Spirit of Passive Resistance

Through Budapest recently circulated a clandestine leaflet: "Further armed action in the face of the overwhelming strength of the Soviet army is both impossible and pointless. We Magyars must now go to the road of Gandhi." Last week there were no anonymous Gandhian millions squatting in the path of the ten Red army divisions still in Hungary. The passive resistance of the defeated Magyar nation was all in the heart and head.

In the Csepel Island industrial works, famed center of revolt, grimy threadbare workers were responding to the reiterated Communist propaganda that they were agents of the Horthy counterrevolution by addressing each other ironically as Baron, Count and Lord Bishop. It was said that those workers who had remained loyal to the People's Democracy--all six of them--had formed the Kadar government. There were grim jokes about children not getting their milk unless they surrendered their arms.

Dividing to Conquer. The slogan of the Kadar regime is "Order, Peace and Collaboration," but its strategy has been to divide the country by cracking down hard on industrial workers and intellectuals and building up the peasantry, who gave the Russians relatively the least trouble last October. Rakosi had been tough on the peasants ("Every Kulak is guilty of something"), but Kadar has redistributed the national income in favor of the peasants, even made the hated farm collectivization program voluntary. For the first time nylon stockings and suede shoes are within reach of peasant girls and boys who, without being enthusiastic about Kadar, say they are now "almost as well off as they were under the rule of the Esterhazys." Among white-collar workers there is widespread unemployment. Piecework, introduced into the factories, is being used as a method of selective coercion to break what is left of the Workers' Councils.

Kadar has succeeded in suppressing all active resistance by ruthless use of the secret police, reconstituted under the command of Colonel Laszlo Matyas, strengthened by Hungarian army officers, but still basically made up of the old semi-moronic AVH professionals. The sadists of 60 Stalin Ut (old AVH headquarters) are busier than ever, helped out at a Buda jail by the Russian MVD, which has its own interrogation procedure for VIPs. Scores of Freedom Fighters, including youths and girls, have been brought before summary courts and sentenced to hanging--slow strangulation, old Magyar style.

Child Villages. Damage from Russia's ruthless suppression of the revolt is estimated at $500 million. Russia has offered Kadar a $50 million stopgap loan (in convertible currencies) and promised a new $200 million loan for food grains, oil and raw materials. The Petofi Club, where the revolution sparked, has been replaced by the Tancsics Club, whose meager membership is made up of old Stalinist hangers-on.

Last week, in an effort to get the Hungarian Communist Party on its feet again, Puppet Kadar announced a new 14-man central committee and a reshuffle in the party secretariat. To be his first deputy president: Ferenc Munnich, 71-year-old Communist veteran of the Bela Kun regime, the Spanish civil war and long residence in Moscow, who as Minister of the

Interior was Kadar's chief policeman during the suppression of the revolt.

But police action cannot change a people's heart. A hint of Kadar's despair at overcoming the Gandhi-like spirit of resistance in Hungary was given in Nep Szabadsag recently. Children, said the party newspaper, should be separated from their parents and brought up in "child villages," where they could be taught "socialist patriotism and discipline." This was the Communist way of saying that it was a struggle that could go on for generations.

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