Part One
Simon Bourgin came to Hungary immediately after the Second World War for Time magazine. Based in Vienna, he visited Hungary frequently over the next ten years, cultivating many friends in Budapest. He briefed Radio Free Europe in Munich on what he had seen and heard; Time's publisher, C. D. Jackson, was also Chairman of the Committee for a Free Europe, RFE's parent organization.
The reports that follow are excerpted from edited transcripts of talks Bourgin gave in Munich after three visits to Hungary just before the Revolution. Simon Bourgin followed events in Budapest closely and was respected among his Western colleagues for his knowledge of Hungarian affairs.
Time magazine ignored Simon Bourgin's reports, despite his attempts to make his editors aware of the troubled situation in Hungary. He quit Vienna a few weeks before the Revolution, to take over Newsweek's Los Angeles Bureau. He is currently Consultant on Eastern Europe for the Aspen Institute, Washington.
May 22, 1956
I presume to have a very good knowledge of Budapest. I was there frequently just after the war. I arrived there first in September 1945 and made seven or eight visits there until the end of 1949. I was there for the last extended visit in the summer and autumn of 1948 and then was not able to get a visa until just a couple of weeks ago. I spent sixteen days in Budapest. I was prepared for some great changes and for some great shocks but I should say that the changes and shocks were much greater than I was prepared for. [...]
Budapest is a town that is almost completely cut off in this sense. This whole world that the motor car represents they just don't know anymore because they don't see Western movies. I met people after I had been there a week who said, "So you're the man who has that big car! We've been watching it all over town now for ten days." This is not very important except that it suggests how much the town is cut off. During the time I was there, there were perhaps three or four foreign cars that were in town. I visited Yugoslavia frequently as well and I remember the sensation that a foreign car used to make when it came into Zagreb or Belgrade after the break with the Russians in 1948. The newspaper men used to call those towns one-car towns because it created such a sensation when a new car came to town. Budapest is that kind of town now. Also in other ways Budapest today suggests the kind of Belgrade and Zagreb that we used to know just after the break; not Belgrade and Zagreb today, mind you, but before. The deterioration of public life is so great that, to people who used to know the city, it simply can't be realized. Everything is, if not quite dirty, at least soiled. There are no spotless, white tablecloths, the trams are dreadfully rundown, even the buses which used to be the pride of the city in '48 and '49, all looking so new and sparkling, are now in a dreadful state of disrepair. People look soiled. Their clothes are not quite clean. The hotels, with the exception of the two or three that are reserved for foreigners, are also unclean. People appear to have made a desperate effort to keep their clothes tidy but they are beginning to let down even on that. Budapest is not as dirty as I observed that Prague was when I was there last summer but it is still a town where the depreciation in public standards of all kinds was [striking].
The predominant colour of Budapest is grey and the greyness of it is difficult to over-emphasize. [...]
It is very difficult to describe what has happened to the main shopping streets. Perhaps you can summarize it by saying that where there used to be twenty shops along the block of one street there are now mostly twenty empty shop windows of various kinds with paper advertisements in them representing some kind of state activity and then on one corner there will be a big bustling state shop that sells either conserves, either groceries, or sells delicatessen goods. More than one Hungarian warned me not to be taken in by the shops. He said that they look good, there are hundreds of people patronizing them, but I should remember that where twenty or forty shops used to be there was now one and it doesn't represent anything like an increase in merchandizing. The big impression that these shops made upon me was the uniformity of goods displayed in them. There is one kind of meat, more or less one kind of pastry. [...] There are two kinds of shops that show an unexpected brilliance: one are the antique shops which sell for next to nothing most of the goods that the middle and poverty classes have given up because they can't afford them any more, and the other are the bookshops which are probably the best in Europe for the simple reason that this was a highly literate city and all these people who had great libraries have now surrendered them to the second-hand shops, and the cultivated Americans and Britishers at their embassies have been having a field day, those who love books, going around bookshops picking up things that simply can't be obtained in any other city in the world.
[...]
[...] Perhaps one of the most remarkable changes is the disappearance of the kind of cultivated, bourgeois, intelligent family faces that used to be characteristic of this city, which was a great middle class city. They scarcely exist any more. As a matter of fact, during the first five or six days after I was there I was convinced that it didn't exist at all and I found it very hard to get used to. On the Váci utca there was occasionally a face with intelligence, a good looking girl, a well-dressed man, something of interest - when you saw their face. Elsewhere in town, almost none at all. [...]
[...]
I have many Hungarian friends in Budapest. I got most of my information from them rather than the people at the Legations. And they all complain, even the ones who are relatively successful, about not being able to leave the country. Even some of the Party people whom you get into friendly conversations with will say, in an unguarded moment, how they would like to get out somewhere. They will ask you how it is in Vienna and how it is in Munich and so on. The one thing that even the people who are well off resent is the fact that they can't get out of the frontier. And when I, on the day that we were leaving town, met several people I'd had contact with, I told them, in the due course of events, that I was going, they said, "when?", and I said, "now," and they looked at me so pathetically and said "now?" "right now?, you mean you are just going to go right out of Hungary?" and I said, "yes." But you see for people who have been there and can't leave, it's impossible to imagine leaving. And the other things they resent, and now I'm getting back to the cost of living again, and to living problems, is this seething on incomes which is standard, universal and unchangeable and almost everywhere in Hungary.
Everybody has got his racket and the story is told, and I'm told that it comes out of other occasions like it, that a certain worker was leaving work at his factory every night and taking out a wheelbarrow full of sand. And the guard who was watching for things being stolen watched this every night for about two weeks and finally took the guy aside and said, "Look pal, I know that something is going on here but surely you aren't stupid enough to be taking all that sand out", and the worker said to him, "Don't be silly, I'm stealing wheelbarrows." And the other story is about a Hungarian and an American who met and the Hungarian asked the American how much money he made. The American said $500 a month and the Hungarian asked how much of it was used on food and the American said $150. The Hungarian asked what the rest went for and the American said that about those things one doesn't ask. The American asked the Hungarian how much money he made and the Hungarian said 1,200 forints. The American asked how he possibly got by, what was done with the rest of the income and the Hungarian said about those things one doesn't ask. And that tells the story you see. [...]
I would like to point out that the first impression is false. After we had been there for about a week we were convinced that everything had been levelled down, ironed down, pressed down; that the colour was unrelievedly and unchangeably gray and that the whole spirit of the city had been flattened out. That isn't so. The first impression is erroneous and after you're around long enough to gain perspective and depth it becomes apparent that there is still enormous vitality in the people that live in Budapest. If you take the trouble to go around remote parts of the city at night, somehow life hasn't changed so much. It changed much more in the so-called Western part of Budapest where the great restaurants, hotels, cafes, used to be than it has in the rest of the city. This is so much so that we were convinced after a couple of weeks there, and this requires much more explaining than I have time to go into, but the kind of hold that communism has on this country, at least in so far as is exhibited in the capital, is more superficial than not. One Hungarian put it to me this way. "Just give us one year under the kind of conditions that the Austrians have and you'd see what we'd do, we'd make the Austrians look silly." People don't talk that much about change, as a matter of fact they don't talk very much about anything of the kind of thing that you and I would expect them to talk about. They are rather, well, I'll get into it another way. I'll lead into it through some notes that I have here about Rákosi. Because it's all part of the piece. Rákosi of course is the key to change in Hungary and everyone calculates that if he goes there may be some change and if he stays there will be none at all. [...]
[...] I talked with an extremely well-[informed] Hungarian who used to be a professional in politics, he was probably the most objective man that I talked to there, American, Hungarian or otherwise, despite the fact that he has been a factory worker for the last five years. He was very straight, very clear and very outspoken in the things that he told me. He wanted it emphasized very strongly that Hungarians were bored with almost all forms of public affairs. They were completely and utterly bored with propaganda of any kind. They were even bored to the extent where the whole impact of the changes in the satellites and the de-Stalinization changes in Russia and the great new contacts that Russia has had with the West. They are not talked about by workers at the bench, by workers at lunch hours, by workers when they return home. Now, the reason for this, and [he] wanted me to be very sure to absorb this, that these are not things that affect [them]. The only two things that my friend felt that Hungarians want to hear about is: is whatever they are going to hear going to change the living standard and is it going to get rid of the Russians, who are the key to the Russian system that they have to work under. [...] The Party press is universally unread and ignored except for the sports news. The leaders in Szabad Nép and the other cheap papers are read apparently almost only by the people who write them and the people who monitor them. Almost nobody even makes a pretence of going through this material and one person emphasized to me that it was a mistake to debate these things in specifics simply because that goes into a vacuum, people have no interest or contact with this kind of thing in their daily life. He felt that the biggest form of public opinion there was or, let's say that it's formed almost exclusively by foreign radio. Now I talked to many informants about foreign radio, they have different feelings about it. This particular man whom I told you about felt that RFE was more popular than the Voice, but he felt that its biggest fault was that it's "unreal." He felt that the general tone of unreality about RFE was so great that even genuine friends of Western radio talked about it openly and regretted it. Now, he gave me some specifics which I will repeat and please understand that I'm not debating them or urging them or stating them, I'm passing them on because I think they're important for you to have in the form in which he gave them. [...]
With regard to RFE: don't excite the Hungarians when it won't serve any practical purpose. This has been done too often. Don't provoke the Hungarians to sabotage or even openly to pasive resistance. He felt that the Hungarians, by their own spirit, will enter into passive resistance without being told. As a matter of fact they would be more probable to do it without being told because if they are urged to do it they feel that they are being patronized. The people who are telling them to do this are in a perfectly safe position and they resent it.
[...]
[...] He pointed out that there were a million and a half Hungarians who had been in Russian prisons or in Russia for Army service and they knew Russia perfectly well. They knew what bad conditions there were without being told, they also knew how effective and how powerful the Russians were at any time or place that they decided to be and they were not impressed by suggestions on the Western Radio, they were mostly unimpressed, that the Russians are weak. Don't, he said, tell them that the Russians can be defeated by a short war or by a couple of H-bombs. He did not mean "tell", he meant to suggest because he felt that this was the same kind of mistake. This is not being done. The presentations we are getting now are too abstract, too academic and too much in the department of fuller explanation. He listed here a few things that people want. That they aren't getting. First of all, of course, and everyone agrees about this, they want news. He felt that RFE news was directed and whether it is or not isn't important so long as listeners such as he think that it is. He felt that it ought to be more objective. BBC was still way ahead in the department of presenting objective news and it still has the highest credence of any foreign radio. [...]
[...]
July 5, 1956
Intellectual Revolt in Hungary and Petőfi Circle Discussion
I was in Budapest for seventeen days. The last time I was there the diplomatic people were debating openly whether Rákosi would last; the odds were that he would remain. This visit I found that the political situation had changed considerably. Hungarians were debating openly about Rákosi, and it wasn't even so much of a debate. They were all saying that Rákosi had to go, that this was the minimum of what the people would stand for; and this was the sort of talk that you heard from mechanics in garages and middle-class people and hotel porters - anybody whom you could manage to take aside and to talk to for a bit. This doesn't at all mean that Rákosi is going. The best guess in Budapest is that unless Tito, in his last visit to Moscow, has absolutely insisted that Rákosi has to go, he will remain.[...]
[...]
The events that started in Moscow with the de-Stalinization program have more than ever begun to have some kind of influence in Hungary now, and they are travelling at a pace where the results cannot be predicted. Of course, they found their climax in the meeting at the Petőfi Club the night of June 27th. The accounts that I have read in the Western press, in the German and English press, seem to be rather to distort the actual events and their meaning. [...]
The Petőfi meeting was staged, of course, by the regime. It was one of a series of meetings that have been held to rebroaden the base of the Communist Party support. I learned upon arriving here, talking with some of your colleagues, that the rest of these meetings have been almost entirely unreported here. Now, the last meeting that preceded this had gotten some attention in the press; and some of the reports tied it in with the Petőfi meeting, but it was separate. That was the event in the Petőfi Club on June 19th, at which the people assembled there were addressed by Mrs Rajk.
[...] She made a very bitter speech. She remarked that she did not want to be made a hero over what had happened to her husband. She only wanted that the people who had murdered him should be pushed out of office. She said that the prisons in communist Hungary were a disgrace to a people's democratic country, that prison conditions under the Horthy regime were much better. During the time that she was in jail herself, she was permitted neither visitors nor packages nor mail. She was completely isolated for some years from her newly-born child, and she thought that these conditions were a disgrace and ought to be changed. When she finished her talk, she was given a standing ovation by the audience, which applauded her roundly. There were about 2,000 people in the audience, about one third of them army officers.
She was followed by a young lady who requested permission to speak, a faculty assistant in the University of Budapest in the Philosophy Faculty. This also was an impromptu speech. The young lady remarked that the people in the regime had lost touch with the rank-and-file of the Party and with the common people altogether. They bought their clothes and their food out of special commissaries in Budapest, they lived in five-room villas in Buda, they had forgotten that most people were crowded one family to a room and that a lot of people in Budapest did not have enough to eat, that there absolutely had to be a change in Party leadership. The person who gave me the account of the young lady's speech told me that she had not been arrested yet.
That was the setting for the Petőfi Club meeting. The word about Mrs Rajk speaking her mind spread around the town. It was the strongest attack that had been made on the regime by anyone of prominence to date, and everybody in Budapest talked about it. And, of course, when another meeting was set for the Petőfi Club it was pretty well acknowledged that a lot of people were going to crowd in and blow their tops, if they could possibly get an opportunity to do so. That was why, when the next Petőfi Club meeting assembled on June 27th, there had been a crowd waiting since 4.30 in the afternoon.
Just a word about the Petőfi Club. It is made up of a group of intellectuals who are not particularly well known. The club itself is obviously a regime device to hold such "free expression" meetings. It has had no standing whatsoever in the past. It is formally attached to the DISZ, which is the workers' youth federation, but this seems to be only a kind of holding-company device. In fact, the Petőfi Club is whatever the people on the top, the people who pull the strings, decide that it shall be on any night of the week. This particular meeting had been called for the purpose of rehabilitating several hundred so-called bourgeois newspapermen who had lost their jobs as the result of various Stalinist decrees during the last years and whom it was desired to draw back into the fold.
The meeting was scheduled to be addressed by Márton Horváth, the editor of Szabad Nép; and two other communist newspapermen were going to act as chairmen. The Petőfi Club has been meeting in a small theatre on the Váci utca, which has about 800 seats. The meeting was scheduled to get underway at seven o'clock. In fact, the house was full at 4:30; and the crowd continued to arrive in such numbers that the ushers, who had been demanding tickets (all entries were on the basis of invitation), finally shrugged their shoulders and let anybody come in who wanted to. Soon people began to sit in the aisles, anywhere that there was space. The hallway was crowded to such an extent that Horváth himself, who arrived late, was almost unable to get into the building.
It was finally decided to get the meeting underway a bit early, at about 6:30. Horváth made a short, nervous, introductory speech. He said that this meeting was called for the purpose of self-criticism, which he was going to indulge in, and criticism by anyone else who wanted to make it, so that the Party could be examined by writers and newspapermen in the light of 20th Congress decisions. The meeting went on after that without interruption until 3:30 in the morning. It was one of the hottest days of the year, of course the air inside was absolutely humid, and by universal consent it was agreed that there would be no smoking. There was also no eating or drinking. Nobody left the room for nine hours until the meeting broke up.
The meeting was quite orderly at first. People began to make speeches and were applauded by the audience. Later on things got out of control, but during those nine hours Hungarians, for what may well be the first time since the beginning of communism, really were able to say what they pleased. And hearing others say it, they took courage so that in the end almost everybody had his say. I found that almost none of the newspaper accounts commented in detail upon exactly what some of the people in the audience who got up and made speeches said. Now, the opening speech was made by Tibor Déry, who is a well-known novelist. He is a member of the Party and was an illegal communist during the Horthy days. Although he is a member of the Party, he has not always gotten along with it; and as recently as a year ago, a novel that he had published was condemned by the Party because it presented a too-sympathetic portrait of a bourgeois professor. Déry got up and began his speech by commenting that a lot had been heard about the effective censorship of literature in the most general way and that he thought it was about time that "we got down to specifics. Specifically, Márton Horváth here, the editor of Szabad Nép. He doesn't stand for himself at all, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether he even stands for the Party. On one day he's extreme right and other days extreme left, and one never knows where he stands."| Then he moved on to the case of József Révai, the former Minister of Culture. Révai, he said, is like a Jewish talmudist; he knows what he says isn't the truth, but he goes ahead saying it anyhow. And as for József Darvas, the Minister of Culture, "He's afraid of himself. That's all there is to be said about him." And then he asked the rhetorical question, "What is the source of all our troubles?" And his answer was, "There is no freedom. I hope there shall be no more police terror. I am optimistic and I hope that we shall be able to get rid of our present leaders. Let us bear in mind that we are allowed to discuss these things only with permission from above. They believe that it's a good idea to let some steam off the over-heated boiler. We want deeds and we want the opportunity to make speeches. I do not entrust the future of literature to Márton Horváth. He is responsible for the distortion of literature in art." Then Déry remarked to the effect that "we've been fighting and struggling for so many things, but we've forgotten the chief thing, that is, humanism."
The next speech was by Tibor Méray, the novelist who became a sort of pseudo-expert on germ warfare at the time of the Korean war. He reported the Korean war from Korea for the Hungarian press, and he provided a lot of testimony with regard to how the Americans were conducting bacteriological warfare in the Far East. He is a man of not very much stature, but considerable reputation; and he was quoted as saying, "We need a purifying stream from top to bottom and from bottom to top. This stream must not be rationed into a gentle breeze." Then he attacked Mihályfi, the Deputy Minister of Culture, and said, "How is it that he's made a professor of journalism at the University? He's already got about ten jobs."
Alexander Fekete, another journalist who had come in on the Moscow plane a few hours before, addressed the meeting, saying that he had spoken just a few hours before leaving Moscow with the highest Yugoslav and Russian officials and members of the Party and that they had told him with regard to the cultural revolution in Budapest, that "If you want it, you journalists have got to build it yourselves."
Then a young physicist named Jánossy spoke. He used to be at Trinity College in Dublin, doing research on atomic physics. He returned to Budapest about 1949 to visit his mother and was kept there. He is now one of the regime's best physicists. He said, "The fact is, it's impossible to get information and mediocre journalists are bringing about nation-wide frauds. The Togliatti speech was published only partly in Budapest and parts of it were left out. Only from the Western radio stations could we get the full text of Khrushchev's speech. Western broadcasts are also being jammed. Western newspapers must be allowed to reach this country. Classes must be rehabilitated. The closed shops (meaning the AVH prisons) must be rehabilitated. This belongs to democracy."
György Nemes remarked that cadre policy is bad and that bourgeois journalists were better educated than ours are now. People must not be judged by their background. Then Nemes listed the names of about fifty journalists who had been restricted or put in prison, and he closed by remarking that out of fifty-two journalists who worked for Szabad Nép in 1951 only six still had their jobs there.
Probably the most direct attack on Rákosi was made by Péter Kuczka, who, I was told, is a gifted young poet. Kuczka said, "A good journalist is not characterized by a car, a chauffeur and a special shop. He must write the truth. In our country, however, the truth must not contradict the Party line. In 1949 Rákosi said that Rajk was a Titoist, and in 1955 he said Rajk was a palace provocateur. This year he calls Rajk a comrade. The masses have lost confidence, not in the Party, but in its leaders. It should rather be a tragedy of one or two men than a whole nation. Truth can be spread where there is freedom. We demand a free press which is also guaranteed us by the Constitution. What kind of press is it that attacks Imre Nagy in Szabad Nép and then doesn't give him space to defend himself in the same paper? There must also be rehabilitation of the press. How ridiculous was Rákosi's mocking remark on the British socialists, referring to the fact that our social democratic prisoners had been released two weeks before it appeared in our press. How could they have known about it if our press kept silent? It was the nationalization of the press that brought about the decline and present low level of the Hungarian press. We want the publication of the full text of the Khrushchev speech."
These speeches proceeded one after another through the night, and when people heard them they took heart themselves; and the meeting got more and more disorderly. Pretty soon the people on the stage who were talking began to be talked back to by the audience. Trying to make sense out of what took place became very difficult. I managed to collect some exchanges that did take place, and they're rather remarkable. Horváth got up to defend the regime and was shouted down three times. He remarked in reply, "Don't insult the Party." Someone got up and shouted, "We're the Party." Another time someone said, "Let's take Rajk's corpse out of the ditch and give him a funeral." And then somebody remarked, "How come we call this the Sándor Petőfi Club? Petőfi fought for freedom of the press." And then somebody jumped up and said, "Which we don't have." Then Horváth said, "That's right." And someone else said, "You're telling us that? You're the editor of Szabad Nép." And he shrugged his shoulders.So you see, the atmosphere inside was very infectious. Probably the greatest point of sedition from the government's point of view was when a bunch of people in the audience got up in applauding some speech and said, "Down with the regime! Long live Imre Nagy!"
That's as far as they went. Of course, word had already gotten around Budapest that night; two hours after the meeting started the Váci utca was blocked with crowds of people, several thousand in the street. Upon someone's order, loudspeakers were strung up so that the people in the street heard all of this commotion as well. The next day there was an atmosphere in Budapest that had not been felt there for a long time. The events of the night before had in a way electrified the town, and people were talking of nothing else. A lot of people said this was the second Hungarian revolution, that this was the way things were going to be from now on. [...]
The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVII No. 142 Summer 1996
Simon Bourgin, "The Well of Discontent: A Senior American Correspondent's Briefings on Budapest, 1956"
Part Two
[...]
The changes that I observed in the very brief period between my two visits to Hungary are so numerous that they ought to be listed and discussed separately.
First of all, waiters in restaurants and cafés don't listen to what you say any more. This is very important because Hungarians have begun to talk openly in public places about politics and about the regime, something which they never did before. The waiters don't listen because they no longer have instructions to do so. The police are no longer processing this kind of information - no one is.
Secondly, the ÁVO1, according to at least one party member, is no longer following through on personal denunciations. They are, according to reports, restricting themselves chiefly to frontier security.
Thirdly, more people are getting passports than ever before. In a good many cases both husband and wife are permitted to leave at the same time even though they have no children. This is something that just never happened before. Some entertainers are being permitted to go to Czechoslovakia, Romania, and even to Vienna. This also never happened before. A Hungarian I know, who has a daughter in America and whose daughter was not particularly popular with the regime, was told by a regime official that if he wanted to he could go out and visit his daughter. He felt a little bit the way a soldier would feel if an army sergeant came over and asked permission to make up his bunk. These things just never happened in Hungary and it testifies to the great change in the general atmosphere.
One Hungarian remarked to me about Rákosi's going, "Only the wording is different, Russia's servants are the same." But, he added, and this is change number four, "Atmosphere in Budapest has changed in the last weeks as the result of so many people getting out of imprisonment." A very common greeting in Budapest today is, "When did you get out of jail?" People told me that recently they had been at parties or at meetings at someone's home where almost everyone had just gotten out of jail and was comparing notes. Without exception everyone concerned was, of course, completely innocent. This included a couple who had gone abroad on state business and had been sentenced to seven years for espionage. Also included were a couple and their child who had been caught trying to cross the frontier. The child was only twelve but had spent part of his time in prison with them and then had been kept separately from them in a home for criminal juvenile delinquents. The frontier, incidentally, is regarded as being about 60 per cent de-mined and de-wired. A number of Hungarians who have tried to escape, have encountered the barbwire and come back and spread the word. This may have something to do with the fact that not so many people are trying to leave. With regard to these people who are getting out of jail, they are having trouble getting jobs. About the only work that they can get is as common labourers at about 600 forints a month. It requires about 2,000 forints to keep alive and furthermore they are not completely pardoned. They are out on probation and their cases will be reviewed at the end of six months. Some of these people, incidentally, have been sent enormous and staggering bills for their board and lodging while they were in jail. A good example concerns a person who was arrested for distributing news handouts from a western legation and who became sick in jail. He spent most of his time in a prison hospital and when he got out he was given a bill for something like 8,000 forints for all of his food and upkeep while he had been in jail. It seems a curious kind of thing but there have been a number of cases like this.
Change five. The deportees have been permitted to return to Budapest.2 This concerns between 12,000 and 20,000 people. Previously they were not specifically banned from returning to Budapest but were proscribed from visiting three Hungarian cities which, allegedly on the grounds of overcrowding, required a special permit for residence. These were Miskolc, Debrecen, and another city, Győr, I believe. This permit has been now eliminated and it means that between 10,000 and 20,000 Hungarians, many of them Jews, many of whom were living in the city illegally, or in the suburbs illegally, have been able to come back and look for an apartment and a job.
Change Six. Social Democrats who have emerged from internment or prison are being given jobs. There is an office set up for this. They are also being given apartments and sometimes they are being given bonuses to make up for their false imprisonment. These bonuses amount to between 4,000 and 6,000 forints.
Change Seven. The government has begun to hold press conferences. I believe that this was done, until now, only in Czechoslovakia. It was started there about four months ago but now the Prime Minister's office has begun to have press conferences. The first was just two weeks ago and the Foreign Office has been holding a weekly press conference since July 8. Questions have to be submitted in writing, of course, on the grounds that the person answering them can in that way prepare much better answers for correspondents. But even so, some questions get asked and some get answered and it is a kind of a forum.
Change Eight. There are thousands of foreigners in Budapest and in Hungary as compared with just a few dozen a few months ago. There are so many that the government couldn't keep track of them if it wanted to and it doesn't want to. There is almost no interest in any foreigner in Hungary, even in newspapermen. No attention whatever is paid to where we go or who we talk to. In this sense, it is a completely relaxed atmosphere.
Change Nine may not be so big but it is worth reporting. A man who runs a state enterprise told me that he had been instructed to hire people for their ability instead of whether or not they belonged to the Party or what kind of political friends they had. This is a minor revolution and he tells me that it is going on in a good many of the other state enterprises.
Change Ten concerns Hungarian journalists. All of them have been rehabilitated, that is, all of them who were put on the black list. This amounts to some 400 or 500. There are three newspapers coming up soon and one of them is said to be a Smallholders' Party newspaper. One will be a weekly boulevard sheet, an opinioned feuilleton which will be edited by Iván Boldizsár3. A few months ago Boldizsár swore to some friends of his that he had left journalistic life forever but Rákosi is gone now and Boldizsár will return to journalistic life. He is an interesting case because he was the Press Chief for Foreign Affairs prior to the communist takeover in Hungary and also for a brief period under communism. He is a very able man and I suspect that the fact that he couldn't stomach the way things were going resulted in his "retirement" during the past year.
[...]
(The End)
Notes
1 * ÁVO: State Security Orgazination, later State Security Authority; the infamous secret police of the era.
2 * In June 1950 around two thousand members of religious orders, both male and female, were expelled from Budapest, Székesfehérvár and the Yugoslav border area; a year later several thousand former "exploiters" mostly from Budapest had to leave their homes.
3 * Hétfői Hírlap, a weekly, was first published on October 8th 1956, and Iván Boldizsár was, indeed, the editor.
[...]
Notes by Csaba Békés
Simon Bourgin was Time magazine correspondent in Vienna after the war and frequently visited Hungary over a period of some ten years. In 1956 he briefed Radio Free Europe in Munich on his experience before leaving Europe to take over Newsweek's Los Angeles Bureau a few weeks before the Revolution. Part 1, including the briefings of May 22 and July 5, 1956, appeared in the Summer issue.
The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVII No. 143 Autumn 1996