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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 11. September 17, 1958

Hungary — Student's Demands

page 5

[unclear: Hungary]

Student's Demands

The R.I.C. report on student conditions in Hungary consists of 44 pages of tightly documented material. The original team set up to make the report—a Sudanese, an Indonesian and a Dane—applied for visas to visit Hungary, but had no success. In the end, most of the investigation was done in Austria, Switzerland and London, which means that the report must, of necessity, be unsatisfactory in many respects. It was adopted without opposition by the 7th International Student Congress at Nigeria last September.

The report reviews the history of student conditions in Hungary since World War II. Between 1945, when the Nazis were expelled, and 1948-49 when the cold war got going, there was a multiparty government for the first time in Hungarian history, and the situation is described as better than it had ever been—

"A period of intensive academic work in the universities. L Scholars dismissed by the conservative governments and the short-lived Nazi regime were re-appointed to their posts. A few brilliant communist ideologists such as George Lukacs were also appointed. The universities now gave special facilities for study to students of the working and peasant classes, and courses of instruction aimed at preparing them for university work were arranged. The universities themselves were taking steps to provide higher education for the worker and peasant students."

From 1948 on began a policy of encroachment on the universities by the state, now in the sole effective hands of the Communist Party. Statutes were enacted placing on the universities an obligation to "provide well-trained students faithful to our People's Republic with a thorough Marxist-Leninist knowledge", which in practice meant yes-men of the regime. "Marxism Leninism", National Defence, and Russian were made compulsory subjects.

The statutory requirement that the children of workers and peasants be given precedence in admission and advancement over students with other social backgrounds, while perhaps not reprehensible in itself in consideration of Hungary's agonizing social history, opened the way to political jobbery in the universities. The report cites examples of this which not only led to gross personal injustice but worked even against the interests of the state itself by producing a high proportion of graduates of mediocre calibre. It was accompanied by a system of police surveillance on the leisure activities of students for the purpose of checking on their political reliability. The report includes copies of some of the material on personal files compiled under this system.

Representative and independent student organizations were replaced entirely by the Student Section of the Party's junior auxiliary, "The Union of Working Youth", which was committed by its constitution to inculcate "unshakeable faith in the Soviet Union".

Results were so bad that even the Minister of Education was stating publicly by September, 1956, (after "de-Stalinization" had begun) that "There must be more independence for the universities. . . . The present excessively restrictive system must definitely be relaxed."

But by this time, the remedy was out of the authorities' hands. Some relaxation had led to groups within the official organizations, such as the Petefi Club (a forum sponsored by the Union of Working Youth as a place where intellectuals could let off steam), and the Writers' Union, formulating demands for reform. It was around these demands that the demonstrations of 23 October, 1956, were organized, and it was police action against the demonstrators that provoked the uprising of the following weeks which unseated the Government and was put down in the end only by Soviet military force.

Repression

With the arrest and removal of Nagy and the installation of the Radar Government, repression began against student and intellectual groups whose demands had pre-cipitated the crisis. Up till March, 1957, the government was forced, by pressure of public opinion, to continue amendments to the law in a liberalizing direction which had begun about a month before the crisis came to a head. Compulsory Russian at university, and exams in the general schools, had been abolished in October in the spate of eleventh-hour reforms, aimed at forestalling the inevitable. Nagy's Minister of Education, the respected Lukacs, was committed to sweeping improvements, and even under Kadar some of these were proceeded with in the early months. But it was not long before it became clear that it was the Government's intention to slow down the pace of these changes as soon as it was safe to do so, and then to reverse the process completely.

By January, it was announced that compulsory "Marxism-Leninism" was restored in the medical schools, and that the general power of prescribing courses of study had been removed from the universities and resumed by the State.

"It is clear," says the report, "that during this period a real measure of academic freedom was fought for by the university community and promised by the authorities. The kind of demands made, and the strength with which they were made, indicate clearly the degree of repression that existed, and the fierceness of the opposition secretly harboured by the entire university community."

But promises of freedom and autonomy were doomed to remain unfulfilled.

Arrests of students and university teachers who had participated in the uprising commenced almost as soon as Kadar took power, and the demands that these people should be released. Assurances given by the authorities in January that students who had been arrested had been freed again, were followed by the arrest en bloc of the entire Revolutionary Students Committee of Budapest and many others who had been active in the groups which had formulated the October demands. The report also accepts certain evidence that many Hungarians, including students, were deported to the U.S.S.R. during November. This evidence was explained by the Hungarian authorities in December as "isolated cases in the first days of chaos after 4 November", but even this admission was later denied.

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."