New Perspectives on Hungarian Socialism, 16 Oct 2000

This period was dominated by the personality of Janos Kadar, secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1956 until 1988. Kadar began his period in power by aiding the Soviet surpression of the Revolution of 1956. By the mid-1960s, however, a reformist socialism emerged in Hungary under his rule. Consisting of social settlement between regime and people based on socialist consumerism, an expanded welfare net and economic reform it formed the backdrop against which many Hungarians grew up. During the 1990s when Hungarian society wasracked with recession, economic transformation and increased social tension ordinary Hungarians increasingly came to see the period of Kadar's rule as a golden age of greater security - hence the "Unfinished Socialism" of the title, drawing the readers attention not only to the life, but also the afterlife of the Kadar era.

The book is far from a conventional history book. Instead of presenting one "true" view of the Kadar era it presents a series of histories. These are explained through the myriad of images contained in the book which present the official parades of the socialist era alongside images of urban decay and poverty. By presenting these multiple histories of the period the book draws upon culture, memory and history. The relevance of such an approach to the Hungarian audience for whom the book was originally designed is self-evident. Its role and value to the western reader is a little different. Western readers too have perceptions of Eastern Europe's socialist decades shaped by theories of totalitarianism, the rhetoric of the cold war and the sight of revolution depicted visually. This book gives readers the opporutnity to think about state socialism in new ways - as a system in which ordinary people lived, worked and coped. It shows the alongside a lack of democracy and a police state socialism for many represented the promise of social advancement and membership of an Eastern European variant of consumer society. By self-conciously examining the intersections between history and memory, Andras Gero and Ivan Peto (its authors) give western readers the opportunity to develop a degree of empathy with Eastern European concerns. This can only be welcome.

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