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DISCRIMINATION, OPPORTUNITY, AND MIDDLE-CLASS SUCCESS IN EARLY COMMUNIST HUNGARY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2005

JAMES MARK
JAMES MARK
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Abstract

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This article explores the middle-class response to life under the early Communist state in Hungary. It is based on an oral history of the Budapest bourgeoisie, and challenges some of the dominant indigenous representations of the central European middle class as persecuted victims who were forced into ‘internal exile’ by the Stalinist state. Despite being officially discriminated against as ‘former exploiters’, large numbers achieved educational and professional success. Their skills were increasingly needed in the rapid modernization of the 1950s, and the state provided them with semi-official opportunities to remake themselves into acceptable Communist citizens. Middle-class testimony revealed how individuals constructed politically appropriate public personas to ensure their own upward mobility; they hid aspects of their pasts, created ‘class conscious’ autobiographies, and learnt how to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty. The ways in which individuals dealt with integrating into a system which officially sought to exclude them and which many disliked ideologically is then examined. In order to ‘cope with success’, respondents in this project invented new stories about themselves to justify the compromises they had made to ensure their achievements. These narratives are analysed as evidence of specifically Communist middle-class identities.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 499 - 521
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

I would like to thank all the interviewees who were prepared to talk to me about their experiences of Communism. I am grateful for postgraduate funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, postdoctoral funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and support from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, all of which enabled me to write this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous Historical Journal readers, Robert Evans, Richard Crampton, Kate Fisher, and the members of the University of Plymouth Humanities Seminar for commenting on earlier versions of this piece.