and its tax base were whittled away by the Diet, which met to approve royal decrees and taxes, while the nobility filched common land and otherwise increased their exploitation of the peasantry. Impelled by poverty, many joined the crusade of 1514, which, under the leadership of György Dózsa, turned into an uprising against the landlords. Its savage repression (over 70,000 peasants were killed and Dózsa was roasted alive) was followed by the Werbőczy Code of 1517, binding the peasants to “perpetual serfdom” on their masters’ land and 52 days of robot (unpaid labour) in the year.
Hungary’s decline accelerated as corruption and incompetence bankrupted the treasury, forts along the border crumbled and the revived banderia system of mobilization disintegrated. Ulászló’s son Louis II was only nine when crowned, and by 1520 the Turks, under Sultan Süleyman “the Magnificent”, had resumed their advance northwards, capturing the run-down forts in Serbia. In August 1526 the Turks crossed the Drava and Louis hastened south to confront them at the battle of Mohács – a catastrophic defeat for the Magyars, whose army was wiped out together with its monarch and commanders.
After sacking Buda and the south, the Turks withdrew in 1526 to muster forces for their real objective, Vienna, the “Red Apple”. To forestall this, Ferdinand of Habsburg proclaimed himself king and occupied western Hungary, while in Buda the nobility put János Zápolyai on the throne. Following Zápolyai’s death in 1541 Ferdinand claimed full sovereignty, but the Sultan occupied Buda and central Hungary, and made Zápolyai’s young son ruler of Transylvania. Thereafter Transylvania became a semi-autonomous principality, nominally loyal to the Sultan and jealously coveted by the Habsburgs. The tripartite division of Hungary was formally recognized in 1568. Despite various official or localized truces, warfare became a feature of everyday life for the next 150 years, and national independence was not recovered for centuries.
Royal Hungary – basically western Transdanubia and the north – served as a “human moat” against the Turkish forces that threatened to storm Austria and Western Europe, who were kept at bay by Hungarian sacrifices at Szigetvár, Kőszeg and other fortresses. Notwithstanding constitutional arrangements to safeguard the Natio’s privileges, real power passed to the Habsburg chancellery and war council, where the liberation of Hungary took second place to Austria’s defence and aggrandizement, and the subjugation of Transylvania.
Turkish-occupied Hungary – Eyalet-i Budin – was ruled by a Pasha in Buda, with much of the land either deeded to the Sultan’s soldiers and officials, or run directly as a state fief (khasse). The peasants were brutally exploited, for many had to pay rent to both their absentee Magyar landlords and the occupying Turks. Their plight is evident from a letter to a Hungarian lord by the villagers of Batthyán: “Verily, it is better to be Your Lordship’s slaves, bag and baggage, than those of an alien people.” Peasants fled their villages on the Alföld to the safer fields around the expanding “agro-towns” of Debrecen and Szeged, the nexus of the cattle trade which gradually supplanted agriculture, while neglect and wanton tree-felling transformed the Plain into a swampy wasteland – the puszta.
The Voivodes of Transylvania endeavoured to provoke war between the Habsburgs and Turks, in order to increase their independence from both and satisfy the feudal Nationes. The latter, representing the elite of the region’s Magyars, Saxons and Székely, combined to deny the indigenous Vlachs political power, while competing amongst themselves and extending the borders of Transylvania (then much bigger than today). István Bocskai’s Hajdúk forces secured the Szatmár region and Gábor Bethlen promoted economic and social development, but Prince György Rákóczi II aimed too high and brought the wrath of the Sultan down on Transylvania.
Religion was an additional complicating factor. The Protestant Reformation gained many adherents in Hungary during the sixteenth century, and, while religious toleration was decreed in Transylvania in 1572, in Royal Hungary the Counter-Reformation gathered force under Habsburg rule. The Turks, ironically, were indifferent to the issue and treated all their Christian subjects (Rayah) with equal disdain. After the expulsion of the Turks, Protestant landowners were dispossessed in favour of foreign servants of the crown – a major cause of subsequent anti-Habsburg revolts.
After heavy fighting between 1683 and 1699, a multinational army evicted the Ottomans, and the Turks relinquished all claims by signing the Peace of Karlowitz. Yet for many years peace remained a mirage, for the Hungarians now bitterly resented Habsburg policy and their plundering armies. The Kuruc revolt (1677–85) led by Imre Thököly was but a prelude to the full-scale War of Independence of 1703–11, when peasants and nobles banded together under Ferenc Rákóczi II, György’s grandson, and initially routed the enemy. Ultimately, however, they were defeated by superior Habsburg power and the desertion of their ally, Louis XIV of France, and peace born of utter exhaustion came at last to Hungary.
Habsburg rule combined force with paternalism, especially during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1740–80), who believed the Hungarians to be “fundamentally a good people, with whom one can do anything if one takes them the right way”. The policy of “impopulatio” settled thousands of Swabians, Slovaks, Serbs and Romanians in the deserted regions of Hungary, so that, in areas such as the “Military Border” along the Sava, Magyars became a minority. By the end of the eighteenth century they formed only 35 percent of the population of the huge kingdom. For the aristocrats it was an age of glory: the Esterházy, Grassalkovich and Batthyány families and their lesser imitators commissioned over 200 palaces, and Baroque town centres flourished. Yet the masses were virtually serfs, using medieval methods that impoverished the soil, and mired in isolated villages. Cattle, grain and wine – Hungary’s main exports – went cheap to Austria, which tried to monopolize industry.
The Germanization of culture, education and administration was another feature of Habsburg policy. Yet, though the richest nobles and most of the urban bourgeoisie chose the Habsburg style, the petty gentry and peasantry clung stubbornly to their Magyar identity. The ideals of the Enlightenment found growing support among intellectuals, and the revival of the Magyar language became inseparable from nationalist politics. Ferenc Kazinczy, who refashioned Hungarian as a literary language and translated foreign classics, was associated with the seven Jacobin conspirators, executed for plotting treason against the Habsburgs in 1795.
Magyar nationalism, espoused by sections of the Natio, became increasingly vocal during the early nineteenth century. Hungary’s backwardness was a matter for patriotic shame and self-interested concern, especially after the occurrence of peasant riots in the impoverished, cholera-ridden Zempléni, and the publication of Hitel (“Credit”), written by Count István Széchenyi, which scathingly indicted the country’s semi-feudal economy. However, most nobles were determined to preserve their privileges. One wrote that “God himself has differentiated between us, assigning to the peasant labour and need, to the lord abundance and a merry life”. Moreover, national liberation was seen in exclusively Magyar terms – the idea that non-Magyars within the multinational state might wish to assert their own identity was regarded as subversive.
The Reform Era (roughly 1825–48) saw many changes. Business, the arts and technology were in ferment, with Jews playing a major role in creating wealth and ideas (although they remained second-class citizens). The Diet became increasingly defiant in its dealings with Vienna over finances and laws, and parliamentarians like Ferenc Deák, Count Batthyány and Baron Eötvös acted in the shadow of the “giants” of the time, Széchenyi and Kossuth, who expounded rival programmes for change. Count István Széchenyi, the landowning, Anglophile author of Hitel, was a tireless practical innovator, introducing silkworms, steamboats and the Academy, as well as an unprecedented tax on the Natio to pay for the construction of his life’s monument, the Chain Bridge (Lánchíd) linking Buda and Pest. His arch rival was Lajos Kossuth, small-town lawyer turned Member of Parliament and editor of the radical Pesti Hirlap, which scandalized and delighted citizens. Kossuth detested the Habsburgs, revered “universal liberty”, and demanded an end to serfdom and censorship. Magyar chauvinism was his blind spot, however, and the law of 1840, his greatest pre-revolutionary achievement, inflamed dormant nationalist feelings among Croats, Slovaks and Romanians by making Magyar the sole official language – an act for which his ambitions would later suffer.
The fall of the French monarchy precipitated a crisis within the Habsburg Empire, which Kossuth exploited to bring about the 1848 Revolution in Hungary. The emperor yielded to demands for a constitutional monarchy, universal taxation, wider voting rights and the union of Transylvania with Hungary; while in Budapest the nobles took fright and abolished serfdom when the poet Sándor Petőfi threatened them with thousands of peasants camped out in the suburbs. However, the slighted nationalities rallied against the Magyars in Croatia and Transylvania, and the reassertion of Habsburg control over Italy and Czechoslovakia closed the noose. The new emperor Franz Josef declared that Hungary would be partitioned after its defeat, in reaction to which the Debrecen Diet declared Hungarian independence – a state crushed by August 1849, when Tsar Nicholas of Russia sent armies to support the Habsburgs, who instituted a reign of terror.
Gradually, brute force was replaced by a policy of compromise, by which Hungary was economically integrated with Austria and given a major shareholding in the Habsburg Empire, henceforth known as the “Dual Monarchy”. The compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, engineered by Ferenc Deák, brought Hungary prosperity and status, but tied the country inextricably to the empire’s fortunes. Simmering nationalist passions would henceforth be focused against Hungary as much as Austria, and diplomatic treaties between Austria and Germany would bind Hungary to them in the event of war. In 1896, however, such dangers seemed remote, and people celebrated Hungary’s millennial anniversary with enthusiasm.
Dragged into World War I by its allegiance to the Central Powers, Hungary was facing defeat by the autumn of 1918. The Western or Entente powers decided to dismantle the Habsburg Empire in favour of the “Successor States” – Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – which would acquire much of their territory at Hungary’s expense. In Budapest, the October 30 “Michaelmas Daisy Revolution” put the Social Democratic party of Mihály Károly in power, but his government avoided the issue of land reform, attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate peace with the Entente, and finally resigned when France backed further demands by the Successor States.
On March 21, 1919, the Social Democrats agreed on cooperation with the Communists, who proclaimed a Republic of Councils (Tanácsköztársaság) led by Béla Kun, which ruled through local Soviets. Hoping for radical change and believing that “Russia will save us”, many people initially supported the new regime, but enforced nationalization of land and capital, and attacks on religion, soon alienated the majority. Beset by the Czech Legion in Slovakia and by internal unrest, the regime collapsed in August before the advancing Romanian army, which occupied Budapest.
Then came the White Terror, as right-wing gangs spread out from Szeged, killing “Reds” and Jews, who were made scapegoats for the earlier Communist “Red Terror”. Admiral Miklós Horthy appointed himself regent and ordered a return to “traditional values” with a vengeance. Meanwhile, at the Paris Conference, Hungary was obliged to sign the Treaty of Trianon (July 4, 1920), surrendering two-thirds of its historic territory and three-fifths of its total population (three million in all) to the Successor States. The bitterest loss was Transylvania, whose 103,093 square kilometres and 1.7 million Magyars went to Romania – a devastating blow to national pride.
During the 1920s and 1930s, campaigning for the overturn of the Trianon diktat was the “acceptable” outlet for politics, while workers’ unions were tightly controlled and peasants struggled to form associations against the landlords and the gendarmerie, who rigged ballots and gerrymandered as in the old days. Politics were dominated by the Kormánypárt (Government Party) led by Count Bethlen, representing the Catholic Church and the landed gentry, which resisted any changes that would threaten their power. Social hardships increased, particularly in the countryside where the landless peasantry constituted “three million beggars” whose misery concerned the Village Explorers (Falukutató), a movement of the literary intelligentsia ranging across the political spectrum. With the Social Democrats co-opted by conservatism and the Communist Party illegal, many workers and disgruntled petits bourgeois turned to the radical right to voice their grievances, and were easily turned against Jews and the “Trianon Powers”.
Resentment against France, Britain and Romania predisposed many Hungarians to admire Nazi Germany’s defiance of the Versailles Treaty – a sentiment nurtured by the Reich’s grant of credits for industrialization, and Nazi sympathizers within Volksdeutsche communities, commerce, the civil service and the officer corps. The rise of anti-Semitism gave power to nationalist politicians like Gyula Gömbös. At the same time, Hungary’s belated industrial growth was partly due to the acquisition of territory from Czechoslovakia, following Germany’s dismemberment of the latter. The annexation of Austria made the Reich militarily supreme in Central Europe, and Hungary’s submission to German hegemony almost inevitable.
With the outbreak of World War II, the government’s pro-Nazi policy initially paid dividends. Romania was compelled to return northern Transylvania in July 1940, and Hungary gained additional territory from the invasion of Yugoslavia a year later. Hoping for more, Premier Bárdossy committed Hungary to the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 – an act condemned by the former prime minister, Teleki (who had engineered the recovery of Transylvania), as the “policy of vultures”. The Hungarian Second Army perished covering the retreat from Stalingrad, while at home, Germany demanded ever more foodstuffs and forced labour. As Axis fortunes waned Horthy prepared to declare neutrality, but Hitler forestalled him with “Operation Margarethe” – the outright Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944.
Under Sztójay’s puppet government, Hungarian Jews were forced into ghettos to await their deportation to Auschwitz and Belsen, a fate hindered only by the heroism of the underground, a handful of people organized by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, and by the manoeuvring of some Horthyite politicians. Mindful of Romania’s successful escape from the Axis in August, Horthy declared a surprise armistice on October 15, just as the Red Army crossed Hungary’s eastern border. In response, Germany installed a government of the native Arrow Cross Fascists, or Nyilas, led by Ferenc Szálasi, whose gangs roamed Budapest extorting valuables and murdering people, while the Nazis systematically plundered Hungary. They blew up the Danube bridges and compelled the Russians to take Budapest by storm – a siege that reduced much of Buda to ruins. Meanwhile in Debrecen, an assembly of anti-Fascist parties met under Soviet auspices to nominate a provisional government, which took power after the Germans fled Hungary in April 1945.
In the November 1945 elections the Smallholders’ Party won an outright majority, but the Soviet military insisted that the Communists and Social Democrats (with seventeen percent of the vote) remain in government. Land reform and limited nationalization were enacted, while the Communists tightened their grip over the Ministry of the Interior (which controlled the police) and elections became increasingly fraudulent. Mátyás Rákosi, Stalin’s man in Hungary, gradually undermined and fragmented the “bourgeois” parties with what he called “salami tactics” (chopping his opponents into small groups and then swallowing them), and by 1948, officially called the “Year of Change”, the Communists were strong enough to coerce the Social Democrats to join them in a single Workers’ Party, and neutralize the Smallholders. Church schools were seized, Cardinal Mindszenty was jailed for “espionage” and the peasants were forced into collective farms. More than 500,000 Hungarians were imprisoned, tortured or shot in native concentration camps like Recsk, or as deportees in the Soviet Union – victims of the ÁVO secret police (renamed the ÁVH in 1949), who spread terror throughout society.
Soviet culture and the personality cults of Rákosi (known as “Baldhead” or “Asshole” to his subjects) and Stalin were imposed on the country, and Hungarian classics such as the Tragedy of Man were banned for failing to meet the standards of Socialist Realism. Under the 1949 Five Year Plan, heavy industry took absolute priority over agriculture and consumer production. To fill the new factories, peasants streamed into towns and women were dragooned into the labour force. Living standards plummeted, and the whole of society was subjected to the laws and dictates of the Party. “Class conscious” workers and peasants were raised to high positions and “class enemies” were discriminated against, while Party officials enjoyed luxuries unavailable to the populace, who suffered hunger and squalor.
Although the Smallholders retained nominal positions in government, real power lay with Rákosi’s clique, known as the “Jewish Quartet”. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe at this time, Hungary saw bitter feuds within the Communist Party. In October 1949, the “Muscovites” purged the more independently minded “national” Communists on the pretext of “Titoism”. The former Interior Minister László Rajk was executed, and his friend and successor (and, later, betrayer), János Kádár, was jailed and tortured with others during a second wave of purges. Two years later, following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Kremlin power struggles resulted in a more moderate Soviet leadership and the abrupt replacement of Rákosi by Imre Nagy. His “New Course”, announced in July, promised a more balanced industrial strategy and eased pressure on the peasants to collectivize, besides curbing the ÁVH terror. Nagy, however, had few allies within the Kremlin, and in 1955 Rákosi was able to strike back, expelling Nagy from the Party for “deviationism”, and declaring a return to Stalinist policies. This brief interlude, however, had encouraged murmurings of resistance.
The first act of opposition came from the official Writers’ Union, who, in their November Memorandum, objected to the rule of force. The Party clamped down, but also began to rehabilitate the Rajk purge victims. During June 1956 the intellectuals’ Petőfi circle held increasingly outspoken public debates, and Júlia Rajk denounced “the men who have ruined this country, corrupted the Party, liquidated thousands and driven millions to despair”. Moscow responded to the unrest by replacing Rákosi with Ernő Gerő, another hardliner – a move which merely stoked public resentment. The mood came to a head in October, when 200,000 people attended Rajk’s reburial, Nagy was readmitted to the Party, and students in Szeged and Budapest organized to demand greater national independence and freedom.
In Poland, Gomulka’s reform Communists had just won concessions from the Kremlin, and Budapest students decided to march on October 23 to the General Bem statue, a symbol of Polish-Hungarian solidarity. Patriotic feelings rose as about 50,000 people assembled, the procession swelling as it approached Parliament. A hesitant speech there by Nagy failed to satisfy them, and students besieged the Radio Building on Bródy utca, demanding to voice their grievances on the airwaves. In response, the ÁVH guards opened fire, killing many. Almost immediately, this triggered a city-wide Uprising against the ÁVH. The regular police did little to control it, and when Soviet tanks intervened, units of the Hungarian army began to side with the insurgents.
Over the next five days fighting spread throughout Hungary, despite Nagy’s reinstatement as premier and pleas for order. Revolutionary councils sprang up in towns and factories and free newspapers appeared, demanding “Ruszkik haza” (Russians go home), free elections, civil liberties, industrial democracy and neutrality. Intellectuals who had led the first protests now found themselves left behind by uncontrollable dynamism on the streets. The Party leadership temporized, reshuffled the cabinet and struggled to stay in control, as all the “old” parties reappeared and the newly liberated Cardinal Mindszenty provided a focus for the resurgent Right.
The negotiated Soviet withdrawal, beginning on October 29, was merely a delaying tactic, while the Russians regrouped in the countryside before bringing in fresh troops from Romania and the USSR. On November 1, Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and asked the UN to support Hungarian neutrality; that night, Kádár and Ferenc Münnich slipped away from Parliament to join the Russians, who were preparing to crush the “counter-revolution”. America downplayed Hungary in the United Nations while the Suez crisis preoccupied world attention, but the CIA-sponsored Radio Free Europe encouraged the Magyars to expect Western aid. At dawn on November 4, once Budapest and other centres had been surrounded with tanks under cover of a snowstorm, the Soviet attack began.
Armed resistance was crushed within days, but the workers occupied their factories and proclaimed a general strike, maintained for months despite mass arrests. Deprived of physical power, the people continued to make symbolic protests like the “Mothers’ March” in December. Inexorably, however, the Party and ÁVH apparatus reasserted its control. Over 200,000 refugees fled to the West, while at home thousands were jailed or executed, including Nagy and other leading “revisionists”, shot in 1958 after a secret trial.
In the aftermath of the Uprising, the new Party leader János Kádár ruthlessly suppressed the last vestiges of opposition. After the mid-1960s, however, his name came to be associated with the gradual reform of Hungary’s social and economic system from a totalitarian regime to one based, at least in part, on compromise. Kádár’s famous phrase, “Whoever is not against us is with us” (a reversal of the Stalinist slogan), invited a tacit compact between Party and people. Both had been shaken by the events of 1956, and realized that bold changes – as happened in Czechoslovakia in 1967 and 1968 – only invited Soviet intervention, justified by the Brezhnev doctrine of “limited sovereignty”.
Having stimulated the economy by cautious reforms in the structure of pricing and management, and overcome opposition within the Politburo, Kádár and Resző Nyers announced the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) in 1968. Though its impact on centralized planning was slight, the NEM was accompanied by measures to promote “socialist legality” and make merit, rather than class background and Party standing, the criterion for promotion and higher education.
While generally welcomed by the populace, these reforms angered “New Left” supporters of either Dubcek’s “Socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and also, more seriously, conservatives within the Party. With backing from Moscow, they watered down the NEM and ousted Nyers, its leading advocate, from the Politburo in 1973, expelling Hegedüs and other “revisionist sociologists” from the Party later.
Following a power struggle, Kádár was able to reverse the reactionary tide, and reduce constraints on the so-called “second economy”. While structural reforms were extremely limited, consumerism, a private sector and even “forint millionaires” emerged during the 1970s, when Hungary became a byword for affluence within the Socialist bloc – the “happiest barracks in the camp”, as the joke had it. Mechanics and other artisans with marketable skills were able to moonlight profitably, as demonstrated by the boom in private home-building; and workers and unions acquired some say in the management of their enterprises. This “market socialism” attracted the favours of Western politicians and bankers, and before perestroika the “Hungarian model” seemed to offer the best hope for reform within Eastern Europe.
In the 1980s, however, economic and social problems became increasingly obvious, ranging from thirty percent inflation, whose effect was felt hardest by the “new poor” living on low, fixed incomes, to Hungary’s $14.7 billion foreign debt (per capita, the largest in Eastern Europe). Despite reformist rhetoric, vested interests successfully resisted the logic of the market, whose rigorous application would entail drastic lay-offs and mass unemployment in towns dominated by the unprofitable mining and steel industries. Although frank analyses of Hungary’s economic plight started appearing in the media during the mid-1980s, other issues ran up against the limits of state tolerance. These included fears for the environment in the wake of Chernobyl and the decision to build a dam at Nagymaros; an unofficial peace movement that was quickly driven back underground; and any discussion of the Party’s “leading role” or Hungary’s alliance with the Soviet Union. Discussion of such topics could only be found in samizdat (underground) magazines such as Beszélő, whose publishers were harassed as dissidents. Although in 1983 the Party announced that “independents” could contest elections, it proved unwilling to let them enter Parliament, as demonstrated by the gerrymandering used against László Rajk in 1986.
Yet the need for change was becoming evident even within the Party, where the caution of the “old guard” – Kádár, Horváth and Gáspár – caused increasing frustration among reformists, who believed that Hungarians would only accept income tax and economic austerity if greater liberalization seemed a realistic prospect. Happily, this coincided with the advent of Gorbachev, whose interest in the Hungarian model of socialism and desire to bring a new generation into power was an open secret.
The end of Communism in Hungary was so orderly that it can hardly be termed a revolution, but it did set in motion the collapse of hardline regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Prefiguring the fate of Gorbachev, the politicians who created an opening for change hoped to preserve Communism by reforming it, but were swept away by the forces which they had unleashed.
At the May 1988 Party Congress, Kádár and seven colleagues were ousted from power by a coalition of radical reformers and conservative technocrats. The latter backed Karóly Grósz as Kádár’s successor, but his lacklustre performance as Party leader enabled the reformists to shunt him aside in July 1989, forcing conservatives and hardliners onto the defensive. As the ascendancy of Imre Pozsgay, Rezső Nyers, Miklós Németh and Gyula Horn became apparent there was a “traffic jam on the road to Damascus” as lesser figures hastened to pledge support for reforms.
In mid-October 1989, the Communist Party formally reconstituted itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP), dissolved its private militia and announced the legalization of opposition parties as a prelude to free elections. To symbolize this watershed, the People’s Republic was renamed the Republic of Hungary in a ceremony broadcast live on national television, on the thirty-third anniversary of the Uprising.
Meanwhile, the Iron Curtain was unravelling with astonishing speed. In May, Hungary began dismantling the barbed wire and minefields along its border with Austria, and thousands of East Germans seized their chance to escape to the West, crossing over via Hungary at a rate of two hundred every day. Despite protests from the Honecker regime, Hungary refused to close the border or deport would-be escapees back to the DDR, and allowed 20,000 refugees encamped in the West German embassy in Budapest to leave the country. After the DDR sealed its own borders, frustration spilled over onto the streets of Leipzig and Dresden, where mass demonstrations led to the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989) and the ousting of Erich Honecker. A week later, the brutal repression of a pro-democracy demonstration in Prague’s Wenceslas Square set in motion the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, which overturned forty years of Communist rule in ten days. The annus mirabilis of 1989 climaxed with the overthrow of Ceaušescu in Romania on December 22.
After such events Hungary’s first free elections since 1945, in 1990, seemed an anticlimax. During the first round of voting on March 6, Pozsgay and the Socialist Party were obliterated, while two parties emerged as frontrunners. The Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), founded at the Lakitelek Conference of 1987, articulated populist, conservative nationalism, encapsulated in the idea of “Hungarianness”, whereas the rival Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) espoused a neo-liberal, internationalist outlook, similar to that of the Federation of Young Democrats (Fidesz). Two prewar parties revived under octogenarian leaders also participated, namely the Smallholders’ Party (under the slogan “God, Home, Family, Wine, Wheat and Independence”) and the Christian Democrats.
Despite being diminished by voter apathy, the 1990 elections unceremoniously swept the reformist Communists out of power. Their place was taken by a centre-right coalition dominated by the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and its prime minister Jozsef Antall. A born politician with a schoolmasterly style, Antall relished the opportunity to take a role he had longed for but never expected to get during the Communist years. The model for his Hungary was its prewar state, with the restoration of the traditions and the social hierarchies that had prevailed at that time. Very much a moderate, his policies rested on the belief that over forty years of Communism had destroyed the true values of Hungarian society. However, not everyone wanted the Catholic Church to return to the dominant social position it had enjoyed before the war, and his party’s proud belief in restoring the Hungarian nation to its former position sounded to Hungary’s neighbours like a revanchist claim on the lost lands of Trianon – an interpretation that was strengthened by Antall’s failure to distance himself from the ultra-right-wing nationalism advocated by István Csurka.
After Antall’s death in 1993, his successor Peter Boross was unable to turn the economy around, and the 1994 elections saw the return to power of the Socialists (reform Communists), assisted by sympathetic media that presented the outgoing government as amateurish and arrogant. To guard against accusations of abusing power as their Communist predecessors had done, the Socialists also brought the Free Democrats into the government. The government’s corruption became blatant, however, and, though their austerity policies succeeded in bringing an economic upturn, living standards did not improve for most people.
Despite this, the government still rode high in the opinion polls, helped by the fact that the opposition was in disarray. After its poor showing in the 1994 elections, Fidesz had been repositioned by its leader Viktor Orbán to the right of centre, bidding to become the focus of opposition to the Socialist-led government. Orbán adopted phrases about the need to revive national culture that would appeal to the right, and renamed the party Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Party (the word for civic – polgári – also evokes notions of bourgeois middle-class values). It still seemed, however, that Orbán needed more time to mature as a potential prime minister.
Then, in early 1998, the Socialists committed their biggest blunder, announcing that Hungary would go ahead with building the controversial Nagymaros dam. It was the revenge of Gyula Horn: as a leading figure in the old Communist Party he had given full support to the dam, but it had been condemned as undemocratic; now as prime minister of a democratically elected government he could give the go-ahead. At first it looked as if he had got away with it, but as the May 1998 elections approached, public disillusionment mounted. Fidesz’s win by a narrow margin came as a surprise to many people – though it was not as unexpected as Csurka’s extreme right-wing Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) breaking the four percent threshold to get into Parliament. Orbán, given the chance to be the youngest premier in Hungarian history, set about talks with the MDF and Smallholders with alacrity in order to form a coalition – despite the fact that the prospect of government with the unpredictable Torgyán and his Smallholders worried many Fidesz supporters. Orbán, however, bit the bullet.
Hungary’s first major step into the wider European arena came the following year on March 12, 1999 when, just twelve days before NATO allies were due to begin a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, Hungary was formally admitted into NATO. Whilst delighted at receiving the recognition it had long coveted, the timing was awkward to say the least. With the country now a fully fledged member, it was placed in the rather dubious position of having to play an active role in the campaign, if only as a base from which allied aircraft could fly – convenient for the allies, not so for Hungarians who were distinctly nervous at the prospect. Not only was Hungary a neighbouring country – one of the few with which Serbia was on good terms – but there was also the very delicate question of the large Hungarian minority living in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, which borders southern Hungary. However, despite very real fears of a backlash against Hungarians living there, it turned out that most Serbs were far too concerned with surviving the bombs to be bothered about stirring up further trouble. In the event, the bombing lasted eleven weeks, and aside from the odd stray cruise missile, Hungarians were not too troubled.
Back on the domestic front, few predicted anything other than another Orbán victory in the 2002 parliamentary elections, thanks to an upwardly mobile economy, steadily falling inflation and low unemployment levels. However, in what was the most spitefully contested election since the end of Communism, the Orbán-led Fidesz-MDF coalition was surprisingly ousted by a centre-left alliance – comprising a combination of the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) and the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) – whose margin of victory was just ten seats. Rejecting Orbán’s media-savvy, aggressive style and attendant nationalist overtures, the Hungarian electorate – in an unprecedented post-Communist turnout of more than 70 percent – instead opted for a return to the same coalition that had governed, albeit largely ineffectively, between 1994 and 1998. The new premier was Peter Medgyessy, a former banker and an altogether less charismatic figure than Orbán. Medgyessy’s past, however, was discovered to be rather more colourful when it was revealed just a few months later that he had, alongside ten other government ministers, worked as an agent for the country’s Moscow-linked secret service, though he was quick to deny any links to the KGB.
Internationally, at the tail end of the same year, Hungary saw final accession negotiations to the European Union wrapped up, with referendums held the following April. Although the turnout was disappointingly low, support was more or less unequivocal, with 84 percent of voters in favour. A little over a year later, on May 1, 2004, Hungary, alongside nine other former Eastern bloc countries, was admitted to the EU. While most Hungarians remain fervently committed to membership, believing that they will benefit under Europe’s protective mantle, there are several areas of deep concern, such as the desire of most Hungarians to limit foreign ownership, which goes against EU directives, and apprehension over the distribution of agricultural subsidies.
With the euphoria surrounding the country’s accession having barely died down, domestic problems were brewing. A poor showing in the European elections, combined with bitter party infighting and barely disguised dissatisfaction at Medgyessy’s performance as prime minister, resulted in the premier’s shock resignation in August 2004. His successor was sports minister and millionaire businessman, Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose task it was to revive the party’s ailing fortunes in time for the elections in 2006.
In the event, Gyurcsány and the ruling Socialists once again comfortably defeated Orbán and his Fidesz party in the 2006 elections, the first occasion since the end of Communist rule that a governing party had won consecutive terms. However, what occurred in the aftermath of the election proved to be far more exciting than anything that happened during it. In a tape of a private party speech given by Gyurcsány just after the election (broadcast on national radio a few months later), the prime minister openly admitted to lying to voters in the run-up to the election, in particular about the country’s ailing economy. In the speech Gyurcsány reveals that both he and his “boneheaded government” had “lied morning, noon and night” in order to secure electoral victory. His subsequent refusal to resign prompted mass protests in front of Budapest’s parliament building, which continued throughout September and into October. As the demonstrations grew, so they became increasingly inflamed, culminating in particularly violent clashes on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Uprising on October 23. For several nights thereafter, running battles between protesters and police – whose use of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons subsequently drew charges of excessive force – brought the city to a virtual standstill. In one of the more surreal moments, a tank that had been on display as part of the commemorations was commandeered by a protester and driven down one of the main city boulevards towards police lines. Orbán and his party also came in for some heavy criticism, with accusations that, in addition to staging their own high-profile rallies, they had been responsible for orchestrating the protests. In the event, and after narrowly securing a vote of confidence, Gyurcsány survived.
Whilst the premier’s candid gaffe may have been the spark for the clashes, there had already been growing widespread public disenchantment at the country’s deepening economic crisis. Reckless government spending – largely financed with foreign currency loans – and unsustainable public sector wage increases, allied to high levels of personal debt (many loans had been taken out in Swiss francs and euros, and following the dramatic collapse of the forint against both currencies, many found themselves with rising debt payments), had contrived to create a critical state of affairs. As similarly violent clashes between police and protesters erupted in Budapest the following year – in March, on the occasion of the anniversary of the 1848 Revolution, and then again in September on the next anniversary of the Uprising – the country’s economic situation had reached crisis point. Only a multi-billion-dollar bail-out in late 2008 from the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank averted the total collapse of the national currency. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Gyurcsány resigned from his post in March 2009, stating that he could do no more to further the country’s economic reforms. Replacing him as prime minister was the little-known Gordon Bajnai, who had hitherto been serving as the government’s economic minister.