Hungarian Socialism: The Deceptive Hybrid
Hungarian Socialism: The Deceptive Hybrid

Summary/Abstract: Experience has shown that the dictatorship of the proletariat is "not such a bad dictatorship after all. One can live under it, create freely, and gain honor," observed Janos Kadar to a gathering of notables at the conclusion of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party's 1975 congress. Nine years later, he defended his economic reforms before an audience of workers with the argument that "if we do not want to preserve our system by force and the use of arms-which we do not wish to do-­then we must prove by other means that our social system is superior." The Politburo's chief economic spokesman, Ferenc Havasi, told the party's thirteenth congress in March 1985 that the "well-intentioned revolutionary illusions" underlying socialism needed revising, since real existing socialism still offered no guarantee of steady and balanced economic development and was still infected with nationalism. [...]

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