The Politics of Legitimacy and Hungary’s Postwar Transition

The years between Hungary’s occupation by the Red Army that concluded its traumatic involvement in the Second World War and the construction of socialist dictatorship in the country at the end of the 1940s constitute a moment of transition, a moment that is central to understanding the subsequent development of the country. For this reason the interpretation of this moment of transition has been mired in controversy. For much of the Cold War, Western historiography characterised this moment as one defined by the ruthless drive of the Hungarian Communist Party and the country’s Soviet occupiers to eliminate political opponents and thus pave the way for dictatorship.1 Others argued that the moment of postwar transition should be separated from the dictatorship that followed it and should instead be seen as a distinct sub-period, in Charles Gati’s words a ‘democratic interlude’ before the onset of Stalinism.2 The subsequent collapse of Hungary’s socialist dictatorship has not led to any kind of scholarly consensus about the meaning of the postwar transition. The polarised nature of the country’s post-socialist politics have resulted in historians attempting to appropriate aspects of the immediate postwar years to contribute to essentially political debates about Hungary’s present. Some have seen the postwar transition as being ‘an attempt to introduce a state based on the rule of law and its failure’, thus arguing that the transitions in the middle and at the end of the twentieth century were directly comparable.3 For historians associated with the conservative right, however, postwar anti-fascist purges formed no more than a cynical attempt by the country’s Soviet occupiers and their domestic clients to lay the foundations of a ‘totalitarian’ regime.4