The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 by Mark Pittaway

Reviewed by: The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 by Mark Pittaway J.-Guy Lalande Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2012) Major changes accompanied the end of World War II in East-Central Europe, a large geographical area where it had all started on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, and where the Soviet Red Army had finally defeated Hitler’s Wehrmacht in May 1945. One of these changes was the progressive coming to power in the years 1945 to 1948 of Communist Parties determined to implement a set of policies inspired by what defined them in the first place – Marxism in its Leninist-Stalinist version. The beginning of the Cold War and the defection of Titoist Yugoslavia in 1948 naturally added an extra sense of urgency to this project. Mark Pittaway’s groundbreaking study deals with the Hungarian experience. The socialist industrialization drive in post-World War II Hungary, characterized by severe shortages of housing and consumer goods (food and clothing, in particular), intensification of labour (payment-by-result wages and labour [End Page 376] competition, for example), and reductions in wage levels, created a gulf between the emerging socialist state and its workers that resulted in a deep crisis of legitimacy for the regime. Workers felt betrayed by politicians who had promised, then failed, to bring about material improvement. As discontent and social protest increased, the state responded at first with fairly widespread repressive measures; then, under the leadership of a new prime minister, the reformist Communist Imre Nagy (1953–1955), more conciliatory policies – the so-called “New Course” – were introduced. This new approach had a double effect: on the one hand, it accentuated divisions within an already fractured Communist Party; on the other, it raised expectations among the working class. The dismissal of Nagy in April 1955 and, the following year, the dramatic impact in Hungary of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of February 1956 – an event that inaugurated the process of de-Stalinization – triggered a national explosion that had a lethal impact on the regime: “the very fact of large numbers of workers taking to the streets, while none were prepared to defend the regime, led to the collapse of its authority, as the credibility of its claim to legitimacy evaporated.” (266) In the wake of the 1956 revolution, brutally crushed in early November by the Soviet military, the Kádár regime, installed by the army of a foreign power, faced a particularly challenging task: how to pacify Hungarian society, and how to construct a semblance of legitimacy for itself? Bloody and costly as it had proved to be, the uprising of 1956 nevertheless cast a long shadow in Hungary: it made all participants conscious of the fact that a return to the politics of the recent past was no longer an option and that, therefore, legitimacy would have to rest on the ability of the Communist authorities to deliver material improvement. The latter managed to generate a degree of acceptance in the late 1950s by distancing themselves from the practices of their Stalinist predecessors (Rákosi – “Stalin’s best pupil” – and Gerő, in particular), by approving tacit bargains in the workplace, by giving trade unions greater independence from management and the Party, and by improving the standards of living of the industrial workers (more generous family allowances for large families, introduction of a minimum wage in industry, increase in the value of pensions, major housing construction programs, wage increases, significant investments in public health services, improvements to public transport, and greater cultural opportunities for youth). These measures – a clever exercise in “plac[ing] material flesh on … ideological bones” (233) – provided the bases for the emergence of a still, however, conditional and brittle legitimacy for the regime among urban workers. Pittaway focused his research on three industrial communities that were very different in terms of their patterns of industrialization, local identities, occupational structures (skilled and unskilled workers), cultures, and political outlooks: the industrial suburb of Újpest, with its large textile plants and a machine-manufacturing sector; the multiethnic coal...

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