Scandal in a Small Town : Understanding Modern Hungary Through the Stories of Three Families 9781315700885, 9780765634740

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Scandal in a Small Town “Scandals are like lightning: for a second, the viewer can see almost everything. Marida Hollos grasps the unique moment of a scandal unfolding in 1989 in a small Hungarian town. Applying the method of microhistory and oral history, Hollos succeeds in showing how impersonal social and historical forces intertwine with personal fortunes.” –Slavic Review “Hollos gives Western readers an intimate, microcosmic perspective. …This is an academic page turner.” –Choice “The author’s emotional involvement with her subject is evident … making it enjoyable reading rather than a dry academic account.” –Europe-Asia Studies “Rich at the level of ethnographic example, … the book is genuinely interesting both as a collection of life histories and as village ethnography. –Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institue.

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Scandal in a

Small Town Understanding Modern Hungary Through the Stories of Three Families

Marida Hollos ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2001 by M.E. Sharpe Published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hollos, Marida, 1940– Scandal in a small town : understanding modern history through the stories of three families / Marida Hollos. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7656-0740-9 (Case : alk. paper); ISBN 978-0-7656-3474-0 (Pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hungary—Rural conditions—Case studies. 2. Rural families—Hungary—Case studies. 3. Hungary—History. I. Title. HN420.5.A8 H65 2001 943.9—dc21

2001032822 ISBN 13: 9780765634740 (pbk) ISBN 13: 9780765607409 (hbk)

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Dr. Hollós István and Marton Mária.

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Table of Contents

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables Preface Guide to Hungarian Names and Phonetics

ix xi xiii

1. Introduction The Death of a Mayor Unearned Honors at Tiszadomb High School Studying Tiszadomb Overview of the Community

3 3 4 7 14

2. The Boglárs: An Ódomb Peasant Family The “Blessed Village” Beginnings: Turn of the Century World War I: Sándor Between the Wars: Dénes World War II End of the War: Tamás The “Peasant Question” Ódomb No More The First Cooperatives The Revolution of 1956 The Collectivization of Agriculture Tamás: A New Beginning The New Economic Mechanism

21 22 25 27 30 36 39 41 47 49 50 54 58 59

New Age at Tiszadomb Tamás: The Making of an Entrepreneur

62 70

3. The Faragós of Ujdomb Origins The Turn of the Century Mihály: The First Bolshevik Ujdomb Between the Wars Béla: Eking Out an Existence in the Interwar Years World War II Land Reform The Proletarian Dictatorship Béla: Early Collectives Ferenc: A Socialist Childhood Counterrevolution The New Wave of Collectivization Ferenc: Out of Peasantry The Golden Years

79 81 82 87 94 95 97 100 109 112 116 117 120 125 129

4. Pintér Katalin: A Life Formed on the Farmlands The “Borderlands” or “Farm World” Family Early Years School Years High School Teachers’ College After College University Student and High School Teacher Economic and Political Developments in the Country The Opposition The Dawning of Political Consciousness

136 136 140 145 148 153 155 157 161 164 167 170

5. Conclusion: The Beginning and the End “Unearned Honors” and the Press The Court Hearing

172 172 179

6. Postscript: Waiting for Rebirth

187

Appendix

199

Bibliography

201

Index

205

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables

Maps Tiszadomb Inner Area Tiszadomb and Surrounding Borderlands

10 16

Figures Boglár Family Tree Faragó Family Tree Pintér Family Tree

23 80 141

Tables 1 2 3 4 5 6

Landholdings in Ódomb and Ujdomb, 1935 18 Annual Average Income in Tiszadomb Cooperatives, 1961–75 67 Distribution of Landed Properties in Ujdomb, 1935 93 Beneficiaries of the Land Reform, 1945–47 103 Distribution of Landed Properties in Ujdomb, 1949 106 Nationwide Distribution of Income 121

ix

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Preface

This book tells the story of modern Hungarian society through the interconnected lives of three families in a small town on the Great Hungarian Plains. The story traces their history and the changes in their fortunes from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The emphasis is on the Communist years and on the end of this era. The ups and downs of each family are tied not only to the strengths and weaknesses of its individual members, but also to the twists and turns of East European history and the vagaries of politics under changing political regimes and economic systems. Although the names have been changed, the town and the families are real and their story is true. This is not a work of fiction but a historical ethnography, told through these lives. My main purpose in writing the story of these families was to show the complex tapestry of history in the local context and through this to reflect the history of the country. During the period of researching and writing this book, my life also had its ups and downs, many of them, it seems, connected to Tiszadomb. I am grateful for the support and help of many individuals throughout this period and especially during the hard times. First and foremost I am indebted to the people of Tiszadomb, whose willingness to answer seemingly senseless questions, good cheer, unlimited patience, and friendship made this project possible. Among them, I am especially grateful to the Bárány family, Patai Marika, Zobokiné, Janka, Tajti Erzsébet, and Miskó István. xi

xii Preface

Numerous friends and colleagues have generously given their time to this project. First and foremost I am deeply indebted to Hofer Tamás for his support and advice over the years. I am also grateful to Boglár Lajos, Bodrogi Tibor, and Hoffman Tamás for their encouragement and help while I was working at the Ethnographic Research Institute, the Ethnographic Museum, and the Department of Cultural Anthropology of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. I thank Boglár É va, Szabó Katalin, Gergely Katalin and Jávor Kata for their constant friendship. Over the years, Philip Leis, Peter Richardson, and Marilyn Rueschemeyer have provided encouragement and intellectual stimulation. From the M.E. Sharpe editorial staff, I am especially indebted to Patricia Kolb who believed in this book in spite of its unusual format. I appreciate her careful and considered reading of the text; the book is far better for it. In the final stages of writing, valuable assistance was given by Irina Belenky, Bojana Ristich, and Ana Erliæ. My father, Hollós István, who inspired my interest in rural Hungary, did not live to see the completion of this work: he died as I started to write. My mother, whose good nature and constant cheer were my guiding light, died as I finished this manuscript. I am indebted to their memory and to their belief in me as a scholar and as a person. My daughter, Nora Marton, whose origins are closely connected to Tiszadomb, has brightened every day of my life.

Guide to Hungarian Names and Phonetics

In Hungarian names, the surname precedes the individual’s given name. Stress the first syllable when pronouncing Hungarian words. The following list is a greatly simplified guide to pronouncing some of the Hungarian personal and place names that appear in the book. Pronounce

c as ts (Laci as Lots-ee; Ferenc as Ferents) cs as ch (Kecskemét as Kech-ke-mate) cz as ts (Móricz as Morits) s as sh (S®ndor as Shon-door; Tam®s as Ta-mash) sz as s (Tisza as Tee-sa) z as z (Teréz as Teh-raze) zs as zh (József as Yozhef) gy as dy (Magyar as Mod-yahr; Nagykõrös as Nad’kurosh) j as y (J®nos as Yanosh; Joó as Yo) ly as y (Mih®ly as Mee-high) th as t (Kossuth as Ko-shoot).

xiii

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Scandal in a

Small Town

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1 Introduction

The Death of a Mayor At ten o’clock on the morning of February 1, 1989, Joó István, the mayor of Tiszadomb, shot and killed himself in the upstairs bedroom of his home. The suicide ended his colorful career of over twenty years as the leader of a small town in the middle of the Great Hungarian Plains that under his leadership had evolved from a dusty village to a nationally known example of success under socialism. This dramatic act signaled the end of an era, not only in the history of the small town, but also in the history of a nation that was on the brink of a momentous political and social transformation. The reaction of the townspeople was at first stunned disbelief, which soon turned into a variety of interpretations, accusations, and selfjustifications. The disbelief and surprise stemmed from the townspeople’s difficulty in understanding how a seemingly insignificant event that started at the local high school could end in the demise of a strong and dominant, albeit controversial, personality who during his reign as mayor had devoted his life to the betterment of the town. Joó István, a native of Bög, one of Tiszadomb’s satellite villages, had been the mayor of Tiszadomb since 1967. He was the son of a prosperous peasant. By sheer determination and ability he had manipulated the socialist system despite his “tainted” background, and he had led his community into prosperity. In the process he may have broken many 3

4

Introduction

rules and skirted others, but his position seemed unshakable. His power in the town was virtually unlimited, and although he may have acquired enemies, he was undoubtedly the uncrowned head and leading patriarch of this small community. The ensuing reactions to his suicide reflected the differences in the experience, background, and self-definition of the individuals whose lives had collided with his and precipitated the event. My interest is in some of these lives and in the lives of their predecessors. What was the path that led the teacher Pintér Katalin and the students Boglár Laci and Faragó Péter, in particular, to the acts that eventually culminated in the mayor’s tragedy? The local context is a complicated tapestry, made up of individuals and their histories, and it is through recounting and examining these individual and family histories that I intend to tell the story of the small town where the event took place. Unearned Honors at Tiszadomb High School It all started innocently enough. When the graduating seniors of Tiszadomb High School assembled for their last class in Hungarian literature in 1988, they were not surprised when their teacher, Pintér Katalin, began the class with the statement that she had some special announcements to make. They expected to hear about the details of the graduation ceremonies, their place in the procession, and the rules of conduct at the senior dance. Instead, the teacher opened her grade book and listed the grades she had given to each individual. This in itself was not the usual practice, but even more surprising was the fact that most of the students had received at least one grade higher than expected. Ms. Pintér explained: “You may have noticed that I gave you higher grades than you deserved. I decided that this was the only honorable thing for me to do. If I had to give Péter an A when he deserved a B, you should all be given equal treatment.” She went on to explain that a few days earlier she and the vice principal of the school had been summoned by the mayor, who had asked them not to spoil the chances of Faragó Péter for admission to the National Gymnastics College by ruining his grade point average. This warning was for her in particular since the vice principal had already agreed to elevate Péter’s grade in mathematics. Péter’s parents had complained to the mayor that his grade in Hungarian literature was not satisfactory.

Introduction 5

“I have to tell you that when confronted by the mayor, I didn’t act heroically. I told him that he could trust me to do the right thing and that I had intended to give Péter an A anyway but wanted him to work for it a little harder. I am telling you all this now because I want you to think about this incident and decide for yourselves: was this right? Should Péter get the same grade as Boglár Laci, who has taken all the tests, written all his reports, attended all classes diligently, and clearly took an interest in the literary heritage of our culture?” The students were stunned. In their experience this kind of differentiation between the children of the town elite and the rest was not unusual. Favoritism toward children of the party secretary and the mayor’s special group of favored friends was accepted, as was open discrimination against the children of the former landowning peasants and the preCommunist leaders of the town. But why were they being told about this now? At this point Péter himself appeared in class, late as usual. He casually threw himself down on his seat and continued licking an ice cream cone. The teacher greeted him and briefly told him what had already transpired in class. Péter protested that his parents were innocent in the matter and concluded by saying, “You know, you should not have revealed this whole thing to the class!” The difficult confrontation ended with the ringing of the bell signaling the end of the class. Naturally, during the break the mystifying confession of the teacher was the major topic of discussion. This continued into the next period, which was history. Members of the class were attempting to explain the situation to the history teacher when the vice principal burst in and sent her out, saying that he needed to talk to the students alone. “All that you heard in the previous period,” he announced, “was a lie. The teacher did not tell you the truth. Her version was not the way it happened. And in any case, it was wrong of her to tell you about it. You are children; you don’t understand. A true teacher would never have burdened you with this.” One of the girls stood up, burst into tears, and ran to the door. “Why are you ruining our graduation with all this? How are we to know who is right and who is wrong?” Her classmate Boglár Laci responded: “That is not really the issue. What is at stake here is a question of ethics.” Well, ethics was not exactly high on the list of values promoted by the leaders of this small

6

Introduction

town, which was trying to navigate the troubled waters of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. The news about the highly unusual class spread like wildfire through Tiszadomb. The townsfolk had difficulty fathoming what was at stake. They all knew that Faragó Péter’s father was a close friend of the mayor and that his mother was the Communist Party secretary, and they saw nothing unusual in the special treatment that he was accustomed to being given. Nor did the mayor’s interference surprise them. Joó István was the unchallenged head of the town, where what he said was done without question. So why would the young and exceptionally dedicated teacher Pintér Katalin, daughter of poor peasants, nurtured and educated by the Communist system, elect to confront the mayor and challenge the status quo in this manner? And why should she compare Péter to Boglár Laci, who, although hard working and one of the best students, was known to come from a background of rich peasants that made his family a so-called “enemy of the people”? Why should such a person deserve equal treatment to the party secretary’s son, when for decades children of kulaks had been openly and legally persecuted? What the general population of Tiszadomb did not yet appreciate in these spring days of 1988 was that the winds of political change were blowing with increasing power in the country. The movement toward democratization in Hungary had developed gradually and relatively slowly. Spurred by the liberalization of Soviet political life and the consequent relaxation of outside control imposed on Eastern bloc countries, between the summer of 1987 and the fall of 1988 a string of independent, non-Communist associations, ranging from student groups to a forum of intellectuals, appeared, many of them seeking legal recognition. By early 1989 there were several hundred independent associations, and a number of political parties had been established. The pressure for change came from mass strength and was manifested in the proliferation of broadly supported rallies and demonstrations. Beginning in 1986, the March 15 anniversary of the Revolution of 1848 against Austrian rule was celebrated by an annually increasing number of people marching through Budapest, singing, chanting, and applauding calls for democracy and freedom of the press. When the crowd had grown to 75,000 in 1989, the one hundred and forty-first anniversary of the Revolution of 1848, it was clear that momentous changes were taking place in the country. Individuals had become more politically aware, more engaged. The unstated goals of the popular movement were the destruction of state socialism, the

Introduction 7

introduction of a multiparty system with modern democratic institutions, and the establishment of a market economy. In May 1988 these movements were perceived as distant stirrings by most people in Tiszadomb, who could not foresee or even imagine the extent of political and economic transformation that they presaged. However, the possibility of a democratic transformation of Hungary did penetrate the consciousness of some who, like Pintér Katalin, became actively involved in one of the newly formed political parties. Studying Tiszadomb My account begins with the mayor’s suicide because it signaled yet another dramatic transformation in the fabric of this small town. I had first visited the town in 1972 as an American anthropologist who hoped to write an ethnography of a collectivized community. It was not until 1995 that I found a form to give to my study. I returned to my native Hungary in 1970 to explore the possibility of conducting ethnographic fieldwork. At the time no American anthropologist dared contemplate research there, although travel was relatively easy in and out of the country. Through my contacts with members of the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest, whose director agreed to sponsor my work, I applied for and received a permit to return the following year and to work on the relatively harmless and apolitical topic of child development in the context of a rural community. It was made clear to me that the choice of the community would be curtailed to some extent and that it would have to be a politically “neutral” place. This meant the avoidance of border zones, the vicinity of military installations, the sites of major economic development projects, the hotbeds of the 1956 uprising, and Gypsies. Since I had little interest in any of these areas and my own choice of a location—puzzling though it was to the authorities because of its lack of any known folk art tradition, such as weaving or embroidery—seemed as harmless as my topic, I was allowed to roam around and to select a community in the area known as the Great Hungarian Plains. My interest in this area stemmed from my reading and understanding of Hungarian history and culture. This was supposed to be the “real Hungary,” the puszta (Hungarian prairie) of romantic imagination, of early pastoral settlements, little affected even in the twentieth century by the culture of the country’s dominant German and Slavic neighbors

8

Introduction

or by tourism of any kind, including vacationing Budapest folk. The region was also the subject of early ethnographic work, beginning with the Monograph of the Town of Nagykõrös in 1896 by Galgóczy Károly. Two other classics of Hungarian ethnography, Erdei Ferenc’s Futóhomok and Gyõrffy István’s Magyar Falu, Magyar Ház, published in the 1930s and 1940s respectively, were both devoted to the Great Plains area. I thought that against the background provided by these historical documents I could better understand the development and current profile of communities in the region. The question, of course, was which community? The search for the ideal location was circumvented by my official sponsor, the director of the Ethnographic Museum, Hoffman Tamás, who, when I returned the following year, without any further discussion drove me down in his official Volga to the town of Nagykõrös and handed me over to the family of one of his childhood friends. The Tóth family, which at the time consisted of Gábor (a lecturer at the Economic University in Budapest), his widowed mother Anna, and Margit, his unmarried sister (a physician in the local health care center), gave me a place to live in the beginning, introductions to many key people in the town, and continuous friendship and sustenance over the following two decades of intermittent research. In the course of this first summer of fieldwork, while doing routine participant observation on family life and social relations in one of the outlying farming sections of the town, I very quickly transgressed the limits of the topic set by my research permit. What increasingly came to interest me was the socialist transformation of the countryside. Specifically, I wanted to understand the extent to which the collective system of work and land ownership had succeeded in bringing about the behavioral and attitudinal changes desired by the forefathers of the movement. When I returned to Nagykõrös in the summer of 1972, I was an accepted and generally welcomed presence, among both the members of the elite and the farming people. I was now able finally to focus on the issue of collectivization and on people’s attitudes toward it. Very soon it was clear that in this town, where for a variety of reasons collectives had by and large been economically unsuccessful, the majority of the people, regardless of their socioeconomic background, were unhappy with working in a collective and would have preferred to have their land returned to them. The question was whether this desire was widespread in the Plains or specific to Nagykõrös. Had the socialist regime completely failed to produce a new generation of workers with “new habits”

Introduction 9

and new attitudes, or was the failure in Nagykõrös due to the manner and method of collectivization there? My attempts to find answers to these questions led me to search for a comparable community in the Great Plains region with successful agricultural collectives. This was how I became acquainted with the community of Tiszadomb, a village about fifty kilometers from Nagykõrös. The two communities shared historical and social conditions and occupied similar physical environments. Collectivization of agriculture started around 1949 in both communities, but neither achieved complete collectivization until 1960. The major difference between them was that in one town the cooperatives had been economically unsuccessful, whereas in the other its two cooperatives were highly successful. Tiszadomb, in contrast to the dusty and crumbling Nagykõrös, presented a bright and shiny image of a community progressing and developing. Tiszadomb seemed an ideal location for the intended comparative work, and very quickly it assumed a dominant position in my research. Armed with letters from influential and politically well-placed ethnographers in Budapest, I introduced myself to Joó István, the progressive mayor, who welcomed me and approved my research plans. He proudly showed me around “his village” and presented me to such key people as Buda Károly, the president of the larger cooperative, and Simkó János, the party secretary. I managed to secure a new research permit and returned to Tiszadomb in 1976–77 for the academic year. My sponsoring institution was the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Ethnographic Research Unit, a newly created institution where members could devote their entire time to research and writing. I had wonderful new colleagues who provided a context for discussions, an office, and a library. These were the golden years of the New Economic Mechanism, a period of liberalization in Hungary. The country became wide open for Western researchers. I was no longer a closely supervised sole American anthropologist with a research permit limited to child development. After my completion of the work on the comparative aspects of the two communities (Hollos 1982; Hollos and Maday 1983), my primary focus became the study of Tiszadomb, a fascinating and complex community. I set out to collect data that would enable me to write an ethnography of the village along the lines of the training I had received during my years as a graduate student. This turned out to be a much more difficult task than anticipated. It very soon became clear to me that there

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10 Introduction

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were a number of divisions in the town, and depending on which side of the divide the informant came from, very different interpretations of historical events were given. To begin with, Tiszadomb was not one but originally two separate villages, Ódomb (Old Domb) and Ujdomb (New Domb), united in 1950. The two communities had very different developmental histories and populations that were, if not outrightly hostile, certainly not friendly with each other. Quite apart from other differences, Ujdomb was Catholic and Ódomb Protestant (Calvinist), each with its own church and clergy. The Ujdomb population originated in northern Hungary and considered itself a different ethnic group. Then there was the issue of pre–World War II social class divisions and the history of postwar persecutions. There was also a complex pattern of occupations. While all of these to some extent cut across town and religious lines, the two communities presented very different identities: Ódomb people were proud of their prewar wealth, progressive farming techniques, and Protestant work ethic, and looked down on Ujdomb, which they considered an upstart, overpopulated hotbed of layabouts and the home of troublemakers and Communists. Ujdombers were proud to be Catholic, more urbanized, and occupationally differentiated, with a sizable tradesman class in the prewar period. It was also clear that Ujdomb had gained the upper hand in the postwar socialist years. The town council of the united villages had been moved to the center of Ujdomb, where the

Introduction

11

Communist Party offices were also built; Ujdombers held all the major administrative and political posts and ran the cooperatives. The streets of Ujdomb had recently been paved, its older houses rebuilt, and new subdivisions had sprung up in various locations. By comparison, Ódomb presented a sad and decaying face, its turn-of-the-century houses falling in disrepair, its once elegant town hall turned into an orphanage. Some of these signs were readily observable. All I had to do was to walk the length of the village and compare one end to the other. Their interpretation was given to me by informants, most of whom were anxious to share their life histories. I became especially close to the ninetyyear-old Uncle Szigeti, formerly one of the largest landowners in Ódomb; to Boglár Dénes, another Ódomb landowner who became the president of an agricultural collective in Nagykõrös; to Faragó Ferenc, son of a landless laborer from Ujdomb, now a close friend of the council president; and to Pintér Lajos, a day laborer in a collective, formerly the owner of a small farm outside of Ujdomb. They and many others spoke the truth as they each knew it, and out of these voices I tried to construct a coherent story that would explain the present. I decided that archival research was necessary to help interpret the historical development of the village. In 1981 I spent several months in Budapest acquiring data from the National Archives and the Central Statistical Bureau on the two communities. I was also given the parish records of the Catholic and Protestant churches by their respective pastors. These records, which contain the baptismal, marital, and death registries for the two populations, enabled me to understand something of the population dynamics of the communities, going back to the end of the eighteenth century. I returned to the community in the summer of 1986 and again in 1988. I found that during these years, as a consequence of economic liberalization, an increasing polarization had taken place between the successful and the less successful, between those who had managed to do well in the second economy* and those who had not or could not take advantage of the opportunities provided by it. By 1988 there was much talk about political liberalization in Budapest and about the birth of a number of new political parties. Tiszadomb, however, was abuzz with the news of the confrontation between the high school teacher and the *The second economy is the unofficial private sector that grew parallel to the official state economy.

12 Introduction

mayor, the significance of which eluded the townsfolk and the anthropologist as well. Otherwise, life in the town seemed much as in the preceding years. I paid my respects to the mayor, who was as welcoming as ever and who seemed firmly in control of the council and the town. The party secretary still informed Budapest about local people, and attendance at gatherings and meetings was noted. Then in the summer of 1989, I received a letter with the inexplicable news of the mayor’s suicide. Unfortunately, I could not return that year. By the time I was able to return to Tiszadomb in the spring of 1991, the town was in the throes of a postsocialist restructuring. The collectives were being disbanded and land was returned to the original owners. This process of decollectivization was the main concern of the people, and I soon found myself doing a study of people’s attitudes about the privatization of land, approximately fifteen years after looking at the opposite process. I interviewed people from various socioeconomic backgrounds—the formerly landless and the landed, collective members and nonmembers, people in leadership positions and ordinary workers, men and women, old and young—and found that as before there were multiple truths and interpretations of the events. In retrospect, it seemed that the mayor’s suicide was a watershed in another major social transformation that was engulfing the town. It soon became the focus of my own interest, partly because the human dimension of the mayor’s tragedy took hold of my imagination and partly because the events leading up to it and their interpretation by various people provided me with an opportunity to better understand the social currents running through the community. By now it was clear to me that the traditional anthropological monograph was not a suitable form in which to present my understanding of this town. To begin with, the town’s history was an integral part of its present, and without it the present could not be comprehended. Writing in the “ethnographic present” would have made little sense in a place where change was constant and each time I returned I found new conditions. But history itself was complex: depending on whom I talked to, it was told from a different point of view and constructed to tell a particular individual’s, and through him or her a particular family’s or social class’s, version of the truth. In order to represent this historical depth and multivocality in an attempt to make the reader understand the present, I decided on a suitable genre. A historical ethnography through the accounts of individual life stories seemed by far the best.

Introduction

13

I know that the family histories I was told in 1995 would have been quite different if I had recorded them before 1990, the time of postsocialist transformation. They may also have been different had my informants not perceived me as a member of a certain social class. It is also probable that because of who I am (a female and a member of a group initially persecuted by the Communist regime), I had a closer relationship with the Boglár family and with Pintér Katalin than with the Faragós. However, in spite of my awareness of the constructed nature of their narratives, I still rely on them to depict various aspects of the history and culture of Tiszadomb. The voice recounting the tales told to me is my own, that of “a self-styled ethnographic historian,” in the words of Richard Price (1992: xvi). This type of history writing is informed by an ethnographic perspective, with an attentiveness to meaning that in Price’s paraphrase of Dening (1990, 1989) is “shaped by the ironic trope in which things are never what they seem to be, and is at its best a thoroughly demystifying art” (1992: xvii).* The main body of the work takes up the history of three families as recounted to me by members of those families. Although I start out with three individuals involved in the grade scandal, two of these are not the tellers of the family histories since they were too young to have a perspective on the past. Their family stories are told by their fathers and grandfathers, who were witnesses to many of the events that formed these young people’s worldviews and identities. The third person, Pintér Katalin, tells her own story. The three families on which I chose to focus come from different sides of the community. The Boglárs are from Ódomb, the home of the wealthy, hard-working Protestant peasants of pre–World War II times, prosecuted and villanized by the postwar regime. In spite of his entrepreneurial skills, the father of Boglár Laci was marginalized and barely tolerated by the new elite. Laci himself came of age feeling alienated and knowing that even excellent grades and an unblemished record could not make him equal to the newly privileged children of the new elite. The Faragós are formerly landless peasants from Ujdomb who toiled as seasonal laborers or harvesters before World War II, members of the fledgling Communist movement in the early years of the century, a family whose members had been uplifted, educated, and placed in influen*For more details on the life history tradition in psychological anthropology, see the appendix.

14 Introduction

tial positions by the postwar regime. The father of Faragó Péter became part of the new leadership and an important member of the mayor’s inner circle. His wife, whom he met at an agricultural college, assumed the position of Communist Party secretary soon after Péter was born and as such wielded her own political power. Péter is the pampered and spoiled offspring of this well-placed couple. Pintér Katalin comes from an outlying farm where her family eked out a marginal living on a few acres of land. Combined with sharecropping and renting, this existence barely provided them with their daily bread. Nevertheless, because of the parents’ hard work and diligence, the family holdings gradually grew and flourished. Paradoxically, this made the family somewhat suspect in the eyes of the Communist regime, with which Katalin’s father never attained a position of trust. Katalin herself, however, was embraced by the socialist system, which encouraged and helped her through her years of college. It was in the Szeged Teachers’ College that she discovered her love for Hungarian literature and through it for the folk heritage of the country. And it is the belief in the ultimate value of folk heritage and the need to protect and foster it that has led her to an involvement in the fledgling Hungarian Democratic Forum, a conservative party dedicated to Hungarian nationalism. The main body of the work takes up the history of these three families, in the process also reflecting the life and personality of the mayor. At the end, the story makes clear the connection between the grade scandal and the mayor’s suicide, and concludes with a glance at the Boglárs, Faragós, and Pintérs in 1995. Overview of the Community Tiszadomb is a small town on the Great Hungarian Plains, a region between the Danube and the Tisza Rivers. This area of the country is an open, rolling plain with occasional low hills, and most of it is covered with sand. For centuries, the area was considered one of the poorest in the country, devoted mostly to extensive herding. In the last century, the regulation of the rivers, draining of swamps and irrigation, and advances in viticulture have made the cultivation of grains as well as the planting of vineyards possible. These advances were especially significant for Tiszadomb since the community is only a few kilometers from the Tisza River, the regulation of which gave the town an area of excellent humus-rich soil deposited on its flood plains. Until World War II, the re-

Introduction

15

gion continued to depend strongly on the traditional combination of herding, the cultivation of grains, fruit, and garden crops, as well as viticulture. Since the war, a similar combination of crops has been grown by the agricultural collectives. The town is nestled in the center of a large arc made by the river. Its settlement pattern is characteristic for the region: a central, densely settled core and a large and dispersed surrounding farm area. In 1990 Tiszadomb had a population of twelve thousand, of which five thousand lived on the dispersed farms. The central area is the administrative, commercial, and cultural center for the farming area and for some of the smaller neighboring villages. It houses the regional administrative offices, post office, medical facilities, churches, cultural center, coffee shops, restaurants, most schools, a variety of stores, the central market, and some light industries. The outlying farming areas have no shopping or cultural facilities, although there are some primary schools serving the most distant farms. Of the two original villages, Ódomb is older by far. It is an ancient settlement, first mentioned by name in fourteenth-century documents. In 1541, when the Turks occupied the village, it had 57 houses and a population of around 350. It was subsequently abandoned during the Turkish occupation. In the 1690 census, two years after the Turks were repelled, it was listed as unoccupied, its lands fallow. By 1720 it was resettled, and in the 1720 census 18 households were counted. This small population was able to cultivate only a minimal amount of land around the central settlement. The lands of the community after 1720 belonged to a group of nobles in the nearby town of Abony. The peasants working the lands were serfs, divided into various classes depending on the size of their holdings, all of them with certain rights and obligations, including a set number of days’ work for the lord, as well as taxes in the form of produce or money. When the landlords found that the returning population provided insufficient manpower, they brought in landless workers from northern Hungary and settled them in the abandoned areas north of the existing village. The two groups were kept separate because the newcomers were Catholics and the original inhabitants Protestant. Some of the settlers were minor impoverished nobles, others commoners. They differed from the original population not only in their religion, but also in their legal status. The newcomers were not serfs but free men who, in return for using the land, paid certain taxes to the lords. Such was the beginning of

16 Introduction

TISZADOMB AND SURROUNDING BORDERLANDS

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the community of Ujdomb, which for over two hundred years following its settlement maintained its religious, ethnic, and economic differences from Ódomb. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the original difference in the legal status of the two populations was translated into an even larger difference in the social and economic organization of the two communities. In 1850 the serfs were emancipated and Ódomb serfs became owners of their land. After emancipation the communal manorial working methods and ties began to break down, giving way to new methods and experiments and to individual initiative. In 1860 the Tisza River was regulated by cutting off some of its large loops, which meandered through the sandy plains of the region. The Ódomb peasants gained land in the former floodplains, which provided excellent humus-rich soil for vineyards and orchards. The Ódomb population took advantage of the economic development of the country following the 1867 Compromise with Austria. The period saw the beginning of industrialization and, most important, the development of an infrastructure that ensured that the country could fulfill its role as the supplier of agricultural products to Austria and Germany. As foreign demand for Hungarian food and primary products increased, the influx of foreign capital into the country also in-

Introduction

17

creased, further stimulating domestic production. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an upswing in wheat production and in the size of herds. Ódomb developed a reputation for its fruit crops and for its innovative methods of cultivating grapes. Due to these innovations, as well as to its population’s dedication to the land and hard work, by this time the village was, by all measures, a prosperous peasant community, composed largely of medium to small holders. In Ujdomb the 1850 emancipation of serfs had no effect on the legal situation of the population. Most Ujdombers continued to be renters or laborers, although some of them could now purchase land from the lords. Furthermore, due to the poorer quality of land and to a rapid growth of the population, most inhabitants did not profit from the opportunities provided by the country’s economic boom. Although Ujdomb was more favorably located than Ódomb in its nearness to harbors, major roadways, and the railroad, it lagged behind in economic, social, and cultural development. At the turn of the century it was a highly stratified society, with a sizable population joining the growing numbers of the agrarian proletariat. Between the two world wars, the majority of the population of both villages continued to depend on agriculture, although in Ujdomb there was an increased growth of local industries and commercial activities. Nevertheless, Ódomb continued to surpass it in terms of the general wealth and well-being of its population. The following figures (see Table 1) show the comparative size of landholdings in the two communities in 1935. The figures depict two very different landholding patterns. They highlight the fact that although a third of Ódomb’s landholdings were under one hold (less than an acre and a half), at least two-thirds of its people lived a relatively comfortable existence, while Ujdomb had very few middle-sized holdings and the majority of its population toiled on minuscule parcels. The figures hide an even greater difference between the two communities: the rich soil in Ódomb, which made the cultivation of fruit crops and grapes possible, provided a much higher return per hold than the poorer sandy soil of Ujdomb. Thus the holdings between one and five holds provided an adequate living in Ódomb. Holdings above five holds were considered to be those of “middle peasants,” with relatively few of those at the upper level being truly affluent. The Land Reform Act of 1945 had an impact only in Ujdomb. The act called for the alienation of land over one hundred holds from absentee owners and over two hundred holds from peasant owners. Landless fami-

18 Introduction Table 1 Landholdings in Ódomb and Ujdomb, 1935 Size of landholding (in holds) 0–1 1–5 5–50 50–100 100–500 500–1,000 1,000–3,000

Number of landholdings Ódomb 270 272 209 9 3 0 0

Ujdomb 1,043 1,100 613 80 23 15 1

Source: Royal Hungarian Statistical Central Bureau, 1936. Landholdings in Hungary in 1935. Budapest: Stephaneum. Note: 1 Hungarian hold = 1.422 acres.

lies could claim a maximum of fifteen holds if they had at least three children. In Ujdomb the large estate of one absentee owner and those of several large peasant owners were divided. There were no such holdings in Ódomb. The complete restructuring of the country’s social and economic system following the Communist takeover in 1947 had vastly different effects on the two communities. By the 1950s, the ever-growing central power of the state, under the direction of the Communist Party, had managed to bring under its jurisdiction all spheres of society, including the economy and the legal system. The aim was to abolish social and economic differences among groups. The result was an extinction of local autonomy and local levels of organization, economic as well as political. In 1950, Ódomb and Ujdomb were united under the name of Tiszadomb, and the seat of the village government was moved to the former Ujdomb. The union deprived Ódomb of its territorial and political autonomy and of any possibility for defending its members against the persecution that befell primarily those peasants who were classified as kulaks or exploitative landowners. The most progressive leaders of the community were included on this list, resulting in the confiscation of their holdings, constant harassment, and taxation. About two thousand people fled the community, leaving their lands and houses behind. The same was true for the large owners in Ujdomb. Here, however, the dominant group being poor and landless, the change was welcomed.

Introduction

19

Collective farms were first started on the abandoned lands, some voluntarily, some by force, but the movement in Tiszadomb was slow and the collectives unsuccessful since the knowledgeable farmers had fled. This early wave of collectivization limped along, with less and less enthusiastic governmental support, until 1958, when, following the Russian intervention in the 1956 uprising, the government decided that the agricultural situation needed a solution and a new, concentrated effort was mounted. In this effort “voluntariness” and “gradualness” were the slogans; however, by 1959 peasants countrywide realized that collectivization was here to stay. In Tiszadomb, as elsewhere in the country, by the end of that year almost every cultivator had signed the membership list since holding out was no longer a viable option in the face of the government’s determination to collectivize. Originally, there were four large collectives in Tiszadomb, one functioning in Ódomb, one in Ujdomb, and two in the outlying areas. By the 1970s the two central and the two peripheral collectives united, and by the 1980s, all four collectives were fused into one. While collectivization remained a controversial issue, in Tiszadomb the collectives provided an adequate income and became the mainstay of over 30 percent of the population. This was accomplished to a large extent through imaginative allocations of household plots and the encouragement of private enterprise and marketing within the limits allowed by the collective structure. From the 1960s on, Tiszadomb’s development was in many ways spectacular. To begin with, a number of light industries were brought to the community, providing alternative employment and curbing the outmigration of the labor force. By the mid-l980s, 43 percent of active earners were employed in the industrial sector. Early on, attempts were made by the local government to improve the infrastructure. Most internal and external roads were paved, the entire community and most outlying farms were electrified, all houses had running water, and most were connected to the central gas supply. In the mid-l980s, over half of the residents in the central community had telephones. Significant in the town’s progress was the expansion of a resort on the banks of the Tisza River, which was attracting hundreds of tourists from all over the country, injecting much needed cash into the local economy. The result of these efforts was that in l986 the status of Tiszadomb was elevated from village to township. It is generally agreed by residents and outsiders alike that it was the community’s leadership and most significantly its mayor who were re-

20 Introduction

sponsible for these achievements. The mayor saw opportunities when they arose, knew how to exploit connections and networks, was not afraid of taking risks, and had an uncanny skill for manipulating the various levels of power. It was through these maneuverings that he managed to stretch the limits of the centralized state and to exploit its resources for the benefit of his community. It is not surprising that in the process he and his clique became the embodiment of the paternalistic central power and the democratic process was largely forgotten. That this was resented by some became clear only when the liberalizing events of the late 1980s were beginning to be felt in the country.

2 The Boglárs: An Ódomb Peasant Family

In June 1988 Boglár Laci was an eighteen-year-old senior attending Tiszadomb High School. Much like his classmates, he was anxious to graduate and to move on to the next stage of his life, which, he hoped, would be to attend the agricultural college in Gödöllõ. As far as Laci could remember, from his earliest days he had had a deep-seated love for the land and wanted to devote his life to some sort of work connected to agriculture. Since his family had lost all of its lands to the collective, he no longer entertained the notion of running his own establishment, but the idea of giving up farming altogether and operating a store, as his father had ended up doing, did not appeal to him. The obvious choice then was to go to college, become an agricultural engineer, and, as the proud possessor of a diploma, join the technocratic elite, which was increasingly taking over the management of the nation’s agricultural enterprises. This was high aspiration indeed for the son of a kulak family that after years of persecution had just recently begun to recover some of its former wealth. This did not mean, however, that they had been allowed to recapture their standing among the community’s elites. Even in the relatively democratic open society provided by the New Economic Mechanism, the former kulak status was not easily forgiven; the sons and grandsons of former landowning peasants were not trusted by the new elite. 21

22 An Ódomb Family

Laci, aware of open discrimination all his life, knew that his past was not forgotten. The favoritism shown to children of those in the inner circle of Communist power had bothered him ever since in the first grade he had not been allowed to be a drummer for the morning flagraising ceremony. That honor was reserved for the son of the party secretary, a boy of no particular merit who, in addition, could not be bothered to learn the beat. But no matter how hard Laci practiced drumming and, having perfected the simple rhythm, offered to audition, he was told that as the offspring of the enemy of the people he should lay low and certainly not expect to march at the head of the class. From then on he knew that he would have to battle against unfair odds and work extremely hard on his grades in order to succeed on merit. And work hard he did. Through grade school to high school, his name was on the honor roll with an almost perfect grade point average. Being the only child of his parents and having to help out in his father’s store, his days were very long, with little time for fun. After school he could usually be seen either studying in the school library or standing behind the counter of his father Tamás’s greengrocery. Although he was a talented athlete and ran a fast mile, he had little time to train and gradually even gave up going to soccer practice. While his favorite subject was Hungarian literature, he knew that he could not indulge in spending too much time on it since he had to do outstanding work in all his courses. Girls liked him—he was a handsome boy with big brown eyes and a nice smile—but found him somewhat aloof and distant. He did go to school dances but had no steady girlfriend and was never seen in the groups of youths who were drinking and carousing with the summer guests in the bars and restaurants on the banks of the Tisza. He had his eyes on a goal and worked steadily toward it. On that fateful day in June, the last thing he had on his mind was a confrontation with the son of the party secretary. The “Blessed Village” Who are the Boglárs, and what are the experiences that influenced the development of this young man? The current history of the Boglár family begins with the grandfather of Boglár Laci, Dénes, who was born in 1920 into one of the more prosperous families of Ódomb. The family’s house at 100 Kossuth Street was built in 1899 in a style that became popular among well-to-do peasants

The Boglárs 23

Boglár Family Tree Tekes Benjamin

Teréz = Boglár Lajos (b. 1871) (b. 1870)

István (b. 1899)

Sándor (b. 1895) = Szabó Klára (b. 1900)

Tóth Margit (b. 1927) = Dénes = Kocsis Anikó (b. 1920) (b. 1930)

Miklós (b. 1922)

Tamás = Kis Ágnes (b. 1949) (b. 1946)

Laci (b. 1970) in this region. The houses are L shaped, lying perpendicular to the street, with the shorter part fronting on the main street. These front sections have four to six windows, and their often elaborate Art Nouveau decorations bear witness to the wealth of their owners. The Boglár house had four large rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a pantry. Three of the rooms were arranged in a row, the fourth forming the short section of the L, with all of them opening onto a large covered porch. Under the entire length of the house was a wine cellar sufficiently large for the storage of hundreds of barrels. A number of outhouses were arranged in the yard behind the main house, including a washhouse, stable, barn, henhouses, and storage houses. The servants usually slept in the washhouse. The Boglár lot stretched between two streets, the front gate opening on the main street, the back gate, used for produce and animals, on a smaller back street. Houses built in this style replaced the earlier, less elaborate,

24 An Ódomb Family

and much smaller houses in Ódomb, built basically in the same shape around the turn of the century, when their owners acquired sufficient wealth to be able to afford them. By the time Dénes was born, the entire length of Kossuth Street consisted of these elaborately decorated large houses, neighbors competing to outdo each other in terms of height, number of windows facing the main street, and the amount of relief work. Kossuth Street was one of two major thoroughfares of Ódomb. The other large street that cut through the length of the village, Petõfi Street, had less elaborate but similarly large houses, displaying comfortable financial circumstances but on a clearly lower level than those of Kossuth Street. These two streets dead-ended at the main square, three sides of which were formed by the Protestant church, the Ódomb Town Hall, and the residence of the town clerk. At the time of Dénes’s birth the last building on Petõfi Street housed the Landholders’ Club and the Reading Circle. The Ódomb main square, or Church Square, is at the highest elevation of the community. From here a number of residential streets and roadways lead downhill to the surrounding agricultural lands and the Tisza River. Along these streets lived the less affluent members of Ódomb society, most of whom owned at least a limited amount of land. The landless did not live in the town proper; their residence was in the outlying farm area, a spatial distinction that also denoted a significant social division between peasant owners and landless workers. Dénes’s birth coincided with the beginning of a period of prosperity and well-being in the community that some ten years later was characterized as the “Blessed Village” by the Hungarian novelist Móricz Zsigmond in a newspaper article. According to Móricz, Ódomb by the 1930s had paved roads with brick sidewalks. All the main streets and their houses (including the barns, outhouses, and wine cellars) had electricity. There was running water in the larger houses, most of which also had bathrooms—an unparalleled achievement in the rural Hungary of those days. For those who could not afford the installation of running water, there were artesian wells, dug at public expense on every corner. There was a public resort along the Tisza River with cabins, changing rooms, and a restaurant. Most of the public works were financed by the savings bank, organized and run by the local landholders. The community also had a public loan association and a large array of cooperative economic associations, including the Viticultural Cooperative, the cooperative store, the Dairy Association, and the Well and Water Association, which in-

The Boglárs 25

stalled and ran the waterworks. In addition, there were a number of social clubs, including the Landholders’ Club, the Hunt Club, the Reading Circle, the choir, the Boy Scouts, and the Women’s Association. Móricz also found a harmonious and cooperative relationship among the inhabitants, with interest in and dedication to village affairs and the public good. The reputation of the Ódomb farmers in neighboring towns was excellent; they were known to be pioneers of fruit and vine cultivation, and winners of medals at agricultural exhibits. This is a clearly idealized depiction of the community, but it shows that while there were wealth differences among its inhabitants, in the Hungary of the 1930s Ódomb was a somewhat exceptional place in terms of general welfare and prosperity. The population of Ódomb in 1935 numbered 2,990 (Borovszky 1909), of whom 2,514 were engaged in agriculture. As noted above, there was a relatively even distribution of landholdings, with no owners having over 200 holds and no one landless. The Boglár family’s holdings totaled 104 holds, of which 14 holds were vineyards and orchards, and the rest plowland and pasture. While this made the Boglárs one of the largest landowners in the community, on a national scale they were in the ranks of medium holders. Beginnings: Turn of the Century Where did the family’s wealth come from? According to Dénes, it was his father’s maternal grandfather, Tekes Benjamin, who had acquired most of it around 1870. Benjamin was a younger son who, after returning from the Austro-Prussian War in 1867, found himself disinherited by his father, who had given all of the family’s land to his older brother in the belief that Benjamin was dead. Fortunately, Benjamin had saved his soldier’s wages. With these, on the advice of a family friend, he purchased a piece of land in the parcel that became available after the Tisza River was regulated. This area, known as the Dead Tisza Valley, turned out to be the richest land in the region and became the foundation of the Tekes wealth. Benjamin started experimenting with grape cultivation and wine making, and by the turn of the century, he was one of the richest men in Ódomb. He had one daughter, Teréz, born in 1871. On the paternal line, the Boglárs were not wealthy. After the emancipation of the serfs they redeemed their maximum allotment, four parcels of twelve holds each, most of them plowland and pasture. This

26 An Ódomb Family

made them comfortably off but certainly not in the category of the Tekes family. The house on Kossuth Street, built by Tekes Benjamin, would have been way beyond their means. Benjamin and Lajos, Dénes’s grandfather, however, were friends, having attended the Protestant elementary school together, where they had formed a bond that continued for the rest of their lives. Ódomb was a closed community; people tended to look for marriage partners among themselves. There was no intermarriage with Ujdomb residents, partly because of religious differences and partly because Ódombers held Ujdombers in contempt. The Ujdomb people were known by a variety of pejorative names, most of them implying that they were not only penniless, but also lazy and untrustworthy. The residential central sections of the two communities were separated by a no-man’s-land in which the only building housed the office and residence of the county’s circuit judge, who stayed there only intermittently. Interaction between the two villages was largely limited to Ujdomb peasants working for Ódomb landowners. Ódomb by this time was suffering from a chronic manpower shortage since the community had begun limiting births around the l860s, with the specific aim of conserving wealth. The birthrate was low: most families had a maximum of two children and many only one. The same could not be said of Ujdomb, where up to World War II families with ten to fifteen children were not unusual. The inevitable land fragmentation followed, with increasing numbers becoming landless and looking for wage labor. These were quite naturally not the desired marriage partners for the offspring of the wealthy Ódomb peasants. They married outside of their community only if no match could be found among their own, and then they preferred to search for partners in other wealthy Protestant villages east of the Tisza. It was only a matter of course, therefore, that Tekes Teréz married Boglár Lajos in l893. They had two sons, Sándor, born in 1895, and István, born in 1899. Sándor grew up in the prosperous and peaceful early years of the new century that preceded World War I. When he was four years old, the family moved into the new house (built by grandfather Tekes), where his brother István was born. The boys went to school across the street, attending the Protestant elementary and middle schools along with the offspring of Ódomb’s peasant proprietors. Much of Sándor’s education was practical: he worked with his father or his hired workers as one of them. At fourteen he was finished with formal schooling and turned to working full time with his father. Since István showed little

The Boglárs 27

interest in agriculture, he was sent to study law in Budapest. Thus, Sándor eventually became heir to the combined Tekes–Boglár landholdings. The Boglár men, Lajos and Sándor, were excellent cultivators who not only used their inherited lands well, but further developed them by experimenting with new crops and new techniques. In addition to vineyards, they also started an orchard, cultivating apricots and apples in the Dead Tisza lands. Lajos joined the ranks of the other Ódomb proprietors in speculating in wine and wheat, warehousing them after harvest, and selling only when the price became optimal. Thus, on the eve of World War I the Boglár wealth was well founded and the family was secure in its prosperity. World War I: Sándor When World War I broke out in 1914, Sándor was nineteen years old, a prime candidate for military service. Before he could be called up, however, his mother, who did not want him to die in a war that she saw as senseless, sent him to stay with relatives in Budapest, assuming that the recruiters would have a harder time finding him there. He spent three years in Budapest working in a factory. By the time the army caught up with him, the worst of the war was over, and although he was sent to the front, he did not see much action. Sándor returned home in the fall of 1918 to find chaotic conditions in the country as well as in his home community. In Budapest, the government of Count Károlyi Mihály, a liberal leader, was trying to negotiate a separate peace, national independence from Austria, and democratic reforms, including land reform. It was a hopeless endeavor; Károlyi’s reign of five months could not solve the economic problems of a country devastated by the war. Capital resources had dwindled to a fraction of prewar value; agricultural and nonmilitary production had decreased dangerously. There was unemployment in the factories and starvation in the cities. Revolutionary sentiment characterized the workers’ movement as well as the armed forces. Military leaders blamed the agitation on former prisoners of war, who had been sent back home from Russia. At the end of the war, open rebellions broke out in every area of the country. In March l9l9 Károlyi resigned and a newly formed Communist–socialist coalition headed by Kún Béla grabbed power. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared on March 21. In the communities of Ódomb and Ujdomb, at the request of the newly

28 An Ódomb Family

established County Soviet, local soviet councils were formed in the first days of April. These were organs of the Communist Kún government and replaced the previous forms of political organization. The holdings of large and medium owners were confiscated and made state property, with the aim of eventually dividing them up among the landless. Before this could be accomplished, however, later in April at the behest of the Allied powers the Romanian Army attacked the country. To repel the attack, the Hungarian Red Army formed a new front along the Tisza, billeting its members in the surrounding communities, including Ódomb. The first attack was repelled in May, but the situation for the Hungarians seemed desperate, and Red Army recruiters scoured the countryside for new recruits. These were hard months for Ódomb. Between worrying about the Romanian danger, the Red Army recruiters, and the war, little productive agricultural work was done. In addition, it was not clear who should do the cultivating. The original owners had been told to stay away from their land. The village council kept the potential new cultivators busy confiscating and parceling out land, organizing the landless, and ordering members of the leading families to attend County Soviet meetings throughout May and June. In July a Communist Party secretary was appointed, and a number of committees, including a Threshing Committee and a Committee for Requisitioning Produce, were established. None of these helped the harvest. After his return from the war in the fall of 1918, Sándor joined his father in an attempt to return their lands to some semblance of their prewar routine. This was a difficult undertaking since news of Károlyi’s land reform was widely circulated, with the Land Reform Law finally passing in February 1919. In the early days of April, with the declaration of the Soviet Republic, the Boglárs began to fear not only for their lands, but for their lives as well. The Revolutionary Council declared their lands to be the property of the state and forbade the family to work on them. Spring plowing and preparation came to a stop, and what work was accomplished was only through the illegal activities of some of the loyal Boglár sharecroppers who continued to reside on some of the outlying farms of the Boglár holdings. In late April the Hungarian Red Army requisitioned the Boglár house for the billeting of its soldiers. The occupation of the house was a frightening experience for the family, which included the Tekes grandfather Benjamin, Lajos, Teréz, and Sándor. The soldiers came at night, broke down the front gate, and sent the family in their night clothes to sleep in

The Boglárs 29

the washhouse with the servants. By early morning, when Lajos crept back to investigate the extent of the damage, most of the family’s food supply had been either demolished or carted away. Chickens, ducks, and pigs had been slaughtered and roasted on a huge bonfire made of the parlor furniture. Sajó, the family’s old dog, had been killed by a shot to the head. Sándor was once again in danger of being forced to join yet another army. After hiding in the barn for several days, he finally fled the village one night and walked the thirty kilometers to Kecskemét, where he went into hiding among relatives. Having to leave his parents and grandfather at the mercy of the Red Army and to flee his home in the dark of night had an effect on Sándor that he was unable to forget for the rest of his life. Although the Red Army soldiers stayed for only a week, for the community’s landowners the soldiers’ pillaging became associated with the devastation visited on them by the edicts of the local soviets, especially the land reform committees. The psychological effect of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic on Tiszadomb’s cultivators was long lasting and was easily recalled when, after a new war, similar developments once again threatened their secure existence. At the end of July 1919 the Romanian Army attacked again and advanced to Szolnok, and on August 1 the Kún government resigned. Ódomb rejoiced at the news of the end of the war, but it was not until October of that year that free democratic elections were held to fill the void left by the departing council. Only then were the confiscated properties returned to their owners, whose thoughts could finally turn to next year’s planting. The winter of 1919 is remembered in the community as one of the most difficult : there was no heating fuel; mail was not delivered from Nagykõrös since neither Ódomb nor Ujdomb could pay for postal workers or transport; and—most important—there was very little to eat. Soldiers were again billeted in the community—this time members of the Romanian Army, who stayed for an entire year. The following year turned out to be little better: there was galloping inflation countrywide, and when the Romanians finally departed after the signing of the Trianon Peace Treaty in June 1920, they took whatever foodstuffs they could find and all the plow horses. The aftermath of World War I, especially the Communist Kún interval, left fear in the hearts of Ódomb’s landowners that remained with them until the next—and for them much worse—Communist takeover at the end of the next war. The war had devastating effects on the country as a whole. While Hungary had finally gained its much desired independence from Aus-

30 An Ódomb Family

tria, it had lost more than two-thirds of its historical territory and onethird of its ethnic Hungarian population. The ensuing struggle in Hungary and in other parts of Europe for the revision of the Trianon Peace Treaty eventually ended in a new tragedy, World War II. The years between, however, saw an era of consolidation—first political and later social, economic, and financial—under a conservative government led by Admiral Horthy Miklós, who was elected regent in 1921. In spite of the economic difficulties, after his return from self-exile Sándor felt a surge of optimism for the future. The war was finally over, cultivation could begin, and when the Romanians left in 1920, he decided to marry. His bride, Szabó Klára, was the offspring of another prominent Ódomb family, well known to the Boglárs. Klára’s older brother János and Sándor had often played together as children, had been classmates at the Ódomb Protestant school, and, but for the war, would have spent carefree bachelor years together as well. They had much in common. Both young men had skipped higher education and relied on practical training from their fathers and grandfathers in their agricultural practices. They also looked forward to years of relative freedom in the period between the end of schooling and the inevitable assumption of responsibilities as married proprietors. Because of the war, the young men were catapulted into a premature adulthood; Sándor and Klára even skipped the usual lengthy period of engagement and married as soon as they could. The wedding took place in the Ódomb Protestant church across the street from the Boglár house. The subsequent all-night party was noteworthy for its joyous, noisy celebration, and its relative scarcity of food. There was no lack of wine, however, the Boglár cellars having been well hidden from both armies and Communist councilors. The young couple was given the main Boglár house as their residence. Tekes Benjamin did not survive to the end of the war. Lajos and Teréz moved out to the refurbished washhouse in the rear of the garden, Lajos having semiretired. Sándor used his wife’s dowry to buy out his brother István’s inheritance and at the age of twenty-five took over much of the responsibility for the Boglár properties. In 1920 he also became father of a son, Dénes. Two years later another son, Miklós, was born. Between the Wars: Dénes The Boglár boys grew up in a well-to-do rural family that in its outlook, behavior, appearance, and taste had very little resemblance to its peas-

The Boglárs 31

ant forebears. These urbanized peasant cultivators, if far from being members of the country’s elite, certainly assumed important positions in the local rural society. The Boglárs along with ten to twelve other families constituted the elite of Ódomb: they controlled the local political organs; they provided the judges, council secretaries, and members of the local council; they served as deacons and presbiters in the church. They set the standard for behavior, agricultural practices, lifestyle, and goals. The men in these families were not idle: while they employed laborers and had sharecroppers, they also worked alongside them. Usually, they were the overseers of all agricultural activities, and, among their several holdings, they were to be found where the most important work was going on. Some of these men were conservative and ran the enterprise on a patriarchal model, in which they considered the workers as part of a large family. They gave their workers presents at Christmastime, were invited to their birthdays, and asked to be godparents to their children. Others were more focused on developing and improving their crops and modernizing the methods of cultivation. These were people who sent their sons to agricultural colleges and even to courses in Germany, and whose fruit crops and vineyards won prizes at agricultural exhibits. But for all of them, the aim was to conserve and improve family property and to accumulate more. Thus ostentation was discouraged and the choice of marital partners was dictated primarily by property considerations. This top layer of society was separated by an invisible line from the next, more numerous category. This group of “middle peasants” constituted over half of the rest of Ódomb’s society. The major difference between the groups was clearly in the amount of land owned. However, simply acquiring more land did not guarantee mobility upward into the elite. One’s marriage partner and street address, as well as a reputation for excellence in cultivation and involvement in civic works, were also important. Dénes’s childhood years were spent in this privileged context. The two Boglár boys shared one of the large rooms in the Kossuth Street house, where the family lived year round. As was usual among landowners in the region, the family also owned a number of farmsteads in the outlying areas that it did not occupy. The difference in the pattern of residence—whether the family lived in the central village or in the outlying farm area—was one of the major distinctions between categories of people in Ódomb. There were several such patterns. The wealthiest

32 An Ódomb Family

owners maintained only a central residence and had sharecroppers or hired hands live in and care for the farmstead and the animals that were kept there. This pattern was shared by the local intelligentsia, merchants, and tradesmen. The next category maintained a house in the village but moved to the farm during the peak agricultural season. Often in this social group, within a multigenerational extended family the residence was split: the younger couple lived on the farm and the parents in the town, with the children, as they grew older, sent to live with the grandparents to attend the central school. A third category of less well-off people lived year round on the farmstead as either owners, renters, or sharecroppers. Finally, the least fortunate of the landless hired themselves out as harvesters or day laborers. In Ódomb there were very few of these, and they lived at the edge of the village. The bulk of the landless lived in Ujdomb, either inside the village, on farmsteads, or on manorial lands. This economic and class order essentially reestablished itself in Ódomb after the war ended. Although the country’s economy between 1920 and 1924 was characterized by runaway inflation, it affected the community relatively little because of its secure base of mixed agriculture. Nor did the Land Reform of 1920 have much impact on Ódomb. This postwar attempt at redistributing the land of the large estates to the country’s landless and the owners of dwarf holdings was a direct outgrowth of the failed land reforms of the Károlyi and Kún governments. Initially after the war the country’s large landowners, who dominated the conservative Horthy government, were reluctant to commit themselves to this course, afraid that it might end up undermining their economic as well as political power. By 1920, however, there was a feeling of inevitability about the reform, and when Nagyatádi Szabó István, himself of peasant origin, became minister of agriculture, the land reform law was finally enacted. Szabó, however, was convinced that the country’s economic and political interests demanded that the reform proceed gradually and with moderation. Initially, only 1.2 million holds were to be taken from the largest estates and given to enlarge or to form new dwarf holdings. Further reform was to follow later. Szabó’s death in 1924 and the continuing opposition of the large landowners eventually left Hungary with the least effective postwar land reform programs in all of Eastern Europe. All in all, through Public Law 1920: XXXVI, enacted on December 7, 1920, apart from some land for building lots and public institutions and given to individual agricultural officials,

The Boglárs 33

979,067 acres were distributed in the form of small farms among 411,514 persons, each receiving on average 2.38 acres. Further, 217,429 acres were distributed among peasant families in the form of low-rent individual farmlands countrywide (Kerék 1939). Because in Ódomb the land distribution was relatively equitable and there were no large estates, there was no land redistribution. The local government asked owners to voluntarily sell or lease land, but there was no response, even though the town clerk recorded 110 applications for leased land and 25 for house plots in May 1920. Subsequent minutes of the meetings of the village government record considerable discussion regarding the shortage of house plots; this was so acute that the government could not provide housing even for its own officials, including clerks and midwives. The clerk also recorded complaints about in-migrants, who settled in the village without the consent of the magistrates and were looking for housing. The government’s response was to notify them that they were not welcome in the community. In the end, the status quo prevailed, and since there was no law that forced them to do otherwise, Ódomb’s proprietors managed to hang on to every last bit of their land. It was not until March 1927 that the community finally apportioned a block of land formerly used as part of a public garden to 13 qualified applicants to use as house plots. Dénes and Miklós were raised to love the land. Their favorite pastime was to accompany their father on his rounds to the farms during the spring and fall months. During the summer school holidays they stayed out on the fields as much as they could. Since his holdings were in so many different areas, Sándor bought an automobile—one of the very few in Ódomb—in the late l920s. He was an interested and involved owner who supervised all phases of production. The family lands included vineyards, orchards, plowland, and pasture, the cultivation of all of which required different types of specialized knowledge. The Boglárs owned four farmsteads, all occupied by hired hands who reported to Sándor directly; there was no overseer or manager in this basically family-run enterprise. Sándor’s major interest was in improving his fruit crops. In the late l920s he went to the northern Hungarian county of Nyirség to study apple cropping, a specialized knowledge that he then brought to Ódomb. Sándor was known by the workers as one of the kindest landowners in the community. He not only paid fair wages but also treated the men with respect, and on Saturdays, paydays, invited them to help themselves to the wine in his cellar.

34 An Ódomb Family

Dénes’s memory of his father is of a mild-mannered and quiet person who was nevertheless highly respected and very much in charge of his land and his workers. But it was his mother who was the most important influence in his life. Boglár Klára was a strong personality who made the decisions around the home and kept the purse for the house and the accounts for the lands. She was also involved in a number of civic associations: she ran the Library Association and the Association for the Welfare of Farmstead Children. But her major focus was the family and her two sons. It was Klára who decided that Dénes, being older, would step into his father’s shoes and become a cultivator and that Miklós would study law. Dénes did not protest, although his secret desire was to study architecture and to eventually become a town planner. During these golden years between the two world wars, as Sándor’s generation came to be in control, there was a general economic wellbeing and a seeming political stability in Ódomb. Sándor was active in local politics as representative to the council, as were many of his friends and relatives. His father-in-law became judge of the local court, and his best friend, Seres Jenõ, was elected as the local delegate to parliament. The mood in Ódomb in general was mild and middle of the road in spite of the growth of extremist movements elsewhere in the country on both the Left and the Right. In 1930 the Ódomb branch of the Smallholders Party was founded, with another member of the Seres family as its leader. On the national level, the party represented a moderately conservative direction with the aim of protecting the interests of the propertied peasantry and small business owners. Locally, the party quickly gained a following, its members originating from all Ódomb social groups, but the leadership remained in the hands of the elite. Its meetings were held in the Landholders’ Club, the locus of most decisions regarding community affairs. The minutes of the local council between 1923 and 1939 depict a stable and wealthy community. The community’s leadership was preoccupied with the following issues: electrification of the village, including streets, government offices, and private homes; the establishment of a spa by the Tisza, including a steam bath; the paving of Kossuth and Petõfi Streets; the building of a community slaughterhouse; the landscaping of the Church Square; and the building of a new village hall, for which a sizable loan was taken out by the local body of representatives. There were also discussions regarding the number of libraries and movie houses the community should have. One painful issue that occupied

The Boglárs 35

much time and against which the leaders lobbied successfully in 1925 and 1936 was the proposed unification of Ódomb and Ujdomb by the county government. A serious disturbance in this peaceful picture came with the general financial crisis in the country from the effects of the world economic crisis between 1929 and 1930. In addition, between 1928 and 1935 there was a series of droughts that further burdened the agricultural sector. Sándor, along with many of his peers, almost went bankrupt, but a Hungarian government loan bailed him out. This was not true for much of the rest of Hungarian society, where unemployment and poverty were the lot of almost a million people, resulting in demonstrations and protests. Ódomb, with its relatively secure economic base of vineyards and orchards, along with the other market towns of the Great Plains, was relatively unaffected, although the heavy burden of increased taxation took its toll on the income of its proprietors. In 1934, after completing eight years of primary school in Ódomb, Dénes was sent to high school in Kecskemét. This was increasingly the pattern for the sons of Ódomb’s elite: they went to the Protestant high schools in either Nagykõrös or Kecskemét, a step that required living in the school dormitories and learning to get along with others of different backgrounds. For the first time in his life, Dénes came under the influence of individuals who were not from the closed circle of his community. Several members of the Kecskemét Protestant high school at the time were involved in a movement that became known as Village Explorers, one of the very few organizations in the country that could not be classified as leaning to either the Left or the Right. The group was founded by young men, most of them sons of the owners of dwarf holdings or landless agricultural laborers, who by their talents had won scholarships to secondary schools and universities; the purpose of the group was to describe the conditions prevailing among the rural poor. The members published a number of monographs, many of which are still considered important sociological documents of village life in the 1930s. Their orientation was pro–ethnic Hungarian; they wanted to preserve national values and culture and consequently attacked both German and Jewish influences. During its later history, several of the members were coopted into movements on either the Right or the Left, but in its first constellation the group represented a genuinely native, grassroots organization that served as a source of inspiration for intellectually inclined rural youth.

36 An Ódomb Family

Dénes and Miklós were both involved in the movement as a consequence of their friendship with some of its members. They met these young men in Kecskemét during their high school years and established a strong bond with them in spite of the fact that they came from a more affluent background. Dénes in particular genuinely believed that the future of Hungary should be in the hands of a liberal but not extreme left-wing group such as this, the aims of which should include a more equitable division of land, the education of rural youth, and the fostering of Hungarian peasant culture and values. His attempts to promote these ideas when he returned to Ódomb on weekends and holidays were met with suspicion. The peasant proprietors of Ódomb still vividly recalled the Red Terror of the Kún government and reacted to the slightest whiff of left-wing sentiments with exaggerated emotions. After a while Dénes learned to limit his discussions of the movement to the family circle, where Sándor gave him a sympathetic though skeptical ear and his mother encouraged him to limit his interest to the cultural heritage of his people. After graduating from high school, Dénes went to Budapest in 1938 to attend the agricultural university. Miklós followed him in 1940 and enrolled in legal studies. They both continued their involvement with the Village Explorers and concentrated their efforts on the founding of the so-called folk colleges, which were being organized to further the education of rural youth. Dénes again lived in a dormitory, and his social life was centered around the movement. He often traveled home, however, and, as befitted the heir to the Boglár properties, kept in touch with his father’s work and plans. Miklós, on the other hand, increasingly lost touch with the home community. Eventually, he married a girl from Budapest, started a legal practice, and settled there. The plan was, as in his father’s generation, for Dénes to buy out his share of the inheritance. Because of the ensuing events, which destroyed the Ódomb economy and society of their youth, this was much delayed. World War II By the time the Boglár boys went to Budapest, it seemed almost inevitable that the country would become embroiled in the war that was brewing among the European superpowers. During the l930s, successive Hungarian governments tried to avoid too close an association with Germany, and nearly all political and social groups agreed that the Germans represented a threat. This included even the Hungarian pro-Nazi,

The Boglárs 37

anti-Semitic forces, which had differences with their German mentors, resenting Hitler’s slighting of Hungary’s national ambitions. The country’s dilemma was that it needed the help of a powerful ally to regain the territories it had lost after the Trianon Peace Treaty, and as a last resort it was willing to accept Germany’s assistance toward that end. The German sanctioning of the return to Hungary of southern Slovakia in 1938, Carpatho-Ruthenia and portions of southern Hungary in 1939, and the northern portion of Transylvania in 1940 effectively put the country into German debt. Even so, it was not until 1941 that it joined German forces and declared war on the Soviet Union. Sándor predicted that Hungary would lose the war and that the Communists would take over the country. Ódomb landowners still remembered the terror of l9l8 and reacted to news of the war with fear and trembling. There was also the danger that the boys would be called up. Miklós was safe since he had contracted tuberculosis and spent most of the war years in a sanatorium. Dénes stayed away from home much of the time but finally received his papers in l94l and was taken to the county army headquarters in Kiskunfélegyháza. Sándor was upset and encouraged him to desert. He saw no reason for his son to fight in a war that, in his mind, was totally senseless and doomed to failure. During the chaotic first week in the barracks, Dénes and some of his friends finally escaped through a hole in the wall and fled to Budapest. There he spent almost three years in hiding, not returning home to Ódomb until October 1944. Up to 1940, life in Ódomb continued much as before. While the return of the lost territories was welcomed, pro-German or right-wing sentiments did not prevail. A right-wing youth organization, the Levente, operated only in Ujdomb. The minutes of the meetings of the Ódomb town council between l940 and 1942 show that the following issues— none of them war related—were on the agenda: permit for a local liquor brewery, building of a child-care center, rebuilding of the damaged harbor, burial of the Protestant minister, funds for a slaughterhouse, and the need for a gymnasium for one of the schools in the periphery. There was also a continuing debate between Ódomb and Ujdomb regarding the amount the villages should pay each other for the schooling of Catholic children from Ódomb in Ujdomb and the Protestant children from Ujdomb in Ódomb. Finally, in 1942 the council discussed a new ordinance requiring the planting of certain crops in preparation for the war. Also in 1942, as part of the same preparation, the community

38 An Ódomb Family

had a telephone installed in the home of the council secretary. As another ominous sign of the times, in 1943 Ódomb purchased a new anti-air-raid warning system. This was timely since Allied air strikes against Hungary began in the spring of l944, after the German occupation of the country. By the summer of 1944, war had reached the community. In June, the three Jewish families in the village disappeared, fleeing from impending deportation. Also in June, Szolnok, the nearest town across the Tisza, was bombed for the first time, an action that destroyed its railroad station. The bombing continued throughout the summer, causing much damage to Szolnok and the surrounding area, but the communities across the Tisza were not hit. They were told, however, to prepare for the advancing front by not cutting down the stalks of tall crops such as corn and sunflowers, thereby helping the home army to hide. It was hard to know by this time whom to consider “friendly,” as people were equally afraid of Germans and Russians. By the time Dénes decided in October 1944 that it was safe to return home, the Soviet Army had entered Hungary and was quickly advancing toward the Tisza. The family could hear cannon fire from a distance of sixty to seventy kilometers. At the instigation of Klára, who was afraid that her son would be taken by the Germans to dig ditches, the entire family fled to Kecskemét. Others who were afraid that the whole village would be wiped out also escaped and went either to Kecskemét, Nagykõrös, or the peripheral farms. By the end of October, the Russians had crossed the river and after three weeks of bloody battle occupied the neighboring villages of Kürt and Inoka. On October 25, the Romanian Army, allied at this time with the Soviets, attacked the German stronghold in Ujdomb, was repelled, but entered victoriously on November 1. During the shelling several houses in Ódomb were hit, and in one, four women on their way to the well were killed. After the fighting in Ódomb ceased, the Boglár family returned home to find the village occupied by the Soviet forces. The soldiers were plundering, taking whatever tickled their fancy. The residents were terrified and the village council seemed helpless. Sándor established contact with the Soviet commander, headquartered in Ujdomb, and proposed that each community establish a requisitions center where the Russians could come and collect what they required. In Ódomb the Boglár house was chosen for the purpose. It was here that Sándor and a group of his friends brought what the commander requisitioned. This stopped the plunder,

The Boglárs 39

but the Russians remained in the community throughout that winter and the following spring, summer, and fall, long after the war had ended in April. Dénes did not return to his studies in Budapest, and consequently he never graduated. During the bleak winter of 1944–45, he assisted his father and the rest of the adult males in the community in trying to reestablish a semblance of normality. This was, of course, difficult. Not only was the Russian presence strongly felt, but there was also a rising inflation, a chronic shortage of foodstuffs, and no electricity. Nevertheless, the village council resumed its meetings in January, at first with its prewar membership. In the fall general and local elections were held, and in Budapest a coalition government was formed, with the Smallholders Party holding the majority of seats. In Ódomb, the Smallholders also gained a clear majority, and after Seres Jenõ resigned as judge, Boglár Sándor was elected. The first act of the council was to try to deal with the damages caused by the war. It buried thirty-one war dead at public expense; voted to repair the steeple of the church, which had been hit by a bomb; provided heating fuel for the returning prisoners of war; and tried to collect an extra tax imposed by the county. It also tried to deal with the urban residents who came to barter for food and established a committee that was to set a fair price for foodstuffs. End of the War: Tamás In the summer of 1945 Dénes fell in love with the daughter of a neighbor who had also interrupted her studies at the Cegléd Protestant high school. Tóth Margit was only eighteen years old at the time, which, according to Boglár Klára, was much too young to marry. Although she was friendly with and approved of the bride’s family—another of Ódomb’s establishment—she encouraged the young couple to wait until normality returned to the country and both of them had finished their respective studies. Nevertheless, they married and, after a quiet ceremony in the damaged Ódomb church, moved in with the Boglár parents, setting up their home in Dénes’s and Miklós’s boyhood room. At this point the Boglár family counted three generations in the same homestead: Lajos and Teréz lived in a separate house in the yard, and Sándor and Klára occupied the main bedroom. The three generations soon became four when Margit gave birth to a son in the spring of l946. The boy, who was baptized Tamás, never knew his mother, who died after his deliv-

40 An Ódomb Family

ery. His upbringing was taken over primarily by his paternal grandmother, Klára, who was helped to some extent by Margit’s grieving mother. The two grandmothers doted on the boy and became the major influences in his life, inculcating in him the dominant Ódomb values of staunch Protestantism, the love of the land, property, and hard work. The years between 1945 and 1947 were known as the years of consolidation in Ódomb. Agricultural production began anew, and the rural economy gradually recovered. On the national level, however, there were fierce battles among the ruling parties, as a result of which the Communists, with the active help of the occupying Soviet Army, gradually took over various organs of the government. The aim was not only to dominate the political life of the country, but also to remold its economic structure in the Soviet image. The consequence was that by 1948 the economic system of Hungary, as that of the other Soviet-bloc countries, had come to parallel that of the Soviet Union itself. The hallmark of this system was direct state interference, central control, and nearly total state ownership of major industries and finance. Agriculture at this point was allowed to continue on the same basis as before the war, and the solution to the damages caused by the war was seen in a land reform (1948) that was to equalize holdings among various segments of the population but not touch private ownership. Countrywide, approximately 35 percent of the total land area was divided up among seven hundred thousand individuals, giving rise to four hundred thousand new peasant holdings. The maximum size of a holding became 114 hectares, or approximately 170 holds. The maximum size of granted land units was fixed at approximately 10 hectares (15 holds). Those who became eligible for land grants were landless agricultural laborers and very small landholders. The land reform created individualistic smallholder agriculture since the coalition governments between l945 and 1948 had no active policy encouraging cooperative methods (Orbán 1972). After a continuous barrage of assaults on the other political parties, by the end of 1946 the Soviet-backed Communist Party had managed to undermine the four-party coalition and, after the resignation of the prime minister, called for general elections. The aim of these elections was to consolidate the Communist gains and to achieve legitimacy. The elections, which were held on August 31, 1947, were by all accounts influenced by the Communists in two ways. First, they managed to disenfranchise a large segment of the population that was allegedly as-

The Boglárs 41

sociated with Fascist organizations. Second, on election day, mobile voter squads of Communist Party workers traveled around the country casting multiple votes. This election made the Communists the largest single party in the country. The leader of the party, which was soon renamed the Hungarian Workers’ Party, was Rákosi Mátyás, a staunch Stalinist who had been converted to the Communist cause during his years as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union after World War I. Rákosi eventually became prime minister as well as party secretary general and dominated the political scene until 1953. The “Peasant Question” Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1949, the transformation of agriculture became a priority for the government. Up to this point, the concept of economic development had in essence been limited to heavy industry. Agriculture received only 15 percent of total investments, resulting in poor performance and a level of production that was 15 percent below the prewar level. There were periodic food shortages, and the rationing of several foodstuffs and industrial products was gradually introduced. It became clear that with the structure that had developed after the land reform, agriculture was able to satisfy neither the increasing demands of the population for food nor the demands of industry for raw materials. This was particularly so since the number of those who entered the salaried sector was increasing rapidly. As early as June 1948 the Central Leadership came out in favor of a rapid reorganization of agriculture and the sharpening of the class struggle against the rich peasantry. The cooperative movement was seen as the solution for eliminating the “last remnants of capitalism.” The operational regulations for cooperative farms defined three types of production associations, according to the stage of development of the work organization and the work done in common. Types I and II were still close to individual farming, but in Type III the features of common farming were dominant. The models came from the Soviet Union, with Type III, which became the dominant form, being similar to the Soviet artel. The artel had free use of the nationalized land, and buildings, animals, and equipment were used collectively; members had the right to own a house, some livestock and equipment, and a plot of land, limited to a half hectare adjacent to the house.

42 An Ódomb Family

The party considered the landless, the poor, and the poorer middle peasantry to be its most reliable political allies in the countryside. The rich peasantry was perceived as an obstacle to socialist development and had therefore to be systematically eliminated. This started with registering the rich peasant (or kulak) farms countrywide in 1948–49. The term kulak, which became widely used, is a Russian word denoting a peasant who lives off the work of others. In defining whether a farm, and therefore its owner, came into this category, a number of factors were to be taken into consideration. Primary among these were the size of the landholding—more than twenty-five holds of plowland or more than five holds of vineyards—and/or cadastral net income of over 350 gold crowns. In reality, however, people were declared kulaks without these criteria. Persons entered on the kulak list could not be taken off again even if they reduced the size of their farm or abandoned farming entirely. The alleged purpose of registering the rich peasants was to determine who should be burdened with increased taxes and compulsory deliveries, designed partly to alleviate food shortages in the urban areas. Soon, however, in the hands of local bureaucrats and political leaders, the list became an instrument of persecution and terror. License for this was given by Rákosi himself, who in his speeches as early as 1948 used a number of derogatory terms to characterize this group. Most common among these were “fat,” “greasy,” and “speculator.” The terminology was picked up by the national and local press, which between 1948 and 1953 described kulaks in ways that furthered the image of a lazy, fat drone who earned his living off the back of a skinny, overworked, starving laborer. As the years progressed, so did the negative imagery. The papers also began a propaganda campaign describing the crimes committed by kulaks. Among these were the blackmarket selling of pigs, not sowing wheat deeply enough, keeping animals hidden, not meeting delivery quotas of fat, and not weeding corn. The motivating factor for the kulaks’ supposed crimes was presumably a desire to sabotage production, ruin the cooperatives, and eventually undermine socialism. The cooperative movement during this time progressed slowly. The government’s original aim had been to raise the share of socialist agriculture to 80 percent of total arable land by 1953. This goal was repeatedly revised, and by the middle of that year the amount of arable land that was farmed in common amounted to 24.6 percent of the total. Even this much was the result of direct or indirect force. Between 1949 and

The Boglárs 43

1953 the rich peasants, wanting to escape from the burdens of taxation and compulsory delivery quotas, “offered” a total of one million holds to the state. Those who did not offer voluntarily fell victims to the socalled “consolidation of holdings” for cooperative farms. Since it was important that these lands be contiguous, owners whose parcels fell within the desired boundaries of the collectives were offered lands elsewhere in exchange. In most cases this transaction was implemented in such a way that the cooperatives acquired the best land in the area and farms given in exchange were on the worst land. In spite of this, many of the early cooperatives soon went bankrupt, and in 1953 overall agricultural production remained below the prewar level. In Ódomb, for many people the elections of 1947 resulted in an ideological crisis. Peasants who, like Boglár Sándor, had supported the coalition government and believed in the importance of the electoral process were dismayed. Early on election day they heard rumors about the countrywide Communist maneuver of sending illegal voters around to various locations with the aim of inflating Communist votes. A group of Ódomb proprietors camped out at the entrance of the road from Kecskemét and apprehended a truckload of about forty of them heading for the Ódomb polling station. They threatened them with physical violence and arrest. The thugs, who were not true believers in Communist ideology but were being paid by the party, quickly retreated and in all probability made their way to the next village. So theirs was a meaningless gesture, and the Communist victory soon became evident. Thus began a period in which self-protection became the primary concern for people in Ódomb, resulting in a turning away of the leading citizens from civic issues, fragmenting the community, isolating families from each other, and leaving them to cope with their troubles and fears on their own. Sándor resigned his post, unwilling to support the illegal government, and decided to devote himself to farming. Others, fearing persecution, fled to Budapest, Kecskemét, and other large towns where they were not known. Many immigrated to Western Europe. According to Dénes, at least a thousand people disappeared from the Ódomb/Ujdomb area, mostly the wealthy and the landless who no longer found work. An opposite trend was for urbanites to flee to the villages, also to shed their past and identity. The kulak registry came to Ódomb in the winter of 1949. Without exception, all of the owners of the elegant houses on Kossuth Street were included, as were all the residents of the somewhat less affluent

44 An Ódomb Family

Petõfi Street. This came as no surprise to anybody. However, the inclusion of the owners of relatively small parcels, extending little over five holds of vineyards, was somewhat of a shock. Kulak status was determined by committees sent from Budapest or other areas of the country, the idea being that nonlocals would be less biased, either for or against certain individuals. However, these outside cadres consulted with local Communist Party members who did hold grudges. Since no party members could be found in Ódomb, the locals were recruited from Ujdomb, where Communist sympathizers had already been active during the Kún regime. The agroproletarian elements in Ujdomb had long ago targeted the Ódomb owners as enemies of the people, and their festering resentment had now surfaced in an often merciless persecution. The final kulak list included about three hundred names, of which about as many as fifty had either very little land or no land at all. Apart from the small vineyard and orchard owners, whose hard work made them appear more affluent than the size of their holdings warranted, this number included pensioners without heirs whose land had been fallow for some time, elderly widows who lived elsewhere but retained nominal ownership, merchants and industrialists without any land at all, and members of the local intelligentsia. In this last category were, for example, the doctor son of a middle peasant and the teacher son of a poor peasant who had married the daughter of a wealthy one. Also included were some relatively poor people who were simply thought to have the wrong attitude. The majority of those classified as kulak, however, were the relatively affluent peasant cultivators who made up the majority of Ódomb’s society. These people traced their ancestry to the original serf settlers of the community, who with hard work had created the “Blessed Village” of the 1930s. Many of them were the political leaders and public servants of the community. Others were cultivators whose main interest was simply in farming and crop improvement. The most affluent of them had farms slightly over 100 holds, with the majority in the 50–100 hold range. The tricky and somewhat slippery part of the situation was that all of these holdings were made up of different kinds of land—some pasture, some plowland, some combined orchards and vineyards. Thus even if the land was divided among various heirs, it was relatively easy to declare different members of a family kulak, one on the basis of the 5 holds of vineyard in the Dead Tisza Valley, another on the basis of the 7 holds of orchard along the Tisza, and yet another on the basis of the 80 holds of combined plowand pastureland in the Western fields.

The Boglárs 45

Simultaneously with the kulak registry, an office was set up in Ujdomb for the purpose of supervising the collection of taxes and compulsory deliveries. The head of this so-called Delivery Office was an individual by the name of Orkán, a former groom on a large estate in western Hungary who bore a lifelong hatred for the landed and the rich. His office issued a delivery booklet to every individual in the two communities, with those of the kulaks bearing a large capital K. This distinction indicated a sizable difference between what was owed, what could be taken, and ultimately how the individual could be treated. The Boglár family, owners of a total of l04 holds, was among the first to be put on the list. This was done so quickly that they did not at first have time to officially divide the property among the father and sons so as to reduce the burden on the father. This was eventually done, and one-third of the total area, or approximately 35 holds, was registered for each man. Ironically, this resulted in each of them now being classified as a kulak (although somewhat of a lesser one)—even Miklós, who was living and working in Budapest as a lawyer. Experience showed that it was the kulak status itself that was the decisive factor, not how much or how little land put a person in this category. From 1949 on a nightmarish period started for the Boglárs. To begin with, a number of deadlines for various phases of agricultural work were imposed on them—for sowing, plowing, harvesting, milling grain, pressing grapes, and picking fruits—none of which necessarily coincided with what they considered to be the appropriate time for the work for the region. They were also told how deep to plow and how to broadcast seeds. These guidelines were presumably imposed to preempt the peasants’ sabotaging of food production. To be able to slaughter, they had to apply for a permit, and if the animal was judged not to have reached the ideal weight, they had to continue fattening it. The amount of animal fat to be delivered to the state was projected on the basis of the slaughtered animal’s weight, and if it did not have enough to meet this level, they had to purchase fat elsewhere and add it to their delivered amount. The same rule applied to eggs, to fleece from sheep, and to milk from cows. Early in 1949, Sándor was called to the Delivery Office, where Orkán confronted him with an anonymous report accusing him of having given grain to his pigs instead of delivering it as part of his quota. Since he could prove that the pigs in question did not belong to him but to his former sharecropper, to whom he had given one of his farms, he was allowed to leave with only a warning. A year later Dénes was reported to

46 An Ódomb Family

have hidden in his cellar a number of wine barrels that were presumably needed for one of the fledgling cooperatives. Before he had a chance to answer the charge and voluntarily deliver the requisitioned barrels, on an early September morning two carriages drew up in front of his house. When he came out to investigate what the heavy pounding on his gate was about, he was rudely pushed aside and three men demanded to be let into his cellar. The leader handed him a slip of paper from the Delivery Office and informed him that his barrels had been confiscated and given to “the People.” He was given the choice of voluntarily handing them over or being arrested. Later that year, a group of men of unknown origin showed up at the house wanting to see the loft over the house and over the barn. They had come to sweep the lofts of all the remains of the harvest since the family had been unable to meet its quota of grain delivery. Similar or worse things were happening to the Boglárs’ relatives and friends, including deportation, jailings, and beatings. It was well-nigh impossible to meet the quotas even if families ended up starving during the winters, but as long as part of the required amounts was missing, they were fair game for harassment. For example, Szabó Ilona, the elderly widow of a Boglár neighbor, tried to hang on to her lands for some years but had a hard time meeting the quotas: she was repeatedly visited by members of the Delivery Office. One day she was asked whether she had ever let her dog loose. She knew that if she said yes, she would be told that this was against the law since the dog could conceivably catch small game. If she said no, she would be punished for not treating the dog humanely. She ended up killing the dog to put an end to the mindless harassment. Another Ódomb cultivator, Fekete István, owned a small home brewery. This made him an “industrialist” in the eyes of the authorities, and he was fined for operating a private plant. The fine was more than ten times the value of his entire operation, including the value of his lands. He hanged himself, leaving his widow and two teenaged children to face the charges. As the push for collectivization gathered force in 1949, new landowners and kulaks alike increasingly abandoned their lands, hoping that by divesting themselves of the majority of their property they could make a living on a small parcel without attracting attention. A new means of speeding up this process and harassing the kulaks presented itself in the form of the forced consolidation of parcels. If a parcel was declared to be lying in the area of a future cooperative or State Farm and thus in the way of progress, it could be expropriated and the owner offered land

The Boglárs 47

in exchange elsewhere. As this parcelization could be done three or four times—always with the avowed purpose of creating large, contiguous, and easy-to-cultivate areas for the collective—the owners would eventually give up the fight of plowing, seeding, and fertilizing parcel after parcel, throw in the towel, and “donate” their lands to the collective. The land was given over to the state, leading to the organization of the large-scale State Farms, which were cropping up countrywide during this period. The “donated” kulak lands in Ódomb were incorporated into the State Farm operating on former Ujdomb lands. The headquarters were set up in a mansion formerly owned by one of the largest landowners, the Radványi family, whose priceless paintings were slashed, carpets cut up, and parquet floors destroyed by hobnailed boots. It soon became clear to Sándor and Dénes that they had to divest themselves of the majority of their holdings. In late 1950, they offered 90 holds of plowland to the state. This left each of the three men with about 4.5 holds of vineyards, just below the kulak minimum. Economically, this made them viable. With the price of wine being high, they could sell it or barter it for other commodities. Their problems from here on were primarily political in nature. Ódomb No More In December 1949 the government issued a decree reorganizing public administration and regulating the new county boundaries. The decree was implemented in early 1950, with the resultant smaller number of administrative units serving to strengthen centralized state control and supervision. The Constitution of the People’s Republic made the county, district, and village councils the local bodies of the state. The councils were viewed by the Communist Party as their own local arm, primarily designed to carry out the party’s directives. In the beginning, the major part of their work consisted of collecting produce and taxes and consolidating land-strips for the State Farms and agricultural collectives. As part of this administrative reorganization, Ódomb and Ujdomb were united, the community henceforth known as Tiszadomb. The seat of the new local council was established in the former Ujdomb village hall, with the Ódomb public buildings and facilities emptied and abandoned. The first council president (who for brevity’s sake I will call the mayor), was a former landless peasant from the outskirts of Ujdomb, the first party secretary a factory worker from Budapest. Since it was

48 An Ódomb Family

soon discovered that the president was illiterate and could not deliver any of the speeches written for him by his staff, he was replaced by a former shoemaker. The unification was a devastating blow for the Ódomb cultivators, who had fought against unification with Ujdomb even during the prewar years, long before it implied Communist and proletarian control over their lives. Now they were divested not only of economic but also of political control. The elegant public buildings of Ódomb were left to decay; as many others of their kind around the country, they were eventually used for housing such low-priority organizations as the state orphanage and a day-care center for the elderly and disabled. It was soon after the unification that the Boglár family received an order of eviction from its home. The house was needed for the new functionaries and council members, none of whom had residences in the community. Sándor went to the council, and after his talk with the mayor, the family was allowed to move down to the backyard and join Lajos and Teréz in the two-room reconverted washhouse. Sándor, Klára, and the four-year-old Tamás were given one of the rooms in this building, with Dénes sleeping in the kitchen. The main house was eventually given to two families who shared the main kitchen and the bathroom. One of them, that of a landless peasant from Ujdomb who was attached to the Delivery Office and had five children, was a source of constant irritation to both the Boglárs and the other tenant. There were ongoing quarrels over the use of the kitchen, the children ran wild in the yard, and the man demanded various improvements to his quarters from the Boglárs. Fortunately, after two years they were given new housing elsewhere. With the other family, a party dignitary from Budapest, his wife, and two adult children—the friendly and accommodating Boglárs established a congenial living arrangement that lasted for the entire six years of their residence in the Boglár home. After the Ujdomb family moved out, Sándor, Klára, and little Tamás were allowed to take one of the rooms in the main house, and for the next four years the two wives shared the kitchen in peace and cooperation. Tamás started school in 1952, attending his father’s old school in Ódomb, which of course no longer belonged to the Protestant church. The school, which now formed part of the state-operated public educational system, was a facility with eight grades. In spite of a considerable number of immigrants to Ódomb, the majority of the children were the offspring of the old families. The teachers, however, without exception

The Boglárs 49

came from elsewhere and were instructed in the proper treatment of these children of the enemies of the state. The children were all forced to join the Young Pioneer movement, recite slogans in praise of the Soviet Union and the party, and denounce kulaks and saboteurs. Tamás knew many of the other children, and as objects of this treatment, they soon formed a silent but solid bond that endured for decades. An important experience that had a lasting effect on Tamás was his early participation in farm work. In the summers, beginning at age six, Tamás started to help his father and grandfather and was given the responsibility of pasturing the family’s cows. Having lost the fields and farms, the Boglárs now had to keep the animals inside their yard. Fodder was hard to come by, but they were allowed to use the abandoned pasture outside the village that had been considered an impromptu commons for some years. Tamás and other small boys of a similar age were entrusted with driving out the animals after the morning milking and getting them back to the village for the evening milking. They stayed out in the fields all day, playing and enjoying the feeling of limitless freedom. The First Cooperatives By early 1952 the cooperative movement finally reached Tiszadomb. Up to this point the call to collectivization had received little response here. In 1952, as part of a nationwide campaign, organizers came and started a number of small cooperatives on some of the lands abandoned by the kulaks and not used by the State Farms. Most of these were unsuccessful and relatively short lived. Their membership consisted of former landless laborers and factory workers who had little knowledge or understanding of agricultural methods. Because of their low level of production, the cooperatives soon became the laughingstock of the community and reinforced the already negative image of the movement. The phase of forced collectivization was relaxed in 1953, when a new prime minister, Nagy Imre, took over from Rákosi a few weeks after Stalin’s death. Nagy was opposed to wholesale collectivization and pointed to its dismal results, especially the productive capacity of the middle peasants. He permitted cooperatives to disband, and about a third of them did so. Production figures began to improve and continued to do so through 1954, when Rákosi came to power again and initiated a new phase of collectivization.

50 An Ódomb Family

Nineteen fifty-four became known as the year of terror in Tiszadomb. The Nagy period of relaxation was over, and many people who were thought to have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by it and reclaimed their land were arrested. A new mayor and a new party secretary were sent from Budapest, both of them proven cadres who carried out the central directives to the letter. To make matters worse, the fall harvest of 1954 was dismal, followed by food shortages during the winter of 1955. The compulsory delivery system was escalated to the extent that a virtual epidemic of flight from the land started up again. During these years the Boglár men laid low, working quietly on their remaining land and trying to cooperate with the authorities as much as possible. They decided not to reclaim any of the land they had previously donated to the cooperatives. This turned out to be a fortunate choice. After Sándor volunteered to contribute to a national development fund in 1952, thereby setting a good example of cooperation with the regime for his fellow kulaks, the family was less harassed. Because of this and because of good management and also some luck, the Boglárs remained economically solvent. In 1954 they had a good harvest of apples, which they somehow managed to store without being caught. The local price per kilo at the time of harvest was 1.50 Ft, but by saving it for the following spring, they sold it in Budapest for 15 Ft per kilo. Their total earnings were 250,000 Ft, an unheard of amount in those hard times when the price of a privately owned apartment in Budapest, was 100,000 Ft. Klára took her husband and two sons on a shopping expedition to Budapest, where in spite of their protestations she had two sets of suits made for each of them by the best tailor. The rest of the money was the basis of their survival during the coming decade. It enabled them to pay their taxes and fulfill their quota of deliveries. Others, however, were not as fortunate, and the general mood that characterized the society of Ódomb was one of fear, depression, and hopelessness. The Revolution of 1956 It is not surprising, therefore, that the news of an anti-Communist uprising in Budapest was received with tremendous interest in the community. The first snippets of information that reached Tiszadomb were not clear. Contradictory interpretations of the events were published by the local newspaper, an organ of the Communist Party, on different days. On October 24, 1956, a day after demonstrations in Budapest and the

The Boglárs 51

outbreak of armed engagement between the secret police and the demonstrators, the paper still called for the consolidation of Marxist–Leninist principles in party politics. On the following day, the paper informed its readers that counterrevolutionary activities, provoked by Fascist elements, were going on in the capital, threatening the democratic order of the country. Finally, on October 26, it greeted Nagy Imre as the new prime minister and Kádár János as the new party secretary. Meanwhile, demonstrations that broke out in Kecskemét, the county seat, were quickly crushed by the armed forces and went unreported. These bits of news were followed avidly by the people of Tiszadomb. During these October days, individuals met on street corners and in private houses, defying the ban on the congregation of more than two people. By October 26, revolution was in the air, and Orkán, the hated head of the Delivery Office, was caught trying to escape on a government truck. He was pulled off and sent home but managed to flee from the village on foot. On October 27, spontaneous demonstrations took place at three locations: the trade union building, one of the local factories, and in front of the village council building. It was unclear who organized these and why they occurred simultaneously, but once news of them spread, people from all over the community, including the most remote farms, started arriving. By 11 A.M., the workers’ group from the factory had merged with the group from the trade union building and moved down the road to the council building. Here they were joined by the third group, and an everswelling throng of people marched down the main artery toward the railroad station in Ujdomb. Their intention was to circle around the central part of the village and eventually to return to the council building for a revolutionary meeting. Along the way, they sang national songs and shouted anti-Communist slogans. It was estimated that by the time they returned to the central square fronting the Catholic church, there were at least two thousand people of all ages in the crowd. They stopped at the monument of the national flag, where they were met by the mayor who responded to their petitions and promised to help remedy their grievances. Foremost among these was the demand to abolish the hated compulsory delivery quotas. The mayor cautioned the crowd against violent actions and asked for cooperation in keeping the peace. He also agreed to meet with a delegation in the afternoon and prepare the council for a democratic election of new members. The assembled crowd then started singing the national

52 An Ódomb Family

anthem and prepared to peacefully disband when at 12:30 P.M. it was suddenly attacked by fire from a military aircraft. It is more than likely that the aircraft had been sent from the Hungarian Airforce headquarters in Kecskemét, but it was unclear who had given the orders and why it had attacked the peaceful demonstrators of Tiszadomb. The plane circled around the village three times, each time returning with yet another volley of fire. The shots first hit the thickest part of the crowd standing by the flag, killing and wounding a number of people and sending others into panicked flight. The mayor himself was in peril of his life but managed to duck into a nearby house. Others fled into the church, into cellars and houses, and into the council building. Those who could, dragged or carried the injured, and many of them were also hit in the process. The Catholic priest tried to dress the wounds by tearing up the altar covers and vestments. All in all, 17 people were killed and at least 110 wounded in the attack (Tiszakécskei Honismereti Kör 1995). Sándor and Dénes participated only peripherally in the demonstration and were not hurt. At first, news of the uprising in Budapest had caught them by surprise. Sándor, more of a realist, was concerned about repercussions, but Dénes was elated. He had hoped that a change in the political system would ensure an easier future for his son; to show his appreciation of the events, he went to Ujdomb and joined the group at the flag. The killing of the unarmed demonstrators cast a pall on his hopes. However, for several days afterward, it appeared that the revolution was succeeding in the capital and that the Nagy government was managing to stay in power. In Tiszadomb, the police and the staff of the Delivery Office fled. There was another demonstration in the main square in which several hundred people burned their delivery booklets. Members and the staff of the council, however, remained and were concerned about public order but, for obvious reasons, were afraid to take matters into their hands. Soon, two new institutions of local authority were established, the National Committee and the National Guard, which took over the role of the council and the police respectively, making the old council obsolete. Dénes was approached by one of the staff members on October 29 to help organize the local National Guard. He was reluctant to get involved but finally saw that maintaining peace was possible at this point only if people with his background and authority took part. With the help of a group of Ódomb cultivators, who primarily staffed it, the new National

The Boglárs 53

Guard moved into the police headquarters and tried to keep order. Seres Pál, son of another Ódomb peasant, was elected commander. The membership of the National Committee was more mixed, but the upper and middle strata from both Ujdomb and Ódomb predominated. Its elected head was Batka Gyula, a teacher in the Ujdomb elementary school, the offspring of wealthy cultivators who had been prominent members of the prewar society. These two new political organs organized new elections and kept the peace. An attempt to burn down the Ujdomb Town Hall by some youthful hotheads was preempted by the swift action of a National Committee member who extinguished a flaming carpet about to be thrown into a gasoline drum. The revolution was defeated in early November, when Soviet troops entered the country, deposed Nagy, and elevated Kádár to head of state. But life in Tiszadomb seemed to have vastly improved for the few months between November 1956 and March 1957. The hated Orkán and his Delivery Office crew had disappeared, the delivery quotas were abolished, agricultural collectives and State Farms were disbanded, and confiscated or “donated” farms and houses were returned to their original owners. People held their breath and hoped for the best: perhaps the bloodshed of the innocents had paid the price of freedom for others. This optimism was short lived. It soon became clear that the new Kádár regime had instituted a reign of terror under the cover of Soviet bayonets. Resistance was broken by arrests, executions, and deportations. There was also a purge in the party and state apparatus of both Nagyists and the old Stalinist guard. In the spring of 1957, new police came to Tiszadomb and the National Guard was disbanded. Seres Pál was arrested and later executed. The other Ódomb peasants who were involved, including Boglár Dénes, were arrested but soon released. A new mayor, formerly a miner, and a new party secretary, formerly a tailor, were appointed, both of them from outside the community. Bitterness against the regime was extreme, and interpersonal animosities surfaced as well. There could no longer be any pretense that a Communist Party–led government was in power because of the will of the people. The Kádár government, meanwhile, decided to follow a step-by-step economic reform and for the time being relaxed the drive toward collectivized agriculture. In mid-1957 the proportion of collective members in the total agricultural labor force of the country stood at 6.1 percent, and the number of private farms reached the 1949 level. The situation in Tiszadomb was even more extreme: there were no collective members left at all.

54 An Ódomb Family

The postrevolutionary years of 1957, 1958, and 1959 remain in the memory of the people of Tiszadomb as golden in terms of economic well-being. In spite of the political reign of terror, being allowed to cultivate private farms, without the imposed compulsory deliveries, was considered to be the important achievement of the revolution. The price of wine and fruit was high, and the peasants of Ódomb thought that their years of trial were finally over. The Collectivization of Agriculture Soon, however, serious party efforts to reconcile the peasantry with Communist rule began, and a new collectivization drive was launched in January 1959 with the Cooperative Land Reform Act. The avowed aim of the drive was the modernization of the underdeveloped, obsolescent agricultural sector and the creation of cooperatives on the Soviet model. The major difference this time was that “Lenin’s principles” of voluntariness, gradualness, and state support were followed more closely. The relative smoothness of this transition, for the most part, can be attributed to the pragmatic style of leadership introduced into Hungarian politics by Kádár and to the increased financial support by the state of the agricultural sector. This support had been lacking in earlier years, characterized by a forced drive toward industrialization that imposed heavy economic burdens on agriculture. In the Kádár years more was invested in the agricultural sector, and a measure of voluntariness was achieved by using economic incentives instead of coercive regulations. Gradualness was observed in that small-scale methods were given recognition, especially the treatment of household plots. Other, simpler types, the so-called specialist cooperatives, were allowed where the artel type was found unsuitable—for example, in fruit-growing areas and vineyards. In this manner, within two years 96 percent of the country’s arable land was collectivized. Gradualness notwithstanding, most people in Tiszadomb in the beginning of this period wanted nothing to do with collectives. Very quickly it became clear, however, that there were no alternatives. Agitators came by truckloads to the village in early December 1959, first visiting and trying to win over those locally respected individuals who were considered a key in encouraging others to join. When friendly persuasion produced few or no results, they turned to force. Some people were arrested, some threatened, others were called to the village council and beaten; one man, reputedly, was killed.

The Boglárs 55

The agitators came early to the Boglár household since Sándor and Dénes were not only known to be members of an old and respected family, but were also considered moderate and reasonable by the party. They were told that Tiszadomb was slated to be a cooperative village by the end of the year, and they were asked to sign the entry declaration. This was required of all new members in order to prove that the act was voluntary. Sándor, who was by this time sixty-four years old, refused, and no amount of persuasion or force changed his mind. At his age he could see no role for himself in a collective and no possible adaptation to cooperative labor. Those of his contemporaries who did join were very quickly pensioned off, receiving a minute pension if they stayed as long as five years. Dénes also refused at first. When the agitators returned, he was told that unless he joined, his son would be prevented from entering any educational institution after his completion of the first eight years of schooling. He joined in the last days of December, taking his land of about 4.5 holds of vineyard with him. Sándor and Miklós donated their lands to the common. The Cooperative Law of 1959 required that a new cooperative member bring all his property, including the seed from the previous harvest, with him. The cooperative in turn agreed to pay an annuity for the land that was not to exceed a set amount. The relationship of the members to the cooperative was to be as co-owners, not as employees. This meant that their wages were to be paid in accordance with the earnings of the cooperative, that they had decision-making power, that they could not be dismissed, and that they were entitled to a plot of household land. The size of this plot was eventually agreed on as one hold. In order to receive a full household plot, a member had to show full membership— that is, he or she had to have worked a certain number of days per year. This was established as 250 days for men and 200 for women. In Tiszadomb, as in 1952, at first a number of cooperatives of different sizes sprang up. By 1961 most of the smaller ones were incorporated into the larger ones, resulting in six that soon became four. In Ódomb, the Freedom (Szabadság) Cooperative was resurrected on 4,760 hectares of land, much of which it gained after the smaller and weaker cooperatives joined it. The cooperative at this point had 1,280 members, of which 976 were active and the rest retired. In January 1960 an organizational meeting was held for the Freedom Cooperative in the House of Culture, the former home of a wealthy

56 An Ódomb Family

cultivator. It was unfortunate that the party nominated for president a formerly landless laborer who was duly elected by the membership and who then proceeded to bungle production in the following year. He was followed by another person of similar ilk, under whose management the Freedom became the laughingstock of the community. Finally, Sas Vincent, a former mechanic and movie projectionist who had married into a wealthy Ódomb family, took over. It was known that he was a personal friend of Losonczi Pál, the president of the Council of Ministers, and it was hoped that through him the collective would receive special help from the central government. Whether it was because of this special state assistance or because the Freedom’s lands were excellent, throughout the 1960s the cooperative remained solvent and production results gradually improved. They never matched those of the Ujdomb Peace (Béke) Collective, however, which had considerably poorer lands but was allowed to be led by a group of former middle peasants. Nor did Sas himself ever gain acceptance among the Ódomb cultivators. Dénes, having joined as a cooperative member, was obligated to accept a position but not necessarily in his home town. He decided that in order to avoid conflict with the local leadership, which he thought was inevitable given his family background and his considerably higher level of education, he should look for work elsewhere. First, he took a job as agronomist at the State Farm of a neighboring village but soon tired of it when he saw how poorly it was run. Next, he accepted a similar position in a cooperative in Nagykõrös, but he soon came into a conflict with its president. During these years of central state control over the cooperatives certain branches of agriculture were supported and the directors were told what to grow. Dénes saw the folly of planting unsuitable crops on lands where they were doomed to fail and fought against this, the result being that he was asked to leave. One positive outcome of the Nagykõrös debacle was that after twenty years of living as a widower, Dénes finally met a woman he wanted to marry. Kocsis Anikó was a native of the neighboring town of Cegléd, a daughter of a formerly wealthy peasant cultivator whose social standing, lifestyle, religious orientation, and values were very similar to those of the Boglárs. She was thirty-two years old when they met (ten years younger than Dénes), had a medical degree, and held a position specializing in ear, nose, and throat diseases at the Nagykõrös dispensary. They both felt that this was truly a match made in heaven and wanted to marry immediately. The only obstacle was that Dénes felt obligated to com-

The Boglárs 57

mute between Tiszadomb and Nagykõrös, at least on the weekends, in order to take care of his ailing and distressed father. Anikó did not want to give up her job and move to Tiszadomb as long as Dénes’s employment was in Nagykõrös. The problem was solved when he lost his job and in the summer of 1964 moved back to Tiszadomb. Much to the joy of Sándor and Tamás, who had been concerned about his happiness, they married in the Ódomb Protestant church and took up residence in the old Boglár house. Anikó was offered a job in the Tiszadomb Health Center and they seamlessly settled into married life. Because they thought that they were too old and because of their double careers, they decided not to have any children. Dénes attempted to swallow his pride and work with Sas in the Freedom Cooperative, only to see his worst fears come true. Sas could not get along with the competent and well-trained former landowner, who had little respect for Sas as president, and he made it a prestige issue to constantly contradict Dénes publicly. Dénes quit before he could be fired. At this point he decided to ask the county council for a job where his knowledge and education could be utilized, only to be told that because of his kulak background he could not be trusted with a leadership position. It was then he realized that there was no place for him in this society. Finally, the Nagykõrös cooperative, which had previously asked him to leave, having realized what it had lost, asked him to return. After a discussion with the president, who promised him more cooperation and more authority, he decided to return in the winter of 1967 as vice president. Since now he had a wife in Tiszadomb, this meant several hours of commuting every day on narrow roads that were only partially paved and that were truly hazardous in the winter. Nevertheless, he remained in Nagykõrös until 1975, when, after a nervous breakdown, he went on sick leave, was finally pensioned off, and returned home, much to the relief of his wife. For the first time in the history of the family, there was only one generation living in the Boglár house. Sándor had died in 1972, and Tamás was married by then. Dénes, at the age of fiftyfive, found himself idle. Neither he nor his father had ever been interested in household plot cultivation, and at this point it was too late to start thinking of entrepreneurial activities. With his wife’s earnings and his pension, they were relatively well off financially, so he turned his attention to remodeling and refurbishing the family home. After years of neglect, the elegant house once again shone with its old splendor, and its lovingly tended flower garden became known far afield.

58 An Ódomb Family

Tamás: A New Beginning Tamás graduated from grade school in 1959 and instead of going to high school decided to enter the agricultural technical school in the town of Szarvas, about an hour away from Tiszadomb. He wanted to be a cultivator, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and father. At the time of his application to the school, the cooperative movement was still dormant and it seemed that private farming would again be allowed. He looked forward to rejuvenating the family lands. By the time he graduated in 1962, the situation had drastically changed: the family had no lands at all, his grandfather was aimlessly wandering around the house, and his father was going from job to job, dissatisfied. While he had been truly happy doing farm work during his school years and enjoyed learning about planning and management, in his anger at the situation he decided to leave farming altogether. Remembering that he had enjoyed working as a cook’s helper in the Hotel Hungaria in Szeged during one of his summer vacations, Tamás now returned there. The chef liked him, and after the three months of his trial period were over, he asked him to stay for two years of professional training. Tamás wanted to remain, but a sudden illness forced him to return home in the fall. This occurred around the time when Sas took over the leadership of the Freedom Cooperative. Sas, who at this point had not yet tangled with Dénes and had no fear of competition from the young Tamás, talked him into remaining and joining the hometown enterprise, which was badly in need of people with specialized agricultural training. Tamás joined the Freedom in October 1963 and at the age of eighteen became the leader of a brigade of sixty men, most of them former peasant proprietors and friends of his father. His brigade was assigned to animal husbandry, taking care of about half of the cooperative’s three hundred cattle and eight hundred pigs. This work was much to his liking. Unlike the other Boglár men, who preferred to work in the vineyards and orchards, Tamás had always been interested in cattle. As a child he had once asked for four oxen as his Christmas present. In spite of the age difference between him and his men, they established an easy rapport and an excellent working relationship. After a year, he was made agronomist and was moved to the headquarters of the division of animal husbandry, located in the outer farm area (known as the “surrounds”) near the old Boglár farms. The responsibility for a man his age was awesome, but he enjoyed the challenge.

The Boglárs 59

In 1965 Tamás was called up to do his army service, and when he returned to Tiszadomb in the fall of 1966, he found that he had a new boss and a new responsibility: the Freedom Cooperative had decided to take on large-scale poultry management. His boss, the chief of animal husbandry, had been hired to a newly created position to oversee all of the cooperative’s activities having to do with the care and raising of animals. Boros András—“Uncle Andrew”—a former manager of a baronial estate in western Hungary, became the patron and role model of young Tamás. He was not only a competent professional, but also knew how to get along with both the president and the workers. He taught Tamás that in order for the unit to look good, its annual production plan had to underestimate what it could achieve. When results were better than the projections, the unit became a much decorated example of the socialist work ethic. Unfortunately, Boros András left after a few years since the one person with whom he could not get along was the secretary of the county Department of Agriculture, who was suspicious of him because of his past. Before he left, he recommended Boglár Tamás as his successor, and in l967, at the age of twenty-one, Tamás was promoted to this post. In his care he now had 600 cows, 800 pigs, 120 horses, 3,000 sheep, and 7,000 chickens (housed in two widely separated locations), and over one hundred workers of all ages and backgrounds. Uncle Andrew, who during his years at the Freedom had established important connections with various state-owned marketing firms, took Tamás around in Sas Vincent’s private car and introduced him as his personal protégé. This served him well in the days of the more liberal economy that was soon to come, when networking and maneuvering among alternative strategies became possible. The New Economic Mechanism By the mid-1960s, it had become clear in Hungary that the strict centralized economic planning system had become obsolete and unviable. In December 1963, a Central Committee plenum entrusted Nyers Rezsõ, the minister of finance, with the task of preparing a program for economic reform. In May 1966, the plenum approved the transition to a new system of economic guidance that went into operation in January 1968. Under the new system of economic management, known as the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), enterprises were freed from the iron hand of central planning and were given increased economic autonomy.

60 An Ódomb Family

The enterprises were allowed to manage their own finances, carry out market research, and negotiate directly with their customers and suppliers. The central plan concentrated only on the main targets and the direction and proportions of development. The state ensured that these objectives were realized through credit policy and by influencing the utilization of the net income of the enterprises, but it allowed them to develop their production more flexibly in accordance with changing demands. After a brief interlude in the mid-1970s, when party conservatives staged a backlash against it, by the end of the decade the NEM was in full bloom. Its “measures were aimed ultimately at strengthening commodity and money relations and market conditions and influences by increasing company independence and the competitive environment” (Berend 1990: 275). In this new wave of reform, the growth of the private sector was not only permitted, but also encouraged. This took place in two ways: by permitting small private businesses to operate independently and by combining public ownership with private activity. According to Iván Berend, this latter, imaginative combination, known as the “Hungarian way,” owed much of its existence to the favorable experiences with the special relationship that had worked so well in the agricultural sector between cooperative and household farming. This model, in which smallscale production was linked to large farms that provided certain services and marketing activities to the small producer, was now lauded as the best of both possible worlds and was seen as an example for the rest of the economy. It led essentially to the legalization of the “second economy.” This resulted not only in the growth of small private industry and the retail trade, but also—and more important— in the establishment of unusual and imaginative combinations between private activity and the public sector, especially in the service industries. One example was a system in which small state-owned shops and restaurants were leased to private families, who operated them on contract. To run such a shop, an individual had to have been employed by the “landlord” company; it then allowed him to bid for the contract, which ran for a maximum of five years. In certain respects the relaxation of legal constraints on repair and service work that was done after hours by those in full public employment could also be considered a similar combination of the public and private sectors. The typical afterhours activities were in the service sector and included appliance, television, and radio repair; plumbing, electrical, and other manual work on

The Boglárs 61

building sites; and the use of private cars as taxis. Small enterprises were also allowed to be established within large state-owned factories, where so-called “economic work teams” were set up and took over a phase of the production process. The main achievement of this period was the modernization of agriculture. Agricultural production by the late 1970s reached a level that made Hungary not only self-sufficient in major agricultural products, but also a net exporter. This was partly due to massive state investments in technology and the consolidation of farms into large production units, but also to allowing these units to function as semi-independent enterprises with locally appropriate production targets and marketing strategies. Additionally, the unique form of cooperation that characterized the other sectors of the economy was allowed to develop to its fullest between the private and the socialized sectors of agricultural production. This form of private farming had been slowly evolving since the complete collectivization of the 1960s. In the beginning, the average area of a household plot was one hold, which was designated to cover the vegetable and fruit requirements of a cooperative member’s family. In addition, the member was entitled to keep one cow and her calf and one sow with her litter. By the time of the NEM, the laws relating to the regulation of household plots were allowed to be interpreted by the leaders of the individual cooperatives, resulting in a variety of arrangements regarding the size, location, and type of activity that was allowed. In some areas, units of household farming also included some inherited, purchased, or leased lands. In most places, the household plots lent themselves primarily to highly specialized, labor-intensive activities, with most of them engaged in vegetable, fruit, and grape cultivation as well as pig breeding. The cooperative retained a supportive role in supplying equipment, performing certain mechanized phases of the production process (such as plowing, fertilizing, and weed control), and often helping in certain phases of marketing. By the late 1970s private sector activities in the cooperatives were no longer limited to agricultural activities. Cooperatives were given the license to establish subsidiary plants in which a variety of items were manufactured, including such things as matches and umbrellas. They also ran machine shops and repair establishments. The result was the production of scarce commodities, both agricultural and industrial, which developed into a highly lucrative enterprise and became instrumental in the emergence of a new agrarian society.

62 An Ódomb Family

New Age at Tiszadomb In Tiszadomb, the beginning of the NEM coincided with the appointment of a new mayor. Joó István was a local man, the son of a middle peasant from one of Tiszadomb’s satellite villages who had been poised for several years near the center of power, ready for the opportunity to grab it. This fortuitous confluence of the new opportunities provided by the NEM and the personality of the mayor had far-reaching consequences for the development of the community. In many ways, because of his background and family history, Joó was an unlikely person to become the champion of this community, which at the beginning of the l960s showed very little resemblance to the “Blessed Village” of the 1930s. The united community of Tiszadomb was a lackluster, dusty village with very few amenities. In the former Ódomb, the postwar policy of prosecuting landowners resulted in their wholesale retreat and the decay and crumbling of the former village center and its splendid homes. In the new center in Ujdomb, the council was controlled by a succession of outsiders who had little interest in improving either the economic base of the village or the general welfare of its population. The events of 1956 exacerbated hostilities and suspicion among the different strata, and the post-1956 reconstruction of the socialist system created further problems. It took a visionary mayor to see and harness the opportunities that had become available with the political and economic decentralization in the mid-1960s. Joó István, born in 1933, grew up in Bög, a satellite farming center of Tiszadomb, the only son of a middle peasant who was later declared a kulak. Despite this rural background, István had little interest in agriculture and farming as a profession. After finishing his studies in the Kecskemét high school, he applied to the technical university but was rejected because of his father’s kulak status. He finished his military service in 1954 and from 1955 on worked as an unskilled laborer in the Tiszadomb fertilizer plant. This made him so unhappy that in early 1956 he took the unprecedented step of writing to Premier Rákosi, explaining his plight and asking for his help. Much to his surprise, the secret police looked into his case, and in the summer of 1956 they secured him a position as an accountant in the Tiszadomb council’s Department of Works. With this, his career was off and running, and in the course of a very few years and after some strategic moves he found himself in the center of power. In the early 1960s , he moved from the council to be-

The Boglárs 63

come the chief accountant of the agricultural cooperative in his home community of Bög. After finishing as a part-time student at the Marxist–Leninist University in Kecskemét, he became the chief economist of Tiszadomb in 1964 and was elected mayor in 1967. From the beginning of his tenure as mayor, and probably even before it, Joó’s goal was the betterment and progress of the community. He was convinced that its current decay had been caused by strangers who had no local ties and interests and who simply carried out central directives that were not in the best interests of the village. His first step was to assemble a loyal crew and to appoint trustworthy individuals—recruited primarily from among his friends, many of whom came from Bög—to key positions. The party secretary, who was an outsider and could not be replaced, was won over to his side and was effectively neutralized. The idea was that this united local group of leaders would mobilize the population, convince it of the rightness of their plans, harness its interests, and thus carry out the ideas conceived by the mayor without opposition. But there was to be only one planner, and while he relied on the others for support, there was never any doubt where the real power was lodged. Joó’s basic strategy was to find out what projects the central government would support and then qualify for that support with local programs. He pursued these opportunities with single-mindedness and considered identifying them the test of his leadership. Always the first step was understanding what they were; the second, attaining them by hook or by crook. The latter was not always easy. While he could choose his underlings, he could not choose his bosses. In the beginning of his tenure, Tiszadomb was just one of thousands of problem-ridden, dilapidated villages in the country, just one small cog in the county and national administration. While the NEM allowed for increased local economic autonomy, the funds to support local projects were limited, and the prioritization of projects and locations was determined by higher authorities. These priorities were often not based on project qualifications but on personal connections. The question for Joó then became how to gain access to these circles of power and how to manipulate them for the ultimate benefit of his community. Even before his election as mayor, while still the chief accountant of the cooperative at Bög, Joó had managed to wrestle advantages for Tiszadomb from the county administration by not quite playing by the rules. In 1965 the local council decided to ask the county council in

64 An Ódomb Family

Kecskemét for funds to build a new House of Culture. It was felt that this would not only serve as a focus for local cultural activities, but also help in the town’s attempts to unite disparate elements of the community, especially its youth. The county council allocated 500,000 Ft for the purpose, an amount sufficient for either the building of a very small house or the renovation of the mansion in which cultural activities were then held. Joó convinced the Tiszadomb council to accept the money and then go ahead and lay down the foundations of a grand new building in the center of town. After this was done, the funds ran out and the council members panicked. Joó was unfazed and asked Kecskemét for an additional 3 million Ft to complete the building. Having already spent the half million for the foundation, Kecskemét decided to bite the bullet and honored his request. This paid for the walls and for the marble in the foyer. When the funds once again ran out, Joó returned to Kecskemét and asked for additional funds to put up a roof, much needed to protect the building before the impending fall rains. He was reprimanded for his poor accounting and given additional funds. At the end, the building costs reached close to 7 million Ft, given bit by bit over a period of two years to Joó, who kept on appearing in Kecskemét, pleading for his community. The result was the erection of a House of Culture that was without rival in central and eastern Hungary, and to which visiting artists could be invited from all over the world. It put the name of the community on the cultural map of the country. After he became mayor, Joó showed an uncanny ability to establish give-and-take relationships with key people in the county administration and the central government. Under the prevailing circumstances, the only way to be a successful economic and political leader was to ask those in power for help. To get this help, it appeared to be a good idea to have first offered some favors that could then be called in. Joó had access to some people in power through the old connections of Ujdomb Communists. For example, the president of the Council of Ministers, Losonczi Pál, was an old comrade of Sas Vincent from their days as presidents of postwar cooperatives. Sas, living in Tiszadomb, was beholden to Joó. Others, he cultivated through various advantages and favors. If all failed, he won them over by the power of his personality and his visionary plans. In all of these manipulations, he used the community’s resources as his bargaining chips, but the benefit and advantage he gained were also for the community. Once he had established his networks, he no longer bothered to comply with decrees and rules that he considered

The Boglárs 65

cumbersome and overly bureaucratic; he simply went around them. Of course, this was possible only with the knowledge and tacit approval of the higher-ups. As a first step in establishing connections to the central government, Joó managed to get his boyhood friend from Bög, Ördög János, elected as parliamentary representative for the district. This office provided a location in the capital where powerful people could initially be invited, wined, and dined. Eventually, many of the Central Committee members were asked to Tiszadomb for all-expenses-paid hunting parties and were sent venison and locally produced wine for Christmas. Later, many of them were given building lots on the banks of the Tisza, once the development of the local spa was under way. In 1980, in addition to being mayor of the town, Joó himself replaced Ördög as parliamentary representative. He was now ready to take advantage of the position that gave him the opportunity to meet informally with the country’s leaders, as well as legal immunity from inspections and investigations. By the end of the decade, Joó’s power in the community was almost limitless. In the prevailing political system of Hungary, there was a lack of democratic process or grassroots political organizations that could provide local control over leaders. The only control over a local mayor was central. Once this was countervened and manipulated in a system of favors and counterfavors, Joó had absolute power in the community. But since his power rested on the goodwill of others and its legitimacy was somewhat shaky , it contained a trap: there was always the danger that it could be withdrawn and his semilegal activities uncovered if he should for some reason displease his patrons or if they found it expedient to drop him to save their own skins. Primarily as the result of Joó’s efforts, in Tiszadomb the decades of the 1970s and 1980s seemed to recapture the glory of the 1930s. He saw that the first step in improving the economic base of the community was to reform the functioning of the agricultural collectives in such a way that they not only became more productive on the common fields, but also provided an incentive for individuals to work for their own benefit on private plots. He understood that many of the peasants were opposed to the collective only as long as their own economic interests were not met. Thus, taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the NEM, he put a plan into effect to interpret the governmental guidelines for the management of agricultural cooperatives in such a way as to broaden them and adapt them to local needs. .

66 An Ódomb Family

Both the Peace and Freedom Cooperatives did very well under this regime, and their members prospered through the opportunities provided by the second economy. When in 1975 the two cooperatives were united, Joó managed to use the situation to advantage. Tóth János, the president of the Freedom, was pensioned off. The former president of the Peace, Pap Zoltán, became the vice president of the united Peace and Freedom. As president, a personal friend and protégé of Joó, Buda Károly, was elected. Buda, son of the owner of a dwarf holding from the satellite village of Kerekdomb, was a true “son of the people” who from his early school years on had been helped and promoted by the new regime. After completing his studies, he returned to his native community with a degree in agricultural engineering; he was welcomed by the progressive mayor and was soon made a member of his inner circle. The unification of the two collectives, which now had a total area of 11,203 holds and 1,081 members, gave him a much awaited opportunity to assume a leadership role, working hand-in-glove with the mayor, following his lead in taking advantage of the new opportunities, and bending the rules whenever possible to achieve the desired goal of a successful enterprise. Consequently, a complete reorganization of the cooperative was effected. An important result, as far as individuals were concerned, was a switch from working in geographically assembled brigades to more independent work on the commons. Individual incentives were introduced, and more liberties with the cultivation and marketing of produce from the household plots were allowed. Household cultivation was further made profitable by allocating plots adjacent to members’ houses wherever feasible. This made possible the growing of labor-intensive crops, such as tomatoes, and the keeping of slow-maturing plants, such as fruit trees and vineyards. Cattle could also be kept around the house, especially since additional pasture on adjoining lands could often be rented from the cooperative. The result of these opportunities was that household plot cultivation became extremely lucrative, and since it was possible only as an adjunct to collective work, many younger people began to view employment on collectives as attractive. Personal incomes also rose. Table 2 shows the annual average income for the members of the Peace and Freedom Cooperatives between 1961 and 1974, and for the united Peace and Freedom in 1975. Since it was clear that agriculture did not provide sufficient employment opportunities for everybody and that the community was losing people to industrial centers, the next step was to attract industries to the

The Boglárs 67 Table 2 Annual Average Income in Tiszadomb Cooperatives, 1961–75 (in Forints)

Freedom Cooperative Peace Cooperative Peace and Freedom

1961

1965

1969

1972

1974

600

15,543

17,581

18,356

23,878

1975

28,000 6,795

13,936

19,060

25,944

26,247

Source: Peace and Freedom Cooperatives annual reports. Tiszakécske. Note: These figures include only average wages received from collective work and do not include the income derived from household plot cultivation.

community. The first of these was Remix, an electronics assembly plant that came to the community purely through the clever networking of Joó and his cronies. Joó’s friend and member of his inner circle, Kürti László, was appointed as its local director. The majority of the workers in Remix were women, and their successful retraining in industrial work served as a groundbreaker that convinced other industries that the local manpower could be relied on. In short order other industries followed. Next came a branch of the Budapest Coca-Cola bottling plant, then a branch of National Fertilizers, then a branch of the Kecskemét agricultural machinery assembly plant, and eventually a textile factory. All of these industries were attracted to the community by various offers and guarantees, ranging from initial rent-free facilities to substantial loans extended by the council. Workers were attracted to these jobs in spite of the fact that the wages for the same positions were higher in larger industrial centers since they could compensate by working in the agricultural second economy alongside family members who had joined the cooperatives. Thus both workers and industry benefited, all of which ultimately contributed to the betterment of the community. To attract intellectuals to the community and to improve its cultural life, Joó thought that it was important to promote the widening of local educational facilities. At the time of his election to the council presidency, the local fledgling Folk High School was in the process of being dissolved. Since its inception in 1963, when it was installed as part of a national campaign to improve rural education, the school had been unsuccessful, primarily due to the lack of local support. Tiszadomb parents sent their children to Kecskemét or Szolnok and considered the

68 An Ódomb Family

small local school inferior. When the county decided to abolish the school altogether in 1970, Joó harnessed local sentiments and whipped up a public outcry against this move. After a former Tiszadomb reporter aired the complaint on the Kecskemét public radio station, the president of the county council agreed to come to the village and discuss the decision in a public forum. After a long battle, the county agreed to permit and support the Tiszadomb high school, provided that the enrollment figures increased and the community paid for and provided a suitable building. This was done in a structure adjoining the primary school, initially in an organizational framework where the two schools shared a principal. This allowed the local council to funnel funds earmarked by the central government for the improvement of primary education to the high school. Later, when a national plan for the improvement of high school education came into effect, the council received funds that allowed it to separate the administration of the two and to move the high school out of the primary school. Simultaneously, the primary school’s boarding facilities were opened up to high school students from outlying communities. This met with such enthusiasm that soon a new high school dormitory was built, providing over two hundred new places. Enrollment was no longer a problem. However, Joó did not want Tiszadomb to operate a high school primarily for out-of-towners and made it a question of honor for the local leaders to send their children to Móricz Zsigmond High, the name by which the new school was soon known, in honor of the writer who had celebrated the Tiszadomb of the 1930s. Ördög János became the principal first of the primary school and eventually of the joint primary–secondary schools in spite of considerable opposition among parents who supported the appointment of a man with better qualifications. Throughout all these efforts, the major problem and obstacle to further progress was the lack of funds. The forever troubling question for Joó was how to pay for everything. In spite of clever schemes, the county and the central government would provide only relatively limited amounts and not fast enough, and local citizens could only be cajoled into contributing and helping with so much. Early in his career, as chief accountant to the council, Joó had had an inspiration about exploiting a local resource that hitherto had received little attention: the spa on the Tisza. Once he became mayor, he declared that the future of the community would be decided on the banks of the river. Since modernization and industrialization had to be paid for and the community had no money,

The Boglárs 69

it had to utilize whatever resources were available. He understood that the value of the land adjoining the Tisza would be considerably higher if used for developing a local spa rather than for growing corn. It was this strip of land, approximately two kilometers long and half a kilometer wide, that came to be viewed as the key to solving Tiszadomb’s financial problems. The obstacle was that it was not owned by the community but by the agricultural cooperative and some private owners who had managed to hang on to a few parcels here and there. The collective had acquired most of it from Ódomb cultivators during the wholesale collectivization drive of the 1960s. With very little effort—the president was after all his good friend—Joó first convinced the leadership of the cooperative to swap the land for an equal amount of community-owned land elsewhere. Private owners presented more of a problem: they either did not want to give up their land or wanted to be paid for it at market price. Eventually, most of them received some compensation, either in cash or in the form of lots elsewhere, often with additional guarantees of bank loans and secured building permits for new homes. Those few who refused to budge were forced off the land by governmental expropriation. Once the council owned all of the land it needed, work began to clear out the old vineyards, orchards, and cornfields— paid for by public funds. Public funds were also used to build a thermal bath, consisting of a series of pools utilizing the natural hot springs that were discovered adjacent to the river. This, of course, necessitated the development of the sewage, water, and electrical systems. Once these were in place, as repayment for their collaboration, cooperative and council leaders were “sold” the first lots for a pittance. Many of them held these only until their value rose substantially, when they resold them at highly inflated prices. Needless to say, this caused an outcry on the part of those whose hard-earned family lands had been taken by the cooperative to be cultivated as common lands, then swapped with the community for vacation lots, and eventually given out to favored individuals and sold at profit, with the original owners receiving nothing or little as compensation. The lots were also given out as gifts to Central Committee members and party leaders from Budapest; some lots even included small vacation homes, built with the help of the cooperative’s brigades. The funds for all these manipulations were laundered through the council’s accounts, with not a penny going to any of the council members or to Joó. What they and the community gained was a booming development

70 An Ódomb Family

around the Tisza’s thermal bath and sandy beach, which was also leveled and filled. By the end of the 1970s the Tiszadomb spa had about a hundred houses, paved roads, several restaurants, bars, grocery stores, greengrocers, boutiques selling everything from inflatable rubber floats to bathing suits, and a sizable campground. The taxes and revenues from all these sources were channeled to community development projects, including the high school and the industries. It soon became clear to Joó that the goal to reach for was the acquisition of city status for the community. Under the prevailing socialist policy urban centers were considered more progressive than rural ones and qualified for more central governmental support. The urban development program, however, was also centrally directed, with the national government earmarking selected villages for this purpose. Tiszadomb was not among these, primarily because it was surrounded by cities on all sides and there was no perceived need for further urban growth in the area. The process thus had to be started through local efforts and local funds. Before a community could apply for city status, a number of requirements had to be met, including a particular occupational structure; an infrastructure including running water, sewage, and central gas; and a certain level of transportation and communication networks, health and cultural facilities, and service industries. Some of these were already in place by the mid-1970s, but others, such as piped water and central gas, had to be developed, and for this the residents had to be won over and eventually taxed. As success begot success and as prominent leaders were gradually won over and funds started coming in from the government, the standard of living rose visibly. A local newspaper was started and the synagogue, abandoned during the war, was rebuilt as a library. Beautification and reconstruction projects were started in the village center, and well-placed and clever nationwide propaganda started extolling the virtues of the community. Tiszadomb became an example of a socialist success story, shown to prominent foreign visitors. At the end of 1985, the community achieved the coveted city status, with all the attendant advantages. From here on, the sky became the limit for community development projects, and the popularity of the Joó-led council had never been higher. Tamás: The Making of an Entrepreneur Tamás, in his position as chief of animal husbandry, soon saw that new opportunities had opened up for those who understood how to take ad-

The Boglárs 71

vantage of them. At this point in his life he was mostly interested in utilizing these opportunities for the benefit of the cooperative. Maneuvering in the somewhat murky waters of the public sector, however, turned out to be an excellent training ground for the eventual skillful management of his own private economic affairs. One example of maneuvering on behalf of the cooperative was his handling of the “goose crisis” early in his career as chief. After Boros András retired in 1967 and Tamás stepped into his shoes, the cooperative’s animal husbandry operation continued along its successful route. Animals were bought and sold through the county branches of the various central marketing organs, of which an organization called Barneval (a Hungarian acronym for poultry raising company) handled poultry. Tamás, who was beginning to develop a reputation as a savvy manager and clever professional, was approached by the representative of the Kecskemét Barneval early in 1967 and asked to add geese and turkeys to the cooperative’s thriving chicken operation. Barneval was especially interested in geese since in addition to meat these animals provided down and feathers, which fetched a good price on the Western markets. Tamás expressed his willingness but was concerned that he simply did not have sufficient manpower to pluck the ten thousand geese that he was asked to raise. The Barneval representative promised to send a brigade of women when the time came, and as the fall approached and the goslings turned into full-feathered birds, members of the Freedom prepared for the arrival of the pluckers. They never came. Tamás decided that the Kecskemét Barneval had made a fool of him. In desperation he asked around, and through his personal networks he found out that the community of Kerekegyháza, located about one hundred kilometers across the Tisza, had a plucking brigade and was willing to lend it to Tiszadomb. The women came, did the work, and as payment were wined and dined by the Freedom. Tamás was so pleased with the arrangement that he wanted to continue it. However, Kerekegyháza was located in a different county (Borsod), and the pluckers were under contract to the Orosháza (the seat of that county) Barneval. Since Tiszadomb was buying and selling through the Kecskemét Barneval, located in Bács County, it could employ pluckers only from it. Moreover, Tiszadomb was prohibited from contracting for poultry raising outside of its own county and thus could not simply switch from Kecskemét to the Orosháza Barneval. This was an irksome bureaucratic problem, made even worse when it turned out that Orosháza paid 3 or 4 Ft more per

72 An Ódomb Family

kilogram of meat than did Kecskemét. This was indeed a predicament for which Tamás found a clever solution. He contacted the representative of ÁFéSz, a national marketing organization that could buy and sell most anything and was not limited to a specific territory. By selling his geese to the ÁFéSz in the Orosháza area, which then sold it to the Orosháza Barneval, he circumvented Bács County’s stranglehold on his dealings. He was so pleased with the arrangement that he continued it in the following years, eventually selling his chickens to the Orosháza Barneval in this manner as well. Needless to say, this did not please the county organs, and Tamás and the cooperative’s president were interrogated personally by Romanyi Pál, the Bács County Communist Party secretary. When Romanyi understood the situation, he had a good laugh and agreed that of prime importance was the cooperative’s profit margin. At the end, he congratulated Tamás for his cleverness in circumventing the state bureaucracy that had proved to be so stultifying. Tamás was doing well in his personal life as well. In 1968 on his rounds of the cooperative’s new barns in the area known as Szerfás, he met a young woman whose parents had a house and farm across the road. These were old Ódomb lands, where the Kis family had for generations owned a number of farms. In the early 1950s, when the kulak persecution and collectivization came, in the hope that they might prove to be more invisible away from the center, the Kises decided to give up their town house in Ódomb and took up residence on one of the farms. Needless to say, like all their friends, they lost their land but could at least keep a household plot next to their residence, and in the 1960s they began to reap the benefits of this by growing hothouse tomatoes and paprika on a fairly large scale. For the cultivation of these labor-intensive crops it was a great advantage to live right next to the plot and to be able to pump water, mix fertilizer, and control the temperature from home. The disadvantage of this choice of residence was that the Kis children grew up in this outlying area and had to attend the local one-room school, where the standard of education was much lower. They also lost contact with their Ódomb peer group, so that while the Kis and Boglár families had been friends for generations, Tamás had never before met Ágnes, who had just turned nineteen in the spring of 1968. Having met her, however, he suddenly became so interested in cattle that he found himself checking up every day on the new barn construction across the street from her house. Both families welcomed the young people’s courting:

The Boglárs 73

here was a proper Ódomb union in the making. They were married in November of the same year in the Ódomb Protestant church, with all the remaining kulak families in attendance. Because the bride’s parents lived so far away, Dénes and Anikó hosted the party afterward in the Boglár house. They also offered to house the newlyweds, but they declined. Tamás and Ágnes had their eyes on the old Kis family house in town, a quarter of which should have been Ágnes’s inheritance since she was one of four children. As things stood, there was no right to ownership but a preferment at purchase. The house, after the family abandoned it, became the property of the state, or of the local council as the representative of the state. For over fifteen years the council used the premises, which were divided into four units, as a tenement for various families who paid a minimum of rent and took very little care of it. When Ágnes and Tamás found out that one of the tenants was leaving, they bought one of the apartments and started their married life in the former living room of the Kis family home. Eventually they managed to buy another quarter of the house on behalf of Ágnes’s younger sister, who gave over her right of inheritance. Their son, Lászlo (nicknamed Laci), was born here in the first days of 1970. Ágnes was also a cooperative member, but after her child was born, instead of farming she took over the running of the Freedom’s small vegetable store, located on the premises of the former cinema in the center of Ódomb. She took this job because it was near her home and allowed her to check up often on her child, who was left with a babysitter and not enrolled in the state-run crèche. Instead of the allowed two years of maternity leave at half pay she decided to take only a three-month leave since she felt that they needed her full salary to accomplish all they had set out to do. Besides, as an extremely hard-working young woman, she could not imagine being relatively idle for two years. Both Tamás and Ágnes requested household plots adjacent to the Kis parents’ land. They joined their two holds to the Kis’s two, and the two couples began to run a successful and increasingly large-scale enterprise growing hothouse vegetables. Tamás continued as chief of animal husbandry in the Freedom, where he was doing well and was happy with his job, until 1975, when the news about the merging of the Freedom with the Peace came as an unpleasant surprise. By this time the Freedom had a group of people in leadership positions who were knowledgeable about their fields and trusted each other. The cadres who had come from elsewhere and had

74 An Ódomb Family

no expertise in cultivation had either retired or left the community, and their places had gradually been taken over by the sons of former Ódomb peasant cultivators. This included the presidency, which was now held by Tóth Árpád, a much respected former middle peasant who had replaced the much disliked Sas Vincent. Under this old Ódomb peasant leadership the cooperative flourished, and in general the members were satisfied. After unification Tóth became the vice president of the new mammoth collective and Buda Károly its president. As new chief of animal husbandry another Ujdomb man, Finta János, was brought in, and Boglár Tamás was asked to remain as his deputy. The reasoning was that Finta had a college degree and Tamás did not. The same thing was happening in the other branches as well, and soon the Ódombers found themselves disenfranchised and dislodged from all of the leadership positions. They felt that the unification had been engineered by an Ujdomb interest group and the mayor himself, who wanted more control over the cooperatives and could only ensure this by placing his own people in key positions. Those of the Ódomb leaders who were old enough retired immediately, and others started looking for jobs elsewhere. Tamás applied for a position with a poultry-marketing firm that was glad to have him. The Ódomb rank-and-file members, however, begged him to remain and not to abandon them to the mercy of the Ujdomb crowd. So he agreed to stay and tried to work under Finta. He soon found, however, that although the members’ wages increased after unification, there were so many shoddy practices that he had a hard time tolerating them. He had no objection to the reporting of inflated production quotas, but when it came to registering and receiving money from the county for a nonexistent flock of ten thousand ducks, he had had enough. He stayed for three years, and on December 31, 1977, he finally resigned his position. Since he had been so involved in the business of raising, buying, and selling poultry, Tamás petitioned the council for a license to open his own store to market it. Joó denied his petition but suggested that he take over the vegetable stand originally operated by one of the smaller cooperatives and now by the united Peace and Freedom at the spa by the Tisza. Tamás agreed to this provided that he could enlarge the stand into a proper store and in addition to fruits and vegetables also sell poultry. The advantage of this scheme was that by operating the cooperative’s store, he could remain a member and retain his valuable household plot. In the spring of 1978, after two months of training his replacement in the animal husbandry branch, he left his old job and opened his small

The Boglárs 75

store, conveniently located between the entrance to the beach and the parking lot for the pool area. Thus began his career as a greengrocer. Through working with his inlaws, he was already familiar with the vegetable marketing networks and knew which producers had superior quality produce. His wares came primarily from household plots, including his and his family’s. He took only top quality fruits and vegetables, paid a better price than Zöldért (the national fruit and vegetable marketing chain that bought and sold produce locally), and also charged more. His store soon had a reputation for excellence and did a booming business for the cooperative. After a few years he eliminated poultry from his offerings since the price of chickens was low and provided little or no profit due to the mass production of Barneval. Also, the growing and selling of vegetables took all his time. The major problem was that the spa functioned for only four months out of the year, and for the rest of the time Tamás had little to do. Every fall he and his wife went to the regional fair and bought three cows, ten pigs, chickens, and geese. In the winter months he occupied himself raising these, then selling them in the late spring. Although his profit margin was reasonable, he felt that he was underemployed and that he should be earning more. He could not enlarge this operation because his share of the yard at his home was too small and the owner of the other half of the house refused to sell his portion. Although Ágnes was reluctant to once again leave the old family home, they agreed that they needed more space and decided to move. This was a heartwrenching decision for the entire family and one in which all the old families of Ódomb became involved. Relinquishing ownership of one of the old houses, the most important symbols of success in the prewar years, and allowing it voluntarily to go to an upstart nobody from Ujdomb was considered akin to a crime against the old Ódomb society. It shows the determination of this young couple to succeed: in spite of the parents’ and the community’s concerted efforts to convince them otherwise, they prevailed and sold their half of the house to the tenant occupying the other half. But where to go? Ágnes and Tamás agreed that they wanted to remain in Ódomb, in spite of the fact that their household plots were quite a distance away. Their places of work were in Ódomb, and so were their friends and acquaintances. They wanted their son to grow up with the old values, to go to the Ódomb school, and to walk the same streets and alleys that all their ancestors had walked. Just then Tamás found out

76 An Ódomb Family

that Joó had had a parcel of land surveyed for a new residential development. The parcel, which was part of the old Ódomb vineyards where the Boglár family had owned a few holds in the past, was between Ódomb and the river, an ideal location for both Tamás and Ágnes and an easy walk to Laci’s school. The parcel at this point was the property of the cooperative, and only members could apply for a lot. Tamás petitioned to be given the particular piece of land that had been part of his family’s ancestral holdings and where he remembered spending time as a small child with his grandfather. His request for land was granted, but to spite him, the council voted to give him a different parcel, further away from the town. He had little choice. He accepted the land and there he built his new home, a modern two-story house with a large yard and several outbuildings. Here he could have a proper farmyard and a large flock of animals. By 1982 Tamás was ready to further enlarge his other operation. He again went to Joó and asked for a license to operate his own private fruit and vegetable store, in addition to the cooperative’s at the spa. By this time several private businesses, all in the service sector, were operating in the town, and it would have been difficult for Joó to justify denying Tamás a permit . He insisted, however, that he open the store in Ujdomb, reasoning that there was a larger population base there, with more people in nonagricultural occupations who would therefore be more likely to buy and not grow their own vegetables. But Tamás did not want to go to Ujdomb, and eventually he wore down the mayor, who grudgingly granted him the permit to open his own greengrocery in Ódomb. Not finding suitable premises, he bought a lot and put up a new building in a small square at the junction of Petõfi Street and Virág Lane, a small alley leading to the Tisza. Originally this was the location of the central town well, which had been covered up in the 1920s, when Ódomb bore artesian wells at almost every street corner. In order to be able to buy the lot, even with the financial help he received from both families, Tamás had to borrow a sizable sum from the bank. Ágnes now quit her job at the cooperative’s store and started working full time in the new family store. Tamás continued running the one by the Tisza in the summer, keeping animals in the winter, cultivating the household plot with his in-laws, and procuring supplies for both stores, primarily to be able to pay off his debts. After five years, as his finances improved and his business flourished, he finally gave up the store by the spa and put all his energies into running his own business.

The Boglárs 77

With this, Tamás joined a small but growing group of individuals who had taken similar risks and began to shift toward what Szelényi (1988) has called an entrepreneurial trajectory. The majority of the entrepreneurs in Tiszadomb were involved in market gardening, growing primarily tomatoes and paprika under the ubiquitous plastic tunnels. They were joined by the cabbage growers, of whom Papp Jenõ, the largest producer, had, by the mid-1980s, what amounted to a small industrial plant for the processing and canning of sour cabbage. These producers were no longer marketing their produce locally; they were oriented to the Budapest market. They owned at least one and often several trucks, with which they transported their wares to the Bosnyák Square wholesale vegetable market, leaving late at night and returning early the following morning. Tamás differed from them only in that he also sold vegetables in his own store. This was an additional risk, but this diversification also provided a cushion against possible failure in his role as a grower. Without exception, these new entrepreneurs came from formerly rich or middle peasant backgrounds, the majority of them from the old Ódomb elite families. These individuals were not only accustomed to hard work, but also had been raised with a value system in which autonomy, selfdetermination, and risk taking had been highly cherished through generations. Similar to the entrepreneurs in Szelényi’s examples, they had started out as part-time producers with full-time employment in the public sector and gradually began to pursue consumption goals, such as a car, a refrigerator, or even a new house. They worked extremely hard at two shifts a day and intended to slow down once their projected goals were achieved. This was easier said than done, however, since a lifetime’s habits could not easily be abandoned. Of these peasant–workers, all of whom continued to work long hours, a small minority began to intensify production. They eventually accumulated a small fortune, which could be used for investment purposes. Thus they entered the entrepreneurial trajectory in which their entire operation was oriented toward risk taking and capital accumulation. Theirs was a stressful and difficult life, but by the mid-1980s most of the entrepreneurs were flourishing. Their standard of living certainly matched, if it did not surpass, that of the cadres. They had all the markers of financial success: large houses, cars, color television sets, and (for those who took time off) even vacations abroad. Within the social order of Tiszadomb they became a second or economic elite, one that

78 An Ódomb Family

paralleled the political elite. But while the two groups may have been equal financially, they were certainly not matched in power. None of the entrepreneurs were in leadership positions. They became a wealthy but marginalized subgroup, living mostly in Ódomb, even geographically removed from the political seat of power, located entirely in Ujdomb. This was the context in which Boglár Laci was socialized and which shaped his personality and value system long before he entered Tiszadomb High School in 1984. He was the offspring of a proud and righteous family that had survived political persecution and economic hardship and had after many years emerged once again as an example of economic success, now under socialism. Yet this success was also frustrating in that the family had not been able to restore its former prominence in the political arena and felt that its self-determination was severely curtailed. Having run into discrimination and roadblocks at every turn, Laci could not help but resent the political elite’s cronyism, unethical practices, and solid hold on power, denying equal access to decisions for the rest of the citizenry.

3 The Faragós of Ujdomb

Faragó Péter was the only child of one of Tiszadomb’s elite couples. He was a handsome, tall boy with a bodybuilder’s physique of which he took excellent care through daily exercise. As a matter of fact, exercise and sports were his major interests, and gaining admission to the National Gymnastics College in Budapest was his life-long goal. He wanted to get out of Tiszadomb as soon as he graduated from high school and live someplace more exciting. The community with its small-town atmosphere bored him. The sole entertainment facility was the House of Culture, where films were shown three times a week, and the only disco, down by the river, was open only during the summer season. This is where he spent most of his time when his out-of-town friends arrived and opened up their vacation homes. These youths were the offspring of parents as prominent as Péter’s and had also grown up in a privileged environment. None of them had ever had to work; they had all the consumer goods they desired and felt no need to bow to any authority, including the police, who were frequently called to break up their noisy parties. These were the only age-mates with whom Péter felt he had something in common. He had no friends among his peers in Tiszadomb, who considered him arrogant. So during the school year he spent all his free time in the gym, where the gymnastics teacher became his special coach; when he trained for a meet, he was allowed to cut classes altogether. Péter was used to special privileges since his birth. His parents lived in one of the best houses in the Ódomb section of the town, having 79

80 An Ujdomb Family

Faragó Family Tree Faragó Mark = Sörös Mária (b. 1862) (b. 1866)

13 children

6 children

Mihály = Szekeres Verona (b. 1893)

Béla = Balla Rozália (b. 1923)

Ferenc = Szabó Anna (b. 1946)

Péter (b. 1969) moved there from Ujdomb before his birth. In this formerly affluent area, with its beautiful homes crumbling and decaying, theirs was one of the few houses in top condition. They even had a beautiful garden, which replaced the sheds, barns, and storehouses that had served the needs of its former peasant owner. There was a terrace out in the back where the family proudly displayed a barbecue. Inside, the house had two new bathrooms and a kitchen with an electric range. The furniture was modern, city-type furniture, including sofas, armchairs and coffee tables in the living room unlike those found in peasant households. The floors were covered with fake oriental carpets. The stereo and a color television set were in a central position. Péter, of course, had his own room, where he stashed his own stereo and sports equipment.

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81

There were no books anywhere in sight. The family always had a car, first a Soviet-made Lada, then a Mercedes in the mid-1980s. Coming from this home to the Ódomb primary school, where the majority of the students were the impoverished offspring of former kulaks, may have been a mistake that left a mark on Péter for life. The child of the Communist Party secretary was immediately and effectively excluded from most groups, and only children from similar poor peasant backgrounds would play with him. But as a child of privilege, he considered them beneath him. It did not help that teachers and administrators, aware of his parents’ position and influence, deferred to him and gave him special privileges. He had no local friends, became arrogant and unpleasant to his peers, and bragged of his parents’ power over their families. By the time he entered high school, this pattern was set, and Péter was one of the most disliked boys in his class. In his last year in high school it became clear that in spite of his prowess in sports, because of his middling grades he would have a difficult time gaining admission to the institution of his choice. So what was a person in his predicament to do? The only solution that seemed to present itself was the one that had served to pave his way all his life: privilege and connections. Origins At the end of the 1790s two Faragó brothers came to the Tisza Valley as part of a colony of new settlers from Nógrád County. János, the elder, was a manorial worker on the northern estate of the lords who also owned the lands around Ódomb. When volunteers were sought for the move to the south, János gladly grabbed the opportunity to escape servitude, and in hope of a better life he left all he knew behind. To alleviate homesickness, he convinced his younger brother Lajos to accompany him. The Faragó brothers’ expectations were fulfilled only in part. In the new settlement of Ujdomb they were no longer manorial workers but finally landowners, each settler having received a small parcel of about five holds. The land was relatively poor plowland, however—the richer lands had been kept as manorial property—so their main livelihood continued to come from laboring as sharecroppers on the lands of the lords. The brothers were Catholic and eventually married the daughters of settlers from similar backgrounds. Generation after generation the fertile Faragó clan multiplied, populating the community; according to their

82 An Ujdomb Family

current descendants, they are now related to half of Ujdomb, and the family name is among the most common. Descent lines and exact relationships are long forgotten, but the memory of János and Lajos lingers on, and all Faragós proudly count themselves among the founders of the community. The Turn of the Century By the time Faragó Péter’s great-great-grandfather Mark was born in 1862, this branch of the family had no land at all. Mark was a day laborer who lived a hand-to-mouth existence, joining work gangs in the summer for harvest jobs across the Tisza. It was a brutal existence; workers were paid in produce and were housed in temporary shelters or stables and barns. They worked from sunup to sundown, and their measly portion of food was barely sufficient to keep them alive. This pattern of migrant labor was mandated by the fact that the estates around Ujdomb were relatively small and could not provide a livelihood for the teeming population of the landless and the owners of dwarf holdings residing in the community. Nor could the owners of dwarf and small holdings survive on their own holdings, which, due to the high birthrate, became smaller in each succeeding generation. The shortage of land was catastrophic; even if some families managed to save a little money, there was no available land to purchase. With the regulation of the Tisza River in the last years of the nineteenth century, Ujdomb gained acreage in the newly acquired lands. These lands were offered for sale to individual owners, and Mark managed to buy five holds. Unfortunately, as opposed to the humus-rich lands that encircled Ódomb, these Ujdomb lands were poor and suitable primarily for pasturing. Nevertheless, ownership of any kind of land was a major step forward for the poor of Ujdomb, to whom it represented a level of independence for which they strove. By the time Mark had purchased his land, he was in his thirties and married, with a sizable family. He had met his wife, Sörös Mária, the daughter of a manorial worker, as a fellow member of the summer harvest gang in 1882. Mária was sixteen years old at the time, exceptionally pretty and hard working. Since neither of them had property or expectations for any, they had nobody to answer to and nothing to lose and were married by the end of that summer. Because neither the Faragós nor the Söröses had any room for the newlyweds, they decided to build

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their own house next door to the Faragó parents, who lived in the lower end of the village. This was possible only because Mark’s father had a somewhat larger lot than the average and made half of it available to his son. The size of the lot given to Mark was three hundred square fathoms, most of which was occupied by the newly built tiny mud house. The original house, which had a thatch roof and in good years was whitewashed, consisted of one room and a kitchen. The kitchen was built first. This space of 3 x 4 meters was shared by the brick kiln for baking and cooking, a table, some chairs, the double bed for Mark and Mária, another double bed for the children, and a crib for the baby. Since fourteen children were born to them, it seemed that there was always a baby in the crib. Eventually the other room was completed, and the parents and the smaller children moved there. The older children continued sleeping in the kitchen. No child in this family ever had a bed in which he or she slept alone; there were at least four children per bed at any given time. The house was on a crowded, unregulated street, surrounded by similar buildings. At this end of the village there was no room for storehouses, barns, or stables. The only outhouses were chicken coops or pigsties, which were scattered among the houses in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. The stench of the pigs so near the houses was overwhelming and the noise of crying children deafening. It was also a most unhealthy living environment, with frequent epidemics that carried away about a third of the children in each family. As noted, the birthrate was high and the pressure on both agricultural land and house plots incredibly strong. The village grew by leaps and bounds: in 1888 it had 839 houses; in 1892, 1,116; and in 1902, 1,339 (Magyar Korona Országainak Helységnévtára 1888, 1892, 1902). Ujdomb was a highly stratified society, and this was reflected in its architecture and town plan. The first settlers clustered around the Catholic church, which was built in 1743 on the ruins of the original Protestant church, destroyed by the Turks. The Catholic church was refurbished in 1815, and the area around it was regulated. With the original houses cleared out, this area became the village center, with the town hall, an elegant building erected in 1890, and the market square forming a triangle with the church. This is where the main highways from the neighboring towns of Kecskemét, Nagykõrös, and Szolnok met, creating a busy traffic junction. In 1897 the railroad also reached the community, which became a regular stop on the busy Szolnok–Kecskemét run. The

84 An Ujdomb Family

railroad station was built somewhat west of the center on a hitherto unused lot that soon became surrounded by the homes of the poor. The homes of the wealthy and middle layers of Ujdomb society fronted on the central square or on the two wide streets radiating from it. By the early years of the new century the houses of the wealthy resembled those of the rich peasants of Ódomb, but there were relatively few of them. The truly rich landowners of Ujdomb had manor houses and lived outside the community when they were in residence. After the turn of the century there were sixteen families who fell into the manorial category, with estates ranging between five hundred and one thousand holds. Only one holding exceeded one thousand holds. These large estates were the successors of the original estate that had been sold off in the second half of the nineteenth century, at the time when the serfs were emancipated in Ódomb. Since in Ujdomb there were no indentured serfs, only agricultural laborers, land could be bought by anyone who could pay the price. Some of the land was eventually resold in small parcels around the turn of the century to former sharecroppers and manorial workers. But the sixteen families continued to own and control over 50 percent of the land until after World War II. The middle level of society in Ujdomb was relatively small. Holdings ranged between 50 and 150 holds. Because the quality of the land was much poorer in this area than in Ódomb, much of it was in pasture or plowland and not suitable for the intensive viticulture and fruit cropping that made the Ódomb peasants so wealthy. Thus holdings of comparable size in the two communities represented very different levels of wealth, and a much larger parcel was needed in Ujdomb to reach the income level of an Ódomb owner. The vast majority of Ujdomb’s inhabitants were poor. The landless predominated, but families with 2–5 holds were not much better off. The lower end of the village, where this struggling population lived, was the crowded area of the Faragós—without planned streets, with alleyways connecting narrow roads, with low mud houses whose thatched roofs were always in need of repair, all interspersed with the regionally characteristic draw wells. This was the population that provided the workforce and tilled the lands of the wealthier owners in both Ujdomb and Ódomb. By the turn of the century all feudal ties had been dissolved in the country, but this made very little difference in the lives of the Ujdomb poor, whose status had always been that of “free peasant.” Thus while the former Ódomb

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serfs were given the chance to purchase their share of land at the time of emancipation at a reasonable rate, no such opportunity knocked on the door of the Ujdomb laborers. Their lives continued into the next century much as before. The choice for earning a livelihood was between working as servants on a manor or farm or hiring out as either day or migrant laborers. Day labor was the preferred choice and conferred higher status: it provided freedom of movement, usually residence away from the manor, and often the ownership of one’s own home. It also meant a great deal of insecurity since the demand for laborers was less than the size of the workforce. Hence the persistence of the harvester gangs that crossed the Tisza regularly each summer and whose members were willing to suffer through yet another season in hell in order to keep their cherished independence. The lucky ones managed to find steady employment in either Ujdomb or Ódomb with a good owner who hired them year after year and treated them with respect. One such person was Boglár Sándor of Ódomb. None of the wealthy owners of Ujdomb, who had larger holdings than the peasants of Ódomb and who as a rule hired larger gangs, had a similarly positive reputation. An additional source of income that became available during the last years of the century was work on the railroad. With the widening of the rail network throughout the country, line workers were needed in large numbers, and soon kubikos (“earth mover”/excavator) gangs were roaming the countryside, looking for more hands. While this was perceived much as slave labor, it did provide steady income for the duration. The ultimate goal of all of Ujdomb’s poor, of course, was to purchase their own land and to become independent cultivators. The fortunate ones who accomplished this feat through an incredible effort of saving for decades found that the livelihood their small parcel provided was usually not enough to support their families, and they had to supplement their income through day or seasonal labor, much as before. Nevertheless, land ownership and a house in the village allowed them to enter the ranks of proprietors and conferred on them a status much envied by the rest of the poor. Faragó Mark was among these successful poor who acquired his five holds in 1893, the year his son Mihály was born. His parcel in the Dead Tisza area was primarily meadowland, mostly suitable for grazing. Since he did not own cattle, he broke up the soil and with a great effort tried to grow corn. There were bad years and good years, but overall the land did not produce enough to support his growing family without all of its members regularly contracting for other work. Mihály was his seventh child,

86 An Ujdomb Family

his fifth surviving one, preceded by Verona (1883), Mária the first (1884), János (1886), Imola (1888), István (1890), and Mihály the first (1891); he was followed by Margit the first (1896), Mária the second (1897), Rozália the first (1899), Margit the second (1902), Rozália the second (1905), András (1908), and Ilona (1910). The first Mária, Mihály, Margit, and Rozália died as infants or in early childhood, but their names were recycled and used for later surviving children. This was due to a custom that all children were named after either close relatives or a wealthy patron whose help would later be sought for the child. When a child named after a patron died, his name was reused for the next one of the same sex in order to secure the patronage. As the children grew, one by one they sought their own livelihood, most of them leaving the community. With the exception of Ilona, the youngest, all of the girls disappeared from Ujdomb, having contracted as servants either in neighboring towns or in Budapest. Verona, Imola, and Mária worked for various families in the Kecskemét–Nagykõrös area and eventually married and established families there. Margit and Rozália went to Budapest. There Margit worked as a housekeeper for a family for thirty years and never married. Rozália changed positions more frequently but never came home to Ujdomb. Eventually the family discovered that she had given birth to two illegitimate children, whose existence she tried to hide from her staunchly Catholic mother. The children made it extremely difficult for her to find a live-in position, and on and off she was forced to send them to a foundling home while she worked as a maid. Ilona, who was only ten years old when her father died in 1920, remained longer under the tutelage of her mother than any of the other children. In 1930 she finally married Balla Lajos, the son of another of Ujdomb’s owners of dwarf holdings, who was a comrade of her brother Mihály and by then a Communist Party sympathizer. Of the boys, István was killed in World War I. András, who was twelve when his father died, hung around Ujdomb for a few years but eventually walked all the way to Budapest, took a job in a factory, and joined the ever-swelling ranks of the urban working class. Mihály and János stayed in the community. The work history of János is poignantly depicted in a surviving booklet, Servant Identification Book, Issued to Agricultural Servants, by the Ujdomb magistracy in 1910. The first page of the booklet identifies the bearer, Faragó János, as answering to the following description:

The Faragós Born: Religion: Marital status: Permanent residence: Height: Face: Eye color: Eyebrows: Nose and mouth: Hair: Teeth: Beard: Mustache: Identifying marks: Signature:

87

1886 Catholic Married Ujdomb Tall Roundish Blue Brown Normal Brown Complete Shaved Brown Pockmarks Cannot write

The rest of the booklet shows the seasonal contracts that this individual was party to, as follows: January 1, 1911, to January 1, 1912: Driver for Kiss János January 1, 1914, to December 31, 1916: Worker for Anka Imre March 1, 1917, to December 31, 1917: Worker for Nagy István January 1, 1922, to December 31, 1923: Worker for Kulcsár József October 1, 1924, to October 1, 1927: Sharecropper for Csurka László

In 1927 Faragó János was issued a new identification booklet, now named Worker Identification Book. The sole entry in this book is of a contract into which its bearer entered on April 26, 1928, as a harvester. He, along with nineteen others, had agreed to harvest the grain crops on 248 holds belonging to the Erdõdi/Haraszti estates. There is no mention of the type or amount of payment the gang received for this work. Mihály: The First Bolshevik At the age of five Mihály became part of the family labor force when his father contracted him out as a pig herder. His brother István had started the same job in the previous year; his sister Imola was tending geese and Verona was herding cattle by then. The twelve-year-old János was doing day labor. Mihály’s working hours were between sunrise and 10:30 in the morning and between 2:30 and sundown in the afternoon. The most difficult part for him was waking up in the dark mornings and

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hiking out to the farm where the animals were kept. He did this while munching on his breakfast of one slice of bread. For the rest of his childhood he worked in one or another capacity, as part of the ragged army of poor children laboring for a pittance to help their families. Between working hours, Mihály went to school. Ujdomb had two elementary schools, one at the lower and the other at the upper end of the village. The schools were not segregated, but it was understood that the children of the poor were not welcome at the upper end. He enjoyed learning, but because of the limited time he had to devote to it he did poorly and eventually dropped out at the age of fourteen. Because of frequent absences, he managed to complete only four grades. He knew how to read and write, but with some difficulty. At fourteen he was ready and able to work among the grownups, doing a variety of jobs as day laborer. He seemed to be doomed to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors, becoming yet another drudge among the hordes of laboring poor. Then suddenly World War I started, and in 1914, at the age of twenty-one, Mihály was conscripted into the Hungarian Army. He was sent to the Russian front, where he was captured and became a prisoner of war. He lived through the Russian Revolution as a prisoner and eventually worked on an agricultural collective that had been newly created on manorial lands. He not only became proficient in the Russian language but through this medium, like Kún Béla, the Communist leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he learned about Communist ideology. Before returning home to Ujdomb in 1919, he joined the fledgling Hungarian Communist Party, formed on a Soviet model. Upon his return Mihály found the community in the midst of its own Communist takeover as the Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared on March 21. Events followed very rapidly, and as the sole Soviet-trained comrade in Ujdomb, he was thrust into leading positions in the new revolutionary government. Because of his association with things Soviet, he came to be known by the nickname of Marshal (General), a name which stuck with him for the rest of his life. When the Ujdomb worker–peasant council was established on April 16, 1919, he was at first one of forty-five delegates but soon was elected as one of the five directorate members who formed the inner chamber of the local council. Among the first acts of the council was the registration of landholdings and, in early May, the confiscation of properties over one hundred holds. The landless poor of Ujdomb rejoiced; the long-awaited land re-

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form had finally become a reality. Although the exact number of claimants was not recorded, hundreds applied for land in Ujdomb. Before the land could be parceled out, however, the council realized that the first order of business must be the organization of seasonal agricultural work. Planting and harvesting had to proceed on all lands if the community was to survive. It established a number of committees (including the Committee for Threshing and the Committee for Receiving Produce) and tackled the issue of a pay scale for a variety of workers who were hired to do the work. Although it was not completely different from working on manorial lands—some of the former owners and overseers had even been left on the premises as commissars responsible for production—working on the lands confiscated by the council had a communal feel to it. The workers considered themselves part of a labor force that was working for the collective good, on lands that would eventually be theirs. These former manorial estates were not turned into cooperatives proper; it was always understood that at the end of the agricultural season, the estates would be divided up and given out to individuals who hungered for their own land. Unfortunately, none of this was accomplished without the help of the Red Guards, who terrorized the wealthier landowners, many of whom fled the area. While the memory of the 133 days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic instilled hope and promise for the landless poor, it remained one of terror for the wealthy. The Faragó family, especially Mihály’s parents, were somewhat skeptical of all these goings-on and had little faith that their lot would permanently improve. His brothers and sisters were cautiously optimistic, but none of them actively joined the revolutionary process. The only one who registered as a claimant for land was János. They were all tremendously concerned about what reprisals might befall Mihály should the new government fail. And fail it did. Very soon the wealthy had their chance to strike back. On July 30, 1919, the Romanian Army broke through the Hungarian line of defense on the east and occupied Szolnok. The Revolutionary Governing Council of Kún Béla resigned and fled the country. On August 3, the Romanian forces occupied Ódomb and Ujdomb, and the soviet councils of both communities resigned. On August 7, the prerevolutionary government returned to office and immediately started working. In September the confiscated lands were returned to their owners, and the search for Red Guard and council members began. The White Terror of 1920, which raged countrywide, was designed to punish the

90 An Ujdomb Family

suspected collaborators of the Soviet Republic, many of whom were executed. This fate did not visit any member of the Ujdomb Revolutionary Council, although for years thereafter they all experienced difficulties and were under observation for suspected Communist activities. Among the first to be sought was Mihály. Fortunately for him, it was the Romanian occupying forces who were delegated to arrest the prominent local Communists, and since they did not know him personally, he managed to flee. With the help of his family and friends he first hid in the Catholic cemetery, then started walking toward Budapest. When he saw the Romanians coming in his wake, he stopped by a poor farmstead and acted as one of the day laborers. The owner was willing to put him up for only a few days since the Romanians were combing the countryside looking for him. Eventually he reached Budapest, where with the help of Communist Party comrades he stayed in hiding for over a year. Toward the end of 1920 he was seen and recognized by a visiting Ujdomb resident, who reported him to the authorities. He was arrested but was fortunate in that capital punishment was no longer meted out to collaborators, and he ended up serving only one year in prison. The year in prison only reinforced his commitment to the Communist cause. While Ujdomb suffered under Romanian occupation, inflation, and shortages, Mihály and his fellow ex-commissars spent their jail time imbibing Communist ideology. In this they were helped and encouraged by those members of the outlawed Hungarian Communist Party who were in hiding. They maintained regular contact with the party in the Soviet Union and received funds and literature throughout the interwar years. In these years, the Communist Party of Hungary remained small; nevertheless, together with other populist and democratic groups, it continued to represent a voice of opposition against the steady advance of the Fascists. In 1921 Mihály was freed and returned home. He found that life in Ujdomb had reverted to prewar conditions. Although talk about land reform was in the air, little was done locally to satisfy the land hunger or to alleviate the plight of the poor. The sole act of the Ujdomb government in this direction that year was to appoint a committee that was to designate land available for new house lots and short-term rentals. Nine house lots and twenty-three rentals were made available—not much more than a drop in the bucket. Much to the family’s sorrow, Mark died that year. His pitiful five holds were divided up between his two remaining grown sons, János

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and Mihály, neither of whom had the time or the energy to devote to the cultivation of this poor land. After a suitable interval Mihály decided to marry his long-time sweetheart, Szekeres Verona, who had patiently waited for his return. Verona’s father, a manorial worker on the Haraszti estate across the Tisza, was originally also from Ujdomb. She had ten brothers and sisters, and her family lived much as Mihály’s, crowded and poor. The young people had met, as Mihály’s parents had, during a summer as members of a harvest gang. While Mihály was away, Verona took a variety of jobs in neighboring towns, primarily as a household servant, but they had an “understanding” that as soon as they were able, they would marry and live as peasants in Ujdomb. She had no aspiration for city life and was a Catholic of strong convictions. In her new family, it was she and not her husband who kept the children’s birth dates inscribed in the family Bible. Needless to say, she had no dowry and no expectations of inheritance. After Mark’s death, Mária, his widow, and András and Ilona, her two minor children still at home, moved into the kitchen. János and his wife now had the sole remaining room to themselves and their children. Where to house Mihály and Verona became a serious problem. As a known Communist, Faragó “Marshal” was not about to be given one of the new house lots or helped in any way by the authorities. So the family improvised and built an extra room on the opposite side of the kitchen, thereby creating a house whose shape now more closely resembled the locally popular “long houses.” These houses, like that of the wealthy Boglárs of Ódomb, lay perpendicular to the street, with only the windows of one room facing it. Each room had a door opening to an interior porch, which stretched alongside the entire house. The major difference between most long houses and that of the Faragós was that because of the dimensions of the lot, the size of the Faragó house was minuscule. The three women— Mária, Verona, and Kati (János’s wife)—shared the kitchen, which could not be moved into an outside building since there was no space left on the lot. Mihály and Verona had seven children, whom they raised in the one room, the size of which was forty square meters. There were three beds, one for the parents and two for the seven children. Their oldest child, Béla, was born in 1923, followed by Teréz (1925), János (1926), Balázs (1928), Lajos (1930), Irén (1934), and Sándor (1936). The children were raised in the context of the seemingly contradictory ideology of their parents, both of whom had strong convictions

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with which they tried to imbue them. Mihály was an avowed Communist who believed in the equality of people and strongly objected to differential opportunities from birth. He believed in hard work, in speaking the truth, in honesty, and in integrity. He taught his children that they were proletarians but that this did not take away their dignity, and injected them with a zeal to fight against class and wealth distinctions. He was convinced that with the inevitable victory of the Left, these distinctions would disappear and every person would truly be rewarded according to his or her need when the amassed wealth of the bourgeoisie and landed gentry was distributed among the poor. He was a true idealist who believed in the righteousness of the Communist cause. Verona shared the values of honesty and integrity, but she was less interested in the injustice of wealth differences on this earth than in making her peace with God. She also believed in hard work, but as a way to salvation. In 1923 it appeared that Verona’s prayers and Mihály’s beliefs had finally been heard and rewarded. The Ujdomb authorities responded to the Land Reform Act of 1920 by authorizing the town clerk to register land claimants. There is no record in the minutes of the village council meetings of the number of applicants. According to the 1931–32 Chronicle of Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County (an official document published annually), to which Ujdomb then belonged, 442 holds and 576 fathoms were given out to claimants. But of the size and number of parcels there is no mention. Nor are there available records as to the location or origin of these lands. That some of the larger estates were broken up and made available to landless claimants and to the owners of dwarf holdings is attested to by people who, like Mihály, were recipients. One such estate of about 100 holds, along the road to the neighboring village of Kocsér, was broken up into holdings of 100 square fathoms by former manorial workers, who transformed its sandy soil into productive vineyards. This is where Mihály was given one parcel. By and large the land reform in Ujdomb was a disappointment, and it did very little to change the status quo of landholdings, which in 1935 were distributed as shown in Table 3. Since the table indicates only the number of landed properties and does not include the number of landless individuals, it does not depict the true misery of the majority of the population. It does show, however, that land distribution remained criminally uneven, with 3,118 holds (about 20 percent of the total land) shared by 2,143 of the owners of dwarf holdings, while 4,939 holds (about 28 percent) were controlled by thirty-nine large estates.

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Table 3 Distribution of Landed Properties in Ujdomb, 1935 Size (in holds) 0–1 (no plowland) 0–1 (plowland) 1–5 5–50 100–500 500–1,000 1,000–3,000

Number 456 587 1,100 613 23 15 1

Total

16,604

Total holds 188 364 2,566 8,557 1,544 2,715 680 2,795

Source: Royal Hungarian Central Statistical Bureau, 1936. Landholdings in Hungary in 1935. Budapest: Stephaneum.

From his return from prison in 1921 until the outbreak of World War II, apart from working on his small parcel of land, Mihály supported his family as an agricultural laborer. For most of those years he was quite fortunate to have found a position with the widow Demeter, who was managing her medium-sized farm with the help of hired hands. The number of workers fluctuated somewhat depending on the season, but for at least five of them there was steady employment year round. Mihály was one of these, and he managed to keep the post even during the economic crisis of 1929–30. He elected, however, to continue living in his own house in the village and not to relinquish the higher status attached thereto, staying over on the farm only in peak agricultural times. All his children started work on this farm in the summers, beginning at age five, going through the ranks of child labor from pig herder to goose tender to harvester. For the poor, these years on the wide open lands of the Great Plains were difficult, but they would be remembered by many with a certain nostalgia. They had a shared fate, and they knew that to survive it was essential that they cooperate. Members of the Faragó family tell stories about the ways people helped each other and cheated the landlord. For example, after harvest, it was understood that a certain number of sheaves of wheat would not be threshed for the owner but left on the ground to be collected by the laborers or their children. A poor family could pick up a pile of these, take it home, and beat out the grain by hand. This would provide flour for bread for weeks to come. Similarly, the workers were allowed to pasture their own animals on the lanes that ran between

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the various parcels of the estates. On the wider lanes they were supposed to tie them to pegs and could leave them; on the narrower ones they were to lead them by hand. But in this completely flat area, where an approaching overseer could be seen for miles, who would report a neighbor who happened to pasture his cow off the road on the landlord’s prime meadowland? Beyond these minimal survival tactics there was very little cooperation among the members of the bottom layer of society. Although the authorities were on the lookout for Communist activities and closely watched suspected collaborators, especially in Ujdomb, the movement in this area was by and large dormant. The agricultural workers had no local leader and were not organized. Individuals such as Mihály were beaten down and tired out from working from dawn to dusk and were mostly concerned with feeding their families. They saw no way to fight the established order, which was maintained by an unwritten agreement among the landowners. For example, all Ódomb landlords held to a rate of 80 fillers for day labor, and the workers could take it or leave it. At the same time, a liter of wine cost 20 fillers, as did a loaf of bread. A grown man would work twelve hours for either four liters of wine or four loaves of bread and was grateful for the opportunity. Ujdomb Between the Wars Ujdomb, according to a pamphlet written by a local schoolteacher (Emmer Gábor, 1938), was a flourishing community in the mid-1930s. Its population was over ten thousand, with a total of 2,473 dwellings, including those in the outlying areas. That it retained its hierarchical class structure was reflected in its public institutions. The institution of highest prestige was the parish council, composed of the wealthiest landowners, who had taken over the patronage of the church from the feudal lords whose lands they now controlled. Social life centered around a number of clubs specific to each social stratum. The wealthy met in the Old Citizens Club (formerly the Gentlemen’s Club), the middle layers in the Reading Circle, and the poor in the Farmers’ (Gazda) Circle. The tradesmen had their Tradesmen’s Circle and an attached choir. For the young of the middle layers, there was a Levente association and a sports club. Other associations included the Volunteer Firemen, the Cultural Association, and the Folk Educational League. The occupational structure of the community was far more complex

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than that of Ódomb, where, with very few exceptions, the entire population was engaged in agriculture and the wealth differences were relatively small. In Ujdomb not only were there great differences in wealth, but also a diversity of occupations. While the majority was still in agriculture, there were three hundred tradesmen and thirty-five merchants recorded in 1938. The tradesmen included shoemakers, blacksmiths, butchers, tailors, cabinet makers, plumbers, electricians, wheelwrights, turners, automobile mechanics, masons, and furriers. There were grocery stores, bakeries, greengroceries, wine shops, and pharmacies. A variety of mills operated, as well as a dairy, an ice factory, and a brick factory. The village had a hotel and a number of pubs and restaurants. Five people owned private automobiles and five others, trucks. Among the intelligentsia, apart from the mayor, the judge, and three town clerks, there were four medical doctors, a dentist, two veterinarians, a pharmacist, three lawyers, and numerous teachers. There were also two banks, a post office, a motion picture theater, and a print shop. By 1938 the offices and houses in the central area had electricity and running water. The lower end of the village had neither. Quite possibly it was because of this glaring difference in the standard of living between the flourishing upper and the miserable lower village that the writer Móricz Zsigmond did not view Ujdomb in the same positive light as he did Ódomb. For him, this was not a similarly “Blessed Village.” The majority of the population was Catholic, but there were 101 registered Jews, who had built a synagogue on the no-man’s-land between Ujdomb and Ódomb. They had their own rabbi and cantor. As noted, there were two elementary schools, one in the upper village run by the Catholic church, the other, in the lower end, run by the village council. In addition, there were five council schools in the outlying farm areas. A middle school for boys and girls was built in the early 1920s. Béla: Eking Out an Existence in the Interwar Years There was no electricity in the house where Faragó Béla lived as a small boy. The rooms were lit by a kerosene lantern or by candlelight. When the family ran out of kerosene or candles, light was provided by a rag lit in a bowl of oil. The oil came from pumpkin seeds sown among the corn that were then dried and taken to the oil mill to be pressed. This was also the oil used for cooking.

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Bathing was in a wooden trough, usually on Saturdays, and clothes were washed by the river on Mondays. There was not much of either of these activities during the cold winter months when the waters froze. The Faragós were among the more fortunate, for they had a draw well that supplied the water for the family and the pigs. Water in this well did not freeze in the winter, so they had water for cooking and drinking year round without having to carry it from the town well. When Béla was twelve, his teacher, Mr. Bagó, came to visit his parents and suggested that because of the promise he showed, he should be schooled beyond the customary six grades. Mr. Bagó said that he would be glad to recommend him to the authorities for a free place in the middle school if he could be spared from agricultural work. Because he was the eldest child, there was no possibility of this, and much to his regret in 1936 Béla left school and took up full-time work as a day laborer. Of his childhood, his happiest memories were of the summers spent on the Demeter farm, where he, like his father before him, began his career as a pig herder. He slept in the barn on a pile of straw, which he vastly preferred to the bed he shared with his younger brothers at home. At least the straw was dry: nobody peed on it. He worked hard, but the open land provided a wider horizon and an opportunity for roaming— another welcome change from the cramped family quarters in the village. At home he was always hungry. Here there were opportunities for foraging, although if caught stealing crops from the master, he could be whipped. He was also happy to escape the religious fanaticism and strictness of his mother. On the farm he was mostly in the company of other boys, and in the evenings he had a chance to see more of his father. By the age of thirteen, Béla was a full-fledged agricultural laborer. Since he was a young man, he did not have steady work or patrons, so every Monday morning he reported to the Ujdomb central market square, where day laborers who needed work assembled. Women stood on one side, men on the other, and the landowners looking for temporary help went down the line and picked out those who appeared promising. This practice, somewhat reminiscent of slave auctions, was known as the human market. In a few years Béla gained a reputation as a strong and reliable worker and was quickly “sold” whenever he showed up at the market. By this time he was also offered seasonal contracts and was beginning to spend more time living away from the cramped little family home. Most of his earnings, however, he continued to give to his mother, who was in charge of the budget and decided on what and how money was to be spent.

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Béla’s youth did not provide much of an opportunity for the sowing of wild oats. He was a serious young man, hard working and sober, committed to the Communist cause like his father. Nevertheless, he did have a group of young male friends with whom he participated in various activities that were considered appropriate for bachelors. Primary of these were attendance at the feather-plucking and corn- and beanshucking work groups of the girls, where the boys were invited not to work, but to tell stories, sing, and make music. These were cooperative groups in which members went from house to house, doing the necessary work for each. Corn and bean shucking were done in the fall, feather plucking in the winter. These were happy, carefree occasions, with lots of singing, drinking, and eventually, when the work was finished, dancing. Afterward, the young people paired off, and the boys walked the girls home. Béla was far too young at this point to become seriously involved, so he mostly hung around with a group of boys who roamed around the village. One of their favorite activities was to walk up to the edge of Ódomb and taunt and dare the young men from there to a fight. The Ódomb youth maintained a regular border patrol, designed specifically to keep the Ujdomb rabble out and away from their women. When the Ujdombers did cross over, they were received with blows and kicks, if lucky, and with stones, if less so. There were frequent brawls between the two groups that were eventually broken up by the Ódomb police, who sent the bloodied warriors back to Ujdomb with a warning never to return. World War II The war years did not bring appreciable change to the Faragó family. Mihály was too old to be conscripted, and his sons, with the exception of Béla, were not old enough. Béla was exempted because he was found to be flat-footed. So they labored on, much as before: Mihály continued on the Demeter farm and Béla on various short-term contracts. By 1944 so many of the able-bodied workers had been conscripted that Béla, in spite of his relative youth, was given a sharecropping contract with the Takács family of Ódomb. This was an exceedingly favorable situation, through which he received one-third of the produce he grew. In spite of the dislike he felt for the wealthy and propertied classes, he developed a close and harmonious working relationship with the head of the family, Béni. He remained with the Takácses until after the war, when Takács Béni lost his land and found himself impoverished. Béni liked this seri-

98 An Ujdomb Family

ous young man, who was obviously clever and worked hard. He put him in charge of his new apple orchard and encouraged him to experiment with new methods of pruning and fertilizing. The rest of the Faragó boys were also growing up, but their mother had other plans for them. She was determined to move them out of agricultural work. In 1944 János was eighteen and was apprenticed as a tailor; Balázs, two years younger, followed in his footsteps. The fourteen-year-old Lajos was beginning his training as a lathe turner. These occupations represented a vast advance over being a poor peasant and put the boys into quite another sphere of existence as members of the trading class. In the society of prewar Hungary, traders were looked down upon by the landowners, but they in turn considered themselves superior to the masses of the laboring poor. It was only through perseverance, sacrifice, and the earnings of both Mihály and Béla that Verona managed to start her three sons on this path of upward mobility. For her daughters, Teréz and Irén, nineteen and ten respectively in 1944, she had no such aspirations. She simply hoped that they would marry well. In 1944 the German forces occupied the Tisza Valley and news of Nazi terror spread. The Jewish families of Ujdomb disappeared one by one, their fate unknown. Their estates and houses were confiscated and taken over by gentiles. It was rumored that the Communists would soon be deported as well. Mihály, as a well-known Communist and participant in the Soviet Republic, decided to go into hiding once again and fled to the neighboring community of Nyársapáti. Here he worked as a laborer on a farm, some distance from the center of the village. The owner did not know him and asked no questions; he was short of hands and was glad of the help. His family was questioned by the Germans, but it came to no harm, probably because by then the Germans were preoccupied with hanging onto the bridges over the Tisza, which was once again the line of defense between the opposing forces. When in October 1944 the Romanians, now allied with the Soviets, broke through the German defense at the Tisza, Mihály learned that the war in Ujdomb was over and that it was safe to go home. While the fighting was over in the eastern half of the country, it still raged in the west and in the capital city of Budapest. It was not until April 4, 1945, that the entire country was finally liberated from the German occupying forces and peace was achieved. In the meanwhile, the Soviet forces occupied the east, where they commandeered many of the resources and continued to terrorize the war-weary population.

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The damage inflicted by the war was extensive nationwide. Industry, transportation, and commerce were at a standstill. It was estimated that nearly 40 percent of the national wealth had been destroyed. Agriculture’s share of the total national share of war damages was 17 percent, which represented about one-fifth of the total national wealth in agriculture (Donáth 1977: 26). About 45 percent of all animals and close to 40 percent of produce had been demolished. The recovery of agricultural production was especially difficult because the limited number of animals, the lack of good seed for quality crops, and even a shortage of manure constrained growth after the war (Petõ and Szakács 1985: 19). Upon his return, Mihály found Ujdomb devastated by the battle fought on October 25, 1944, between the Romanians and the Germans. In addition, the community had been shelled from across the river and by aerial bombs. The tower of the Catholic church was damaged, the town hall burned, and some of the houses in the central area destroyed. But the worst devastation was on the fields, which, because of the battles raging in the neighboring areas and the armies marching back and forth, had been left fallow. Moreover, dangerous remnants remained of the battles: minefields and barbed wire fences for years thereafter killed or maimed humans and animals. Agricultural equipment had been carried off; there were no plow animals: the horses were either dead or taken and the cattle had been slaughtered. There was no electricity or mail delivery, the rails were torn up, and the bridges on the Tisza had been blown up. The Soviet Army occupied the village, with the soldiers plundering and taking whatever they desired. The population was in terror. Women of all ages were in hiding, afraid of rape or murder. The men were afraid of being imprisoned and carried off to Siberia. The Soviet commander was headquartered in Ujdomb, living in the elegant house of the Erdõdi family, where the representatives of the village government, led by the chief town clerk, tried to establish a liaison with him. Communication was difficult since the commander spoke no Hungarian and the locals spoke no Russian. Mihály, who still remembered his Russian, was received with open arms and enlisted as translator by the village government. For the next year, while the Russians remained in the community, he worked with the Soviet commander and acted not only as his translator but also as his deputy. During this time the Russians attempted to rebuild the bridge north of Ujdomb. This was a major undertaking and necessitated the recruitment of manpower, as well as the commandeering of food to feed the work-

100 An Ujdomb Family

ers. This was essentially forced labor, in which able-bodied men were simply picked up and herded out to work at gunpoint. The bridge-builders were kept in a camp for several weeks, essentially as prisoners. Neighboring villages and farms were looted for food, with the peasants’ few remaining cattle and sheep driven away and slaughtered to feed the workers. Unfortunately for Mihály, he was involved in this undertaking in his role as translator and deputy. When the Russians left the community in December 1945, his arrest was ordered by the mayor. He was branded a collaborator with the occupying forces and imprisoned in Kecskemét for six months. He was released only after Communist power was consolidated in the country and the head of the party personally secured his release. In the meanwhile, the community struggled to bury its war dead, rebuild its public buildings, clear its fields, and feed its people. These activities were directed by the elected officials of the prewar government, who still remained in power. In these early postwar years, while his father was once again involved in politics, Béla tried to stay out of the limelight and continued quietly working for the Takács family. He was now the sole support of his mother and his two youngest siblings, although János was trying to help from Budapest, where he was working as an apprentice tailor. Life in the village started again, and the daunting task of starting up agricultural production had to be faced. The winter of 1944–45 was extremely cold, followed by a wet spring, which made plowing difficult. The community appointed a committee to oversee production, but it could do very little. Part of the problem was that all work that had earlier been done with the help of machinery or draft animals now had to be done by hand. Béla remembers hoeing for twelve hours every day to prepare the cornfields for sowing. There was little to eat; the diet consisted of three kinds of staples: potato soup, noodle soup, and a regional pasta dish with a bit of bacon. These were rotated in a three-day cycle. Land Reform Land ownership and the redistribution of land had been on the agenda of various political parties and demanded by the peasantry throughout the interwar years. While exactly how much land, to whom, and in what manner it was to be distributed were still debated, by the end of the war land reform was accepted as inevitable by all political parties and fac-

The Faragós 101

tions. In December 1944, while fighting was still going on in the western part of the country, Hungary’s first postwar provisional government came into being in the eastern city of Debrecen. It was a broadly based coalition of representatives of the Smallholders Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the National Peasant Party, as well as the newly formed Hungarian Communist Party. During its brief tenure—from December 1944 to November 1945—the provisional government had to deal with many of the pressing problems of the country’s war-torn economy. Prominent among these was the question of land reform, among the first demands of the Communist Party, which supported the widespread distribution of land among those desiring it and the division of all landed estates belonging to those who were regarded as traitors (Völgyes 1980: 364). By the end of the war, basically two competing plans emerged for the distribution of land. (For details, see Donáth 1977.) The plans agreed on the necessity of breaking up the manorial and large estates but disagreed on who should be the major beneficiaries. The first plan, supported by the Smallholders Party, which represented the middle and upper layers of peasantry, advocated that after the manorial workers had been satisfied, those members of the peasantry who already owned equipment, animals, and service buildings should also receive land. In this conception, the land belonged to those who had the wherewithal to cultivate it. The conception rested on the argument that this would result in faster postwar economic recovery, higher levels of agricultural production, and less of a burden on the national government. This view envisioned a capitalist national agriculture based on medium-sized holdings with an essentially “bourgeois peasantry.” It disregarded the plight of the landless peasants, whose continuing role was to be the supply of cheap labor. The opposing plan, that of the Communist Party and the National Peasant Party, argued for properties to be given to the poorest layer of the peasantry, including the landless and the owners of dwarf holdings. Their motto was: “Land belongs to those who work it!” This essentially politically motivated idea was not primarily intended to enhance the development of agriculture but was seen as a vehicle for the establishment of support for the Communist Party among the poor peasantry and the agrarian proletariat. An integral part of the party’s plan was also to avoid alienating the middle layers of the peasantry. Thus it argued for a higher ceiling of peasant landholdings than advocated by the poor peasantry and

102 An Ujdomb Family

proposed a ceiling of one hundred holds for manorial properties and two hundred holds for peasant holdings to be left for the owners after the rest of their land had been distributed. In the end, the Communist Party’s plan was de facto carried out. The division of land began by March 1945 and was accomplished with considerable speed. The urgency was due to both the impatience of the wouldbe recipients and the dictates of the impending agricultural season, when planting had to begin in a timely fashion. National and county-level organizational structures were created to carry out the reform, but in most communities the actual executors were local committees composed primarily of poor peasants representing the interests of the land claimants. These committees took over the jurisdiction from the county organs and paid little attention to bureaucratic procedures; this often led to clashes between the local representatives and the national and county administration, as well as with their own national party representatives. Nationwide, the maximum amount of land to be given an individual was set at fifteen holds. This was dictated, on the one hand, by the total number of claimants and the amount of land available for distribution, and, on the other, by an agreement among the peasantry that no one should have more land than they were able to cultivate without hired hands. In reality, the average size of allotments was much smaller, with considerable regional differences. Nearly 35 percent of the country’s 16 million holds was expropriated, of which 60 percent (3,258,738 holds) was distributed to individuals. Another third of the properties—mainly forests and pastures—was transferred to state and cooperative ownership. All together 342,642 persons received land, with an average of 5.1 holds given to each; 93.3 percent of the land was given to the agrarian poor, including agricultural workers, manorial workers, and the owners of dwarf holdings. This still left thousands landless (Petõ and Szakács 1985; Orbán 1972). In addition to the land, other valuables that served or were connected to agriculture were also expropriated. These included buildings, animals, equipment, and industrial plants that processed agricultural produce, as well as the manor houses and private gardens of the estate owners. For a distribution of the beneficiaries of the land reform, see Table 4. The land reform fundamentally altered the structure of Hungary’s land ownership. The beneficiaries were the poor peasants and the losers were the large estate owners. The middle peasantry was very little af-

The Faragós 103 Table 4 Beneficiaries of the Land Reform, 1945–47 Number receiving Occupation land Manorial workers 109,875 Agrarian workers 261,088 Owners of dwarf holdings 213,930 Smallholders 32,865 Seasonal workers and craftsmen 22,164 Trained agriculturalists 1,256 Forestry workers 1,164 Total 642,242

Apportioned holds 922,255 1,288,463

Percent of land 28.3 39.5

Holds per capita 8.4 4.9

829,477 143,131

25.5 4.4

3.9 4.4

53,866 14,548 6,998 3,258,738

1.7 0.4 0.2 100.0

2.4 11.6 6.0 5.1

Source: Lampland (1995), calculated from Donáth (1977: 76) and Orbán (1972: 42).

fected; their share of landholdings between 1935 and 1949 increased from 38 to 45 percent. The poor peasantry of Ujdomb responded to the news of the upcoming land reform with enthusiasm. After all, having their own land was what they had been waiting for for almost two hundred years. Early in the spring of 1945 a Land Claims Committee was established, and amid some confusion the registration of claimants began. Many were afraid to step forward, remembering the White Terror and the retaliations against supporters of the Soviet Republic in 1919. Nevertheless, at the encouragement of the Land Claims Committee, eventually almost a thousand individuals registered in Ujdomb and Ódomb. Faragó Mihály, whose presence was highly desired, was still imprisoned in Kecskemét, so he had no role in this undertaking, but others from a similar economic background—if not with the same political credentials—took over. The aim of the committee first of all was to redistribute the largest estates and to give priority to those who had no land at all. Since there were considerably more claimants than available land, military service became an additional criterion for receiving land. This eliminated only a relatively few claimants, but it affected Béla, in spite of the fact that his exemption was based on a physical disability. Similarly eliminated were unmarried people and eventually even married couples without children. The parcels were measured under the direction of individuals who had had some experience in either surveying or working with engineers

104 An Ujdomb Family

in previous attempts at consolidating landholdings. The general practice was for the Land Claims Committee to announce the date when each parcel or estate would be divided up and for eligible claimants who wanted land in that area to appear on that day. People naturally preferred to claim land either in areas that were near their homes or where they had previously worked. Since there were generally more claimants than available parcels at each location, the final allocation was made by lottery. There were no attempts to give claimants land from different parcels in different locations to ensure that families received land of equal quality. In a large community with such an enormous land area this would have been slow and unwieldy work. In this manner, all estates over 500 holds were eliminated, and all the large landowning families were stripped of most of their land. Two holdings over 100 holds that remained intact were in the hands of peasant owners, as were eleven holdings in the 50–100-holds range. At this point these individuals were left in peace and were allowed to get on with the pressing work of spring sowing. The owners of the manorial properties either voluntarily fled the community or were threatened with bodily harm and eventually left. The manor houses were stripped of their valuables, including flooring, lamps, kitchen equipment, and gardens. Some of them became the temporary homes of poor agroproletarians, who for years to come camped out in their formerly elegant rooms. The average size of plot allocated in both Ujdomb and Ódomb was four holds per claimant, somewhat under the national average. But there simply was not enough land to satisfy all the eligible families, and a considerable number of landless still remained. The land shortage, combined with long-held personal grudges and favoritism, led to a large number of irregularities in honoring claims. These were orchestrated by members of the Land Claims Committee and later by a new committee, the New Landowners’ National Union (Ujonnan Földhözjutottak Országos Szövetsége, or UFOSz), in collaboration with the locals, resulting in clashes between owners and claimants. Often, land that was illegally requisitioned and taken away was returned to its original owners, only to be claimed anew by the recipient. Many who qualified were not given land at all, whereas those with less claim were favored. This resulted in long and drawn out court cases and appeals with decisions reversed over and over again. The following examples illustrate some of these situations.

The Faragós 105 On May 17, 1946, the county court in Kecskemét decided that the 177 holds taken away from Bálint György in Ujdomb were to be returned to him since he was a peasant proprietor who worked his own land. Subsequently, he made an agreement with the new owners, who had already completed spring sowing, that they could harvest the crops but hand over a third to him in lieu of the use of the land. In spite of the agreement, on July 8 of the same year the new owners chased him off the land. On August 20 his homestead was burned down, and he was threatened with death if he should appear there again. On September 16 there was a new hearing in the Nagykõr¨os appeals court, where witnesses testified that along with his family, he had been threatened with bodily harm if he tried to take possession of his land. The court found in his favor, whereupon the new owners finally vacated the premises, destroying all buildings and barns and taking with them the entire harvest. Two weeks after this, a new fire broke out on his homestead that was put out with the help of his old neighbors, with none of the new neighboring owners participating (Hungarian National Archives, 1946, Box 261). Papp János, a resident of Ujdomb, appeared before the court on April 16, 1947. He stated that he was a widower with six children whose ages ranged between six and twenty. He was a day laborer, a landless peasant who had requisitioned land in 1945. He did not receive any. However, in the spring of 1946 he was given a vineyard of less than one hold. This was taken away from him and given to somebody else in the fall of 1946. In exchange, he was promised four holds of plowland. When he went to claim this, he was turned down. He still had no land, in spite of his preferred status as a landless head of household, whereas the claims of former shopkeepers had been honored (Hungarian National Archives, 1947, Box 270).

Amazingly, in spite of these irregularities and the long-accumulated anger against the larger landowners, there was very little violence in Ujdomb throughout the process of land allocation. Nor was any leeway shown to estate owners if they tried to sabotage the process and rescue their valuables. It was made clear to them that a new day had dawned and that they no longer had a place in this community that they had never called their own anyway. Because of the fluidity of the process of land allocation and the frequent reversals of decisions, it is virtually impossible to find any reliable data in either the county archives or the national archives that would depict final outcomes. Data from the national archives dated July 25, 1946, indicate that at that point there were 306 claims in Ódomb, of

106 An Ujdomb Family Table 5 Distribution of Landed Properties in Ujdomb, 1949 Size of holding (in holds) 0–1 1–3 3–5 5–10 10–15 15–20 20–25 25–35 35–50 50–100 100+

Number of holders 333 675 500 479 179 70 35 25 8 11 2

Source: Central Statistical Bureau, 1950. 1949 Hungarian census.

which 50 were honored, and 446 claims in Ujdomb, of which 180 were honored. The 1949 census (the first one following the end of the war and the land reform) indicates that the population of Ujdomb was 10,358, of which 2,317 had land. The distribution of landed properties is shown in Table 5. This was a considerably more equitable distribution than the one in 1935 in that it had eliminated the large estates, reduced the number of holdings in the 0–1 hold category, and created a sizable number of small to medium holdings, but it clearly did not satisfy the land hunger of all of the agricultural population. Béla did not receive any land. Mihály, however, did, against his wishes. While he was languishing in the Kecskemét jail, the Land Reform Committee, in recognition of his political past, awarded him four holds of plowland along the road to Kocsér. This location was not far from the land that he and his father had previously owned and near the Demeter farm where he had spent so many years working. He now nominally owned eight holds, of which four were practically useless. He encouraged his family to reject the land since he saw ownership of any sort of private property as basically contradictory to Communist ideology and as a possible means of the exploitation of others. That four holds of meadowland and four holds of poor pasture were hardly sufficient to make a living, much less exploit anybody, did not seem to matter to him. In the end, the family kept the plot but mostly let it lie fallow.

The Faragós 107

Béla’s employment with the Takács family in Ódomb was in a diametrically opposite direction from the Kocsér road, and Verona could not cultivate it alone with ten-year-old Irén and eight-year-old Sándor. Thus while the Land Reform effected a momentous change in the outlook of the poor in Ujdomb, it resulted in very little actual improvement in the lot of many of its people, and this included the Faragós. In the meanwhile, other developments that seemed at the time less significant were percolating in the community. Primary among these was the establishment of the local chapter of the Hungarian Communist Party. While nationwide between December 1944 and November 1945— during the provisional government—the Communist Party had been collaborating with the other major parties, by November 1945, wanting to legitimize its role in Hungarian politics, its leadership called for general elections. This was in the expectation that the population would reward it at the polls for its apparent commitment to pluralism and to the cause of reconstruction. In spite of these expectations, the results of the free elections represented a significant loss for the Communists and a clear victory for the Smallholders Party. Consequently, the next two years witnessed a growing Communist offensive against the other parties. Ranging from persuasion to intimidation and coercion, the techniques the Communists applied became known as “salami tactics.” This referred to the Communist Party’s efforts to remove elements it deemed undesirable from the coalition step by step—or slice by slice (for details, see Gáti 1990). It is probably due to these tactics that Mihály was freed by the personal intervention of Romany, the secretary of the party, and sent home to plant the seeds of the movement among the poor of his village. It was rare to find a person from a rural background who was Soviet trained and had considerable credentials as a fellow traveler with a revolutionary past. With the notable exception of some groups from southeastern Hungary, known as the Storm Corner (Viharsarok), peasants in general were not politicized. Their major concern and only demand was access to land of their own. Mihály came home in December 1945 and immediately called together some of his trusted friends, including Zoboki János, Balla Mihály, and Bekõ András, and established the Ujdomb chapter of the party. He first became the party’s delegate to the coalition village government, and in 1947, after the Communist takeover was masterminded, the first party secretary.

108 An Ujdomb Family

During the coalition years the local government remained much as it had been before and during the war, with the personnel remaining essentially the same and Kecskés János, as before, its mayor. During these difficult postwar years the major task was economic. First and foremost the government had to assure that plowing and sowing could begin and that the new landowners had access to equipment, animals, and seed. This was a formidable task and essentially not solvable. Most agricultural equipment and machinery had either been destroyed or was unsuitable for the small plots into which the land was now divided. Almost no draft animals had survived the war, and those that had were owned by the middle peasantry, who somehow managed to keep them alive and would not voluntarily share them. Village production committees were supposed to commandeer the surplus animals, but there was resistance to this in spite of threats of imprisonment. The new landowners had neither seed nor credit. In addition, the years 1945 and 1946 were uncharacteristically dry, further depressing the average yields of most agricultural products. These were difficult years in Ujdomb. Mihály, along with the village leaders and the delegates from the other parties, labored ceaselessly to remedy the situation and especially to help the poor. He himself received no salary, although he worked full time for the government and even moved into the Communist Party headquarters to be at hand if needed. His family saw very little of him; its main support continued to come from Béla. Verona took jobs as day laborer, mostly hoeing, and occasionally traveled with other women to nearby towns to barter foodstuffs from her garden for much needed necessities such as salt, sugar, and kerosene. By 1946 Béla had decided that in spite of his continuing responsibility for his mother and younger brother and sister, he would get married. His bride was Balla Rozália, another member of the Ujdomb poor whose father was a fellow Communist and close friend of his father, Mihály. Rozália and her eight brothers and sisters had been raised in much the same spirit of left-wing ideology as the Faragó children but without the softening influence of a religious mother. Rozália was thus a much more outspoken and spirited ideologue than her husband and joined the party soon after they married. Following the Faragó family tradition, their first residence was one of the rooms in the Faragó house. Grandmother Mária had died in 1940. One room was now occupied by Mihály and Verona, and the kitchen by their two minor children, so Béla and

The Faragós 109

Rozália were given the second room. This they had to themselves until the birth of their son Ferenc in the autumn of 1946. In a drastic departure from local custom and Faragó family tradition, by mutual agreement this was to be their only child. The Proletarian Dictatorship Until after the Communist takeover in 1948, the political and economic spheres in the countryside were kept essentially separate. While the Communists were waging a political offensive, economic life in the villages was allowed to proceed along a basically capitalist model. In local governments, the Communist Party representatives sat alongside Social Democrats, Smallholders, and Peasant Party delegates, and in most places, Ujdomb among them, the prewar mayor and notary remained in power. Whatever ideological differences may have existed among these various party representatives, they remained isolated from the major task of restarting agricultural production and making sure that the country had enough to eat. Nor was the fabric of local society much affected. It is true that the land reform provided miniature parcels to a struggling group of formerly poor and landless peasants and that the really wealthy left. But the poor were primarily preoccupied with wresting a living out of the soil, a difficult undertaking without capital or equipment. The wealthy were mostly absentee owners anyway, and their disappearance went almost unnoticed. For the mainstays of village society, the middle peasants, little had changed economically, although their political power was somewhat curtailed. The compulsory delivery obligations for all agricultural producers, originally devised in 1944 as emergency measures to feed the country at war, at this point were not perceived as especially burdensome, and they were extended to all producers without discrimination. This relatively peaceful picture of a return to “normality” was marred only by persistent rumors of atrocities committed by the AVO, the political police under the command of the Communist Party. After 1945, the AVO arrested, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of innocent people, especially in smaller cities and in the countryside. This was aimed at least partly to establish its prerogatives and partly to intimidate the population. What end this was to serve became clear only after 1948.

110 An Ujdomb Family

A few months after the Communist-rigged elections in July 1948, the Central Committee of the party issued a decree calling for the isolation of the kulaks, or the middle peasants. This was the new Communist-led government’s first step in the process that was to politicize economic life in the countryside and in which political considerations came before economic ones. This was also the year in which most industries were appropriated by the state, banks and all schools were nationalized, and the private sector essentially ceased to exist in most spheres of life. The time had arrived to begin the restructuring of the agricultural sector along the Soviet model as well. The effects of these new policies on the society and political machinery of Ujdomb became visible very soon. To begin with, the offices of the mayor and the notary were replaced by a new functionary, called the president of the council, and the secretary of the local Communist Party became an important and permanent member of the local government, a status symbolized by moving his office into the Town Hall. The first mayor, Turi István, a shoemaker by occupation, was a stranger to the village. He was sent by the central government to spearhead the Communist-led reorganization of this community. He stayed for only a few months and was replaced by a succession of cadres, all of them outsiders and without exception from proletarian backgrounds. They were basically ineffectual figureheads who could do little and looked at this post as a temporary stop on a path leading to more political glory. Some of them used the post as a vehicle for revenge against the poverty and slights they had experienced in their past, and threw themselves into the persecution of the middle peasants with glee. Many of them, however, were considered comic figures by the peasants since they were illiterate and none of them had any knowledge of farming. The party apparatus was another matter entirely: because there were trusted cadres in the community, it remained in local hands, with the party secretary for many years chosen from one of the three leading local Communist families: the Faragós, the Ballas, and the Zobokis. The Delivery Office worked hand in hand with the party apparatus; its head, the hated Orkán Ferenc, received his clout from its support. This situation prevailed after Ujdomb was united with Ódomb; Ujdomb’s leaders now extended their power over the people of Ódomb, who lost control over all organs of government, as well as their economic and social life.

The Faragós 111

Faragó Mihály became party secretary in Ujdomb in 1948 and remained in this post until his retirement in 1954. Finally his years as a faithful and often persecuted member of the Communist movement had paid off. He himself had little interest in terrorizing kulaks but shared the party’s avowed belief that they had to be divested of their wealth, which they had acquired through the blood and sweat of the less fortunate. He thus gave basically free rein to the Delivery Office over establishing the delivery quotas, as well as over drawing up the kulak registry. In the latter effort the office was assisted by many of the disgruntled day or seasonal laborers of Ujdomb who still remembered real or imaginary slights from the past and recalled the “human market” with hatred. Mihály also shared the general prejudice of the Ujdomb poor against the well-to-do village of Ódomb. So it was with great glee that in 1952, when unification came, he supervised the emptying of the Ódomb Town Hall and the transfer of all documents pertaining to its administration and history to the refurbished Ujdomb Town Hall, henceforth known as the Tiszadomb Council House. Here they languished in unopened crates for some years and eventually vanished, purportedly in a fire. Naturally, for his role in this act Mihály was reviled by the members of the Ódomb elite. Otherwise, he was respected by many from both communities for his fairness and highly regarded by the poor for his widely known ideological commitment and willingness to sacrifice for the Communist cause. It was known that he did not ask for any financial reward for himself or for his family and worked for many years without a salary. He also continued living in the family’s dilapidated mud house in the lower village in spite of urgings by the various mayors to requisition a former kulak house. It cannot be said that the same lack of opportunism was true of all of his children, two of whom had successful political careers. János, who had apprenticed as a tailor in Budapest, could not find any work after the war. In 1946, at the age of twenty, he was recruited as a policeman, and because of his proper credentials as a proletarian with a Communist father was sent to the Police Academy. He became an officer in 1948 and in 1949 was transferred to the political police, the much feared AVO. Balázs, who had also started out as a tailor, came back to Kecskemét and, after completing a short political course given by the party, became the first secretary of the county Communist youth organization, the DISz (Demokratikus Ifjusági Szövetkezet). Lajos remained a factory worker in Budapest, a proud Communist but not particularly active as a cadre.

112 An Ujdomb Family

Teréz married an Ujdomb policeman, Boros Imre, with whom she became an active participant in the local party circles. Béla continued working for the Takács family as long as it was possible. However, after the family was put on the kulak list and became the object of persecution, it could no longer employ a sharecropper. Moreover, for Béla it was not considered politically correct to engage in the production process on a kulak farm and essentially to remain in a dependent position. So in 1949 he took up farming on his father’s fields, where he experimented with a variety of crops, none of which did very well. This was a completely different kind of land from the humus-rich area of the Takács farm. It needed fertilizer badly, as well as machinery to break up the crabgrass that had taken over the area during the years it had been left fallow. Béla worked with the help of his wife and his younger siblings from dawn to dusk without much success. A great unhappiness and hopelessness descended on this farming family, which after years of working for others now finally owned land and was supposedly the lord of its own destiny. The Faragós did not comprehend why the state—which had declared the victory of the underdog and the rule of the proletariat—did not provide more assistance to the struggling poor segment of the rural population. While they were politically well placed, their economic situation showed no improvement over what it had been before the war. Béla of course was not the only one to struggle and fail. After an initial period of jubilation, the beneficiaries of the land reform were quickly disappointed and had an exceedingly hard row to hoe. Without equipment and capital, without draft animals and machinery, making a living out of their poor parcels was clearly doomed to failure from the beginning. Moreover, the compulsory delivery system affected the poor as well as the rich, although at a different rate. Béla: Early Collectives The rural situation became ripe for the next stage as envisioned by the party: the collectivization of agriculture. This centrally mandated and orchestrated step was achieved with the help of a number of weapons in the hands of the state. The first was the aforementioned and progressively increased delivery quotas, which were designed to discourage and break the kulaks. The second was the credit system, which had such high rates of interest that new landowners could not carry the burden of

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debt. The third was an increasing administrative interference by the state in agricultural production so that the use of animals was regulated and the ownership of machinery by private owners was prohibited. Machine stations were established. Only there were machines available to plow the lands, primarily of state farms and cooperatives, and their use by private persons was limited. In spite of such pressures, the collectivization drive was slow and unsuccessful, with only one-third of the peasantry having joined the collectives by 1953 (for details, see Orbán 1972). As it was, in spite of the pressures toward collectivization and the difficult existence provided by farming in the years between 1949 and 1952, no cooperative was established in Tiszadomb until 1952. At first, this cooperative, named Freedom, was on lands abandoned by the Ódomb kulaks and not wanted by the State Farm. It had around twenty members, and its area fluctuated according to the new donations, withdrawals, and repeated attempts at consolidation. The majority of the members were formerly landless day or seasonal laborers who relished the idea of controlling and working the land of their former employers. Eventually eleven cooperatives were founded in the united Tiszadomb area, most of which failed within a few years, with their names largely forgotten. The four that eventually survived included the Freedom; the Peace, on former Ujdomb lands; the New Life (Uj élet), around the small center of Kerekdomb; and the Pearl of the Tisza (Tiszagyöngye), in the Tiszabög area. Around the same time the State Farm was consolidated on the best manorial lands north of Ujdomb. It is hard to find anybody in Tiszadomb today who has anything good to say about these early cooperatives, regardless of their former status. The middle peasants who eventually joined did so only to avoid the obligations of delivery quotas and taxes. They chose membership in a cooperative as opposed to a State Farm because cooperative membership allowed them to keep a parcel of land for household use. They were also told that they could withdraw at any time they wished and receive land outside of the cooperative, and they were promised a small annuity for their land. The small landowners were forced to give up private farming because on their small parcels with their many obligations they simply could not produce enough to survive. It was the landless who joined in the largest numbers. Either the State Farm or the cooperative provided them with much needed employment. What Donáth (1977, p. 142) so aptly noted about the nationwide situation—namely, that for this group of

114 An Ujdomb Family

agroproletarians, as opposed to the rest of the peasantry, “it did not present a problem that work and property were being divorced”—was certainly true for Tiszadomb as well. The former day and seasonal laborers, servants, drivers, and other employees of manorial estates considered these newly formed large agricultural entities as vastly improved forms of their former places of employment—vastly improved because now they were in control. And herein lay the problem. Since the agroproletarians were now in control, they refused to be led by former landowners. But they themselves had no know-how about running a farm, particularly a large one that, in addition, had very little in the way of capital, equipment, seed, and buildings. The first president of the Freedom was a former kubikos (“earth mover”) sent by the party from the neighboring community of Tiszainoka. The results of the first year’s harvest were dismal; the pay of the members amounted to little. For their livelihood they primarily depended on the produce grown on their household plots. The Freedom soon became the laughingstock of the community, but it survived until 1956. The same was true for the Peace, the New Life, and the Pearl. Béla joined the Peace in 1952, partly because of his and his father’s conviction that this was the path of the politically righteous and partly because he had a hard time making ends meet. He was immediately made the leader of the brigade responsible for the entire cooperative’s grain production. The other brigades cultivated vineyards and vegetables and raised livestock. These brigades were under the nominal leadership of the cooperative’s president, whose identity frequently changed. As noted, these presidents were party cadres sent to the community not because of their expertise in agricultural production but because of their political credentials. The Peace was fortunate in that none of its presidents had had any particular desire to interfere in its day-to-day operation; after passing on the centrally dictated quotas and directives to the brigade leaders, they were glad to have them try to implement them. Continuity was provided by the brigade leaders and the members, who were assigned permanently to their brigades, which worked a designated geographical area. On most tasks, the members worked together, and their pay depended on the performance of the entire brigade. Pay was calculated on a day-labor basis, in which different tasks were given unit values. The unit credits accrued by the members of the brigade were added up

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monthly and members were paid accordingly, with all in the same brigade receiving the same pay. In relationship to the size of its membership, the Peace had lots of land and very little machinery. By 1952 a state-owned machine station operated in the village, established primarily to work for the cooperatives and the State Farm. The machine station also offered technical training to aspiring young men in machine operation and repair, thereby enticing them to remain in the rural area. The negative side of this training was that the most talented and diligent peasant sons were thereby siphoned off from the day-to-day work of cultivation. In these early days, an additional problem was that there were not enough machines and the cooperatives had to compete for them at critical peak times. Because the income level of the members did not meet their expectations and was below that of the middle peasants who continued private farming, there was a major problem with discipline. Many workers put considerably more effort into their private plots than on the common, which meant not only that the remaining members of the brigade had to work harder to complete the group’s assigned tasks, but also that their average pay was lower because of the low productivity of their colleagues. There was also an ongoing conflict between the formerly landless and the middle peasants, with the former refusing at first to heed the advice of the more experienced cultivators. The Peace was fortunate in that eventually reason won out and allowed a number of former middle peasants if not to run it, at least to serve as advisers to most of the brigades in every phase of production. It is probably for this reason that while many of the other collectives in Tiszadomb fell by the wayside between 1952 and 1956, the Peace survived. This was true even in the liberal Nagy Imre years of 1953 and 1954: when members left the collectives in droves, very few defected from the Peace. This is not to say that they were particularly happy or satisfied with their lot. But given the alternatives, this was still a bearable situation that provided food for the table and escape from delivery quotas and harassment. In the Faragó family there were two cooperative members, Béla and his wife Rozália. Neither Mihály nor Verona joined, for different reasons. Mihály was busy as party secretary, and Verona helped out on the household plot allocated to the younger couple. Rozália was assigned as an ordinary worker to the women’s brigade that cultivated vegetables. Her take-home pay combined with that of her husband was little more than the income derived from Verona’s efforts on the household plot.

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In 1952 the last two of Mihály and Verona’s children left the house: Irén married and moved to Nagykõrös with her husband, who was working for the State Farm there; and Sándor, at the encouragement of his brothers, moved to Budapest at the age of sixteen and enrolled in a technical high school to learn auto mechanics. Until 1954 Mihály and Verona continued living with Béla’s family in the small, cramped quarters of the Faragó house. At this point, the town council finally decided to reward its faithful comrade and allocated him an apartment in one of the newly built block houses that were put up on lands requisitioned from Ódomb kulaks near the Ujdomb border. Mihály and Verona moved, but for years to come Verona continued working on the joint family plot, sharing its income with Béla’s family. It would have been extremely difficult for Béla and Rozália to make ends meet without these additional funds. Ferenc: A Socialist Childhood With the departure of the grandparents, eight-year-old Ferenc now had his own room—a definite first in the Faragó family history for an individual, let alone a child, not to have to share space! He started school in the newly nationalized Ujdomb elementary school in 1953. The old school in the lower end of the village was completely refurbished by now, with new desks and chalkboards, and was soon declared a School of Excellence. Ferenc was immediately made to understand that he was one of the chosen sons of the proletariat whose turn had now arrived. When official visitors came to the school, he was exhibited as the grandson of one of the early Communists, and in class he was made teacher’s assistant, in charge of taking attendance. He joined the Young Pioneers in the first grade, proudly wearing the blue neckerchief of the elementary school students and doing his best to accumulate enough merits for an honorary red one. He was a diligent if not an outstanding student. Since his family had neither animals that needed pasturing or feeding nor land that needed additional hands to work it, and his parents were gainfully employed with cash incomes, Ferenc was not required to work after school. While he occasionally accompanied his grandmother to her lot and played at helping her, this was a very different kind of childhood from the one experienced by his father. Instead of growing up on the vast expanses of the puszta, under its open skies, his territory was limited to the village with its narrow lanes, and his path led from house

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to school and back. Children were now considered the future hope of the nation, and their physical and mental upbringing was of central concern. How to bring up and create the new socialist man became a question much debated by psychologists. A great deal of emphasis was put on their training in cooperative behavior, accomplished mostly through regimentation and the collective performance of tasks. These methods were introduced in centers of early education and continued through the school years, in both the classrooms and after-school care. At the same time, free well-baby clinics and medical centers sprang up in every community, where, along with health care, parents also received education in nutrition and hygiene. Counterrevolution For the new elite of Ujdomb, the event in the fall of 1956 became known as counterrevolution. When the news of an anti-Communist uprising in Budapest reached the village, the reaction of the council, the party hierarchy, and the cooperative leadership was at first stunned disbelief, then fear. Some of their members chose flight; others decided to go into hiding or simply lay low, awaiting further developments. As noted, the hated Orkán Ferenc of the Delivery Office, fearing for his life, fled the village. The entire police force vanished. Mihály and other local leading Communists, including the mayor, decided to stay. Mihály, who was retired, in particular had had his share of living in exile. He was no longer willing to go into hiding, in spite of the urging of his family and friends, who feared the retaliation of his enemies, particularly the Ódomb peasants. In fact, there was no violence whatsoever directed at the local cadres by the population of the united Tiszadomb. Once the symbols of economic oppression and persecution, in the persons of the police and the head of the Delivery Office, were gone, the mood of the people was jubilant and forward looking. Calmness was also maintained by the mayor, who promised to remedy grievances, among which of primary importance were the abolition of the delivery quotas and the institution of free elections. The mood of the village turned more bitter after the aerial bombing of the unarmed crowd and further demonstrations raised more pointed demands for economic and political relief for the oppressed. For several days it appeared that the revolution was succeeding in the capital, that

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the Communist era might come to an end, and that Communist collaborators would be hunted down. While Mihály survived the revolution unscathed, his two sons, János and Balázs, were not so fortunate. János was caught by the crowd in the AVO headquarters and was severely beaten. He barely survived his injuries and became embittered and revengeful for the rest of his life. Balázs’s office, located in the party headquarters in Kecskemét, was burned down. In the ensuing fracas, he received some injuries but managed to escape and hid for the duration of the uprising in his father’s house in Tiszadomb. The event of central concern to the entire population of this agricultural community was the disbanding of the cooperatives. As elsewhere in the nation, this was initiated by the former landowning peasants, who wanted to reestablish the old relationship of work and property. Nationwide, about 60 percent of the agricultural cooperatives were disbanded, the demand for the return of the ancestral lands uniting the various groups of landowning peasants. In Tiszadomb, this created a great deal of confusion since both cooperative members who had “volunteered” their land to the collective and others who had left the village at the beginning of collectivization and abandoned their lands now demanded the return of their original parcels. The formerly landless peasants of Ujdomb remained loyal to the cooperatives and attempted to continue the cultivation of the common fields. Peace eventually prevailed when the landowners were allowed to take whatever parcels they felt entitled to and the landless were given whatever was left over. Somehow, it seemed, there was sufficient land for most everybody—probably because a large number of former owners elected not to return—and the majority of the population of Tiszadomb, for the first time in its history, was satisfied with the land it possessed. The following three years, between the end of 1956 and the end of 1959, witnessed a return to private farming in the entire community, even though the uprising had been put down by the beginning of November 1956. While economic life was allowed to deviate from the Communist model during these years, the same sort of leniency was not shown on the political front. After the power of the Communist state was reestablished under the leadership of Kádár János, a reign of terror ensued both nationally and locally. In the spring of 1957, new police and a new party leadership arrived in Tiszadomb and ruthlessly tracked down the socalled collaborators of the counterrevolution. The new party secretary,

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Vári István, was a local boy, an orphan raised and educated by a locally prominent shoemaker. Rumor had it that he had never completed elementary school but had a degree from the Marxist–Leninist University. He held a lifelong grudge against the class of his former benefactor that he now had free rein to vent. The members of the National Guard and the National Committee were arrested. Seres Pál, the head of the National Guard, was executed. Batka Gyula was tried in Kecskemét and received a two-year sentence. He was fortunate to escape with his life, but for years he was not allowed to work and the future of his children was forever jeopardized. His daughter Gabi was dismissed from her medical studies, and his son Pál was never admitted to the Faculty of Engineering because of the counterrevolutionary activities of their father. The proletariat was back in political power. On the economic front, however, private ownership and independent farming continued. For the Faragós these were ambivalent times. On the one hand, as staunch supporters of the Kádár regime, their position among the political elite was once again secure. On the other hand, how were Béla and Rozália to earn their livelihood in a Communist society with a capitalist agriculture? Neither one of them had the desire to start farming on a privately owned plot. Not only did they consider this contradictory to the tenets of the ideology in which they were brought up, but they also lacked the background and the knowledge to run a farm on their own. Most of his adult life Béla had worked under the direction of others, and in those few years when he had attempted to run his father’s farm, he had experienced very little success. For a while there was little choice, however, and thus Béla and Rozália reluctantly took up farming on the eight holds originally owned by Mihály. Much to his relief, in the spring of 1958 the State Farm was restarted. He immediately joined and was once again made a brigade leader. Rozália, with the help of Verona, continued cultivating a small area of the family plot, both of them now concentrating on growing cabbage. For the Faragós, as well as for the rest of Tiszadomb, the three years following the uprising were peaceful and lucrative. The hated delivery quotas had been abolished, and the women’s earnings from the cabbage patch brought in more cash than they had anticipated. This, combined with Béla’s steady salary from the State Farm, provided them a new level of wealth. They could have afforded to move from the poor little house at the lower end, but Béla was against this. Instead, he installed running water and added a bathroom to the end of the house.

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The New Wave of Collectivization When the drive for the final collectivization of agriculture reached the poorer elements of Ujdomb, there was very little need for agitators. Unlike the wealthy and middle peasants in both Ódomb and Ujdomb, to whom the return of collectivization was a catastrophe, hundreds of them welcomed the return of the cooperatives and signed up without hesitation. To them, the return of this form of work represented the end of a confusing period in which private farming coexisted with a Communist-led political system. It was unclear throughout how long that situation was to prevail and how individuals should adjust to it. While the former landowners considered this period to be a golden age and reclaimed their land with enthusiasm, many of the formerly landless and owners of dwarf holdings were at a loss about what to do. Most of them had little expertise in independent farming, with all its risks and uncertainties, and consequently felt more comfortable working for somebody else. Work in the cooperative had a number of advantages. Even if the level of income was relatively low in the early years, at least it was guaranteed. As a new incentive, the government also introduced two new forms of social insurance to cooperative members, one in the form of health insurance and the other as a retirement pension (Donáth 1977). Extra income could be derived from the household plot, which proved to be increasingly lucrative, but if it failed, the family could still survive on the wages provided by the collective. The strategy taken by most families was to diversify, one member joining the cooperative, which entitled the family to some cash income and the household plot; another working the plot; a third, retired person, receiving a pension; and a possible fourth, generally a young man, training or working in a nearby industry or machine station. These were pragmatic considerations, very little driven by ideological commitments or a belief in the common good. In spite of government slogans that tried to depict the collective as a “family,” it was basically viewed as a place of work, and the idea of collective responsibility did not take root. Work habits were poor; people often did not show up for their shifts, pilfered produce, and stole supplies. Families in general put in more effort on their household plots, the income from which nationwide soon surpassed collective wages, as seen in Table 6. Nevertheless, the cooperative form of farming took root, and although between 1961 and 1968 growth was slow, there was growth nonethe-

The Faragós 121 Table 6 Nationwide Distribution of Income (in percent) Source Collective work Household plot work

1958 56.9 43.1

1961 45.6 54.4

1964 47.7 52.3

Source: Compiled by Donáth (1977: 202).

less. In all categories of indicators, yields slowly increased and collective production flourished, but no radical improvements took place (Völgyes 1980). In the last days of 1959, the Peace Cooperative was resurrected in Ujdomb. Its total area in the first year was 2,752 holds, which grew to 4,226 holds by the end of 1961. In the beginning of 1961 it had 905 members, of which 631 were active. By the end of 1961, the active membership had risen to 830 and the total membership to 1,106. Although government guidelines stated that only former agroproletarians could be elected president, members of the Peace, having learned a lesson from earlier years, managed to get around this rule and with the implicit approval of the party repeatedly pushed former landowning middle peasants into leadership positions. The first president was Mezei Imre, son of a peasant with 4.5 holds of vineyards who had barely escaped the kulak list. He was followed by Pap Dezsö, whose father had extensive vineyards and owned a house in the center of Ujdomb that was eventually appropriated for party headquarters. Under their leadership the Peace proved to be a productive and profitable enterprise from its inception. Béla joined the cooperative in early December. He left his job at the State Farm where his wages had been considerably higher, especially in the first few years of the cooperative, because he wanted access to a household plot. Even though he was still ideologically committed to the idea of collective work, he became one of those pragmatists who wanted to hedge his bets and get the best of both possible worlds. The family decided that Rozália would not become a member but devote her energies to Béla’s household plot, where she continued growing tomatoes and paprika. As the years went by, this became a considerable source of income, and the family was finally feeling financially secure. Béla, as before, was made into a brigade leader. Because of his lack of formal training, he refused the position of chief agronomist, which he

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felt required a level of knowledge he did not possess. As he said, he did not know about numbers and papers. Although the party encouraged him to attend the Marxist–Leninist University, he refused since at the age of forty he felt that he was too old to go to school. He was satisfied with his position and was known as a good worker and a fair boss. He worked well under the leadership of both Mezei and Pap, whose expertise he never challenged. Over the next few years the resurrected Peace gradually evolved into a different kind of workplace than had originally been envisioned by socialist planners. In order to offset the unhappiness among some of the peasantry at having to rejoin the cooperative movement, the government had made certain concessions. One of these was to allow members to enter into a sharecropping arrangement with the cooperative. This became a popular form of work, especially with labor-intensive crops, and benefited members and their families, as well as the cooperative. In this arrangement, a member carried out all phases of work for a particular crop and received a specified percentage of the sale price after the cooperative marketed it. Sharecropping with the cooperative in this manner meant a return to a system in which the household was the basic production unit. While one member of the family signed the contract, all members (including individuals employed elsewhere, children, and retired persons) could be enlisted in the workforce. The goal was the short-term benefit of the family, but the arrangement benefited the entire cooperative as well. If the crops grown by the family units were of high quality and the land showed a higher productivity, the cooperative’s profits were also higher. Since the cooperative kept 60–70 percent of the sale price, the entire membership ultimately benefited from higher pay rates for all kinds of work, including work in the brigades. With the increasing mechanization of agriculture, the profile of work also changed. There was less need for unskilled manual workers, whose role was increasingly taken over by skilled tractor operators. By the mid-1960s the Tiszadomb machine station was almost out of commission, with most of its equipment transferred to the collectives. The young men who operated and serviced these machines constituted a separate sector within the collective. They worked for wages that were considerably higher than the earnings provided by collective work. Working with machines became a valued occupation and helped stem the flight of young men out of the agricultural sector. For Béla and his generation this represented somewhat of a dilemma.

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On the one hand, they welcomed the increased productivity and higher incomes that increased mechanization helped usher in. On the other hand, they felt that their authority and expertise were being challenged by the “young Turks” whose new skills made their practical expertise somewhat outdated. This was an additional reason for Béla not to have sought positions of leadership. For the rest of his working life he was satisfied with being middle management, and his goal became the economic betterment of his family. In this, he was increasingly successful. While Rozália continued to work on the tomato and paprika patch, the two of them also signed up for a sharecropping contract and raised hothouse tomatoes for the cooperative. Eventually they also contracted for the raising of pigs, for which they grew corn on part of their household plot. The cooperative supplied the fertilizer and machine-hoed and -sprayed the field, which was allocated in a row of similar household plots. It also marketed the animals, with the family receiving a percentage of the sale price. These endeavors—sharecropping, hog raising, and household plot cultivation—were good sources of income, and Béla was financially comfortable. He continued to consider his main source of livelihood to be his earnings from the cooperative and the household production as only subsidiary work that made use of his and Rozália’s spare labor time. In his behavior and value orientation, he closely resembled another type of new villager, identified by the sociologist Iván Szelényi (1988) as the peasant-worker. His main purpose was to supplement wages by working a “second shift” in a family work organization. The fact that he and his wife each worked a twelve-hour shift each day did not mean that he attempted to accumulate capital or become independent or even wealthy. His goal was to put aside considerable sums every year toward building or buying a new house for his son when he married and to purchase a few consumption items for himself. He bought a motorcycle that made commuting between work at the cooperative, the tomato and paprika patch, and the sharecropping hothouse considerably easier. Rozália also learned to drive the new toy and was often seen putt-putting around the lanes, carrying a trailer full of tomatoes or paprika on her way to the Nagykõrös market. Béla and Rozália refused to move from their house, however. This home in the lower end of the village, which had sheltered so many generations of Faragós, had undergone a number of facelifts, but it basically remained the same whitewashed mud house of a poor peasant

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family. The addition of a bathroom and new furniture did not alter this fact. What had changed, however, was the environment around it. As the former poor peasant population of the area started to prosper, people began to move out of this overcrowded section of the village. Many either left the community altogether or built new homes in newly developed areas of the town. One of these, especially popular with tractor operators and other technical personnel, was a large tract west of the community originally used for pasture. Here, row after row of identical houses of a new type that became known as “square houses” popped up and became the destination of many of Béla’s younger neighbors. These houses, which have been derided by ethnographers, architects, and sociologists alike (Szelényi 1988; Hoppál 1983; Makovecz 1975), represented a hybrid between the peasant houses of the earlier years and an “urbanized” design promoted by architects. The square house was neither, and it symbolized the in-between status of its inhabitants as well, showing that they were no longer peasants but still retained some peasant functions in a double life of wage earners and cultivators in the second economy. Like the urban houses, the square houses were primarily residential, with three rooms in three of the corners and a large kitchen in the fourth. It was this large kitchen that showed the link to a peasant existence. Instead of opening to the dining area, it opened up to the yard and was the site where fodder was prepared for pigs or chickens, and where produce was cleaned for marketing. The yard itself was small, leaving very little room for farm buildings, since the house was twice as wide as the traditional long house. Its awkward design notwithstanding, the square house became a status symbol, representing upward mobility. Béla wanted no part of this new design for living. He was grateful, however, that as a result of the exodus from his part of the village, many of the older, more dilapidated mud houses that had been left vacant or uncared for crumbled. It became possible to buy up some of the lots where these houses had formerly stood, and soon there was considerably more breathing room between the old houses. The Faragós bought two small adjacent plots next to their home, and suddenly they had space for a number of farm buildings, including a pigsty, a chicken coop, and eventually a hothouse or plastic tunnel (folia) for tomatoes. As the years went by, not only the lower end of the village but also the entire community of Ujdomb gradually assumed a new appearance. By the mid-1970s most of the major roads were paved. The small, crooked lanes were widened and straightened by bulldozing scores of the poorer

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old buildings. The thatched roofs gave way to tiles and mud walls to bricks. The old market was moved from its former prominent location across from the Town Hall and the Catholic church to a somewhat marginal area of Ódomb. Its old site was transformed into a park with flowers and ornamental bushes. To the south of the Catholic church, a new row of modern buildings was erected. The most prominent one, on the corner, was the Party House, the headquarters of the Communist Party. Next to it came the new supermarket and then a row of smaller stores, all of them branches of various national chains. There were no private shops or stores at this time in Hungary: the tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, painters, and bricklayers all worked through cooperatives that had local representatives. Most of these services were crowded around the square, which became a modern, attractive, and busy central area, clearly the hub for all of Tiszadomb. Ferenc: Out of Peasantry Ferenc graduated from the Ujdomb elementary school in 1960, and, as Boglár Tamás had done a year before him, he also decided to enroll in the agricultural technical high school in Szarvas. His motivation, however, was very different from that of Tamás. He had little interest in land ownership or in farming, not having had the experience of either, and he had not grown up in a family where land was viewed with an almost religious awe. His was essentially a conscious career choice, based on the consideration that since nationwide there was a shortage of trained experts in large-scale agricultural production, a degree in agricultural sciences would put him on the fast track for advancement. The party encouraged the sons of trusted members to enter this field, supported their higher education, and practically guaranteed leadership positions once they completed their studies. Ferenc did well in the technical high school, although he somewhat resented having to do “peasant work” during the summer practical training when the entire student body was sent back to the home communities to help with the harvest. He swore that after this he would never again muck around with manual labor. He graduated from the high school in 1964 and without a pause continued in the agricultural college at the same location. In 1968 Ferenc graduated and returned home. In November of that year he married his sweetheart from college, Szabó Anna, the extremely

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ambitious and clever daughter of a sharecropper from southern Hungary. Like her husband, she had little interest in agricultural work but wanted to take advantage of the new opportunities offered to women by the postwar government, especially in occupations not traditionally perceived as feminine. Agricultural engineering certainly fell into this category, but to hedge her bets she also accumulated credits toward a teaching certificate in biology. Anna was an attractive woman: slim and sexy and well dressed in tailored career clothes. She was a complete departure from the hefty peasant wives who wore the same faded cotton shifts known as otthonka (literally, little home), whether in the field or in the office. She made quite a splash in Tiszadomb. Ferenc and Anna moved into their new home, purchased for them by Béla. The house, an elegant old home in Ódomb, had formerly belonged to the Szelényi family, one of the leading old families of the community. During the kulak persecution they had fled the village, “donated” their lands to the collective, and abandoned their home. The house became the property of the county council and for years was used to house the cadres sent from Budapest in various capacities. It was neglected and run down, and when finally it became a liability, the council agreed to sell it to Béla for a relatively small sum. Béla completely renovated the house and restored it to its former splendor. After a wedding in the council chambers, the new power couple moved into this home in the heart of Ódomb where they were forever thereafter shunned by their impoverished neighbors. The first job Ferenc secured was with the Freedom Cooperative, where he was a bookkeeper. This was not exactly the position he craved, but at this point he was happy to have any sort of employment. Twenty-eight college graduates had come home to Tiszadomb that year, and twentysix found no jobs in their profession. Even though young men with higher education were encouraged to return to their villages, the situation was not yet ripe for them to take over the leadership. Ferenc attributed the difficulty of finding suitable employment to the entrenched position of the old guard, who, like Sas Vincent, the president of the Freedom, hung on to their positions on sufferance by the party as payment for past services. It was clear to Ferenc that Sas, with his six years of education, could not lead an enterprise with over one thousand members. It was the agronomists and the former middle peasants who ran the farm, but they were afraid to challenge him. By 1970, the young and better-trained members started to move against Sas, but it was not until 1975, when the Freedom united with the Peace, that he was finally pensioned off.

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Ferenc was not about to wait that long. While still employed by the Freedom, he took courses toward a higher degree and received certificates as a specialist in soil improvement and in irrigation and waterworks. In 1970 he left the cooperative and went to work for the county water department. This gave him a voice in decisions over the regulation of the Tisza, over the channeling of water for irrigation, and—most significantly—over the disposition of the area that was to become the centerpiece of Tiszadomb’s rejuvenation, the future spa. Above all, his new job put him into the orbit of the mayor and his inner circle. He immediately became close friends with Buda Károly, then the chief agronomist of the Peace, a man from a similar background and with similar education who had decided to remain in agriculture and to await his turn at the helm. Soon Joó realized Ferenc’s usefulness as an ally at the water department, and Ferenc found himself more and more included in discussions regarding future projects and in plotting about how to accomplish them. An example of this is the story Ferenc recounts with a chuckle about how Remix, the electronics manufacturing plant, came to Tiszadomb. He is particularly proud of the part he played. However, the story illustrates more than that: it provides a window on how, through connections and networking, the local leadership circumvented central directives and quotas and managed to secure scarce goods for the community. In 1970, in the middle of a major building boom that had been instigated by Joó, the council ran out of cement, and construction on a new school/day-care center came to a stop. Ferenc’s uncle János, the former AVO policeman, was by then working as the head of the personnel department of Remix in Budapest. More important at this point was that he was known to be a card-playing partner and close friend of the director of the central cement factory in Budapest. Joó asked Ferenc to take the council’s official Volga automobile with his personal chauffeur and drive up to Budapest to see whether his uncle could prevail on the director to give Tiszadomb some cement without having to wait its turn. János called the director, who said that although production had stopped two months previously and there was a shortage of cement countrywide, he would do his best to divert some of his hidden stockpile to the community. While these negotiations were going on in the offices of Remix, Ferenc chatted with one of the production managers, asking him what they were manufacturing there. The manager explained and mentioned that Remix was just in the process of establishing a branch in the rural

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community of Abony, not far from Tiszadomb. Ferenc’s ears perked up, and he immediately proposed that Remix look at Tiszadomb instead, knowing that the next step in Joó’s plan was to attract industry to the community. János joined the conversation, and having convinced the production manager of the advantages of Tiszadomb, he suggested that the idea be taken to the director. Ferenc returned to Tiszadomb with two accomplishments: the promise of cement and the possibility of an industrial plant. Uncle János telephoned him the following morning with a message that Joó should be ready the next day at 10 A.M., when the director and the chief engineer would look over the site and discuss their requirements. Joó was delighted and jumped at the opportunity, and by the time Ferenc returned from his job in Kecskemét that afternoon, he found the leaders of the council and Remix in the middle of an extended eating and drinking bout. The plant was built in Tiszadomb and eventually employed six hundred people. In the meanwhile, Ferenc’s wife, Anna, was also busy. Like her husband, she had managed to secure a job in the Freedom as a bookkeeper. Within a year, however, she went on leave, having given birth to a son, Péter, in October 1969. In 1972, after her paid maternity leave expired, the cooperative asked her to return to the job and offered to send her for further training in accountancy. She studied for two years, partly by correspondence and partly by commuting to Kecskemét. In 1974 she received her degree, and when she returned to full-time work for the Freedom, she was appointed its chief economist. At this point she joined the Communist Party and started working hand in glove with the cooperative’s party secretary, Vonák Lajos. Vonák, not a native of Tiszadomb, was another old-time party cadre who could barely read and write. Anna did most of his paperwork, and the party came to consider her indispensable. To reward her for her work and loyalty, in 1977 the party’s central administration in Kecskemét offered her the position of party secretary in the neighboring village of Tiszaalpár, about twelve kilometers away. Since her son was still quite young and the family had only one car, she did not want to commute and refused the job. In 1980, Anna was picked to be party secretary for Tiszadomb. The previous secretary having retired, she was a favorite candidate for all parties concerned. She had the correct credentials: the daughter of an agroproletarian and married to a son of the same. Her husband’s family had a long and distinguished history in the party, and she herself was a trusted party member. Moreover, she was clever, educated, and present-

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able. It was also important that her husband was by then an established member of the inner circle that surrounded Joó István. First, however, Anna had to complete the Marxist–Leninist University in Budapest. This took four years by correspondence and occasional week-long mini-courses. In 1984 she graduated and was appointed first party secretary of Tiszadomb. Now she, too, assumed a position in the inner circle of power. Meanwhile, their son Péter was growing up. In the fall of 1976 he was enrolled in the Ódomb elementary school, where he was in the minority as a newcomer. Although the homogeneity of this largely middle peasant community was diluted by the often forced in-migration of outsiders—and these included people from Ujdomb—it still remained a stronghold of the former Protestant elite. Their children, whose fathers and grandfathers had all attended this same school, were now considered “kulak offspring”; they stuck together in the face of persecution and would have nothing to do with the upstart sons and daughters of the new elite. Péter, however, was very little disturbed by this. He was raised as the pampered only child of an ambitious and successful couple who were in the center of power and who wanted to surround him with all the consumer goods of which they had been deprived in their childhood. The school’s administrators and teachers recognized and respected his privileged position and treated him accordingly. Although he was a middling student, he represented the school at national debates and spelling competitions, carried the flag at the May 1 parade, and was made the leader of his Young Pioneer brigade. The result, as noted, was that he had no close friends, and to show his superiority to the “kulak clique,” he put increasingly more effort into excelling at sports. These were not team sports but sports that showed off individual prowess. By the time he completed the eight grades of elementary school in 1984, he was county school champion of boxing and gymnastics. The Golden Years Between 1970 and 1984, while Ferenc worked for the water department, under the helm of Joó and in the wake of reforms permitted by the NEM a major transformation took place in the community and in the lives of its inhabitants. Much of this echoed what was taking place in the rest of the country, but in many ways, with the community leaders’ clever management, it surpassed what was considered possible elsewhere.

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First of all, the occupational structure of the community had changed significantly. Due to the establishment of the various industrial plants, Tiszadomb was no longer an agricultural community where the vast majority of the population earned a livelihood toiling on the land. In 1985, only 20 percent of its twelve thousand inhabitants were engaged in agriculture; the rest had industrial, service, or clerical occupations. Those who remained in agriculture worked for the Peace and Freedom, where most considered themselves to be workers, not peasants. This was to a great extent due to the new organizational structure of this mammoth farm, which had been converted from one based on spatial divisions (in which all phases of work in a specific area were performed by the workers assigned to that area) to one based on branches devoted to specific tasks. This was a hierarchical organization with many levels. Two large geographical divisions or districts were retained, but within these districts, the various branches (i.e., vineyards, orchards, nurseries, animal husbandry, etc.) were represented by unit managers who, under the direction of their branch managers, directed the individual brigade foremen. Workers assigned to the brigades were restricted to the tasks of that particular group. Efforts were made to train the foremen in the skills necessary for their area of expertise by sending them to special classes. This introduced a degree of professionalism into all fields of agricultural work, which was increasingly being looked at as just another form of employment, akin to industrial or office work. Young people weighed their choices and elected to stay in the agricultural sector because it paid well, not because of family tradition. In Joó’s drive to achieve city status for the community, its facilities were further modernized and its infrastructure strengthened. The most noticeable feature of this overall transformation was the booming vacation village and spa on the Tisza. By the mid-1980s every house—including the more remote outlying farms—had electricity. The next step was the installation of running water and central gas lines in the houses inside the village. Modernization of the telephone network came next. In the early 1980s Tiszadomb purchased the so-called crossbar system, which eliminated the need for a central telephone switching office and provided automatic dialing capability. Public telephones were installed in the town center and along the main roads, and within a few years about one-third of the homes had telephones. Other achievements included the building of the high school, the dormitory for both high school and elementary school students who

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lived beyond commuting distance, a new football field, a small local rail line from the town to the spa, a new library in the building that had formerly been the old synagogue, and a new House of Culture. None of this would have been possible without a great deal of cooperation and a give-and-take relationship between the leaders of various enterprises and the council. As the cooperative under the helm of Buda Károly had helped with the acquisition of land for the vacation village, so all industries and larger enterprises chipped in and either gave cash for the different projects, donated building materials, or provided work crews free of charge to the town. The council in turn helped the cooperative and the industries by cushioning the impact of the directives that were handed down by the central planning agencies, either by interpreting them liberally or with a hands-off attitude that allowed them to set a course quite free from administrative interference. The community even started its own weekly newspaper, devoted primarily to topics of local interest. It informed its readers about births, deaths, marriages, and the buying and selling of land and houses; it listed the previous week’s soccer results, gave advice on cooking and household maintenance, and named the local high school students who either excelled in local or national competitions or managed to gain admission to institutes of higher learning. There were occasional columns debating the appropriateness of inviting a particular dance troop to the cultural center or complaints about the noise emanating from the bars at the spa. Missing, however, were any references to or criticisms of the policies pursued by the mayor or the local leadership. Some years later it was revealed that such items had been weeded out by the party secretary, the wife of Faragó Ferenc, Anna. Nobody was surprised when in 1985 Tiszadomb was officially declared a town and Joó was personally handed a decree to this effect by Losonczi Pál, the president of the Council of Ministers. Indeed, the townspeople began to believe that nothing was impossible for them and that the community was destined for even more greatness. Rumors began to circulate that Tiszadomb had been picked as the site of the second Hungarian atomic energy plant, and the townspeople began to refer to their community as the Hungarian Athens of cultural life. Many people were doing well economically. The majority were much like Faragó Béla and combined a paying job with some sort of subsidiary activity, mostly cultivating labor-intensive crops on the household plot. Others moonlighted in some service or building industry, such as

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auto repairs, masonry, or plumbing. Others went as guest workers to West or East Germany and returned with enough money to build a new house or buy a car. People who did least well financially were those in white-collar occupations with a fixed salary and no access to land or to subsidiary work in the service or industrial sectors. They included the highest-ranking cadres and administrators, whose top-level pay could not match the money that could be earned in the second economy. Ferenc was among these. Although both he and his wife received a salary considerably above the average, he wanted more so that his standard of living could surpass or at least match that of the cleverest entrepreneurs. He wanted a Western-made car, the best clothes, and vacation trips to the West. He did not, however, have any entrepreneurial skills or ambitions. So he was on the lookout for an opportunity that might present itself through a salaried position in the public sector but would also offer possibilities for additional earnings through some sort of subsidiary activity. Such a position came his way when he heard of an opening in the local branch of the national fruit and vegetable marketing company, Zöldért. Zöldért (literally, green marketing) had its central offices in Budapest, but every county had its own director to whom the local branches reported. Each community had its Zöldért representative who was in charge of buying local produce that he would then either ship on to the county warehouse or market locally through a store that Zöldért operated. The Tiszadomb Zöldért started as a relatively small operation, buying, selling, and shipping produce to the county center, but eventually it became an intermediate-level collection point with large warehouses and its own rail track and loading spur. Here grains, artificial fertilizers, and rubber were stored. From here fruit and paprika were shipped to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Austria. Ninety percent of the cooperative’s produce was brought here and reshipped to buyers, many of whom came from abroad and sent their own refrigerated trucks. Zöldért also bought from individuals who did not want to or could not sell their produce themselves. And therein lay its power. Since the household plots produced more or less the same crops in abundant quantities, it was becoming increasingly difficult to market them. There were all sorts of attempts to diversify, to grow new crops, to improve quality, and to raise the largest paprika or the earliest tomatoes, but the competition was fierce. An innovative attempt at raising and pickling cabbage was an outgrowth of this competition and for a few years proved to be a very good source of income. Household plots were converted from pa-

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prika and tomato fields to cabbage patches, and sheds and barns were made into souring and canning facilities. Soon, however, the market was glutted with sour cabbage, and hundreds of tons of cabbage were in danger of rotting unless a buyer could be found. Whose cabbage was bought and in what quantity were at the discretion of the local director of Zöldért. This was just the job Ferenc had been waiting for. He quit his job at the water department and transferred to Zöldért, first as deputy director and, within a year, as director of the local branch. It was obvious that without the patronage of the mayor he would not have been able to assume this powerful and lucrative position. The job was truly an answer to his prayers. Not only did he have a high salary and a yearly bonus, but he also had unlimited opportunities to manipulate people, to pick and choose from whom to buy, and in the process to collect graft. Since he was a member of the inner circle—and moreover married to the party secretary, who could cause difficulties for people—nobody dared complain about his tactics. Between 1984 and 1989 he became a very wealthy man indeed. He now drove a Mercedes and took his family to England for a vacation. For future security, he also opened a bank account in Switzerland, in case the Hungarian economy floundered. By the second half of the 1980s Faragó Ferenc and Anna had taken their place among the community’s elite. In spite of the official socialist ideology that held that no wealth differences should exist in the ideal Communist society, Tiszadomb’s social structure by this time had recreated a system of stratification similar to that of the prewar years but based on different criteria. According to a survey conducted by two Hungarian sociologists, Módra László and Simó Tibor (1988), in two Great Plains communities, one of which was Tiszadomb, during these years the second economy (which served as a corrective to the first or official economy) enabled people to amass wealth to such an extent that class differentiation developed on the basis of accumulation. The result was not a rigid class structure but a somewhat fluid status differentiation among the different levels, based primarily on wealth. The traditional status indicator of peasant societies, present or past land ownership, no longer applied: of Tiszadomb’s 1988 elite, 94.8 percent had had no land before collectivization and therefore did not belong to the prewar peasant elite. Módra and Simó found six social levels or classes in Tiszadomb. Their most important findings included the following: a comparatively

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large group (25 percent) could be classified as elite; middle-class development had been slow, and the middle layer was relatively small (29 percent); and at the bottom of society there was a large (45 percent) disadvantaged group whose position was reminiscent of the lower rungs of prewar society. Who were considered elite? In answer to Módra and Simó’s survey, townspeople supplied the following list: council leaders, business leaders (in both industry and agriculture), professionals (doctors, lawyers), auto mechanics, and masons. Thus the elite was a mixed group with varying occupations and educational levels; in addition to political and economic leaders, it included physical laborers with lucrative occupations. Missing from its ranks were the entrepreneurs who made their money through the second economy. The Tiszadomb elite was largely found to be composed of those who had advanced in the political or work hierarchy or were in key positions in businesses and centers of redistribution. A large number were in positions that transmitted the decisions of the center. The local center, personified by the mayor and his select group, performed an interesting balancing act between local independence on the one hand and obedience to and dependence on the central powers on the other. Because through independent action they had managed to advance local interests, their power locally was undisputed. The members of the new elite came primarily from Ujdomb, with a few from the satellite villages or outlying farm areas. None of the formerly wealthy peasant landowners from Ódomb were included in their ranks. The majority of the Ódomb proprietors were consigned to status group 4, three levels below the elite. This group, which was characterized as “stagnating” in the survey, consisted largely of individuals who had had considerable landholdings before the war but now worked for the cooperative. Most of them had little involvement in the second economy but had large houses and lived near the town center. Former Ódomb landowners who exhibited entrepreneurial skills and were consequently much better off than their neighbors were put in status group 2, one below the elite. Although in terms of wealth they were not far from the elite and some of them may even have surpassed it, none of them were in leadership or key economic positions or had political power. This was the society that produced Faragó Péter, who entered Tiszadomb High School in 1984. He was an undisputed elite offspring, on both his father’s and mother’s side. His parents had wealth and po-

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litical clout and had raised him as a pampered only child whose every wish was granted. He had a ten-speed bicycle and a boom box before anybody else in his class, he spent his holidays abroad, and when in Budapest, he shopped in only the best stores. In addition, he was a handsome boy, and if not the best student, he truly excelled in his chosen field: gymnastics. He was treated with deference by the school administration and by the teachers, some of whom feared his political connections and some of whose economic well-being was in the hands of his father, who could pick and choose whose cabbage he bought. Small wonder then that he was arrogant, felt entitled, and did not think that the same rules applied to him as to ordinary mortals.

4 Pintér Katalin: A Life Formed on the Farmlands

The “Borderlands”or “Farm World” In the first week of June 1951, Erzsébet, the twenty-two-year-old wife of Pintér János, gave birth to a baby girl in the back room of a two-room farmhouse located in the large open fields surrounding Ujdomb. This area, known as Székhalom, is one of the many named subdivisions into which the lands belonging to Tiszadomb are divided. The entire region is characterized by open rolling plains, interrupted occasionally by a cluster of acacia trees that shelter and give evidence to the presence of a house and human habitation. Unless one is intimately familiar with the area, it is impossible to tell where one subdivision ends and another begins. There is a great similarity to the entire region and a feeling of vast distances that is enhanced by the lack of signposts or road markers. The small lanes that traverse the fields at irregular intervals seem to vanish under the canopy of a sky, under which, because of the flatness of the plain, there is clear visibility for miles. The baby was full term, but she had not been expected for another week, and there was no time to take the young mother to the health center, nine kilometers away in Ujdomb. Nobody in this dispersed farming area had a car or a motorcycle or even a telephone to call for an ambulance. Had there been time, the mother would have been trans136

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ported by a horse and carriage, a trip that under the best of circumstances would take an hour on the narrow, unpaved, dusty lanes leading into the village. Most women, fearing the impact of the potholes on the unborn child, preferred to bicycle into Tiszadomb way in advance of the anticipated event, staying with relatives to wait for the birth. In either case the trip was arduous, and at times of high winds that blew the sand across the lanes, or in wintertime, when the roads vanished under the snow cover, it could be dangerous. Pintér Erzsébet was fortunate that her cries for help were heard by her neighbor, working in a nearby field. She immediately dispatched her ten-year-old son on a bicycle to fetch a woman experienced in midwifery and living in the Székhalom area. The midwife arrived two hours later, in time to help the baby into the world. The young father was working in a distant field and could not be found, but when he reached his home at sunset, he found that all was well with his small family. The same was not always true for others living in the area, which lacked basic services and infrastructure. The “borderlands” (határ) or “farm world” (tanyavilág), as these lands are known in the community, an extensive area of several hundred square kilometers encircling the village of Tiszadomb, were not intended to be a permanent settlement and only became such by a slow process of out-migration from the core areas of Ujdomb. In the nineteenth century much of the land was pasture where the village’s cattle were kept year round. The first buildings were stables for the animals and shelters for their shepherds. Other temporary structures were put up by migrating sheepherders who wandered around the area and spent a few weeks here, then moved on to another area and another temporary shelter. The owners of the cultivated areas resided in the central village, commuting in the peak season to oversee the cultivation of their lands by hired laborers or sharecroppers. The first permanent residential buildings were put up in the early twentieth century to give temporary shelter to this labor force and were accordingly quite rudimentary. Eventually, owners of medium-sized properties (10–50 holds), who could not afford to hire many hands and had to work their land themselves, built a second home in the borderlands where they stayed with their families during the summer months. These houses were somewhat better constructed but were not intended for winter use. Finally, a number of small property owners (5–10 holds), who could afford to maintain only one house, moved out of the village and established permanent residences near their fields. By definition,

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these were mostly poor people, and their houses reflected this. Since there were relatively few of them and each farmer built on his own land, these houses were widely dispersed, with the nearest neighbor often several kilometers away. An exception to this pattern of dispersal was provided by a small number of manorial estates on the Ujdomb lands. Beginning around the 1920s, a number of wealthy owners built elaborate manor houses where they usually stayed for a few months during the summer. To house their workers and servants, they erected large structures with several rooms, only one of which was assigned per family. These were wretched, overcrowded places where large numbers of people were warehoused in each room and where four or five of the families shared a kitchen. These manorial estates were busy and overpopulated centers with which the rest of the farm world had little to do. The social standing of the landlord was very much above theirs and that of the manorial servants well below. This largely unplanned and unintended population inhabiting the farmlands of Ujdomb had grown quite sizable by 1913, the first year that population figures were published for the outlying subdivisions. According to the census, the 16,650 holds (23,676 acres) of the village’s lands were divided into seven subdivisions: Bög, Pereghalom, Sárhalom, Árkusdülõ, Székhalom, Kerekdomb, and Oláháza. The total population of these subdivisons exceeded 3,000; it was approximately one-third of Ujdomb’s population of 8,500 (Royal Hungarian Central Statistical Bureau 1913). By 1937 the population of Ujdomb’s outlying regions had increased to over 4,000, out of the Ujdomb total of almost 10,000 (Royal Hungarian Central Statistical Bureau 1937). In 1952, the year after Pintér Erzsébet gave birth, the Ujdomb farm area had 3,777 inhabitants. (No population figures were given separately for the inner village of Ujdomb since it had been united with Ódomb in 1951.) The permanent population of farm dwellers (tanyasiak) that established itself on the open lands soon gained a reputation for individualism and pioneering spirit. It took a particular type of individual to give up the relative comforts of village life, markets and services, and the closeness to family and friends, and set out for this distant prairie in search of a better life. The goal of such individuals was to be independent cultivators and to own a piece of land exclusively, without having to either sharecrop or work for others. For many, this dream was slow in becoming reality, and for years the income from their few parcels had to be supplemented by work for others. Nevertheless, the dream of inde-

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pendence and freedom from control of others fueled their energies. As Szenti Tibor, the chronicler of the tanya (farm) area of Vásárhely (located in the south of the Great Plains), so poignantly expressed: “The white walls of a tanya shone in the far future like the light of a lamp and drew him [the settler] as it would a butterfly” (1979: 11). The settler’s aim was to start small; work hard; build his homestead; acquire horses, cattle, pigs, and fowl; and then every two to three years increase his acreage through his own sweat and blood and that of his ever-growing family. When a father was satisfied that his sons would inherit sufficient amounts of land to ensure their independence, he began to save for the purchase of a town house where he could retire. Often this was easier said than done: the love of the open land and the freedom from interfering neighbors made this move difficult for many, and stories are told of old men who committed suicide rather than leave their beloved homesteads. The tanya was an entity unto itself. Its physical separation from other farms, the difficult journey on the narrow lanes leading to it, the privacy provided by the trees encircling it, and the number of buildings and outhouses clustered together on its territory created an impression of a separate domain where life was little touched by any influence from the outside. The general plan of the yard and the architecture of the main building were fairly uniform throughout this district, and little had changed since the early part of the twentieth century. The typical farmhouse was built in the characteristic regional style known as the long house but usually with fewer rooms than in the village proper and with little or no attention paid to detail or elaboration. The house was between nine and thirteen meters long, divided into three rooms of unequal size. There was a kitchen in the middle and a room at either end, the one facing the front known as the parlor or “clean room,” and the rear one, the bedroom. The front room was rarely used, although it usually had a number of beds piled high with blankets and comforters covered with an embroidered coverlet. The family lived in the kitchen and, depending on the numbers, some members often also slept there. The storage room and various barns and sheds for the animals, as well as an outhouse, were usual additional structures. The houses were built of mud brick and whitewashed, with a thatch roof. The most visually arresting feature of these farms was the draw well, the long arm of which could be seen from miles away, giving a regionally specific flavor to the landscape. Next to the well, a long trough was used to water the animals. It was also com-

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mon to allow a small pond to form adjacent to the well where ducks, geese, and chickens could frolic. In order to provide shade and to mark off the residence from the fields, most owners planted fast-growing acacia trees around the boundary of the yard. Eventually, this area was also fenced off for additional protection, and most owners kept a watchdog on a long chain. No farming activities went on inside the fence, although animals were tethered and watered in the area behind the house. The farmer’s aim was to own the lands adjacent to his homestead and to consolidate all his dispersed parcels into one. This was only rarely possible since adjacent acres were not usually available for purchase and through inheritance farmers also acquired more distant fields. Nevertheless, all farmers established an orchard (usually for apples), a vegetable garden, and often a vineyard immediately adjacent to the homestead because these were labor intensive. Because both pre- and postwar authorities considered the farms to be little more than temporary squatter settlements, few attempts were made to provide them services. Electricity was not extended beyond the core of Tiszadomb until the 1960s, when it was needed for the offices and activities of the agricultural cooperatives. One-room schoolhouses were first built in the late 1930s, when a law mandating compulsory schooling was passed and it was evident that the majority of the farm children were physically unable to reach the village schools. These schools provided a focal point in the area, and often a small center grew up around them, consisting most frequently of a grocery store where staples such as sugar, salt, and kerosene could be purchased. The schools also became cultural and entertainment centers where dances and musical events could be held. Family The new baby was named Katalin and immediately nicknamed Katika or Kati. Both of her parents were born and raised in the farmlands, a few miles from each other. The area of the borderlands where their families lived is at the intersection of three communities: Ujdomb and the villages of Kocsér and Szentkirály. This portion of the Ujdomb farm world is known as Székhalom, a V-shaped section bounded on each side by a one-lane paved road leading to the two nearby villages. The inner boundary of Székhalom is about two kilometers from the Ujdomb railroad station, the outer one is about twelve kilometers.

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Pintér Family Tree

Mihály = Papp Mária (b. 1855)

7 children

Bálint = Kocsis Julianna (b. 1901)

5 children

János = Lovas Erzsébet (b. 1926)

Katalin (b. 1951) The family of Pintér János had a homestead near the outer edge of Székhalom and thus almost as far from Kocsér—about ten kilometers in the opposite direction—as from Ujdomb. Because of this distance from either community, the area was considered almost a no-man’sland and had very few inhabitants. It was also difficult to tell where one village’s lands ended and the other’s began. The homestead of Pintér Erzsébet’s father, Lovas Béla, was about one kilometer over the border, in the Kocsér lands, in an equally distant and desolate part of the area. It was the grandfather of Pintér János who first settled in this region around the turn of the century, wanting to escape the struggle and humiliation that was the lot of landless day laborers. The family was Catholic and had come originally from northern Hungary as part of the late eighteenth-century resettlement of the area. Initially, it had owned a few acres of land that succeeding generations had attempted to increase, only to see them fragmented again and again as they were divided up among the many progeny. By the time grandfather Mihály was born in 1855, there was no land to inherit, and it seemed that he was destined to join

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the ranks of the seasonal harvesters, barely eking out an existence. Instead, he set his sights at acquiring his own land and homestead, even if it meant leaving the extended family and leading a life of deprivation for decades to come. This he accomplished through hard work, persistence, and some luck. He started out as a hired hand on the lands of Zsoldos Áron, one of the larger landowners of Ujdomb. Soon he became a sharecropper for Zsoldos, who appreciated the hard-working young man and after three years, as part of his year-end accounting, gave him three holds of land as his own. The land was poor, only used for pasture, and located at the outer edges of Székhalom. But Mihály owned it outright, and this poor parcel became the foundation of the Pintér property. By this time Mihály was married and had three children but no house of his own. He left the Zsoldos farm, and to survive the first winter and earn some money toward building a homestead, he took a job as overseer at the estate of Lehel István, near his own small parcel. The family spent the winter in the Lehel barn, sleeping on straw and eating very little. But in the spring, as the snow melted and the air became sweet and warm, Mihály walked over to his land and marked out the outlines of his homestead. He spent the following season working for Lehel during the day and plowing and planting his own field during the evening. With the help of his brothers, he built his house, which had four walls and a roof before the next frost came. Once the all-important draw well was dug, he moved his family in while he continued his double existence, commuting between his own land and the Lehel farm. Over the following years, husband and wife, and later the children as they grew, built the outhouses; acquired horses, cattle, pigs, and fowl; started an orchard and a vineyard; and saved every penny they earned for the purchase of more land. Bálint, the fourth child, born in 1901, was the first to see the light of day in the new house, followed by four others. When Bálint married in 1920, his share of the inheritance consisted of six holds, sufficient to support a family. His wife, Kocsis Julianna, gave birth to six children, the oldest born in 1920. János, born in 1926, was their third child. Through the same hard work and determination that characterized his father, Bálint and Julianna also built their own homestead a few kilometers from the paternal house and set out to acquire more land. Mihály by this time had bought a small house in Ujdomb, but he spent very little time there in spite of its relative comfort and proximity to doctors. He missed the open fields, the color of the sunset, and the quiet of the isolation. He died on his tanya at the age of eighty-five in 1940.

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With his five brothers and sisters János grew up a hard worker, starting at age four as a goose boy. The children had very little education, although in the late 1930s Székhalom was given a one-room schoolhouse. Reading and writing were considered an unnecessary luxury by the parents, who taught the children that the paramount goal was to increase the family land. As the children grew, Bálint gradually gave up cultivation and became an overseer for his own children, who worked as sharecroppers on the joint land. He kept the legal title to the entire holding but assigned a parcel to each child to cultivate as his own. When the girls married, they were given their own parcels as dowry, but the sons’ shares were never registered under their own names. In 1944 János was drafted and served in the Youth Brigade (Levente) for a year. When he returned home, he continued cultivating with his father and brothers as before. He married in 1949 and brought his bride to the paternal homestead, where a room was added to the end of the building for their use. His bride, Lovas Erzsébet, was born on the Kocsér side of the border into a family very similar to the Pintérs. Hers was also a Catholic family that had moved out of Kocsér village at around the same time as the Pintérs had moved from Ujdomb, for similar reasons. It was her grandfather, Lovas Péter, who built the homestead that was inherited by her father, Kálmán. Péter had five children and at one point over thirty holds of land. When Kálmán came of age, he was given six holds, which he eventually managed to increase to about twenty. He was an unusual man who was interested in learning and taught himself to read and write. When the first schools were built in the borderlands, he would often be seen visiting the teacher and discussing the news. He regretted greatly that he could not read the newspapers and that he did not own a radio. Perhaps in order to vent his frustration over this, he often went on drinking binges, spending his family’s hard-earned money in the pub instead of investing it in more land. He and his wife had eleven children who had to share the twenty holds. This did not impoverish them, but it made them certainly less well off than the previous generation, a definite embarrassment in this hard-working and acquisitive group of cultivators. The Pintér and Lovas families represented a middle layer of peasantry in this region of the country. They had sufficient land to make a decent living and to support a family. They did not have enough, however, to employ help or to market surplus produce in order to acquire more land. This meant that family members worked from dawn to dusk

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to make ends meet and that the entire enterprise was extremely vulnerable to mishaps of weather or fluctuations in the market. Theirs was an insecure existence, and the danger of losing the land and sinking to the level of the landless was always present. Buying more land represented real or imaginary insurance against such a catastrophe, and thus year after year these families deprived themselves of all but the most necessary commodities and invested all their meager savings in land. To achieve the major goals of purchasing additional acreage and buying or building a house in town, either the head of the family or a grown son often had to take on additional work, as either a sharecropper or a hired hand on somebody else’s estate, even if temporarily. Nevertheless, they prided themselves on being landowners and masters of their own domain. Because of this, they were considered vastly superior in social and economic standing to the landless day laborers and seasonal harvesters. At the same time, they were considerably below the comfortable Ódomb and Ujdomb landholding class and, of course, of the Ujdomb estate owners. There was very little mobility among these groups, and even if a tanya dweller (tanyasi) managed to move into town in his older years, he was unlikely to be accepted as part of the establishment in either village. It was even less likely that tanya youth would marry into a village landowning family or choose a landless person as partner. This social order was still intact at the beginning of the 1950s, even though a number of changes were becoming evident. The most important of these, as far as life in the borderlands was concerned, was the land reform of 1949, which meant the dismemberment of the manorial estates. The former manorial workers could now apply for and acquire land of their own, and for a few years new homesteads popped up in the middle of hitherto unbroken parcels. This, however, did not intrude on the life of families such as the Pintérs and Lovases, who did not qualify for free land and whose routine continued, at least for a few more years, as previously. Even though János and Erzsébet lived only two kilometers from each other, because their homes were on different sides of the Kocsér–Ujdomb border, they did not know each other as children. They attended different schools that were in opposite directions, each several kilometers away from their homesteads. And because the social life of the tanya youth was organized around events held in the school, they did not meet as teenagers. What finally brought them together was the Catholic church in Kocsér, which was considerably closer to the Székhalom homesteads

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than the one in Ujdomb and where the Pintér family started attending services after the war was over. Both sets of parents were satisfied with the match. Erzsébet was known to be hard working and properly trained in survival under the harsh circumstances of life in the borderlands. It was unfortunate that because of her father’s somewhat erratic habits, her share of inheritance was only 1.5 holds, in the Kocsér surrounds, some distance away from the Pintér holdings. The young couple set up temporary housekeeping in the one room attached to the Pintér household, and János sharecropped with his father on his allotment. Within a few years they had saved enough money to buy a small house in Ujdomb, consisting of one room and a kitchen. Soon it became clear, however, that commuting from the village to the land was too time consuming, and with the help of family and friends, they put up a small farmhouse on János’s allotted area, about one kilometer away from the parental Pintér homestead. Early Years It was in this tiny house, its whitewash barely dry, its big brick oven just finished, its rooms practically devoid of furniture, that Pintér Kati was brought into the world. The young mother was delighted to have given birth to a daughter and determined to give her a different upbringing than her own. In the large family where Erzsébet grew up, girl children were at the bottom of the hierarchy. They were considered important as servants and mother’s helpers but otherwise were considered of little importance. After all, girls eventually got married, left the family, and were unlikely to contribute anything toward land acquisition. If anything, they represented a net economic loss since they took their inheritance away with them. However, as in many other peasant cultures, once a woman married, and especially as she produced children, she had an extremely important role in managing and directing both the economic and the social life of the family. The mother was the center of this small, isolated universe, the glue that held the members together; as such, she demanded and received a great deal of respect and love. But this love did not result in intimacy or even trust between mothers and daughters. As an informant quoted by Õrszighety Erzsébet in her study of the village of Hévizgyörk said, “The truth is that although my mother loved us, we were not intimate; we did not dare talk to her. I couldn’t tell her anything; she had so

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much to worry about. We were never beaten, but we were afraid of mother since she demanded discipline. But it was impossible to talk to her about my feelings, my problems, or to ask her opinion or advice about what would be a good thing to do. We were all taught absolute obedience, and I thought that that was the only possible relationship between mothers and daughters” (1981: 246). Erzsébet grew up as one of eleven children, the third daughter in a family where, because of the father’s somewhat unpredictable behavior, the mother was truly the only strong and reliable adult around. She used her children as a workforce, and together they managed to keep the family afloat even in the worst of times. There was no question, however, of Erzsébet continuing her schooling after she completed the compulsory eight years of elementary school. Because of the law requiring school attendance until the age of fourteen, girls as well as boys by this time received the same education, even in the remote farmlands. But of the tanya girls graduating from the Kocsér elementary school between 1945 and 1950, only 10 percent continued their education. And of the 10 percent, none attended high school but enrolled in some sort of technical training school and became typists or skilled workers. At the age of twenty-two Erzsébet had no aspirations beyond being a hard-working wife and partner to her husband and a good mother who would assure a better future for her children. She especially wanted to make sure that her daughter would have a choice in what she would become and have an easier lot than her own. The young Pintér couple worked hard but they soon realized that sharecropping with the elder Pintér was limiting what they could achieve. Since no land was available for purchase, they decided to rent a few additional holds. In 1954, fifteen holds became available to them on the former Varga manorial estate, which had been confiscated from its owner and made state property. The Varga family had fled the area some years before, and the property had gone to rack and ruin, the fields abandoned, the manor house and the servant quarters falling down. The town council was anxious to find people willing to cultivate the land but was unwilling to break it up into small parcels and sell it to individuals since the eventual plan was to use it as a State Farm. The young Pintér family jumped at the opportunity and signed a five-year rental agreement. This meant moving once again since the fifteen holds, which were some three kilometers away from their home, required more attention than the few holds of their own.

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Kati was three years old when they packed up their few possessions and moved into an abandoned building vacated some years before by manorial servants. Her first memories were of planks hanging from the roof and the terrible desolation of the dilapidated house. There were two apartments in this rented tanya, the other inhabited by a woman and her young son. The house was soon repaired, and through the hard work of the young and energetic Pintér couple, the small family flourished and finally managed to buy five holds outright next to the Székhalom school. Pintér János’s land acquisitiveness continued in spite of the fact that a number of small agricultural cooperatives had started in the area and the rumor was that soon all private ownership would be abolished. One of the first of these early cooperatives operated on the nearby Kecskés estate. Its members were former manorial servants or landless laborers who, without expert leadership, were unable to organize production and year by year left more and more land fallow. The cooperative became the laughingstock of the neighborhood and served as a negative example of what collective cultivation would be like. No selfrespecting landowner, no matter how poor, would throw his lot in with the cooperative’s. This was true in spite of the fact that compulsory deliveries had started by this time in earnest. Although their avowed aim was to punish the wealthy peasants and discourage hoarding, by the mid-1950s even the struggling smallholders in the borderlands had been targeted. As a consequence, large numbers of owners either quickly sold or abandoned their property, finally freeing land for purchase for the likes of the ambitious Pinter János. His success, however, was his downfall since in 1955 he was put on the kulak list, along with his father, who still held the joint family property under his name. Being a kulak meant not only higher compulsory delivery quotas, but also constant harassment and persecution by cadres sent from the council. The one advantage tanya dwellers had was that since the carriages of unwelcome visitors could be seen from several kilometers away, they could spirit away any surplus produce and hide it among the trees or in abandoned wells. Nevertheless, the persecution became increasingly wearying, and it made the hardworking and self-made Pintér János extremely bitter and angry at the new regime. In 1959, when the five-year lease expired, the Pintérs were asked to vacate the house, which they had spent considerable time and effort restoring. The entire area of the former Varga estate was slated to be

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subsumed under a newly formed cooperative, the Hunyadi. Along with the other neighboring houses, theirs was knocked down to make way for large, contiguous parcels that could be cultivated by heavy machinery. Having become homeless, János decided to move his family into his town house, which he had purchased in 1953. However, this proved impossible. Since socialist law disallowed the ownership of two houses, especially when the owner did not permanently reside in one of them, and since János was also registered as the owner of the long-abandoned two-room shack where Kati was born, the council had requisitioned the town residence and given it to the family of a cadre. Because the Pintérs now had nowhere else to live, the tenants were asked to vacate the premises, but they refused. János went to court in Kecskemét and was granted an eviction order, which, however, was not enforced by the Tiszadomb council. Much frustrated and feeling cheated, János and his family were forced to move back to Székhalom, where they were given a small tanya abandoned by one of János’s brothers. Kati remembers this house as a sort of a dollhouse because it was so small. The rooms were so low that the wardrobe did not fit under the eaves and had to be placed in the middle of the room. She shared a bed with her parents since there was neither space for two beds nor room for a bed in the tiny kitchen. Life had become a nightmare for this family and became even more tragic when Erzsébet delivered a stillborn son. School Years The family was living in this small shack when Kati started to attend first grade at the Székhalom school. The school was the most substantial building in the farm world, built of red brick in the 1930s. But it had three classrooms only: one for the first three years, one for grades four through six, and one for the final two years. There were three teachers, two of whom lived across the road in a house divided into two apartments. The third rented a room in a more distant tanya. Neither the school nor the teachers’ residence had electricity, and they shared the draw well in the schoolyard. Kati’s home was about two kilometers away, too far for a first grader to walk, so her mother took her every morning and picked her up every afternoon on her bicycle. It was a hard commute, especially in the winter, when the roads were frozen or covered with snow. But mother and daughter showed up without fail, and by the end of the first grade Kati

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was sitting with the second graders and doing their work in the undivided classroom. By the end of the next year, she had completed the second and third grades and was promoted to the next classroom. Kati loved school from the very beginning. To her it represented a peaceful oasis away from the trials and tribulations of her small family. It also provided peers and playmates in her otherwise somewhat solitary existence. Apart from gathering at school, these children, unless they had siblings, rarely had access to others of similar ages. So most of them went to school quite willingly, although not necessarily to learn but to look for companions. Kati was unusual in that she also enjoyed classwork, especially reading and writing. In the meanwhile, her family was once again besieged, this time by the agitators who came in the wake of the new drive toward the complete cooperativization of the countryside. The population of the borderlands held out the longest; people simply hid when the agitators were spotted. Kati remembers her father either hiding in the haystack or creeping over to neighboring homesteads. When the agitators started coming under the cover of darkness, the barking of the dogs gave them away, an eerie sound that reverberated in the entire farm world. Terrible stories circulated among the farms about the consequences of refusing to sign up once one had been confronted. These included deportation, torture, or imprisonment. There was also a story about a man who was found dead on the banks of the river, probably beaten senseless and left to die by the dreaded secret police, a member of which usually accompanied the agitators. Since the adults were frightened, their fear communicated itself to the children. Kati still remembers this period of her life as nightmare ridden. János was torn. He did not want to lose his hard-earned land, but he was increasingly aware that he had very little choice if he wanted to remain in agriculture. But what else could he do? Two of his brothers and several of his acquaintances left the area and took up employment with the railroad or in factories in Budapest. But János’s heart was in the open fields; he could not imagine living in cramped urban quarters, not having his animals, and not being able to watch the corn grow. So he eventually gave in and in the early days of 1960 signed up as a member of the Peace Cooperative. He took with him the ten holds that he had amassed by this time, as well as all his agricultural equipment and his horse. He was allowed to keep one cow and a pig, as well as the poultry. His father, Bálint, who still held the undivided family holdings, was also

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talked into joining by his children. He did so reluctantly but never recovered from the loss of the twenty-five holds, which to him represented the total family wealth and the rightful inheritance of his descendants. Because of his age, he was not required to work on the common lands and was given a small pension, but within the year he died as a broken and bitter man. The lot of János’s family, however, improved. By joining the collective, János was entitled to requisition a cooperative-owned tanya, one, of course, that had become collective property when its rightful owner had fled the area. The house given to the Pintérs was very near the Székhalom school and adjacent to the land that had originally belonged to them. This was finally a proper tanya, not a room in a house shared with the grandparents, not a two-room shack, and not a tiny dollhouse. It had a front room, a kitchen with a great brick oven that also warmed the front room, a large pantry, and a back room with beds for everybody. Kati still shared her parents’ bedroom, but for the first time in her life at age nine she had her own bed. It was a well-kept homestead that needed only small repairs when the family moved in with a cow, a pig, and poultry. The yard was encircled with the inevitable acacia trees for shade and privacy. Most significantly, the farm was just a short walk away from the school. The cooperative’s surveyors measured out the 180 square fathoms that were allowed as private property and that included very little beyond the farmyard. János petitioned that his household plot be allotted adjacent to the farm so that he and his wife could cultivate it and use it permanently for the same crops each year. This was granted, and János and Erzsébet immediately set out to plant an apple orchard and in a few years started to raise hothouse tomatoes. Thus began the Pintér family’s life in the Peace Cooperative. This was an entirely new experience for János, as it was for the entire workforce, all of whose members had been fiercely independent farm folk, who either were born on isolated homesteads and raised to be selfreliant or had left village life voluntarily so that they could be their own masters. Work originally was organized in brigades, but this turned out to be counterproductive. As Katalin said, “the tanyasi individuals were not used to working in a group. In the old days, they met neighbors only once in a while when passing them on the pathways. Days and weeks could go by without encountering others. When they did meet, they were friendly and cordial, and in an emergency they were always ready to

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help. But this was different from hoeing the corn in a row while another person was hoeing along in the next one.” Some people worked faster, others slower, and eventually the slow people held back the fast ones since those who finished first waited for the others at the end of the row, talking and smoking. Since all the brigade members were paid equally and their pay depended on collective achievement, nobody saw any reason to try harder than the slowest individual. The result was disastrous both for human relations, since it created a great deal of conflict, and for production, which was slowed down. The land between the homesteads was planted with corn, great uniform rows of it that stretched as far as one could see. The harvesting and use of this corn, which was collective property, was prohibited to individuals. However, since the Peace’s office was several kilometers away (in the manor house of the former Varga estate), plundering for both animal feed and human consumption was frequent. In addition, the Pintérs, like most others, pastured their cow in the cornfields. Stealing seed from the cooperative’s storehouses was also popular, and people often remarked that in this they resembled the manorial servants of prewar times who stole seed from the same storehouse that had then belonged to the landlord. With the coming of the NEM, all this changed. Strictly working in brigades was abolished, and a number of other work arrangements were made available to members. The most popular of these were sharecropping agreements with the cooperative, usually for the raising of vegetables or pigs. As noted, in these contracts, the member carried out all phases of raising a particular crop (or animal) and received a specified percentage of the sale price after the cooperative marketed the goods. This type of work, which closely resembled precollective cultivation, proved to be ideal for the individualistic inhabitants of the borderlands. It worked very well for the Pintér family as well. By joint decision, Erzsébet did not join the cooperative but stayed home with the animals, of which there were many by the mid-1960s. On János’s behalf, she raised pigs on contract with the cooperative. In order to feed the animals, János raised corn on half of his household plot and bought extra feed from the Peace. Pig raising turned out to be quite lucrative. On the other half of the household plot the Pintérs grew hothouse tomatoes, and soon their apple trees started producing as well. Tomatoes and apples were not marketed through the cooperative but rather through direct sales at the Budapest market or through wholesalers. Since the Pintérs

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had no car, they had to rely on the latter and bring the apples to the Ujdomb railroad station at appointed times. Katalin remembers these as great occasions for outings with the neighboring women, who banded together and drove their carriages full of the precious, carefully wrapped fruit to the station. As their incomes increased, people complained less and began to find their place in the cooperative. They did not, however, develop an allegiance or loyalty to the common: they simply found what they were looking for in terms of material goods, particularly from the income provided by the subsidiary or household plots. That this came at the extremely high price of working twelve- or fourteen-hour days did not bother them; they were used to this from earlier times. These were happy days for Kati in spite of the fact that she had no siblings and was alone a great deal of the time. She was particularly close to only one child, Rózsa, her cousin on her father’s side. They were approximately the same age, and since they were both only children, they felt drawn to each other. Rózsa also attended the Székhalom school but lived much further away, and visiting back and forth was difficult. School, however, was nearby, and Kati spent as much time as possible in the school library. Her mother, who needed her help around the house, allowed this as much as possible, and she was also greatly encouraged by her teachers. Through the diligence of the teachers and the donations of the socialist state, the school library contained a complete selection of Hungarian classical literature and much of world literature in translation. This collection opened up Kati’s eyes not only to good books, but also to other possible worlds beyond the limits of the farm world. She became an avid reader. The teachers allowed her to check out books so that she could read at night and were amazed at the speed with which she returned them. This was practically her only connection to that other world. The parents were busy people and rarely went into town. All their near relatives lived in the borderlands, and there was no reason for a child like Kati to visit anybody in Tiszadomb. Since the houses in the farm area still had no electricity, most families had no radio. The Pintérs had a battery-operated radio that was kept in the room where the parents slept. Kati’s bed by this time had been moved to the kitchen, where she had no access to the radio until the age of twelve when her father finally gave it to her. But news and music were of less interest to her than literature, which became her abiding interest and, eventually, the focus of her life.

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High School After Kati graduated from elementary school, it was obvious to everybody who knew her that she was bound for further schooling, and, moreover, that it should be in an institution of higher learning, like a high school, not a trade school. Nine students graduated that year from the Székhalom school, four girls and five boys. Three girls—Kati, Rózsa, and Nagy Mariska—applied to the Tiszadomb High School and were accepted. The fourth girl enrolled in a typing and shorthand course but after two years married, joined the cooperative, and became a full-time farm wife. With one exception, none of the boys had aspirations beyond becoming tractor operators or receiving training in operating other machinery and eventually working for the cooperative. The one exception, Bence Tibor, became a barber. Girls were considered equal to boys in potential and encouraged by the socialist state to study. Gone were the days of the 1950s, when Soviet-directed propaganda posters pictured women as tractor drivers or metalworkers. Nevertheless, the idea that women should take their place alongside men in all walks of life persisted. The result was that far more girls than boys continued their education beyond the eight elementary years. The irony was that while boys had fewer years of schooling, they entered into more lucrative occupations and did so much sooner. Girls were more likely to choose institutions that did not provide direct, practical training and that after four or more extra years eventually led them into poorly paying white-collar occupations. So the difference in earnings and in the standard of living between men and women persisted, and married women’s earnings, even if they were more highly educated than their husbands, continued to be considered only subsidiary income. Kati did not particularly worry about this and considered high school not the end of the road but a step toward her final goal of attending a teachers’ college. By the age of fourteen she knew without the slightest doubt that she wanted to be a teacher, a goal that pleased her old teachers as well as her parents. The Pintérs held a conference and decided that whatever the sacrifice in terms of the loss of Kati’s labor on the farm, they were willing to support her aspirations. Tiszadomb High School in those days was still housed in the old Ujdomb elementary school. It was a small institution with a fairly poor reputation since its teachers were former elementary school teachers who had managed to qualify for a high school teaching certificate through

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correspondence courses. Most Tiszadomb families who could afford it sent their children to high school in Kecskemét. Nevertheless, it did provide the basic courses and at the end, a diploma. Even though the school was at the end of Tiszadomb nearest to Székhalom, it was still nine kilometers from the Pintér homestead. During the spring and fall seasons Kati bicycled in, getting up at 5 A.M. and arriving dusty and disheveled after 7. She tried to use the hour between 7 and 8 to finish her homework, which was difficult to do at home due to the lack of electricity. In the winter, however, commuting was not possible. For these months, she had to rent a room and board with strangers. Of the three tanya girls who went to the school, Mariska had relatives with whom she could stay, but Rózsa and Kati had to look for seasonal rentals—not an easy task in those days of housing shortage. The particularly annoying part of this ordeal was that the Pintérs owned a house in town that the tenant still refused to vacate. Going into town every day and coming into contact with youth who had grown up in Tiszadomb was an eye-opening experience for Kati. She became acutely aware of the differences between herself, who had grown up in the borderlands, and her classmates from the town. This was a different world where everybody now had electricity and running water. Children here came from homes with indoor bathrooms and kitchens where cooking was on electric or gas stoves, not in a brick oven with firewood. Their parents and even grandparents were literate and read newspapers. And everybody without fail had shoes. In the farm world, children very often went for years without shoes in the warmer months and put on boots only for the cold season. Kati suddenly became aware of her origins, and while she did not feel that her upbringing had necessarily disadvantaged her in terms of learning, socially she felt the difference and was somewhat alienated from her classmates. She did not attend dances and mixers, had no boyfriends, and mostly kept company with the two other tanya girls. At the same time, spending most of her time in town separated her from the activities of the tanya youth. It was customary in those days for unmarried teenagers who had graduated from the Székhalom school to get together in the school building and learn to play the zither, and once a year to put on a theatrical production. This was the center of youth activity and the place where most of them met their mates. Kati did not attend any of these gatherings, and so she increasingly became somewhat of a loner. In 1968 Pintér János finally had sufficient funds to make a move

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toward reclaiming his house in town. He learned that the orchard adjacent to his property was being divided up into house lots, and he managed to buy the one immediately adjacent to his property. Because this lot had a different registration number, he was allowed to build a new house on it that eventually was joined to the original building. At this point, however, his aim was to start small, and with the help of his friends and relatives, he built a one-room house where Erzsébet and Kati could spend the winter months. This made Kati’s fourth and final year in high school considerably less arduous, and she completed her studies with high honors. Teachers’ College In the spring of 1968 Kati took the entrance exam to the teachers’ college in Szeged. She chose the one in Szeged because this was one of the best schools in the country for teacher training and because she did not think that she was ready to tackle living in Budapest, which would have been the other choice for superior teacher training. It was a difficult school to get into, however, and she expected to have to wait perhaps several years before she could start. Much to her surprise and joy, she was accepted at the first try, partly because of her excellent grades and high recommendations from her teachers, but also partly because she met the profile of a disadvantaged rural proletarian, a true “child of the people” whose father was an unskilled laborer in the agricultural cooperative. She received a full scholarship from the state that consisted of free tuition, free books, and an additional 400 Ft per month. From this she had to pay for her room and board in the dormitory, which was 350 Ft, leaving her 50 Ft pocket money. This was enough to buy a couple of pairs of stockings and a candy bar. Her parents helped her as much as they could, buying her all her clothes, including a new winter coat in the first year. But throughout her college years, she was extremely poor and had no money for extras or little luxuries. This did not particularly bother her. Here she was finally at an institution of higher learning, with a select group of people who shared her interests. The tanya/town difference no longer mattered; there were students here from all sorts of backgrounds. Reflecting back on this period in her life, Kati feels that she became an adult and formed her own identity during those years in Szeged. She suddenly had lots of friends and took part in all sorts of student activities. She went to evening lec-

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tures and performances—usually free of charge for students—with groups of people, and although she did not have a boyfriend because boys considered her too serious, she never lacked for companionship. Her eyes were also soon opened to political undercurrents that were beginning to be felt in the country, especially among students. There was the beginning of a recognition that opposition to the accepted order of things might be possible. Political discussions were starting to become more evident around the time Kati entered college, and she found that at least half of her classmates were more interested in politics and the future of the country than in their lectures and exams. She first became aware of this undercurrent while traveling home to Tiszadomb by bus in the fall of 1968, when she heard about events taking place in Prague. The bloodless revolution ushered in a number of liberal changes in Czechoslovakia under the leadership of the reform Communist Alexander Dubèek. Dubèek was elected first secretary by the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, which had earlier voted overwhelmingly in favor of a reform, in the winter of 1968. By the spring of that same year, his government had drafted an “Action Program” outlining its goals, which were basically a return to a type of socialism that they claimed had existed in the country between 1945 and 1948. The government proclaimed the legitimacy of basic human rights and liberties, objected to the persecution of people for political convictions, and abolished censorship. The reform that enabled this growing freedom came to be known as the Prague Spring. On May 3, an unauthorized demonstration in Prague’s Old Town Square turned into an anti-Communist rally. Immediately afterward, Western analysts detected a massive movement of Soviet troops toward Czechoslovakia. The country was invaded during the night of August 20–21, 1968, by troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, including the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Bulgaria (Romania refused to participate). The Soviets insisted that they had been invited to invade the country, as loyal Czech Communists had told them that they urgently needed assistance against the counterrevolution. The Soviet-led invasion was indeed shocking news for those who expected a similar political liberalization process to take place in Hungary to match the economic liberalization that had been unfolding for some years. By the time Kati returned to college a few days later, a boy in her study group had been drafted into the army and sent to the border

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of Czechoslovakia as part of the invading socialist forces that were being readied by the Soviets. This was an eye-opener for Kati, who was never thereafter oblivious to politics, and although not particularly active, she became a believer in and a supporter of the liberal opposition. Kati became passionately interested and active in the Ethnographic Club, a student-directed organization at the teachers’ college. The club had such a good reputation that even students from the University of Szeged attended its meetings. These university students were interested in ethnography, but since they did not major in it, they were not allowed to participate in the regular university courses. They did, however, have access to books and materials and every so often convinced younger lecturers to attend the club’s meetings. The club met every week, organized lectures, and planned field projects. The members went on trips to traditional villages that had preserved their regional building styles, where the women still wore traditional clothes and old men and women remembered folktales and myths. The club members’ aim was to somehow preserve this heritage before it was lost, so they collected folklore and family histories, and photographed the buildings and objects before they disappeared. After College Kati graduated from the Szeged Teachers’ College in the spring of 1972 with a degree that certified her as a teacher of Hungarian literature and history in the upper division of elementary schools (grades 5–8). She returned to her hometown to work in order to fulfill an obligation that she felt she had to the children there. She had dreamt of becoming a role model and inspiration to them like the teachers that had been so important to her as a child. She accepted an appointment in the school at Bög, an area very much like the one where she had grown up. She took up residence in a room provided by the school, spending most weekends and holidays with her parents, who by this time had moved into their much enlarged and improved house in the village. The tenant was still in the original house, and relations between the two families were extremely strained: the older house was badly in need of repairs that neither the Pintérs nor the town council were willing to make. It seemed that the tenant, a single older woman whose husband had died some years before, would look for more convenient accommodations soon. János was still a cooperative member and kept his household plot, where

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he and Erzsébet continued growing tomatoes and tending their orchards. They had decided not to continue raising pigs, however, which freed them from year-round residence in the farm area. Kati had a wonderful first year teaching at Bög. She was able to communicate her great love of the country, its literature, and its cultural heritage to the children. Her aim was to make them aware and proud of their own place in this history. Fortuitously, she met another teacher, an older woman, Verebélyi Kató, who taught art at the central Tiszadomb school. Auntie Kató, as she was known to everybody, was an avid collector of artifacts and organized a club for the older students to pursue the preservation of ethnographic objects and traditions. These were the days when folk objects had suddenly gained popularity in Budapest, with dealers scouring the countryside for artifacts. Old pottery, painted hope chests, spinning wheels, and handwoven tablecloths that for years had been relegated to a dark corner of the attic suddenly became desired objects, and the locals were offering to sell them for a pittance. Auntie Kató became alarmed at the loss of these important material witnesses to the peasant past of the region and attempted to hold on to them, with the aim of eventually exhibiting them in a local gallery or museum. She was a beloved, charismatic figure who kept the original collection in her own house. After her death, her daughter Veronica donated the entire collection to the town. Since that time it has been languishing in one of the rooms of the old Ódomb Town Hall. For Kati, meeting the older woman was an important experience. After all, Auntie Kató’s passion for preserving the past was a continuation of what she herself had been involved in during her years at Szeged. She became a staunch supporter of the club and also tried to have her own elementary school students cooperate in its efforts. As homework, she often gave them projects designed to increase their ethnographic knowledge of their surroundings. For example, she asked them to write down the place names around their homes and to interview older people as to the origins and meanings of these names. Another project included writing down holiday customs and recording stories that the students may have heard from older people. Unfortunately, this happy period in Kati’s life soon came to an end when in her second year of teaching two farm area schools were combined and her school’s principal was replaced by a woman from the other school. This woman was an outsider to Tiszadomb and not only had little or no sympathy for promoting local traditions, but also consid-

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ered the awakening of feelings for a Hungarian national culture downright heretical and antithetical to the officially promoted identity of the “socialist man.” According to this dogma, national traditions, which could potentially divide people, were to be relegated to the inglorious past and forgotten in the march toward a uniform and unified socialist future where everybody would basically be the same. All this went against the grain of everything that Kati believed in, and she could not work with her new boss. In the middle of her second school year at Bög she quit her job. At this point she did not have qualifications to teach in a high school. This was unfortunate since Tiszadomb High School, which had closed its doors soon after Kati had graduated in 1968, was about to be resurrected through the efforts of the energetic Joó István. For Joó, having a high school in Tiszadomb was a matter of pride and a component in his campaign toward achieving town status for the village. After he convinced the county council of the viability of a local high school, his next step was convince the parents of the potential student body that this would be a school where the children would receive a quality education. To be able to start the school, he needed to have them agree not to send their children elsewhere but to support the local high school. In December 1973 he called a meeting in the auditorium of the House of Culture to which the parents of all children of high school age or younger were invited. He promised that he would personally guarantee that their children would not be educationally disadvantaged, but primarily he tried to appeal to their local pride in asking their help in this important step toward improving the community’s future. His trump card was in the person of a highly respected teacher, Vermes Sándor, who, he said, had agreed to become the principal of the new school. Joó knew that Vermes was valued and trusted by the parents and the authorities alike and that his being at the helm would serve as a guarantee of the high level of education to all concerned. Vermes gave a short acceptance speech, promising that there would be hard work and discipline in the new school. The parents were then asked to vote and almost unanimously decided to support the founding of a local high school. Because of this, Joó received funding from the county board of education, and the new school was started as an auxiliary building to the new Ujdomb elementary school, which for some years had been operating near the central market. Vermes spent the entire summer of 1974 organizing the curriculum, hiring teachers, and making sure that the library and the science labs

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were adequate and that the classrooms were ready for the children. It was decided to admit all four classes at once, although it was clear that the senior class would have few students. It was a formidable task, but Vermes was equal to it. He was an old-fashioned teacher whose entire life centered around his calling and his students, whom he treated with respect and understanding while in return demanding respect and discipline. By the beginning of September the school was certified and was ready to receive students. Then, in early September, much to the shock of the entire community, Joó announced that Vermes was to be replaced as principal by Joó’s personal friend, Ördög János. Vermes was to be vice principal. It seemed clear to all who knew Joó that this must have been his original plan and that he had no intention of allowing Vermes to lead the school. Vermes, not being a member of the mayor’s trusted inner circle, was much less easily biddable and would have stood for a school independent from the mayor’s influence and control. Having Ördög as principal essentially guaranteed that the school would be part of Joó’s personal fiefdom and that the mayor would forever be involved in all major decisions, including the hiring and firing of personnel, curricular matters, and the rewarding and punishment of students. Joó knew, however, that since Ördög was not trusted by the parents, putting him forward as the future principal at the December meeting would not have resulted in the necessary votes to start the school. By September, when, through the superhuman efforts of Vermes, the school was ready to start and the students had been withdrawn from other institutions and committed to Tiszadomb, there was very little anybody could do upon hearing about the sudden personnel switch at the helm. The puzzle was why Vermes accepted the vice principal position. Basically, there was little he could do. He had no other position, and it was too late in the school cycle to apply elsewhere. But probably more important, the school was his creation, and he wanted to see it succeed. He essentially continued acting as chief administrator: he was the one who made sure that communication was maintained with the county, that the grades were posted, and that applications were processed. He was also a father figure to most of the teachers and remained an inspiring role model to the students. What Ördög had was the power to make major decisions. While these developments were unfolding in Tiszadomb, in early 1975 Kati left the community to take a position in Budapest. Why did she go

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so far afield? She somewhat surprised even herself when she made this decision. Unlike many others in her generation, she was never particularly drawn to the capital. She was satisfied living in her rural hometown since her main interest was in things genuinely Hungarian and she felt that the cities were tainted with foreign cultural influence. However, Budapest offered opportunities and in Tiszadomb there were none. Since this was in the middle of the school year, Kati could not immediately find a teaching job, and for the remainder of the year she worked as a librarian in one of the branches of the central public library. The following September, through an old acquaintance from Szeged, she heard about a job in the Maxim Gorky Technical High School. Even though she was not certified as a high school teacher, technical high schools were considered to be of a lower academic standard than regular high schools, and she was hired. Her duties combined teaching Hungarian literature and working in the library. She had been enjoying this work for a year when the school’s principal, who was interested in upgrading its faculty, encouraged her to enroll at the university and to work toward a bachelor’s degree in literature. University Student and High School Teacher In 1976 Kati enrolled in a correspondence course at the Eötvös Loránd University, majoring in Hungarian literature and dropping history, her second major at the teachers’ college. By now she was completely disillusioned with the way the socialist political system was run and especially with the way history was periodically rewritten. She decided that literature was more difficult to lie about and reinterpret since it spoke for itself. It took her until 1980 to finish her degree because, although tuition was free and she only had to attend occasional seminars, she continued teaching part time at the technical high school. Living in Budapest opened up a whole spectrum of new experiences and impressions for her. In the beginning she felt completely alienated, like a country bumpkin who, as she said, “didn’t even know where the National Theater was located.” But slowly she came to realize that she had other kinds of knowledge which, while not as appreciated, were equally valuable. While she was not raised in a context that included the opera and concerts, she had a knowledge of the country, its traditions, and its people. Nevertheless, she decided to acquire as much as possible of that “other,” city kind of culture, and she went to as many plays,

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concerts, and exhibits as time permitted. She went with friends or often alone since she could not find anybody else as hungry for these experiences as she was. She also learned a lot from simply being around friends who she felt were more educated and cultured than she. Once again, she was surrounded by friends and acquaintances without being truly intimate with any of them. She acutely felt her “in-between status” as a rural person in the city, albeit an educated rural person. Perhaps this was the reason she did not allow herself to enter into any serious and committed relationships with men and avoided any close personal entanglements. Instead, she kept her passion focused on literary matters and, although she had less time for it now, continued her devoted interest in Hungarian ethnography, which she kept alive by attending all the new exhibits at the newly refurbished Ethnographic Museum. Kati’s living conditions were difficult throughout her stay in Budapest. She first lived with relatives—two of her mother’s brothers and three of her father’s lived in the city—and living with one of them was a stopgap solution whenever she could find no other housing. But she wanted to be independent of family ties and lived by preference in a succession of rented rooms. The first of these was in a housing project quite far from the center, where it turned out that in addition to paying rent, she was expected to take a child to daycare every morning. She soon tired of this and moved to a more centrally located villa near Heroes’ Square. When the house was sold, she had to move again and with a girlfriend took space in a half-finished house in an area known as the “Buda hills.” This was her most enjoyable home in the city. The house was located on a small street, she could hear birdsong, and her window opened onto the panorama of a green hill. After the house was completed and the owners took up occupancy, the girls were asked to leave. Kati was forced to rent a room on one of the main avenues, notorious for its noise and air pollution. She began to feel constantly ill with headaches and asthma, so she once again moved to yet another room further out in the suburbs. The area was much preferable; however, the room was unfurnished and she was forced to buy at least minimal furniture. She found out that socalled youth furniture was considerably less expensive, so she bought a narrow, short bed, a low table, and four small stools. Fortunately, being a person of relatively short stature, she could live with these, but her choice of furnishings never ceased to amuse her friends. To a large extent it was due to these difficult living conditions that Kati decided to return home to the Great Plains after finally completing

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her degree in 1980. She also felt that while the five years in Budapest had been a valuable experience, she was basically a country person and was ready to reconnect with what she called her “real life.” She was offered a teaching job in the high school at Kiskunfélegyháza, a somewhat larger town than Tiszadomb, about 50 kilometers away. Just as soon as she settled in an apartment there, she received an urgent request from Tiszadomb High School to accept a position there, one of the literature teachers having unexpectedly resigned. By this time the high school was in an attractive new building near the former Ódomb/Ujdomb line. Her parents’ house (from which the tenant had finally departed) was located about two blocks from the school and had plenty of room for her. She felt that this was the best of all possible worlds and took up her teaching duties with great enthusiasm. In addition to teaching, Kati once again decided to promote her interest in ethnography and local history, now with high school students. Since there was no room for these subjects in the curriculum, she started an extracurricular club that met once a week. Her main goal was to make the students aware of their own traditions at a dangerous time when the entire world was being inundated with American-derived ideas and fashions. She also wanted to both save material objects and record memories before their owners passed away. Local traditions were passed down during these years almost as secret knowledge, and although some local people were trying to put together a history of the town, not since the 1930s, when the Boy Scouts had collected folklore, had there been a systematic attempt to preserve and record oral history. A sizable contingent of students joined the club, and it flourished between 1984 and 1989. Some of them did excellent work. For example, a girl from Lakitelek collected the correspondence of her grandparents in the four years between 1929 and 1933, during their engagement. The young people lived in different villages, and since both sets of parents had died, they each had to run their respective households and raise their younger siblings. The letters were less about love than about the households and revealed how a wealthy peasant’s home was run in this period. The student submitted her essay based on the grandparents’ data to a national competition for volunteer collectors and won first prize. Later, she further developed it as a senior thesis for her degree at the teachers’ college at Jászberény. In both her literature class and the ethnographic club one of Kati’s favorite students was Boglár Laci. This young man, who had been raised

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in a context where the past was venerated and where the golden days of the nation and the community were seen as part of bygone years, sought to recapture the glory of his heritage through reading literary works, as well as by collecting oral histories and old artifacts. He became an enthusiastic member of the club and excelled in classwork. Thus an unusual alliance and mutual appreciation developed between the young offspring of Ódomb’s former elite and the teacher from the outskirts of the community. In spite of her great enthusiasm for her teaching and for her club, Kati was beginning once again to feel alienated from her surroundings. She found that it was strange and limiting to live in a small town without all the cultural events that Budapest had to offer and without the constant stimulating discussions that she was accustomed to carrying on with her friends. During these years she would often jump on the train on a Saturday afternoon to attend a play or to see a new exhibit. She could spend the night with relatives and return on Sunday afternoon in time to prepare for her upcoming classes. Most important in this was that she kept in touch with her city friends and did not lose track of the events that were gathering momentum in the capital. Economic and Political Developments in the Country By the 1980s, in spite of a seemingly successful economy in the East European context, there were signs that Hungary’s economic system was in trouble. In the long run, the NEM was not a sufficient remedy for the problems created by the centralized Stalinist command economy. In addition, according to Marshall Goldman (1992), a variety of government policies were also responsible for the failure of the economic system. Foremost among these was heavy investment in the steel and coal industries, which were inefficient and wasteful and consistently had to be subsidized. These funds came from the heavy taxation of private enterprises, consequently weakening this sector as well. Agriculture was undermined for the same reason. In order to bolster the inefficient industrial sector, the government limited credit to agricultural enterprises, forcing many to fail and close. Merging failing cooperatives with efficient ones resulted in undermining productivity in the merged units as well. Hungary’s membership in COMECON (the Eastern bloc’s economic union) also caused problems for the economic system. Hungary had to sell its exports to Eastern-bloc countries at unreasonably low prices. To

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satisfy this market for cheap goods, Hungary ran inefficient and unprofitable industries rather than producing competitive quality goods for the Western market, where they could earn high profits. There was also resistance on the part of entrenched bureaucrats to implement economic reforms already on the books since the management of the Stalinist economic infrastructure was their source of power. Economists think that all this brought about a pervasive impoverishment of Hungarian society in the 1980s. While there were some extremely wealthy entrepreneurs, the vast majority of the people, whose average monthly wages were $160, increasingly found themselves in financial difficulties. Hungarians worked several jobs; moonlighting in the private sector became the norm for those who had marketable skills. Those who did not—and this included much of the middle class—found their standard of living sinking at an alarming rate. It did not help that the government cut back on a number of social programs at the same time. It decreased expenditure on public health, and there was a chronic housing shortage, especially in the cities. The Hungarian youth increasingly found their future to be bleak, and the suicide rate, alcoholism, and drug abuse soared. These economic hardships reverberated in the political sphere. As popular discontent with the socialist rule grew, by 1985 the leading party and government organs had to face the fact that stopgap measures were no longer working and the economy had to be dealt with in their 1987 program. At the 1986 November session of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (as the Communist Party was renamed) a resolution was adopted that recognized the deficiencies of central management, implementation, and control, and blamed the party executive organs and the government. The resolution contained the following indictment: “The development of the system of macroeconomic management was inconsistent. The responsibility for the deficiencies of direction, execution, and control lies with the executive organs of the Central Committee and the government” (cited in Révész 1990: 137). The harsh self-criticism was followed by personnel changes. In 1986 the minister of finance and the chairman of the Planning Office were pensioned off; in 1987 the secretary for economic affairs of the Central Committee was replaced; at the same time, Lázár György, who had held the post of prime minister for twelve years, was replaced by Grósz Károly. The new prime minister presented parliament with a Stabilization Working Program in September 1987, adopted by the Socialist Workers’ Party.

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At the same time, researchers in an institute of the Ministry of Finance published their recommendations for economic recovery in a study entitled “Turning Point and Reform,” in which they urged a comprehensive and conceptual reorganization of the economy and political system (Antal et al. 1987). As 1987 drew to an end, the government apparatus was working on the preparation of new tax laws, projected to come into effect by January 1, 1988, along with higher prices. The effect of this new, progressive income tax was that many people found it less desirable to hold second jobs. In short, the reforms created even harsher conditions. There was genuine disillusionment on the part of the population in the leadership, and this included Communist Party rank and file. Some forty-five thousand party members declared that they did not wish to renew their membership. Within the party, all this culminated in radical changes in the composition of the leading party organs and the gaining of ground by the reform wing. Much of this occurred at the special party conference convened by the Socialist Workers’ Party on May 21, 1988. The conference was highly unusual since it fell between two regularly scheduled party congresses. It included in its agenda the reelection of the Central Committee of the party and of the Political Committee, the topmost organ of the party, with ten to fifteen members. Speakers criticized the errors committed and the indecisiveness of the leadership, and demanded changes. These remarks were no longer limited to the economy but also called for political reform. By the end of the special conference, the composition of the leading party organs had radically changed: one-third of the Central Committee’s members were replaced, and five members of the previously thirteenmember Political Committee were not even reelected to the Central Committee. Two outspoken reform politicians, Nyers Rezsö and Pozsgay Imre, became members of the highly influential Political Committee, the equivalent of the Politburo. Nyers was known for his role in instituting the NEM in the late 1960s, and Pozsgay for his strong contacts with the semilegal opposition and social scientists critical of the political structure. Kádár János was elected party chairman, a highly ceremonial function. Grósz Károly was the new general secretary. The May 1988 conference was a breakthrough in the sense that it ended the almost thirty-year-long Kádár autocracy within the party. After the special party convention, political developments rapidly ac-

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celerated that can be understood only by backtracking some years and tracing the development of the political opposition. The Opposition The movement toward democratization in Hungary developed slowly. As in the rest of Eastern Europe, independent activism largely disappeared after the terror and the Soviet-led retaliation of 1956 and 1968. When it revived in the 1970s, it was no longer directed at overthrowing the Communist system. According to the sociologist Sabrina Ramet (1995), what activists sought was more limited in two senses: first, most East European dissent was defensive in character, seeking to safeguard basic human rights and equality of treatment, and second, it tended to be issue oriented. While in Poland this eventually resulted in the spectacular activities of Solidarity, beginning in 1980, in Hungary no similar large-scale movement developed at that time. As Kis János, the founding editor of the opposition journal Beszélõ, summed it up in an interview, “The role of the opposition in Hungary is not to marshal social forces. The aim of the opposition is rather more to try to elucidate the situation, to show alternatives, to stimulate discussion and political thinking” (1986: 22). Thus, initially, with the permission of the government, apolitical groups such as the József Attila Circle, started by young writers in 1979 to further the exchange of ideas among young intellectuals, were organized. Authorities also permitted émigré George Soros to set up a private cultural foundation in Budapest in 1984 that gave several million dollars to support private educational and research projects. Similarly, the establishment of a self-help organization of elderly people, called the Retired Persons’ Cultural and Self-Help Association, was permitted in April 1986. Apart from these relatively small groups with cultural or social agendas, until the late 1980s the major currents of independent activism were the Budapest School, the Peace Group for Dialogue, and the Blue Danube Circle. The Budapest School was founded by a group of philosophers and sociologists led by Hegedüs András, the former premier, whose expressed aim was a return to the original ideas of socialism, of which, he felt, the country had lost sight. The Peace Group for Dialogue was formed in 1982 by a group of artists and students from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. The group sought cooperation and dialogue with the authorities and the official Hungarian Peace Council, and in January

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1983 actually held talks with them. The Blue Danube Circle was concerned with the protection of the environment and owed its birth to a planned hydroelectric plant and dam on the section of the Danube bordering Czechoslovakia. As the number of such groups grew, the political atmosphere remained relaxed, and between the summer of 1987 and 1988 a string of independent non-Communist apolitical associations appeared, ranging from student groups to intellectual forums, many of them seeking and receiving legal recognition. Ultimately, however, these groups provided the nuclei of emergent political parties that sought recognition as such. Their success became evident when, between 1988 and 1989, a number of political groups and embryonic parties were established. According to one estimate (Ramet 1995: 135), by 1989 there were already several hundred independent associations and political groups, including the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Association of Young Democrats, the Association of Free Democrats, the Smallholders Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Social Democratic Party, to name only the most influential ones. As civil society started blossoming in Hungary, different currents of political and cultural philosophy surfaced. Hungarians no longer considered Russian-style communism or Western-style parliamentary democracy as the only two alternatives. The two competing political philosophies that emerged were “populist–nationalist thinking which abhors consumerism and worries about moral decline and liberal democratic thinking which welcomes consumerism and sees no threat in the Westernization of values” (Ramet 1995: 138). These two philosophies were embodied in two of the leading organizations of the opposition: the Association of Free Democrats and the Hungarian Democratic Forum. The Association of Free Democrats was founded in November 1988, and as of July 1989 it had 3,880 members and thirty-five chapters. Its members saw themselves very much in the Western liberal tradition, and the party became popular among professionals and urban intellectuals. The Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), officially chartered as a political party in September 1988, had 17,350 members in August 1989. Its roots can be traced to a series of informal meetings held in the early 1980s in the backyard of the populist writer Lezsák Sándor in the small town of Lakitelek in the Great Plains. These meetings, much like those of the József Attila Circle, were called reading circles and were origi-

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nally aimed at discourse about cultural matters, particularly traditional Hungarian culture. The topics of these early meetings ranged from a discussion of the situation of Hungarian minorities in Romania and their culture to readings of current poetry, the singing of folk songs, and debates about environmental issues. Visiting writers from neighboring countries were occasionally invited and heard in translation. Many of the participants at these meetings attended a convention in mid-June 1985 at a campsite near the village of Monor, in the same general region of the country. The meeting focused on the nation’s future and heard nationalist writer Csurka István lament that the “culture of today’s Hungarian society is the culture of a defeatist, agonizing, self-exploiting, and neurotic society, a kind of quasi-culture, if you will” (cited in Ramet 1995: 138).The emphasis of the group thus shifted to a nationalistic revival of tradition and Hungarian cultural values. A much larger group, composed of about 150 Hungarian intellectuals, convened in Lakitelek in September 1987 at Lezsák’s home. Among those present were the writer Konrád György and the reform politician Pozsgay Imre. The meeting produced an agreement to create an official body (the Hungarian Democratic Forum) dedicated to helping solve the nation’s problems. In early 1988 the new organization held its first meeting in a theater in Budapest, with 500 people in attendance. The Forum adopted a resolution declaring that the only path out of political crisis and rising social tensions was to establish a functioning democracy in Hungary, including guarantees of individual liberty and an independent parliament responsible only to the electorate. The formal establishment of the Hungarian Democratic Forum as a party and the adoption of statutes followed. The organization pledged to abide by the existing constitution and promised to work for the introduction of a multiparty system in the country. Among the other important new parties was the Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESz), founded in the spring of 1988 and claiming about 5,000 members by the end of 1989. Its stated aims combined advocacy of parliamentary democracy with a concern for human rights. The newly resurrected Smallholders Party (November 1988) had an estimated 6,000–7,000 members by mid-1989. It also advocated free elections and political neutrality. As a peasant party, it emphasized the revitalization of agriculture. What made these developments possible was the Socialist Workers’ Party’s attempt to take the lead in advocating reform, thereby trying to

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salvage its role at the helm. However, it was the very process of democratization it initiated that eventually undermined its power. In November 1988 the parliament passed a democratization package designed to broaden “socialist pluralism” and approved the introduction of a multiparty system by 1990 at the latest. In an even more decisive step toward democratization, on October 18, 1989, the Hungarian National Assembly adopted a series of amendments that prepared the way for multiparty elections. The most significant among these were the abolition of the principle of the leading role of the Communist Party, the provision of guarantees for human and civil rights, and the right of political parties to organize and operate, provided they observed the constitution. The Dawning of Political Consciousness Up to this point in her life, Kati had had little interest in politics. Her main preoccupation had been the resurrection and preservation of national cultural values and the safeguarding of the authenticity of Hungarian history as it was passed down to new generations. After her return to Tiszadomb in 1980, she discovered that these interests resonated closely with the fledgling movement centered around Lezsák Sándor in nearby Lakitelek. Lezsák, originally from Budapest, where, because of his background, he had been denied admission to the university, came to Lakitelek in the late 1960s as an elementary school teacher. Because of the shortage of qualified teachers, he was allowed to work in this small, sleepy community, where he established his residence, eventually received a diploma through a correspondence course from a teachers’ college, and gained the respect and admiration of many of the townsfolk. After some years of teaching, he broadened his activities and became involved in running programs and courses through the House of Culture, primarily directed at adults. He also started publishing his own poetry. At the end of the 1970s he became a member of the József Attila Circle. It was this group that inspired him to start a reading circle in the early 1980s, which he ran from the House of Culture. Soon the Lakitelek meetings became regular and attracted an ever-widening and varied audience, including writers, poets, intellectuals of different persuasions, social scientists, and eventually some politicians. As the movement gained momentum, the presence of Communist Party observers, searching for evidence of anti-Communist activities, became more pronounced. Until 1987, how-

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ever, when the group founded the Hungarian Democratic Forum, these meetings were primarily devoted to the open discussion of cultural matters. Kati heard about the Lakitelek meetings soon after her return to Tiszadomb from a fellow teacher, Zajzon Ildiko, who was from Lakitelek. Another friend, Benke Mártá, also a teacher at Tiszadomb High School at the time, was interested as well. The avowed goal of the group—the rejuvenation of Hungarian culture and the resurrection of its values— was almost tailor-made for Kati. The three women became regulars at the meetings, which became a lifeline for Kati to an intellectual environment to which she had become accustomed during her years in Budapest and that she sorely missed in Tiszadomb. She was very much impressed by the quality of the presentations and the discussions, which she felt had immediacy and relevance. Here, one could get involved in the burning issues of the times with engaged and interested people and be heard and understood. When in May 1988 the Forum became officially registered as a political party, she joined with enthusiasm, completely agreeing with its goals, which by now were focused primarily on a national revival of tradition. In the meanwhile, she taught in Tiszadomb High School but became increasingly dissatisfied with her job. She felt that because teachers were so overburdened with course work and had to teach from morning till night, they had no time or opportunity to pursue other interests. She found that she had less and less energy to devote to what she felt was her mission, the Ethnographic Club and the collection and writing of local history. In the winter of 1988 she began considering possible employment at the Tiszadomb House of Culture. This job, similar to the one held by Lezsák at the House of Culture in Lakitelek, was designed specifically for the furthering of local culture, an important part of which was the collection and writing of local histories. This new opportunity was born in the wake of increasing liberalization, both political and cultural, which made it possible to write about and publish works apart from those approved by the Communist Party. Kati agreed to take up her new position in June 1988, immediately after the senior class graduated from the high school. Her class with Boglár Laci and Faragó Péter was to be her last. Little did she suspect in January of that year that her departure from the school would be under such dramatic circumstances.

5 Conclusion: The Beginning and the End

“Unearned Honors”and the Press In all probability the upheaval in Tiszadomb over the grade scandal at the high school would have passed unnoticed by the residents of the region, not to mention the rest of the nation, but for a small article in an obscure local paper, Petõfi Népe, published in Kecskemét. The article, entitled “Unearned Honors,” which appeared on June 8, 1988, was written by a young journalist, Benke Mártá. Benke was a resident of Tiszadomb; until recently, she had been a teacher at the high school and was an old acquaintance of Pintér Kati. Benke heard about the grade scandal while traveling on the bus between Tiszadomb and Kecskemét. She immediately became interested in the story, in which she saw a potential political angle, but having been raised in socialist Hungary, where the media were controlled by the party and the freedom of the press was severely curtailed, she knew that she had to tread carefully. Investigative reporting in particular was discouraged and allowed only when some positive local development was ferreted out by a reporter and presented so that it showed party and council functionaries in a flattering light. Benke was also aware of the power Joó wielded in Tiszadomb and knew that any attempt at interviewing the participants would end in her being warned to stay away from the 172

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story. Alternatively, if Joó or his circle (which included the Faragós) got wind of her interest, a single telephone call to her editor would surely kill the article. Benke wrote the short report, therefore, without naming either the town or the participants and gave it for approval to her editor. The editor approved of the format, which was an ingenious invention of the East European press known as a “literary report.” This format usually discussed interesting or noteworthy events, thus disseminating information to wide audiences, but without specifying places or individuals, thereby providing protection for the author and the newspaper. It also saved face for the participants, who, unless they responded, remained unknown. In the Tiszadomb case, while approving of the format, the editor at the last minute became worried about the consequences and asked for the approval of the editor in chief. The editor in chief was afraid of being accused of rumor mongering and directed Benke to interview the participants. Because she feared the power of Joó, she was reluctant to do this and argued for the original format. Eventually they compromised, and the final version of the article appeared with only slightly disguised names and a barely camouflaged location. It is possible that the editor’s decision to allow the potentially politically controversial story to see the light of day was influenced by a momentous political event that was taking place in Budapest while Benke Mártá’s piece was making its rounds around the editorial offices of the paper. The event was the unscheduled convention of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party in May, at which the majority of its leaders were deposed. Gone was Kádár and his hard-line colleagues, a number of reform politicians assuming major roles in their stead. The editor’s decision to allow the publication of the negative report about Tiszadomb’s well-entrenched leader must be seen against this background. The piece was read with great interest by the relatively limited regional readership of the paper, and, again, the matter might have rested there. Reporters from the national media, however, always anxious to find and publish stories of local interest—particularly the more scandalous ones that were so rarely permitted to appear—discovered the piece. Ladányi Zsuzsa, a reporter for the southern part of the Great Plains region of Hungarian Radio’s “Chronicles of the Nation” program, came upon the Tiszadomb story in Petõfi Népe after diligently scanning the regional papers. Not being a local person and thus not afraid of Joó, she immediately went to Tiszadomb to interview the involved parties, in-

174 Conclusion

cluding Faragó Péter’s father. Ferenc refused to talk to her, which in itself would not have been surprising. Unusual in the reporter’s experience was the fact that Faragó doggedly followed her everywhere, and the minute he appeared, her informants either evaporated or refused to talk. She became interested in learning more about this person, whose one glance could awaken such fearful reactions from ordinary townsfolk. In the course of her investigation she found out that Faragó was the head of the Tiszadomb branch of Bács-Kiskun County’s Zöldért and that his wife was the town’s party secretary. It was her report that brought to the national consciousness the fact that in a community heavily dependent on the private growing and marketing of agricultural produce, the power concentrated in the hands of a couple where the husband decides whose vegetables are bought and whose rot, and the wife represents the party hierarchy, is considerable. If, in addition, they are personal friends of the mayor, it is virtually unlimited. After the airing of the radio report, the national media descended on Tiszadomb. Newspaper reporters began to camp on the doorsteps of the involved parties, whose statements could no longer be censored by Faragó. The locals were puzzled by all the interest. True, the mayor was involved in the affairs of the high school. However, there was nothing unusual in this: he had been involved in everything that he considered important in the town for the past twenty-three years. Why would this minor incident be of interest to the major national dailies and weeklies, week after week? The popular opinion finally settled on an interpretation that made sense in light of the residents’ experience with their society. The consensus was that this must be some sort of head-hunting or vendetta: somewhere behind the scenes an unknown conductor was directing the orchestra of reporters to keep the Tiszadomb story alive in the press so as to discredit a major player. But whose head was being hunted? Could it be Joó, who had been a locally important politician, a representative to the parliament, and the personal friend and hunting partner of national leaders? True, many of these leaders had recently disappeared. But whose interest would it serve to attack the mayor of Tiszadomb over such a ridiculous affair when for years it had been known that he had committed so many more serious transgressions? Perhaps the target was Joó’s patron, Szánto István, the president of Bács-Kiskun’s county council. Szánto himself had been in power for over twenty years and was perhaps perceived as blocking the ascent of a younger generation of leaders.

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It never occurred to the ordinary citizen that the invisible conductor behind the scenes was the slowly evolving new Hungarian society, whose movers and shakers were still careful not to attack national leaders and issues directly but felt free to uncover and depict national problems through local examples. The Tiszadomb case was important because, in a microcosm, it showed the power of the party, the old-boy network, paternalism, and the corruption and lawlessness of leaders that were apparent at every level. The reason for practically every major paper’s interest in the Tiszadomb grade scandal was that the brief encounter in the mayor’s chambers symbolized the workings of Hungarian society over the past forty-three years. Because of the widespread publicity, both the council of Bács-Kiskun County and the central committee of its Communist Party decided to investigate the affair. Joó immediately asked the Tiszadomb town council for early retirement. A decision on this, however, had to be postponed until the regular meeting of the council on September 8. In the meanwhile, on August 2, the findings of the county council were made public in an open press conference, the format of which was unprecedented. To demonstrate that it had nothing to hide, the council invited all participants of the grade scandal to publicly express their opinions and to talk to the press in an open forum. At the conference, first the council’s findings were announced. According to this report, the council found it unlikely that Joó had actually ordered Pintér Katalin to give an undeserved grade to the son of the party secretary. His error was in discussing with anybody, in his official capacity as mayor, the problems of students preparing for admission to colleges, as well as asking the teacher and the vice principal to treat certain students gently, albeit in the context of a friendly conversation. The council found that his involvement and error were mitigated by the fact that it was the parents of (unnamed) students who had repeatedly complained to the mayor about the heavy load their children carried and in particular about the strictness of the Hungarian literature teacher. This public whitewashing was entirely expected by the audience, which eagerly awaited the second half of the meeting, when the involved parties were finally given the opportunity to speak. The audience was not disappointed: soon sparks began to fly as the participants attacked each other. The first to stand was Joó István, who declared that he had never met another person with as much malice as Pintér Katalin. He claimed that her statement to the press about their

176 Conclusion

conversation in his chambers was an outright lie in that it had not been he but the vice principal who specified Faragó Péter by name. He himself had spoken only in generalities. Joó also accused the media of systematic persecution and asked them to reveal the identity of the person inciting them. Next, Pintér Katalin, speaking in generalities, complained that the school’s leaders overworked teachers. The requirements of the job were such, she said, that it was impossible for even the best teacher to do a really good job. Teachers were insecure, their self-respect was eroded, and they became vulnerable to the influence of the principal and outside authorities since they did not feel that they had a moral base on which they could stand. After this, Ördög János, the principal, and Gyapjas László, the vice principal, attacked Pintér Katalin as a turncoat who dared “tell” about the grade problem only after she decided to quit her job at the school and accept employment at the House of Culture. Moreover, they claimed, being single and living with her parents, she lacked a basic understanding of family finances and the cost of raising children. This enabled her to forgo the extra income provided by growing vegetables, and consequently she did not appreciate the power of Faragó over the likes of Gyapjas. The press conference continued late into the night and illuminated the personal conflicts of a number of individuals on different sides of the affair caught in the powerful beam of national publicity. It showed the puzzlement of Joó István, a powerful person who had devoted his life to the betterment of the community, over having to answer for such trivia as “friendly” advice to a teacher. It also highlighted the predicament of Pintér Katalin, whose devotion to her chosen profession and her moral convictions had led her to be considered a traitor to her town and its leader. The embarrassment of the Faragós was clear as well: they never dreamed that they would be implicated in such negative publicity. On the other side, this was also an intense personal drama for the Boglárs and others of their social group, who saw their own vindication in the questioning and uncovering of the dubious methods of the current leadership. After the press conference was over, Szánto asked Joó to come and see him the following day, when he personally handed him a written warning. Ördög János was sanctioned at the meeting of the Tiszadomb council’s education committee for a number of irregularities at the high

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school. He in turn reprimanded Pintér Katalin for using faulty pedagogical methods, including overburdening students with assignments. These events concluded the council’s investigation, and the matter was laid to rest. The findings of the second investigation, conducted by the county’s party organs, were made public eight days after the council’s press conference. The avowed aim of this inquiry was not the questioning of the grade scandal but an examination of the functioning of the party and the quality of its leadership role in Tiszadomb and its environs. The report stated at the outset that Mrs. Faragó was not involved in the scandal since she personally had not requested any favors for her son. It blamed Petõfi Népe for emphasizing that the Faragó child was the son of the party secretary. It also discussed the errors committed by the Tiszadomb leadership, including the party hierarchy and the mayor and his group, in ignoring democratic methods. As a consequence, the party report issued a warning to the mayor and invited the party secretary for an advisory discussion aimed at helping her correct these mistakes. It also advised Petõfi Népe to refrain from sensationalism and the publication of unproven facts. Finally, on September 8, the Tiszadomb town council held its regular meeting. The main topic on the agenda was the mayor’s request for early retirement. After discussing a number of other scheduled items, the mayor left the room, handing over the chair to the senior council member. Two representatives, one from the party and one from the council, recounted the findings of the county council and the county’s party organs to the assembled members. Their conclusion was that neither had found the mayor or the party responsible for anything other than perhaps a bit of indiscretion. They also reported with some glee that, among others, Petõfi Népe had been censured. In the ensuing discussion the delegates praised Joó István and his achievements. One member listed the roads, sidewalks, electricity, sewage, and water and gas lines that had been installed in the last twentythree years, all under Joó’s leadership. Also in Joó’s praise, another member recounted a trip he had made with Joó to the Ministry of Heavy Industry in Budapest in order to secure money for the town’s gas lines. At the ministry they found out that Tiszadomb was nowhere near the beginning of the list of applicants. When they insisted on preferential treatment, they were summarily kicked out by an assistant secretary and told to come back in a few months. Joó was not about to take defeat

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lying down. He managed to find a friend who eventually contrived to get them in that day to see the secretary of industry personally to discuss the needs of the community. Consequently Tiszadomb received state support for new gas lines, worth several million, in record time. The delegate, of course, neglected to mention the favors the secretary received from the town in return. A staunch supporter of Joó turned out to be the Protestant pastor, Sipos Árpád. He recounted several discussions with Joó in which the mayor had shared with him his political philosophy. According to the pastor, Joó thought that what the population needed was “to feel well and happy.” If there are enough roads and sidewalks—he said—and there is sufficient food and drink, people feel well and do not complain. Since Sipos himself agreed with this philosophy and similarly wanted the townspeople to be happy, he asked the council members not to allow Joó to retire. Ördög János testified that while the law guaranteed teachers freedom from interference, teachers were still part of the hierarchy of the Hungarian state and thus ultimately responsible to organs of the state. Therefore, it was basically not wrong for the mayor to keep an eye on what was going on in the schools. After several others spoke and praised the mayor for his achievements, others berated the national press. Finally, in an open vote, they decided that the question regarding the mayor’s retirement would also be resolved by an open vote. The decision was unanimous in denying the mayor his request for early retirement and in asking him to remain in office. The council thus reaffirmed its staunch support for the mayor and declared its full approval of his actions. Joó was asked to enter and with a self-satisfied smile on his face returned to the chair at the head of the table and thanked the council for its trust and support. “I have no qualms about what happened,” he said. “This is my style. If I receive a complaint, I call the person to my office and tell him my opinion face to face. I would be ungrateful to you who have placed such trust in me if I insisted on retiring in February.” At this, in the fashion customary among comrades, Ördög János kissed him on both cheeks, and the meeting closed with all the delegates clapping. The proceedings caused much merriment in the town, where the early retirement request was considered a charade and where not a single person believed for a minute that Joó had meant it in earnest or that it would be accepted by the council.

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The Court Hearing Thus far it appeared that the entire affair had been a tempest in a teacup and that with a mild warning and a slap on the wrist from the county council Joó had been vindicated. The leaders of Tiszadomb realized that they could have fared much worse if some of the other wheeling and dealing in which Joó was involved had come to light. In fact, they considered it a minor miracle that the reporters’ diligent digging into town affairs had uncovered only the grade scandal. The affair would in all probability have ended here if not for the monumental ego of Faragó Ferenc, who was smarting from what he considered an unjust insult aimed at his family. Not satisfied with the conclusions drawn by the council and the party, he decided to launch a personal campaign against the press in order to clear his name. On September 15, Faragó Ferenc filed a civil suit against Benke Mártá for defamation of character in the Kecskemét town court. The suit was filed in the name of both father and son and claimed that the article written by the young reporter was based on unsubstantiated rumors and twisted facts and that it had hurt their reputation. They asked the court to enjoin Benke from further transgressions and demanded a retraction from her. Further, they asked that she be fined and made to bear the cost of the trial. Among their specific complaints were the following: The title of the article (“Unearned Honors”) was prejudicial. The fact that the article was printed against a special gray background underscored its significance and made it appear that it contained unusually important news. The statement that only Péter and no other student received special time off for practice or preparation for admission to college was false. It was similarly untrue that he had returned to that fateful Hungarian literature class licking an ice cream. Nor was what Péter was quoted as having said to the teacher at the end of the class true. What he said was not “You should not have revealed this whole thing to the class” but rather “You should not have made this up.” The Kecskemét court from the very beginning considered the Faragó suit a test case for the freedom of the press and the courts. Under the newly evolving political situation in the country, this was indeed a first. Until this time county newspapers had been considered nothing more than organs of the local Communist Party, which kept their editors on a short leash. They were consequently reluctant to publish anything of which the party may not have approved. The party in this case had al-

180 Conclusion

ready publicly sanctioned the paper for publishing the unfavorable piece about Joó. Thus Faragó Ferenc’s expectation that the court—not known to be particularly independent from party influence—would find against the paper or its representative, Benke Mártá, was by no means unreasonable. The importance of the case, therefore, lay in its focus on two monumental rights, of which Hungarians had for years been deprived and for which they had increasingly been fighting: the independence of the legal system and the freedom of the press. In addition, the court was aware of another significant issue that had become one of the chief demands of the new emerging politics: human rights and the right of protection against defamation and persecution, whether by press, party, or government. The human rights issue was relevant for both Faragó Péter and Pintér Katalin. The former claimed that he had been unjustly persecuted by a press that was looking for a scapegoat, and only because of his mother’s position as party secretary. The latter had clearly been deprived by the all-powerful mayor of her right to practice her profession as she saw fit. Now more than ever, the Tiszadomb affair assumed national significance. Amid a great deal of media presence, the hearings were held in the first days of October 1998. The proceedings were open to the public, but recording and filming were not allowed in order to avoid further sensationalism. The first witness to be heard was Faragó Péter, followed by a number of his classmates and teachers. The major issues that emerged from the questioning revolved primarily around the privileged position of the leaders in a small town and illuminated their mutual favor mongering and the extreme cockiness with which they treated the rest of the population. The court case showed a political system in which leaders were appointed from above and served at the pleasure of their masters. There were no checks from below, and thus as long as they did not displease the higher-ups, their power was virtually unlimited. In such a system there were no attempts at equal treatment of citizens; crucial to them were their position in the hierarchy and their relationship to key individuals. Specifically, the court wanted to know the following: Who gave permission, and for what reason, to Faragó Péter to stay away from his classes, and did any others receive similar permission? Did Péter brag about this privilege to his classmates and claim that he could cut classes because of his position? Why did he refuse to take advantage of the teacher’s offer of makeup exams to improve his grade? What was the relationship of the vice principal and Péter’s father? How and why did

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the mayor get involved in the entire affair? Who asked him to interfere on behalf of Péter? What exactly transpired in the mayor’s chambers, and what was said by Joó and the vice principal to Pintér Katalin? Finally, what happened in that last Hungarian literature class? Faragó Péter testified that of the thirty-six students in the graduating class about twenty wanted to continue their education. He applied to the National Gymnastics College, to which it was difficult to gain admission because the competition for the few available places was fierce. The admission process consisted of three tests: history, biology, and gymnastics. Before the actual tests, there was a pretest in which the applicants were examined in all sports. The pretest was given two weeks after spring break and Péter wanted enough time to prepare, so he asked his father to request extra time off for him since the time during spring break was not sufficient. Some time later his father told him that he could have the extra time off, but he did not tell him who had given the permission. Péter assumed that it was the principal, Ördög János, since he often inquired about his preparation and progress. Péter also claimed that other students also received a couple of extra days to prepare and could have received more had they asked for it. Of his classmates, one of the major witnesses was Boglár Laci, who testified that no other student received time off for preparing for college admission, although many of them, including those who applied to the teachers’ college at Szeged, would surely have benefited from it. It had simply never occurred to them that this was an option. It was only the likes of the Faragós who knew that they could ask for such a privilege. Laci also recounted a meeting on the street between Péter and some of his classmates during the period of Péter’s absence. According to Laci, when the other students asked Péter what he was doing and why, he assumed an attitude of extreme cockiness and said that he was allowed to do whatever was necessary for his advancement. Later, in a philosophy class debate on social constraints and the question of who was allowed to do what in an egalitarian society, the students had brought up Péter as an example. The main issue was whether it was morally right that the children of leaders be treated differently. The consensus was that it was wrong but that it was done because the leaders “all stick together.” Further, Laci testified that during their junior and senior years, Péter was increasingly absent from his classes. He especially stayed away from the exams in physics and mathematics, classes taught by the vice

182 Conclusion

principal. One time, however, he took a math test and received a barely passing grade. He became angry and was clearly heard by the entire class to say, “[Expletive], Mr. Teacher, just watch your next week’s cabbage harvest rot in your garden!” A number of other students confirmed Boglár Laci’s testimony, all of them pointing to Péter’s privileged position and emphasizing his attitude of extreme superiority when compared to the rest of them. They also affirmed that what Péter had said to the teacher at the end of the last Hungarian literature class was indeed “You should not have revealed this whole thing to the class,” and they claimed that it was said in a threatening manner. When Pintér Katalin was called to the witness stand, she came armed with her attendance book and showed the court her notations about Péter’s absences, both excused and unexcused, and about the number of times he was offered and did not take the makeup exams. The last of these opportunities was on May 11. On that day, three other students came into the classroom and took the test. Faragó Péter was sitting outside the room, and when she sent a student to call him, he came in and said that he was not prepared. It was that same afternoon that she was called to the mayor’s chambers and told to be lenient with Péter. In that fateful meeting, according to Kati, no names of students were initially mentioned by the mayor. He talked to her in generalities about the difficulties of the admission tests and the need to be kind and supportive of the students who were attempting to better themselves. The mayor acted as her friend and mentor and called her “my girl.” When she finally decided to ask which students he was particularly concerned about, the vice principal said, “Come now, Kati, we know whom he is concerned about.” She said that she had no idea, and then the mayor finally named Péter. The conversation ended after the mayor expressed some skepticism about the abilities of the Faragó boy but urged her nevertheless to support him. Both the mayor and the vice principal then asked her to consider this conversation completely confidential and not to mention it even to the principal. While walking back to the school with the vice principal, Kati discussed the situation with him. She told Gyapjas that she hated this sort of privileging of selected students and the entire atmosphere created by corrupt power. Gyapjas defended the mayor and said that he was well meaning, was forced into this position by others, and was himself innocent of corruption. He would never interfere on behalf of his own chil-

The Beginning and the End 183

dren, but when asked by a fellow leader, he could not deny him. “Corrupt power corrupts everybody who comes into contact with it,” Katalin said she told him. Joó presented a very different version of the events and claimed that the entire affair stemmed from Pintér Katalin’s animosity toward him. This attitude had originated in an unpleasant confrontation with the teacher about two years before, when he and Mrs. Faragó, in their official capacities, had attended one of the sessions organized by the Hungarian Democratic Forum in Lakitelek. The party and the county political organs kept an eye on the Lakitelek happenings, which were supposedly purely cultural but were considered subversive by some. Pintér Katalin was present at this particular session, but when he later referred to this in a meeting, she denied that she was there. Ever since then she had held a grudge against him for publicly discussing her affiliation with the group. As far as the meeting in his chambers was concerned, the mayor claimed that he had conducted the entire conversation in generalities, never mentioning any names. When the teacher asked for the names of the students concerned, it was the vice principal who revealed three names, including Péter’s. After five days of testimony, it seemed that practically every point of the Faragós’ claims had been contradicted by the witnesses. The judge at this point asked the plaintiffs to summarize what complaints they still had against the defendant. On the sixth day only Faragó Ferenc appeared, his son having withdrawn his suit in its entirety. The father now offered to withdraw his complaints as well, provided the paper publish a statement that the Faragó family had nothing to do with the grade scandal. When the paper’s editor refused to do so, the lawyers for the two sides presented their closing arguments. Benke Mártá’s lawyer summarized the defense’s case, stating that there was not a shred of evidence showing that Benke had fabricated any of the story or that she had twisted the facts. It seemed clear that the Faragó child enjoyed a privileged position and that the mayor’s interference in the grading process was a natural outgrowth of the way the town was run by a clique that included the Faragó parents. Faragó’s lawyer claimed that there was not a shred of evidence that his client was implicated in the event. Whatever the mayor may have said to the teacher was at his own initiative, and therefore dragging the Faragó family into the affair was defamatory. The court’s much awaited ruling was not made public until December 16. In the meanwhile, members of the national media, whose atten-

184 Conclusion

tion was now focused on Tiszadomb, occupied themselves with other affairs of the town, prominent among which were the doings of Joó and his group. This was not surprising since the major issue continued to be that of leadership under the Communist regime. Joó’s somewhat dubious methods could no longer avoid the spotlight, and in the month preceding the final judgment of the Faragó case, a number of other transgressions came to light. The mayor’s every action during the past twenty-three years was carefully scrutinized. The press had a field day: details of Joó’s various deals were published almost daily. How had he managed to get all those millions for his town? Why was he both mayor and the district’s representative to parliament? What was his relationship to the cooperative’s president, and how had the two worked together to develop the spa by the Tisza? The hunting parties to which dignitaries were invited and wined and dined were depicted in lurid detail. Out came the facts about the gifts of land to influential leaders, the banquets where wine flowed, and how the property of the cooperatives was used as the leaders’ private fiefdom. It mattered little that in a national context Joó certainly was not unique in his actions or that he personally had gained little from his manipulations. Following the media campaign, he became the prototype of a corrupt political leader of the Communist years. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that neither the party nor the political organs tried to curb the media. It seemed almost as if Joó had been offered as a decoy or a sacrificial lamb who would divert attention from the actions of similar others who had equally as much to hide. The reason behind this hands-off attitude regarding the media was probably the increasingly liberalizing political trend in the country. While the Tiszadomb affair was unfolding, in a momentous meeting in early November the parliament passed a democratization package and approved the introduction of a multiparty system by 1990 at the latest. Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that an every-manfor-himself ethos prevailed among those leaders who still managed to hang on to their positions and were quick to wash their hands of their cronies whose dealings were found out. Naturally, the court’s decision was awaited with great anticipation in the region. People’s opinions were divided about the case: some defended the freedom of the press, others pitied the mayor. A woman at the hairdresser’s was overheard to say that if the paper lost the suit, she would spit on the judge. A respected Tiszadomb citizen questioned the

The Beginning and the End 185

sanity of a court that would devote months to such a trivial issue. But by and large, popular opinion was divided along the old class lines. Formerly wealthy Ódomb landowners, deprived of their land, persecuted as kulaks, and having suffered over forty years of discrimination, welcomed the opportunity to unveil the corrupt practices of the leaders. The formerly poor of Ujdomb, who had mostly benefited from the Communist system, were more interested in defending their hard-won privileges than in rights or wrongs. In his decision, made public on December 16, 1988, Orosz Árpád, chief justice of the Kecskemét town court, dismissed the Faragós’ suit outright. The judgment stated that the right of a newspaper reporter to publish his or her findings and share these with the public should be protected at all costs. The judge found that during the hearing it had become clear that Benke’s article was based on facts and that the reporter’s statements were supported by the witnesses’ testimony. The court did not find that Faragó Ferenc’s human rights had been violated since he was not even named in the article written by Benke Mártá, and his son, having withdrawn his suit, was no longer a plaintiff. Most significantly, the judgment praised the article for uncovering a phenomenon that illuminated the operation of local society and the power of its leaders. In the judge’s opinion, the reporter had not only a right but a duty to publicize such cases since the press had an important role in influencing public consciousness and helping create an open and just society. Needless to say, this indeed was a revolutionary judgment that not only stood up for the freedom of the press, but also sent a clear message to the party regarding the independence of the courts. It was somewhat surprising that the judgment created few ripples in Tiszadomb. It appeared, at least to an outside observer, that it had little effect on town politics or on the individuals concerned. Faragó Ferenc threatened to appeal to a higher court, but otherwise it seemed that business was as usual. Not so in Kecskemét, the county seat, which was one step closer to the heart of the country where a number of developments heralded the beginning of a new age. New leaders moved up the party ladder, and although the party secretary was reelected, it was dubious that he would stay for more than the year and a half until new national elections were to be held. The position of Szánto himself became insecure, and on December 17, at the party congress of Bács-Kiskun County, the president of the county council asked to be pensioned off as of June 30, 1989.

186 Conclusion

A few days later, Joó István once again applied for early retirement, which Szánto personally approved, effective after the June 1989 meeting of the town council. Joó was not repentant. In an interview with one of the major newspapers, he declared that without his efforts, the town would still be the sleepy, somewhat dilapidated village that he had taken over twenty years earlier. He said that he was satisfied that he would be leaving a legacy of which any leader could be proud. No, he had purposely not trained his replacement since he wanted the population to feel the difference that his absence would make. “I will be satisfied if people say that things were better when I was there” (cited in Tanács 1989: 166). His resignation, he said, was due to his disillusionment with the press, which made him unable to function in his post in the manner to which he had been accustomed. On February 1, 1989, Joó was called to Szánto’s office in Kecskemét and was informed that the county council was about to initiate an investigation of the illegal land deals conducted by officials of the Tiszadomb town council, including the mayor. The signal was clear: his superiors, who throughout his career had been aware of his methods and extralegal activities, in order to save their own skins and cover up their own probably quite similar activities, were no longer willing to cover for him. Joó drove directly home to Tiszadomb and, acting decisively as ever, at ten o’clock that morning fatally shot himself in the upstairs bedroom of his home. Joó’s tragedy was that of a person who understood the workings of a rigid bureaucratic system and knew that only by circumventing them could his town reap certain benefits. What he did was unquestionably illegal, but he did it in the name of progress and for the benefit of the town. As long as the Communist system, with its old-boy networks and give-and-take relationships, was in place, his actions were overlooked and even encouraged by his superiors. With the change of political winds, these superiors themselves were on insecure ground and could or would no longer cover for him. His crime, for them, was not what he had done but that he had been found out. In the new democratic system, his dealings were judged to be criminal and actionable. The irony was that Joó felt that he had taken risks in the name of progress, and now it was in the name of progress that his former supporters turned against him. He understood that he had fallen into the trap of a changing social and political structure from which he took the only dignified way out.

6 Postscript: Waiting for Rebirth

Approaching Tiszadomb in 1998 on the road leading from the neighboring village of Szentkirály through the borderlands, I am startled to discover that the familiar landscape has disappeared. Gone are the vast fields of corn and wheat that in the past stretched as far as the eye could see and were only occasionally interrupted by the dispersed groves of acacia, signaling the presence of a homestead. Instead, small plots of different color and texture, indicating the cultivation of a variety of crops on a much smaller scale, now dot the landscape. Hedges and fences have sprung up, and a straggling row of new houses borders the highway. The land has been returned to its original owners. The cooperative has not completely disappeared, but it is now a much smaller entity, one owner among many others. The postsocialist changes are thus visibly inscribed into the landscape, indicating the birth of a new order—or perhaps a return to an old one. This latest land reform is not the subject of this work, however. The purpose of this postscript is a brief visit with the town and the individuals whose lives we left in 1988. What are the Boglárs, the Faragós, and Pintér Katalin doing ten years after the reform? Is Tiszadomb a more just and open society with a new generation of leaders ushering in a bright and hopeful new era? The drive through the town certainly seems to indicate economic prosperity. The central square by the Catholic church has been extensively 187

188 Postscript

rejuvenated: the Town Hall has been repainted inside and out, and the once scraggly garden across from it is now elaborately landscaped. In its center is a newly erected monument for the fallen heroes of World War II and the Revolution of 1956. Past the Town Hall, along the right side of the road, is a row of bright new stores, including an elegant restaurant and a cafe, in front of which are parked a number of Westernmade cars, including Mercedeses and BMWs. Across the street is a modern supermarket that replaces the old ÁFéSz-owned market. Many of the wares inside, including foodstuffs, are from Germany and Austria. The side roads also have more restaurants, more cafes, more boutiques. The most startling change, however, is in Ódomb, which for over fifty years was subjected to not-so-benign neglect by those in power. While there was some attempt at rejuvenation in the last few years of the socialist era by a devoted group of the more successful local entrepreneurs, most of the community’s beautiful turn-of-the century houses had been slowly crumbling and decaying since the late 1940s. In 1998 it is hard to find a house on Kossuth Street that has not been repainted, and most of them are extensively renovated. The old Ódomb town center seems to have come back to life: the elementary school has been returned to the Protestant Church, and next to it a new Protestant high school is in the process of being built. The Town Hall is being refurbished as a museum, and under the centuries-old chestnut trees surrounding it are new benches where people can sit and talk after church services. To see whether the town’s outward appearance reflects a similar inner rebirth, I call on the Boglárs. On this summer weekday afternoon Dénes is at home, tending his flowers. His wife, Anikó, is at work in the Health Center. It does not come as a surprise that the Boglár house is well tended and immaculate; it has been like that since Dénes’s retirement in 1975. Knowing the old Ódomb ethic, it is somewhat surprising, however, to see him relatively inactive and taking no personal interest in the land of his ancestors. This land was returned to the Boglár family in 1992, although not in its entirety and not at the same location. Still, Dénes is once again the owner of a combination of plowland, orchards, and vineyards. Anikó similarly reclaimed family lands in Cegléd that she then managed to swap for parcels in Tiszadomb. Thus their combined acreage probably surpasses the prewar Boglár estate. Dénes, however, has no personal involvement in cultivation and has entered into sharecropping agreements with a number of individuals who pay him in either produce or cash for the use of his land. He claims that he has

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simply lost heart, that he is too old to start all over again. The income he receives is sufficient and his wife is still employed, so why should he enter into the fray once again? These are indeed very different sentiments from those traditionally espoused by Ódomb’s proud peasant cultivators, to whom working the land and accumulating more were the unquestioned goals of life. As it turns out, Dénes is not alone. Discussions with members of Ódomb’s prewar landowning elite reveal that while most of them claimed their land at the time of redistribution, the majority of them do as Dénes does and either rent it out or sharecrop it. The renters and sharecroppers most often are individuals from outside Ódomb and come from either Ujdomb or outside Tiszadomb entirely. There are at least two former Ódomb owners who have decided to return to cultivation and have accumulated large amounts of land, either by outright purchase or by renting. It has proven to be a very risky enterprise. The price of fertilizer has skyrocketed, and up-to-date modern machinery, made only in the West, is extremely expensive. Marketing is uncertain since the state-run networks have folded and the middlemen who have filled the void are convinced that the capitalist’s main goal is to get rich quick. The two owners manage to hang on with great difficulty, but they certainly are not the ones getting rich. Another reason for Ódomb owners to have lost interest in cultivation is that most of the younger generation has departed from the community. Thus there is nobody to pass the land down to: the doctor, lawyer, accountant, and engineer offspring living in Budapest or Szeged are not planning to come home to claim their inheritance. Sons who remained in Tiszadomb, like Boglár Tamás, are mostly engaged in other pursuits, which they may combine with cultivation, but they are not willing to switch back to full-time farming. It is simply too risky without the cooperative’s support, and it pays too little. Their attitude is in keeping with a countrywide recession and decline in agricultural production, which fell by a dramatic 23 percent in 1992, leading a group of experts at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to declare that “there is a danger of total disintegration of Hungarian agriculture” (Sipos and Halmai 1993: 123). What about Tamás, then? I find Tamás where I last saw him in 1988— in his store, selling produce. In his economic endeavors nothing much has changed. He is still the same busy and successful entrepreneur that he was ten years ago, growing and selling vegetables both wholesale and in his own store. One difference is that the land he, his wife, and his

190 Postscript

in-laws now use is their own and not a household plot allocated to them by the cooperative. This means that they have also assumed more risk and more expense: they win or lose on their own. The cooperative is no longer there to provide help with plowing and with other machine-dependent operations; not only have they had to buy machinery, but they have also had to pay extraordinary amounts for fertilizer. Because of this, while they are doing comparatively well, economically Tamás has remained at the level where he was previously and has not become truly affluent. He has, however, become politically active and has been successful in getting elected to the local government as one of the delegates from Ódomb. He has not joined any of the parties but has been supported by the Smallholders Party and the Christian Democrats, both of which have a staunch following in Ódomb. In spite of the changes in the local government during the last few years, he has managed to hold on to his seat for two terms and has just been reelected for a third, demonstrating the strength of his support. During his first four-year term the local government was dominated by the Hungarian Democratic Forum, a relatively conservative group whose goals coincided with those of the old Ódomb elite. It was during these years that Ódomb regained some of its old splendor, to a large extent through the financial help that the Democratic Forum managed to get from the Calvinist Church of Switzerland. It seemed to Tamás during those years that his family had finally been vindicated and that through him they had regained some of their political power. Political power, however, proved to be of relatively little value in the context of the economic crisis that engulfed the country as well as the community. The socialists came into power in the country between 1994 and 1998, and many of the achievements of the Democratic Forum were annulled. In Tiszadomb, the power once again passed back into the hands of Communist sympathizers, and although Tamás retained his seat, he lost his membership in the important committees. Recently, the pendulum has swung back once again, and in the 1998 elections a coalition of the Smallholders, Democratic Forum, and FIDESz gained control both nationally and locally. Tamás has been reelected, but he has become skeptical of the process. He does not see a true leader emerging in the community and feels that the new coalition won only because people were disillusioned with the socialists and not because they were convinced that the conservatives had a viable program. After the euphoria of the first four years in office, Tamás has lost interest and faith in

Waiting for Rebirth 191

local politics and thinks that the community is sailing rudderless, veering from one extreme to another without any vision of its goals or future. He ran for office again only because his supporters implored him, afraid of losing the seat to a socialist. Tamás’s son, Laci, completed college, but instead of studying agricultural science as originally planned, he decided to become an engineer specializing in plastics. He attended the technical college in Györ and graduated with honors but found that in the new economic system, which was consolidating and contracting during the transition to capitalism, it was not easy to find employment. He came home to Tiszadomb in 1994, just in time for spring planting, and for a number of years remained and helped his parents and grandparents with the business. It was like a bad dream, he said; he was once again behind the counter of his father’s store, just as during his high school days. In 1997 he was accepted by the College of Trade as a correspondence student, a popular pursuit in postsocialist Hungary. He is currently in the second year of a three-year course that will lead to a diploma and hopefully to gainful employment in the business sector. In the meanwhile he has taken a part-time job as a teacher in the after-school program of the Protestant elementary school. Through the correspondence course he met a young woman and became engaged the previous summer. His fiancée, Nagy Piroska, is from Kecskemét, where she currently works as a cosmetician. She is an ambitious person; she wants to get her diploma in trade because she intends to open her own business—possibly several businesses around the country. After marrying, the young couple does not plan to live in Tiszadomb in spite of an offer of a house by the groom’s parents. Laci does not see any opportunities for employment or for advancement, and Piroska has no interest in burying herself in a small town. In this, they are representative of the new generation of young adults who grew up in Tiszadomb, many of whom fully intended to remain in the community, only to find it impossible. Some of the parents applaud this move since they see it as professional advancement; others, among them the Boglárs, mourn the loss of their family members. They see it as the final exodus of their social group and as the demise of Ódomb as a community. The result is that while the houses on Kossuth Street are once again shining in their original glory, they are inhabited by elderly people or rented out to newcomers or stand empty, waiting for the children and grandchildren to come “home” for their summer vacations on the Tisza.

192 Postscript

My next visit is to the Faragó family, to see how the former Communist power couple has fared in the post-Communist society. I find their house in Ódomb inhabited by another family, who tell me that Ferenc and his wife have sold the property and moved outside of Tiszadomb proper, into an area near the Tisza that formerly contained only summer residences. Here is where I find them, a short ride away from the Ódomb dominated by turn-of-the-century homes, in an impressive, brand-new modern house behind a high fence, with a BMW parked in the driveway. Ferenc explains that the land where the house stands was an old vineyard that he had somehow acquired as a member of Joó’s circle and where he had planned to build a summer house. After the grade scandal, the court hearings, and Joó’s suicide, he and his family were ostracized, and living in Ódomb became a nightmare. At that point he still had his job with Zöldért, so financially he was secure. With the help of his friend Buda Károly, the cooperative’s president, he “borrowed” a gang of workers from the cooperative and within a few months built the house at this location. This turned out to be a fortunate move since shortly thereafter the entire socialist system collapsed and both he and his wife became unemployed. Not only was he now ineligible for perks, such as free labor from the cooperative, but he was also stressed financially. His job at Zöldért was terminated when the company was privatized and the local branch was bought up by one of the local entrepreneurs. His wife’s job as party secretary, of course, vanished. For a while they were in a quandary about what to do. They expected retaliation and persecution, similar to what the kulaks and other prominent individuals had experienced after a similar political upheaval. They even considered fleeing the community, and their car was packed with clothing and valuables in case they had to act quickly. After a while it became clear that they had nothing to fear; the new regime was not intent on punishing the elite of the former regime. The burning question became one of economic survival. With their political past, their Marxist–Leninist training, what sort of employment could he and his wife secure in the new economic system? To begin with, Anna decided to go into business and bought a loom that makes ribbons. She works on commission for a large foreign company that delivers the supplies and picks up the product. This endeavor gives her a decent income but certainly not one sufficient for buying the BMW and maintaining the elegant house with its well-equipped kitchen and landscaped garden. The real income, it turns out, comes from the business run by Ferenc and his son Péter.

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Péter never made it to the National Gymnastics College. He claims that the grade scandal completely destroyed his reputation. Even though he received fifty-seven points out of the possible sixty on his entrance exam, the college rejected him. His appeal was not heard, so he finally gave up the struggle and entered the teacher training college in Szeged, where he majored in sports education. He graduated in 1994 and came home, looking for employment. The elementary school was on its way to being handed over to the Protestant church, but the process was not yet completed. Teachers were badly needed, and with the help of members of the old Communist hierarchy, he was hired as the gymnastics teacher. Soon thereafter the church took over the school, and his difficulties began. The Protestant minister was determined to rout out the son of the former party secretary from an establishment he considered his own and invented a number of petty rules designed to irritate him. For example, he was not allowed to have a key to the gymnastics supply room, where all the equipment he needed was kept. He, an atheist, was also designated as one of the teachers who was to take the children to church every morning. The minister then was overheard to say that all the non-God-fearing teachers would be replaced. The other teachers were discouraged from talking to Péter, and he was told that his discussions with the children should be limited to topics concerning sports. All this was too much for a privileged son of the former regime, and he soon quit the job with the approval of his father. This happened in 1996, by which time the Tiszadomb government was dominated by the socialists, many of whom were old comrades of Faragó Ferenc. Péter and Ferenc managed to secure a loan, which was guaranteed by the governing body, to found a company. The charter of the company allowed them to operate an “entertainment business” in the summer colony on the banks of the Tisza—in other words, a gambling casino. By 1998 the casino was flourishing. Not many of the guests are locals: most are newly rich businessmen who come from Kecskemét, Budapest, and abroad to this new mecca of fun and games. In addition to running a restaurant and bar, father and son are now in the process of securing a license for live entertainment and intend to bring in Las Vegas–style dancers and strippers. Their business is but a small segment of the countrywide boom in the entertainment industry, most of which is financed by foreign capital. It is also rumored that certain Mafia connections control it and that perhaps even drug cartels are involved. Ferenc, of course, does not mention any of this, nor does he reveal who his

194 Postscript

contacts are. But he frequently travels to the West for “supplies and ideas” and has recently opened a numbered Swiss bank account, claiming that he does not consider the Hungarian banks secure or the Hungarian currency stable enough for the deposit of large amounts of cash. It seems then that the Faragós have once again managed to land on their feet. Ferenc claims that they are not unusual among their friends and that many of the former cadres are now doing well in business, utilizing former connections to further their own interests. What suffers is the interest of the town. The new local government has been either unable or uninterested in keeping the industries alive, and its members have not had the necessary experience to network with those in power to help the town. Those, like Faragó, who had the connections were interested only in their own survival and betterment. A number of state-owned enterprises and plants were privatized, and many of them went bankrupt soon thereafter. Others were simply closed down. Ferenc thinks that with a more farsighted leadership, it would have been possible for the town to purchase some of the plants and to keep them running for the benefit of the citizenry. Because most of the industries are gone—including Remix, Coca-Cola, the brewery, and the textile factory—the local unemployment rate has skyrocketed, and with the demise of the agricultural cooperatives, return to that sector is also barred. Pintér Kati’s path after the grade scandal was rockier than that of the Faragós. For several years she had a difficult time. People from all walks of life blamed her for Joó’s suicide, and the mourning for the dead leader resulted in a feeling of anger toward the young woman whose actions had started the avalanche that eventually buried him. She refused to leave town, however, and took up employment at the House of Culture. With the encouragement of the new government in 1990 she started the Local History Circle, dedicated to the collection of oral history. The primary aim of the group was to rescue and record the true history of the previous fifty years. People locally and countrywide were aware that much of what was published during those years was the Communist version of history–and even that changed from time to time, as demonstrated by the frequent rewriting of history books. People who had lived through those years had their own version of the truth to tell, and this was what the circle intended to record and publish. To date, it has published several small pamphlets, the most recent one on the events of 1956. The circle is still active, but Kati is no longer its major convener. She left the House of Culture in 1991, partly because she missed teaching and

Waiting for Rebirth 195

partly because she became tired of the unrelenting ostracism. Nor did she relish her other image, perpetuated by some members of the newly elected conservative government, as a heroic dragonslayer who had single-handedly rooted out the evil mayor. She did not want to appear the handmaiden of these conservative political forces and wanted to avoid the appearance that they had prompted her actions toward the mayor. Kati moved to Kecskemét, where she was offered a job at the Catholic high school as an English teacher. She lived there in relative obscurity for two years before she returned to Tiszadomb, hoping that emotions had died down and that she could finally live in peace. In 1994 she was reemployed by the Tiszadomb school system to teach English on the high school level and history on the elementary level. Now that the teaching of “true” history is once again possible, she has resumed her education and has enrolled as a correspondence student at Eötv¨os Loránd University’s history department. Kati’s connection to the Hungarian Democratic Forum has continued, even through the difficult four years when the forum lost its control of the government and the socialists regained power. As before, her interest is cultural rather than political. She considers the forum to be the only political party whose agenda includes the safeguarding of the Hungarian cultural heritage and the preservation of national pride. She sees the Tiszadomb History Circle as a small replica of Lezsák Ferenc’s original circle at Lakitelek and feels that if every town in the country had a similar group, it would be a safeguard against the influx and wholesale acceptance of foreign values and behaviors. With the return of the conservative coalition to power in 1998, she feels extremely hopeful, especially since Lezsák has been elected as district representative to the central government. She is eagerly looking forward to the coming four years and hopes that cultural life in Tiszadomb will experience a new period of rejuvenation. During the years of Kati’s ordeal, her parents lived quietly in their Tiszadomb house. In 1992 they reclaimed their land from the cooperative; they got back not only all of their own land, but also what they had inherited from their parents. The land is located in Székhalom, but in a different area of the borderlands than their original holdings. Because of this and because they have no desire to build a new homestead, they commute from the town every day by bicycle. In spite of their advancing age, they work most of the land alone, with only the help of a few hired hands in peak work seasons. They are among the few people I

196 Postscript

encountered who essentially resumed a pre–World War II peasant existence, working from sunup to sundown. Through this effort they eke out a fairly comfortable existence, but without luxuries. For example, although it would certainly ease the effort of commuting every day, they cannot afford to buy a car. What they saved for and did buy, however, was a small house for Kati across the street. They felt that as much as they enjoyed her company, she needed a space of her own where she could receive visitors and spread out her books and artifacts without bumping into her parents’ belongings. They sensed that their daughter’s lifestyle and requirements had become sufficiently different from their own. Despite her deep-seated love for her heritage, she has essentially become a member of the middle-class intelligentsia. On the basis of these brief visits, it was possible to conclude that while the Boglárs, the Faragós, and Pintér Kati and her family are doing well economically, many others in the town are impoverished by the demise of the cooperative and the local industries. Much of this is in keeping with what has been described as a countrywide “transformational recession,” resulting in hyperinflation, a decrease in the GNP, a decline in real wages, and high unemployment. Inflation in the country peaked at 35 percent in 1991 and dropped to a more moderate 28 percent only in 1995. Industrial output dropped nearly 40 percent and the GDP decreased by 30 percent between 1989 and 1992. Unemployment jumped to over 13 percent at the end of 1993. Real wages decreased by 15–20 percent within two years between 1989 and 1991. The proportion of people living below the subsistence level increased from 10 percent to 30 percent between 1980 and 1994 (Berend 1996: 348). Economically, the people of Tiszadomb seem to have fared somewhat better than the figures for the rest of the country indicate. Regardless of their financial situation, however, all the people I talked to express a sense of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. They convey an overall feeling that things are not quite the way they ought to be. The landowners, such as Boglár Dénes, complain about the price of fertilizer and seem to have lost interest in their land. Those who are involved in politics see it as a hopeless endeavor. The businessmen complain about taxation and blame the local government for allowing the industries to die. Yet they are certainly not lending a hand to help resurrect them. The rest of the population worries about inflation, about the price of goods, and about the demise of social services. The major complaint

Waiting for Rebirth 197

is that the local government is not effective, be it conservative or socialist, and that neither the mayor nor the council members know how to go about the business of governing and are not accomplishing much. What should they accomplish? The entire town now has electricity, the telephone system works wonderfully well, all the roads are paved, there is running water, and gas lines reach every house. All this, however, was done during Joó’s era. More recent are the restaurants, the discos, the Austrian and German wares in the stores, the showcase of entertainment by the Tisza, the rehabilitation of buildings, and the erection of the monument to the fallen heroes on the main square. Why should these developments seem to be a facade hiding a feeling of hopelessness and despair that seems to permeate this town? It is not easy to point to the cause of this despondency, or perhaps there is no single cause. Nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus among people from various walks of life that the leaders should somehow show the way in this new society, the functioning of which nobody really understands. As Lonnie Johnson recently pointed out, the demise of communism did not naturally create democrats and capitalists: “It would be incorrect to confuse the popular rejection of socialism in East Central Europe in 1989 with a widespread affirmation or understanding of the game rules of participatory democracy or market capitalism” (1996: 291). Thus people feel lost and somewhat bewildered in this new world of freedoms and rights where no paternal figure tells them what to do. If only Joó were still alive! He would know what to do, how to get the place moving once again, and—most important—how to make the town into a community of shared interests. It is now clear that he provided a vision of what they could collectively accomplish and proved that they could do it. His methods may not have been the most democratic or just. But ten years after his death there is hardly a person in Tiszadomb who does not mourn his absence and wish that he was still among them. It is instructive to contemplate the present from the perspective of the last hundred years of history in this small town. The “Blessed Village” functioned well for its peasant landowners because it had competent leaders and because there was a general consensus on values and goals. However, it was not necessarily a just place for those who were not members of the landowning classes. Ujdomb was an unjust society where a few took advantage of the many. This world was set upside down in the postwar years by developments that were not necessarily any more just or efficient. The fabric of old society was destroyed in the name of

198 Postscript

justice, but what developed in its place satisfied only a small segment of the people. Much was accomplished, but society did not become any more just than in the prewar years; there was now a new privileged class, members of which controlled the rest. When this system was swept away by the process of democratization in the late 1980s, the way was finally paved for a more egalitarian society that was no longer to be run from the top down. The unfortunate fact is that without a precedent, without experience in exercising rights, and without a civil society, people were simply not prepared to partake in the democratic process. Thus they feel rudderless and bewildered and experience political and economic disorientation. And they wish that the last charismatic leader were still around to tell them what to do. What the future holds for the region and for this small town is uncertain. Their turbulent history has certainly not given them reason for much optimism, but it has demonstrated their resilience, which will hopefully carry them into a brighter future.

Appendix

Life history research has been an integral part of anthropology since the early part of this century (as reviewed by Langness and Frank 1981), a method that it has shared with other disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology, and literature. In anthropology, the biographical method has been used for a variety of purposes, beginning with work on Native Americans (for example, Love 1900, Linecum 1906, Barrett 1906, Wood 1906, Watson 1916) and soon extended to other cultures (for example, Ntara 1934, Gollock 1928, Perham 1936, Sachs 1937). These works, by amateur ethnographers, were motivated by a fascination with other, alien ways of life and were a curious hybrid of realism and fiction, aimed at simply describing another culture in all its strange details. The beginning of rigorous work in life-history research by professional anthropologists came with Paul Radin’s The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian in 1920 (see Langness and Frank 1981: 18). This was soon followed by Edward Sapir’s publication on the life of a Nootka Indian in 1921. These works represented two different trends in the use of life-history materials during the ensuing decades. One focused on how a life reflected on a culture or social group, its “aim being, not to obtain autobiographical details about some definite personage, but to have some representative middle-aged individual of moderate ability describe his life in relation to the social group in which he had grown up” (Radin 1920: 384). In these early years, this interest was motivated by a desire to salvage as much as possible of the fast disappearing Na199

200 Appendix

tive American cultures. Later it was extended to other regions and was used extensively to portray other cultures (Pozas 1962; Glasse 1959). The second trend focused more on the individual and his psychic functioning in society and grew out of the study of culture and personality. Life histories were used by disciples of Abraham Kardiner, for example, to test the hypothesis that personality linked primary institutions (e.g., childrearing practices) and secondary institutions (e.g., religion, magic, myth, art). As Kardiner said, “Here is our first chance to see whether our guess about the kind of personality a given set of institutions will create is at all approximated in reality” (1945: 37). After 1945, according to Langness and Frank (1981), in addition to the previous two interests, the use of life histories was extended to other uses, including the following: literary purposes (Lewis 1959, 1961, 1964); to portray aspects of cultural change (Mintz 1960; Crapanzano 1969, 1972; Kennedy 1977); to represent groups not usually portrayed by other means (for example, women) (Reyher 1948; Marriott 1948; Smith 1954; Lurie 1961; Kelley 1978; Shostak 1981); and to communicate the “insider’s view” of culture (Nabokov 1967; Winter 1965). In recent years, the movement toward person-centered, interpretive anthropology has ushered in a new kind of interest in life histories. With a weakening of faith in empiricism, there is now a recognition that life stories are not “windows into reality” but narratives that are constructed and “continually reinvented in the service of contemporary psychological and political aims” (Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992, p. 4). Thus in order to understand the events that informants describe it is necessary to inquire into the assumptions of the speakers. The focus is not on the “truth” or “untruth” of the event but its meaning within a personal history (for example, Rosaldo 1989; Price 1992; Behar 1993). My work on Tiszadomb combines these two views on the use of life histories. On the one hand, I wanted to give voice to different individuals from various backgrounds, to have them tell their truth as they saw it, to document their personal experience, ideology, and subjectivity. On the other hand, I am aware that life histories also document the social context in which these individuals function. In Robert Connell’s words, “they give rich evidence about impersonal and collective processes as well as about subjectivity” (1995: 89). And it is this that made the lifehistory method eminently suitable for the study of this ever-changing community.

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Index

A Abony, 15, 128 Acacia trees, 136, 140 “Action Program,” 156 ÁFéSz, 72 Agricultural College, 125 Agriculture, 16–17, 40, 42–43 collectivization of. See Collectivization expert shortages in, 125 guidelines for, 45 investment in, 54 mechanization of, 122–23 modernization of, 61 production decline in, 189 state interference in, 113 transformation of, 41 undermining of, 164 war damages in, 99 See also Cooperative farms Agroproletarians, 114 Alcoholism, 165 Animal fat, 45 Apple cropping, 33, 151 Árkusd¨ul½o, 138 Artel, 41, 54

Association of Free Democrats, 168 Associations, 167–68 Association of Young Democrats, 168 Austria, 29–30 AVO (political police), 109, 111 B Bács-Kiskun County, 175–77 Bagó, Mr., 96 Bálint György, 105 Balla Lajos, 86 Balla Mihály, 107 Balla Rozália. See Faragó Rozália (wife of Béla) Banks, 110 Barbed wire, 99 Barneval, 71 Batka Gyula, 53, 119 Bean shucking, 97 Bekó András, 107 Bence Tibor, 153 Benke Mártá, 171, 172–73, 183, 185 Beszél½o (journal), 167 Blue Danube Circle, 168 Bög, 3, 62, 138, 157 205

206

Index

Boglár Agnes, 72–73 Boglár Anikó, 56–57, 73, 188 Boglár Dénes, 11, 22–23, 30–37, 39, 45–46, 47, 52, 53, 55–57, 73, 188–189, 196 Boglár family, 13, 21–78, 188 beginnings of, 25–27 eviction of, 48 family tree, 23 holdings of, 25 house of, 22–23 interwar period, 30–36 kulak registry of, 45 See also individual family members Boglár Istvan, 26–27 Boglár Klára, 30, 34, 38, 39, 40, 48 Boglár Laci, 4, 5–6, 13, 21–22, 73, 78, 163–64, 181–82, 191 Boglár Lajos, 26, 27, 29, 30, 48 Boglár Margit, 39 Boglár Miklós, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 45, 55 Boglár Sándor, 26–30, 33, 35–39, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57 Boglár Tamás, 39–41, 48–49, 57, 58–59, 125, 189–90 career as greengrocer, 75–78 early farm work by, 49 entrepreneurship of, 70–78 and “goose crisis,” 71–72 political activity of, 190–91 Boglár Teréz, 25, 26, 30, 48 Borderlands, 136–40 Boros András, 59, 71 Boros Imre, 112 Bourgeois peasantry, 101 Brigades, 114–15, 150–51 Buda Károly, 9, 66, 74, 131 Budapest, 6, 11, 27, 37, 50, 90, 160–162 Budapest School, 167 C Calvinist Church of Switzerland, 190 Carpatho-Ruthenia, 37 Casino, 193 Cegléd, 56

Central Committee, 166 Christian Democratic Party, 168, 190 Chronicle of Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County (1931–32), 92 “Chronicles of the Nation” (radio program), 173 Church Square (Ódomb), 24 Class differentiation, 133 Coal industry, 164 Coca-Cola bottling plant, 67 Collective farms. See Cooperative farms Collective responsibility, 120 Collectivization, 8–9, 19, 46–47, 49, 53–57, 112–16 agitators for, 54–55, 149 new wave of, 120–25 relaxation of, 49 College of Trade, 191 COMECON, 164–65 Committee for Receiving Produce, 89 Committee for Requisitioning Produce, 28 Committee for Threshing, 89 Compromise with Austria (1867), 16 Compulsory deliveries. See Delivery quotas Constitution of the People’s Republic, 47 Cooperative economic associations, 24–25 Cooperative farms, 19, 53, 55, 65, 147, 190, 194 consolidation of holdings for, 43 disbanding of, 118 discipline in, 115 first, 49–50 incomes in, 114–15 operational regulations for, 41 private activities in, 61 public opinion of, 113–14 return of, 120 sharecropping arrangements with, 122, 151 Cooperative Land Reform Act (1959), 54, 55 Cooperative movement, 41, 42–43 Corn shucking, 97

Index 207 County Soviet, 28 Courts, independence of, 180, 185 Credit system, 112–113 Crossbar system, 130 Csurka István, 169 Czech Communist Party, 156 Czechoslovakia, 156 D Day labor, 85 Dead Tisza Valley, 25 Debrecen, 101 Defamation, 180 Delivery Office, 45, 46, 52, 53, 110, 111, 117 Delivery quotas, 42, 43, 45–46, 50, 51, 109, 111, 112, 117, 119, 147 Demokratikus Ifjusági Szövetkezet. See DISz Demonstrations, 6 Dening, Greg, 13 Discrimination, 5–6, 22 DISz (Demokratikus Ifjusági Szövetkezet), 111 Donáth Ferenc, 113–14 Draught animals, 108 Draw well, 139 Droughts, 35, 108 Drug abuse, 165 Dubçek, Alexander, 156 E “Earth mover” gangs. See Kubikos gangs Economic work teams, 61 Education, 35, 36, 67–68, 140, 143, 146, 153 Electricity, 19, 130, 140, 154 Elites, 134 Emancipation, 16, 17 Emmer Gábor, 94 Entertainment industry, 193–94 Entrepreneurial trajectory, 77–78 Entrepreneurs, 70–78, 134 Entry declaration, 55

Eötvös Loránd University, 161, 167 Erdei Ferenc, 8 Ethnographic Club, 157, 171 Ethnographic Museum (Budapest), 7, 8, 162 F Faragó András, 86, 91 Faragó Anna, 125–26, 128–29, 192–93 Faragó Béla, 95–97, 103, 106, 107, 108–9, 112, 119 during World War II, 97–100 household plot of, 121 house of, 123–24 in Peace cooperative, 114–16, 121–22 Faragó family, 13–14, 192–93 family tree, 80 origins of, 81–82 Faragó Ferenc, 11, 109, 125–29, 132, 174, 192–93 at Zöldért, 132–33 casino of, 193–94 childhood of, 116–17 civil suit by, 179–86 Faragó Ilona, 86, 91 Faragó Imola, 86, 87 Faragó Irén, 98, 116 Faragó Istv´an, 86, 87 Faragó János, 81, 86–87, 89, 90–91, 98, 111, 118, 127 Faragó Lajos, 81, 111–12 Faragó Margit, 86 Faragó Mária (daughter of Mark), 86, 91 Faragó Mária (wife of Mark), 82 Faragó Mark, 82, 85–86, 90 Faragó Mihály, 85, 86–94, 97, 98, 103, 106, 108, 115 children of, 91–92 as party secretary, 111 political beliefs of, 92 and revolution of 1956, 117 year in prison, 90 Faragó Péter, 4–5, 6, 14, 79–81, 128, 129, 134–35, 192–93 court testimony of, 180–81

208

Index

Faragó Péter (continued) special privileges of, 79–80 Faragó Rozália, 86 Faragó Rozália (wife of Béla), 108–9, 115, 119 Faragó Sándor, 116 Faragó Teréz, 98, 112 Faragó Verona (sister of Mihály), 86, 87 Faragó Verona (wife of Mihály), 91–92, 98, 107, 115, 119 Farm collectives, 12 Farm dwellers (tanyasiak), 138–39, 144 Farmers’ (Gazda) Circle, 94 Farmhouses, 139 Farm world. See Borderlands Favoritism, 5–6, 22 Feather plucking, 97 Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESz), 169, 190 Fekete István, 46 Fertilizer, 190 FIDESz. See Federation of Young Democrats Finta János, 74 Five-Year Plan (1949), 41 Folk art, 7, 158 Folk colleges, 36 Folk High School, 67 Food shortages, 41 Freedom (Szabadság) Cooperative,55–59, 66, 71, 73–74, 113, 114, 126, 128 Fruit, 17 Futöhomok (Erdei), 8 G Galgóczy Károly, 8 Gas supply, 19 Geese, 71–72 Germany, 36–37 Goldman, Marshal, 164 Grade scandal, 4–6 court hearing into, 179–86 importance of, 175 investigation into, 175–77 and media, 172–79

Grade scandal (continued) popular opinion of, 184–85 press conference about, 175–76 second investigation into, 177–78 Gradualness, 19, 54 Graft, 133 Grapes, 17, 25 Great Depression, 35 Great Hungarian Plains, 7–9, 14–15 Grocery stores, 140 Grósz Károly, 165, 166 Gyapjas László, 176, 182–83 H Harvester gangs, 85 Health insurance, 120 Hegedüs András, 167 Historical ethnography, 12–13 History, 161, 194 History Circle, 194 Hoffman Tamás, 8 Horthy Miklós, 30 Hotel Hungaria (Szeged), 58 House of Culture, 55–56, 64, 79, 170, 171, 194 Household plots, 61, 66, 113, 120, 121, 132–33, 150–52 Housing, 33, 124, 148, 165 Human market, 96 Human rights, 180 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 189 Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Ethnographic Research Unit, 9 Hungarian Communist Party, 28, 40, 40–41, 42, 47, 88, 90, 101, 102, 109, 179–80 disillusionment with, 166 and election of 1947, 43, 109 offices of, 11 party apparatus of, 110 salami tactics of, 107 Ujdomb chapter of, 107, 125 See also Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party

Index 209 Hungarian Democratic Forum, 14, 168–69, 171, 183, 190, 195 Hungarian National Assembly, 170 Hungarian Peace Council, 167–68 Hungarian Radio, 173 Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, 165, 169–70 special party conference of, 166–67, 173 Hungarian Soviet Republic, 27–29, 88–89 Hungarian way, 60 Hungarian Workers’ Party, 41 Hungary 1956 uprising in, 19, 50–54 Allied air strikes against, 38 democratization in, 6–7 economic system of, 40 elections of 1947, 40–41, 43 first post-war government of, 101 income distribution in, 121 land ownership structure in, 102–3 liberalization in, 9 living standards in, 165 opposition in, 167–70 peasant question in, 41–47 political and economic developments in, 164–67 political parties in, 6, 168 post-socialist changes in, 196–97 post-war problems in, 27–30 proletarian dictatorship in, 109–12 World War II damage to, 99 Hunyadi cooperative, 148 Hyperinflation, 196 I Identification booklets, 86–87 Immigration, 43 Incentives, 66 Incomes, 66, 196 national distribution of, 121 women’s, 153 Income tax, 166 Independent activism, 167–70

Independent associations, 6 Industrialists, 44 Industrialization, 16, 19, 54 Industry, 41, 66–67, 110, 194, 196 Inflation, 29 Infrastructure, 16, 19, 130 Inoka, 38 Intelligentsia, 44, 67 Intermarriage, 26 Investigative reporting, 172 Iván Berend, 60 Iván Szelényi, 123 J Jews, 95 Johnson, Lonnie, 197 Joó István, 4–5, 6, 9, 19–20, 68, 74, 76, 128, 129, 131, 172–73, 177–78, 197 community power of, 65 court testimony of, 183 founding of Tiszadomb High School, 159–60 investigation into land deals of, 186 lack of funds, 68–70 mayoral strategy of, 63–65 media attention on, 184 request for early retirement, 175, 178, 186 suicide of, 3–4, 12, 186 József Attila Circle, 167, 170 K Kádár János, 51, 53, 54, 118, 166, 173 Károlyi Mihály, 27 Kecskemét, 29, 35, 38, 51, 111, 185 Kecskemét Barneval, 71 Kecskés estate, 147 Kecskés János, 108 Kerekdomb, 138 Kerekegyháza, 71 Kis Agnes. See Boglár Agnes Kis family, 72

210

Index

Kis János, 167 Kiskunfélegyháza, 163 Kocsér, 92 Kocsis Anikó. See Boglár Anikó Kocsis Julianna, 142 Konrád György, 169 Kossuth Street, 22–24, 43, 188 Kubikos (“earth mover”) gangs, 85, 114 Kulaks, 6, 18, 21, 43, 110, 112, 147 isolation of, 110 land abandoned by, 46–47 media characterization of, 42 registration of, 42, 43–45, 88–89, 111 Kün Béla, 27, 88, 89 Kürt, 38 Kürti Lászlo, 67 L Ladányi Zsuzsa, 173–74 Lakitelek, 169, 170, 183 Land: confiscation of, 28, 88 forced consolidation of, 46–47 privitazation of, 12 registration, 88, 103 shortages, 82, 104 Land Claims Committee, 103, 104, 106 Landholders’ Club, 24, 34 Land reform, 32–33, 88–89, 100–109, 112 beneficiaries of (1945–47), 103 competing plans for, 101–2 of 1945, 17–18 of 1948, 40, 144 Land Reform Act (1920), 92 Land Reform Law (1919), 28, 32 Lázár György, 165 Lehel István, 142 Levente association, 37, 94, 143 Lezsák Sándor, 168–69, 170 Literary reporting, 173 Literature, 161 Local soviet councils, 28 Long house, 139 Losonczi Pál, 56, 64, 131

Lovas Béla, 141 Lovas Kálmán, 143 Lovas Péter, 143 M Machinery, agricultural, 108, 113, 190 Machine stations, 113, 115, 122 Mafia, 193 Magyar Falu, Magyar Haz (Gyórffy), 8 Manorial estates, 138, 144 Manual workers, 122 Marketing, 19 Marxist-Leninist University, 122, 129 Maxim Gorky Technical High School, 161 Media, 172–79, 184 Membership lists, 19 Merchants, 44 Mezei Imre, 121 Middle peasants. See Kulaks Migrant labor, 82 Minefields, 99 Ministry of Finance, 166 Módra László, 133–34 Monograph of the Town of Nagykórös (Galgoczy), 8 Móricz Zsigmond, 24–25, 95 Móricz Zsigmond High, 68 N Nagy Imre, 49, 51, 53 Nagyk½or¨os, 8–9, 35, 56, 57 Nagy Mariska, 153 Nagy Piroska, 191 National Committee, 52, 119 National Fertilizers, 67 National Guard, 52–53, 119 National Gymnastics College, 4, 79, 181 National Peasant Party, 101, 109 National traditions, 159 New Economic Mechanism (NEM), 9, 21, 59–61, 129, 151 effect on Tiszadomb, 62–70 New Landowners’ National Union, 104

Index 211 New Life (Uj élet) cooperative, 113, 114 Newspapers, 131 Nyársapáti, 98 Nyers Rezsó, 59, 166 Nyiség, 33 O Ódomb, 10–11, 13, 15, 17, 26, 95, 134 after World War I, 27–29 bombing of, 38 described, 24 during World War II, 37 emmigration from, 43 fragmentation of, 43 interwar period of, 31–36 land distribution in, 33 landholding patterns in, 17–18 population of, 25 post-socialist changes in, 188–91 post-World War II years, 40 residence patterns in, 31–32 social categories in, 31–32 social divisions in, 24 See also Tiszadomb Ódomb Town Hall, 111 Oláháza, 138 Old Citizens Club, 94 Ördög János, 65, 68, 160, 176–77, 178, 181 Orkán Ferenc, 45, 51, 53, 110, 117 Orosháza Barneval, 71 Orosz Arpád, 185 Örszighety Erzsébet, 145–46 Otthonka, 126 P Pap Dezsö, 121 Papp János, 105 Papp Jenó, 77 Pap Zoltán, 66 Parish council, 94 Peace (Béke) Collective, 56, 66, 73, 113, 114, 122, 149–50

Peace (Béke) Collective (continued) land area of, 121 membership of, 121 Peace Group for Dialogue, 167–68 Pearl of the Tisza (Tiszagyöngye) cooperative, 113, 114 Peasant culture, 145 Peasant Party. See National Peasant Party Peasant question, 41–47 Peasantry, 143–44 Peasant-worker, 123 Pensioners, 44 Pensions, 120 Pereghalom, 138 Persecution, 42, 180 Pet½ofi Népe (newspaper), 172–73, 177, 183 Pet½ofi Street, 24, 44, 76 Pig raising, 151 Pintér Bálint, 142, 143, 149–50 Pintér Erzsébet, 136–37, 144, 145, 146, 151, 158 Pintér family, 140–45 eviction of, 147–48 family tree, 141 house given to, 150 land rental by, 146–47 Pintér János, 136, 142, 143, 144, 145, 154–55, 157–58 at Peace Cooperative, 149–50 persecution of, 147 Pintér Katalin, 4–7, 14, 175 after college, 157–61 at teachers’ college, 155–57 in Budapest, 160–62 childhood of, 145–48 disillusionment with socialism, 161 effect of scandal on, 194–95 high school years, 153–55 political awakening of, 157, 170–71 school years, 148–52 testimony by, 182–83 Pintér Lajos, 11 Pintér Mihály, 141–42 Pintér Rózsa, 152 Planning Office, 165

212

Index

Plundering, 151 Poland, 167 Police Academy, 111 Political Committee, 166 Political parties, 6, 168 Poverty, 35 Pozsgay Imre, 166, 169 Prague Spring, 156 Press, freedom of, 179, 185 Private enterprise, 19 Private farming, 61 Private sector, growth of, 60 Production associations, types of, 41 Professionalism, 130 Propaganda, 42 Propaganda posters, 153 Protestant church, 193 Public health, 165 Public Law 1920: XXXVI, 32–33 Public works projects, 24 Puszta. See Great Hungarian Plains R Radványi family, 47 Railroad, 83–84 Rákosi Mátyás, 41, 42, 49 Rallies, 6 Ramet, Sabrina, 167 Rationing, 41 Reading Circle, 24, 94, 170 Red Army (Hungarian), 28–29 Red Guards, 89 Remix, 67, 127–28 Retired Persons’ Cultural and Self-Help Association, 167 Retirement pensions, 120 Revolutionary Governing Council, 28, 29 Rich peasants. See Kulaks Romanian Army, 28, 29, 38, 89–90, 98 Romanyi Pál, 72 S Sabotage, 45 Sajó (Boglár family dog), 29

Salami tactics, 107 Sárhalom, 138 Sas Vincent, 56, 57, 58, 64, 74, 126 Schools, 110 Second economy, 11, 11n, 132, 133, 134 legalization of, 60 Secret police, 149 Seres Jenó, 34, 39 Seres Pál, 53, 119 Serfs, 16, 17, 84 Servant Identification Book, Issued to Agricultural Servants (1910), 86–87 Service industries, 60–61 Sharecropping, 122, 151 Simkó János, 9 Simó Tibor, 133 Sipos Arpád, 178 Slaughter, animal, 45 Slovakia, 37 Small business, 60 Smallholders Party, 34, 39, 101, 107, 109, 168, 169, 190 Social clubs, 25, 94 Social Democratic Party, 101, 109, 168 Social insurance, 120, 165 “Socialist man,” 117, 159 Socialist Workers’ Party. See Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Social mobility, 144 Solidarity (Polish labor movement), 167 Soros, George, 167 Sörös Mária. See Faragó Mária Soviet Army, 38–39, 40, 99 Soviet Union, 37 invasion of Czechoslovakia, 156 Specialist cooperatives, 54 Square housing, 124 Stabilization Working Program, 165 State Farms, 47, 53, 113, 119, 121 Steel industry, 164 Storm Corner (Viharsarok), 107 Suicide rates, 165 Szabó Anna. See Faragó Anna Szabó Ilona, 46

Index 213 Szabó István, 32 Szabó János, 30 Szabó Klára. See Boglár Klára Szánto István, 174, 176, 185 Szarvas, 58 Szeged, 155 Szeged Teachers’ College, 14, 155–57 Szeged, University of, 157 Szekeres Verona. See Faragó Verona (wife of Mihály) Székhalom, 136, 138, 140, 143 Szelényi family, 126 Szenti Tibor, 139 Szigeti, Uncle, 11 Szolnok, 29, 38 T Takács Béni, 97–98 Takács family, 97, 112 Tanya, 150 Tanyasiak. See Farm dwellers Taxes, 42, 45, 164, 166 Tekes Benjamin, 25–26, 30 Tekes Teréz. See Boglár Teréz Telephones, 19, 130 Terror, 42 Threshing Committee, 28 Tiszaalpár, 128 Tiszadomb, 3 bombing of demonstrators in, 51–52 borderlands of, 136–40 city status for, 70, 130, 131 cooperative incomes in, 67 dissatisfaction of, 196–97 early collectives in, 112–16 financial problems of, 68–70 golden years in, 129–35 map of, 10, 16 modernization of, 130–31 new age in, 62–70 occupational structure of, 130 overview of, 14–20 polarization in, 11 post-socialist changes in, 187–88, 190, 194

Tiszadomb (continued) revolution of 1956 in, 51–52, 117–19 social structure of, 133–34 Soviet occupation of, 99–100 spa in, 68–70, 75 study of, 7–14 unification of, 18, 35, 47–48 year of terror in, 50 Tiszadomb Council House, 111 Tiszadomb High School, 4–7, 68, 134, 153–54, 159–60, 163, 171 Tiszainoka, 114 Tisza River, 16, 82, 127 Tomatoes, 151 Tóth Arpád, 74 Tóth family, 8 Tóth János, 66 Tóth Margit. See Boglár Margit Tourism, 19 Tractor operators, 122 Traders, 98 Tradesmen, 95 Tradesmen’s Circle, 94 Transylvania, 37 Trianon Peace Treaty (1920), 29, 30, 37 Turi István, 110 “Turning Point and Reform,” 166 U Ujdomb, 10–11, 13, 16, 17, 26, 32, 37, 76, 82, 134, 197 after World War I, 27–30 birthrate in, 26, 83 counterrevolution in, 117–19 distribution of property in (1949), 106 elementary schools in, 88, 95 emmigration from, 43 entertainment in, 97 income in, 84–85 inter-war years in, 94–95 land distribution in (1935), 92–93 landholding patterns in, 17–18

214

Index

Ujdomb (continued) middle level of society in, 84 modernization of, 124–25 prejudice against Ódomb, 111 social life in, 94 Soviet occupation of, 99–100 youth of, 97 See also Ódomb; Tiszadomb Ujdomb Town Hall, 53, 111 “Unearned Honors” (newspaper article), 172–73, 179 Unemployment, 27, 35, 194, 196 Urban development programs, 70

W Water supply, 19, 24, 130, 154 Wells, 139 White Terror (1920), 89–90 Widows, 44 Women, 145–46, 152 Worker Identification Book, 87 Work habits, 120 World War I, 27–30, 88 World War II, 30, 36–39, 97–100 Y

V Vanák Lajos, 128 Varga family, 146 Vári István, 119 Vásárhely, 139 Verebélyi Kató, 158 Vermes Sándor, 159–60 Viharsarok. See Storm Corner Village Explorers, 35–36 Virág Lane, 76 Viticulture, 17, 25 Voluntariness, 19, 54

Young Pioneer movement, 49, 116 Youth Brigade. See Levente association Youth furniture, 162 Z Zajzon Ildiko, 171 Zoboki János, 107 Zöldért, 75, 132–33, 174 Zsoldos Áron, 142

Marida Hollos is a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She was born and brought up in Hungary. During the 1956 Revolution, as a teenager, she fled with her family to the United States. After attending the University of California at Berkeley, she received a Ph.D. in anthropology. Hollos has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Hungary, where she has returned many times over the past twenty-five years. She has published several books, including New Hungarian Peasants: An East Central European Experience with Collectivization (co-edited with Bela Maday), as well as numerous professional articles on European and African ethnography.