"While We Wait"

For Hungarian writers and artists, whose demands for freedom inspired the 1956 revolution, word of Russia's restalinization of culture at first caused a bad case of jitters. Yet last week, in striking contrast to the clampdown in Moscow, Budapest seemed almost relaxed. Said Cultural Commissar Istvan Szirmai: "The party will be tolerant. All artistic and literary creations which are not anti-Communist will be allowed."

Hungarian intellectuals earned their meager allowance the hard way. Communist Boss Janos Kadar, after betraying his country to the Kremlin during the uprising, for four years tried to whip the country into submission by brutal use of police terror. But Kadar eventually learned that he could not force the sullen Hungarians to cooperate. With his civil service in tatters and economy a shambles, he gradually relaxed controls, even began naming non-Communist experts to key industrial jobs. "He who is not against us is with us," said Kadar in late 1961. Such relative leniency in a Communist state at last earned Kadar a measure of grudging acceptance from the population; fortnight ago he took his biggest step yet by releasing the last group of revolutionary leaders who were still in jail (although up to several hundred rank-and-file Freedom Fighters are still believed to be behind bars), and by setting the stage for the release of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty from his refuge in Budapest's U.S. legation (TIME, APRIL 12).

Happy enough to be outside the cells, Hungarian intellectuals, traditionally an enthusiastically undisciplined bunch, avoided provoking fresh trouble; for one thing, they know that Soviet tanks are always ready to rumble into the city. As Laszlo Nemeth, a respected non-Communist author, puts it: "We Hungarians live today in a new apartment block which many people find ugly. It became clear in 1956 that the block cannot be demolished. While we wait behind the fac,ade for its transformation into something better, let us at least make our own flats as habitable as we can."

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