With Napoleon's permission, I decided to bring some insight into Hungary's syndicalist leaders, and how they go about restoring the value of leftist ideology.
Redeeming an Ideology
Excerpt from From the Ashes of Stalinism: Modern Hungary by Robert Vanice
By 1968, Hungary's Syndicalists had largely solidified their control over the country. Their program of distribution and reconstruction brought the highest period of economic growth Hungary had seen since the Great Depression, but Hungary's leaders realized that the building of economic ties to the rest of the world was needed to ensure the viability of syndicalism. And most were keenly aware of how their ideology was largely distrusted by a world weary of Stalinist excess.
"We cannot make deals, if the world believes behind our outstretched hand is a knife ready to stab them," wrote Deputy Secretary General[1] and former rebel leader Pal Maleter [2] to Imre Nagy.
Their solution did in fact take inspiration from their previous communist overlords: a propaganda campaign. Only instead of creating images of a powerful colossus, as Soviet propaganda did, Maleter pushed for images that would humanize the newly liberated country.
Nagy concurred, and the Hungarian Worker's Tourism Council [3] was established to draw visitors to Hungary. Appointed to Secretary of the council, and specifically demanded by Nagy, was famed photojournalist Andre Kertesz. Exiled from his country during the Second World War, the elderly Kertesz proved to be an eager figure in capturing subtle images of his homeland.
The desire for Hungary's leaders to create an image of normalcy meshed well with Kertesz's humble, but beautiful style. Simple images of men sitting in the park playing chess, or woman walking down an avenue in Budapest [4] appeared in tourist ads throughout Europe. They became simple but powerful tools which drew previously uncertain tourists to visit Hungary. The PR also led to increased trade between Hungary and the capitalist West, as the latter's fears of a Stalinist nightmare were gradually whittled away.
Kertesz's photos are still used to this day in government sponsored ads, and have influenced photojournalism and marketing across the world.
Excerpt from Reinventing the Worker's State: The Beginnings of the IBSU by Slavoj Zizek
By 1970, the foundations for the IBSU were already being laid. Against the objections of the US government, Hungary began trading, or more specifically, providing aid to the somewhat isolated Cuban syndicalist state. Surplus grain, technical assistance, and the arrival of young Hungarian students to the island has profound effects beyond ending the extreme want that most Cubans faced as a result of the US Embargo.
"Our presence on the island proved joyous to the Cubans," recounted Miklos Nemeth [5] then a young exchange student,"the solidarity between them and us Eastern Europeans who could not speak a word of Spanish was incredible".
The phenomenon of Hungarian-Cuban collaboration, famously dubbed "Caribbean Goulash" by columnist Mike Royko, had profound effects on the culture of each country. Hungarians enjoyed Cuban jazz and cigars, while Cubans enjoyed Hungarian Palacinsta, or pancakes. Mixed marriages between Cubans and Hungarians became very common.
While refusing to join the capitalist, integrated Europe, Hungary saw how it could breed success for its model by integrating with other syndicalist, or syndicalist-leaning countries. Hungary and Cuba realized that through the creation of a super-national bloc, they could actively promote syndicalism and gain favorable markets for their goods.
The efforts to integrate drew fruit, and at the Havana Summit in 1971, the leaders of the two countries founded the International Brotherhood of Syndicalist Unions or the IBSU. Their mission would be to provide technical and economic aid to any nation that embraced syndicalism, as well the removal of travel and trade barriers between each country to stimulate growth and intercultural and student exchange. The IBSU would have a profound impact on geopolitics in the 1970s.
Excerpt from Nefesh Yehudi: The Jewish History of Hungary by Isaac Roth
The efforts by the US government to push Holocaust education had varying degrees of success across Europe. But no nation proved more receptive than Hungary.
As much as American diplomacy can be credited for Hungary's interest in the Holocaust education, two other events would push Hungary's revolutionary government into embracing its fierce policy of anti-racism.
One was the publishing of the Solzhenitsyn Report. The first volume held all the sordid details about Stalin's purges, but more importantly to the Hungarians, it revealed the antisemitic nature of the purge of Matyas Rakosi.
After Stalin offed Rakosi, the former Hungarian dictator had been virtually airbrushed from history. After Stalin's death, Suslov and Malenkov returned Rakosi to the history books, but for obvious reasons, concealed the truth of his death from the world, claiming "Zionist agents had murdered Rakosi for his defense of the proletariat". [6] Hungarians disbelieved such reports, and speculated for years about the reason for Rakosi's murder. The Solzhenitsyn Report revealed this truth to the government of Budapest. The infamous letter Stalin wrote singling out the secular Rakosi for his "Zionist ties" sent shock waves across the Hungarian landscape.
While little love was found among Hungarians for their former dictator, the fact that even their former head of state was not protected from antisemitism provoked a profound re-examining of racial attitudes.
But the more serious incident that pushed the Syndicalists toward an anti-racist stance was a disastrous visit to New York by Nagy in May 5, 1969. A group of Hungarians, including Nagy, came to a conference in Manhattan to promote Hungarian syndicalism. They hoped to try and spread their ideas to the American population, but they badly underestimated the hatred many held for leftism. Many of these students had been harassed by many New Yorkers. Even African-American and Latin American populations, known for their economic-leftism, snubbed them.
"We know there would be tension," said Erika Dobo, one of the students, "but we truly did not expect the violence we got.
The meeting descended into violence when it was attacked by angry Jewish Objectivist protesters, many of them Hungarian Jews who had survived the Holocaust, who infamously began beating the Hungarians with copies of Atlas Shrugged. Dobo, however, admitted some in her party labeled the Objectivist's "Jew running dogs". The head of the demonstration, a Jewish Hungarian exile named Thomas Erdelyi [7] assaulted Nagy with an egg to the face, which forced Nagy to end the conference early. Adding insult to injury, NYPD officers called to the scene detained several of the Hungarians under anticommunist laws still on the books. While the federal government released the
detained Hungarians, the incident led to a chill of relations between the two countries.
According to Nagy, however, what truly mortified him were the placard signs the Objectivists carried, that compared him and the Syndicalists to both Stalin and the Nazis.
"Seeing the image of my face looking down evilly at oppressed Jews alongside Stalin shook me to the core," wrote Nagy in his autobiography, "I understood than that burying the past was not the way to build the future. We must right wrongs, no matter how painful it is to face them."
On September 22, 1969, Nagy pushed for a series of programs that came to be called
Bunbanat, or Hungarian for "repetence". The program was a collective call for the Hungarian nation to turn away from antisemitism. Aside from a moral stance, Nagy knew it was the most meaningful way that syndicalism could distinguish itself from the specter of Stalinism.
Bunbanat consisted of the following measures.
1. Compensation for the victims of Hungary's role in the Holocaust.
2. A large program of Holocaust education
3. A recognition of Jews as a threatened minority, and laws against hate speech.
4. A pro-Zionist foreign policy, with staunch ties made to the Israeli state.
5. The restoration of Jewish cultural sites, and promotion of Jewish culture.
The question of compensation was one of the most contentious parts of Nagy's program, as many Hungarians questioned whether the Hungarian state could afford the cost of reparation. Unfortunately, some opposition went into outright antisemitism with some claiming Nagy to have been bought "by Jew interests".
The debate at Hungary's National Assembly in November of 1969 became very heated. In a famous exchange, assemblyman Erno Grisn asked "How can be afford to pay," to the Assembly, to which Nagy firmly replied ,"If our grandchildren are as hated as Stalin, they'll ask you 'why did you not pay'." Nagy's reference to Stalin moved many, and the Assembly narrowly agreed to a reparation plan.
The amount came down to $30,000 (in today's money) to victims as a down payment, plus an additional $6,000 to be paid every year [8]. The program continues to compensate surviving Hungarian Jews to the present day.
Other efforts to combat antisemitism were more easily implemented, since they were not only cheaper, but could enhance Hungary's image and bring in tourist dollars.
Hungary began to build staunch ties to the Israeli state. The Hungarian government saw economic potential in trade with Israel, and taking a cue from the German government, made huge payments to the state of Israel, totaling $200 million dollars in today's money over 20 years. Hungarians sent technical and academic assistance to help Israeli industries. Hungarian students came to work on kibbutzim, and Israeli students were invited to Hungarian universities. To this day, Hungary remains one of the strongest allies of the state of Israel in Europe.
Hungary began a robust system of Holocaust education. The crimes of both Stalin and the Hungarian fascists were put on display in history classes. Large memorials to Jews killed in both Holocausts were built in every town. Trips to Yad Vashem by diplomats became perfunctory. Vasily Grossman's
The Yellow Star became mandatory reading in every Hungarian school. As said, the goal by Nagy and the syndicalists was to make themselves as different from Stalinism as possible.
Elie Wiesel, the famed Holocaust survivor and author of the Nobel Prize winning memoir
And the World Remained Silent [9] was invited to speak at Hungarian schools yearly, and in a rare diplomatic collaboration between Hungary and Romania [10], his former home in Sighet was transformed into a large Holocaust museum by the two governments.
Hungarian museums were built celebrating Jewish culture, and contributions by Jews to Hungarian history and progress were mentioned in classrooms and cultural studies curricula, including the work of Andre Kertesz', himself of Jewish descent. Synagogues that had been closed or demolished under oppressive regimes were rebuilt. On May 3, 1971, the Levys, a British Jewish family was invited to have their sons Bar-Mitzvah (the first one in Hungary since World War II) in the reopened Dohany synagogue, a ceremony Pal Maleter publicly attended. Much of these efforts were (and still are) partly funded, ironically, by the wealthy capitalists, including George Soros, himself a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust. The investment in these cites were made up by the large numbers of tourists who visit these sites.
The celebration of Jewish culture was so fierce, the country's tiny but dormant Jewish community underwent a massive Renaissance. Hungary remains the only Eastern European country with a higher Jewish population (120,000) in the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain then before it.
But one of the greatest fruits of this anti-racist campaign would arrive in 1979. Branko Lustig, the famed Croatian filmmaker and Holocaust survivor [11], produced the Academy Award-winning
Wallenberg, a film about the famed Swedish diplomat and his efforts to protect many of Budapest's Jews from deportation. The aid provided by the Hungarian government toward the making of the movie, both in historical documentation and in providing money and a technical crew, was invaluable. Though the film's ending remains controversial [12], the cooperation between Lustig and the authorities of Budapest were a testament to how Hungary sought to be the nation that would right a wrong.
[1] The title refers to "Deputy Secretary General of the Hungarian Worker's Union", the body that controls Syndicalism.
[2] This guy was one of the OTL leaders of the Hungarian Revolution. He was executed alongside Imre Nagy in 1958 OTL. Here, he becomes one of Hungary's post-communist leaders, as well as a potential successor.
[3] The body is one giant propaganda collective, but they are conscious of how calling themselves "The Information Council," has Orwellian undertones, so they chose "tourism" as a guise.
[4] Kertesz's photos were so groundbreaking in their simplicity, he is considered one of the founders of photographic art.
[5] Miklos Nemeth was the man who helped the transition of Hungary from communism to democracy OTL. I think he would definitely take a leadership role in Syndicalist Hungary once he reach late adulthood.
[6] Suslov and Malenkov's watered-down De-stalinization would mean they would bring Rakosi back into collective memory, but they would still lower themselves to race-baiting and lie about the motivations of Rakosi's death. The point is to show how they really are not much better than Stalin.
[7] Yes, that's Tommy Ramone as an Objectivist. I imagine his family fleeing Hungary during the 1960s revolts. Yes, he turned to Objectivism out of anger toward Stalin's pogrom. No, he did not do music.
[8] The Hungarian government did start paying compensation to Holocaust survivors OTL, but it was pitifully small, and more symbolic than substantive. ITTL, the Syndicalists realize they cannot screw around, as rebuilding their reputation is the only way they can appeal to the next generation of young people.
[9] This was Wiesel's original memoir, and it was like 900 pages. OTL, he was content to shorten it, but ITTL, the trauma of the Soviet Pogrom has made him more activist then ever, including writing a much longer book.
[10] ITTL, Romania and Hungary are still very frosty to each other, even more so over Hungary's Syndicalism, which to many Romanians still brings up bad memories of Ceausescu. Of course, they've decided to put aside their differences for some good PR.
[11] This man got an Oscar for Schindler's List OTL. He even made a reference to the Holocaust in his acceptance speech.
[12] The ITTL controversy is that the movie portrays Wallenberg as being executed under Stalin's orders. Most people ITTL acknowledge this narrative for obvious reasons, but historians and self-proclaimed witnesses dispute this story, as his true fate and cause of death was never officially revealed.
