Demands for Reform

Demands for reform of the university curricula and control in late 1956 had been accompanied by attempts by the students to reform the nominal student organization. Moves to have this body detached from complete subservience to the Party, and to have the leadership directly elected by secret ballot, became widespread before the uprising and even received some press publicity. A representative student conference held in October, 1956, officially described as "the first students' Parliament", aired criticisms of the whole role of the official student organization and its attitude towards urgently needed reforms. Before the outbreak of bloodshed, a separate student body had been formed with a programme of reform and broad support throughout the country.

The initiative gained by student groups through this period and the uprising, was held until some months after the Kadar Government had taken office. The change came in March, 1957, when rigorous Government control was finally reasserted. By July, 1957, obligatory "Marxism-Leninism" was reintroduced into all schools, and the Party was listing as one of the sins of the "counterrevolutionaries" that they "spread on a large scale the revisionist view that in the atomic age the leading force is not the proletariat but the intelligentsia." The new student organization was compulsorily united with the old official one under a new name.

Gradually throughout the country, university life returned to its Stalinist forms. The secretary to the Party's central committee complained in May, 1957, that "teachers . . . keep aloof from any kind of political attitude . . . and if they must express one at all, they take the official line without, however, feeling any sincere conviction." By June it was discovered that secondary school pupils were joining the official student body purely to facilitate entrance to the university.

The pendulum has swung back. "Despite the tremendous efforts of the students to obtain the independence of thought and teaching necessary to proper university education," says the report, "the situation in Hungarian universities has reverted to a situation as bad as that existing before October, 1956. . . . State and foreign influence is now again paramount in the universities and the efforts of the students to follow their national heritage in educational matters have been suppressed; . . . students and university professors are being arrested and persecuted for political reasons. . . . Discrimination is once more operating in Hungary."