Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

THE NATIONALIST MYTHS LIVE ON

During the Stalinist l950s, Slovak historians resolved their dilemma of how to interpret the Hungarian question" by keeping silent about it. The silence had lasted essentially until 1965. In that year, with "liberalization" picking up momentum in Czechoslovakia, Juraj Zyara published a study on the postwar solution" of the Hungarian question. Zvara tried to work out a compromise between the nationalist view, so dear to the heart of Slovak historiography, and the Marxist ideology reigning officially supreme in a Communist society. He admitted that some anti-Marxist "mistakes" had been committed in the course of postwar "solution" of the Hungarian question, but he also excused and justified them by so-called Slovak "rightful self-defense nationalism."

Actually, by different means, Zvara only continued the well-established tradition of double morality and double standards in Slovak thinking on the Hungarian question. However, even the little self-criticism implied in Zvara's Marxist reinterpretation the admission of some Slovak "mistakes" was too much for the nationalist myth-makers. Disguising themselves as Marxists who knew more about Marxism than Zvara, they corrected what they thought were Zvara's mistakes.

In the February 1967 issue of Historicky Èasopis, representative periodical of Slovak historiography, Zvara came under sharp Marxist attack by Maria Lavová."² She denounced Zvara's study as a "pamphlet," smacking of political opportunism. She blamed Zvara for being insufficiently informed about the history of the "solution" of the Hungarian question. Above all, in Lavová's caustic criticism, Zvara was not familiar enough with the Marxist dialectical theory of "rightful self-defense nationalism." For, as Lavová summed up her own Marxist dialectical thesis on this matter: ". . . if one may speak of nationalism on the Slovak side, it was a defensive nationalism which was but a reaction to extreme Hungarian chauvinism."³

To justify Slovak "defensive nationalism" as a reaction to "Hungarian chauvinism," Lavová relied on facts which were of very dubious origin indeed, based on hearsay, rumors, or simply inventions of anti-Hungarian propaganda of the l940s. Prominent among them were the "terrible sufferings" of the Slovak people under recent Hungarian rule; in particular the expulsion of Slovaks, following Hungarian re-possession of South Slovakia in 1938, ranging from "tens of thousands" to "hundreds of thousands." We have dealt with these propaganda items in our earlier chapters, while discussing the Slovak postwar efforts to brand the Hungarians as a "Fascist nation."

In addition to her effort to whitewash Slovak nationalism, as a "defensive reaction" to Hungarian chauvinism, Lavová also eagerly defended the record of the Slovak Communist party. She attacked Zvara for not identifying properly the "bourgeois nationalists" who had been bearers of "alien ideology" in the Party at the time of the postwar "solution" of the Hungarian question.⁴ She also claimed that the Party, since then, has condemned these bourgeois bearers of "alien" nationalist ideology. Lavová made several vague hints at a link existing between the condemnation by the Party of Slovak "bourgeois nationalism" and postwar Czechoslovak policy of discrimination against the Hungarian minority. In order to set the record straight on that score, the following facts should be borne in mind.

At the Ninth Congress of the Slovak Communist Party in 1951, which dealt with bourgeois nationalism, the two principal speakers on this issue, Stefan Bast'ovansky and Karol Bacílek, had made no condemning references whatsoever to the policy of discrimination against the Hungarian minority.⁵ And, in 1950, at the trials of leading Slovak Communists accused of 'bourgeois nationalism," the charges connected with the "Hungarian question" emphasized explicitly only State relations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary rather than discriminations against the Hungarian minority. Let me quote a pertinent passage from the state Prosecutor's speech: ". . . the accused strived for the undermining of Czechoslovak-Hungarian mutual relations, according to instructions received from Clementis, as demonstrated . . . especially by the activities of the accused Okáli during the solution of the question of citizens of Hungarian nationality in Slovakia. Okáli used the office of the Czechoslovak Resettlement Committee for hostile activities against the Hungarian State. "⁶

In the context of the trials of the bourgeois nationalists it is quite clear that what was meant by the "Hungarian question" was never the policy of discrimination against the Hungarian minority but, rather, the execution of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian agreement on population exchange. Nor should it be left unmentioned that, when "liberalization" prompted the Party to rehabilitate Clementis and his "Bourgeois nationalist" colleagues, the lawlessness suffered by the Hungarian minority has never been mentioned among the condemned "illegalities" of the past. And neither the Party nor the Government has ever denounced the extreme chauvinist Kosice program of 1945 that served as the fountainhead of all aspects of the policy of discrimination against the Hungarians. In fact, the text of the Kosice program, painstakingly annotated and documented, has been reissued as recently as 1977-presumably with both Party and Government approval - by the Slovak Pedagogical Publishing House for use in Slovakia's schools.

Ever since the Zvara-Lavová debate on the interpretation of the Hungarian question, the theory of Slovak "defensive nationalism" as a reaction to Hungarian chauvinism," alongside with all the flimsy "documentation" supporting that theory, has been integrated into contemporary Slovak historiography. Although pretended to be Marxist, it is an unmistakably nationalist interpretation, pure and simple. As we pointed out several times in this study, after a brief respite in the 'liberal" l960s, Slovak historical thinking entrenched itself more solidly than ever in the prejudices of a monolithic nationalism.⁷

A particularly favorite topic of Slovak historians, eager to prove "Hungarian chauvinism" as a justification of Slovak "defensive nationalism," is the "brutal oppression" of the Slovaks under the Horthy regime. We have shown, and repeat once again for the sake of truth, and not in defense of the Horthy regime: During the Second World War, the persecution of Slovaks in Southern Slovakia under Hungarian administration affected at most three percent of the Slovak minority population. The remaining 97 percent did not live under worse general conditions than the Hungarian majority, with only one major exception: Slovaks were at a disadvantage regarding the availability of Slovak-language education. There is no way, however we look at it, to draw a comparison between the situation of the Slovak minority in wartime Hungary and that of the Hungarian minority in postwar Czechoslovakia. During the four years of lawlessness, 97 percent of the Hungarians in Slovakia were deprived of all rights, and only some 3 percent were pardoned of criminal charges under the theory of collective national guilt; and even those 3 percent suffered, as did the 97 percent, total cultural deprivation.

The rise from the depths of the 1940s took a long time. The first decisive stop on the arduous road to recovery from the humiliations suffered by Hungarians during four years of lawlessness had been the recognition of the Hungarian minority's civil rights in the fall of 1948, following the February takeover by the Communist Party. In 1954, the Party invalidated the re-Slovakization program, thus restoring a measure of objectivity to the nationality statistics in Czechoslovakia. While according to the census of 1950 there were still only 369,000 Hungarians counted, the census of 1960 found again some half a million Hungarians in Czechoslovakia. (According to the Czechoslovak census of 1980, there are 579,600 Hungarians, which comes close to the prewar official figure of 634,000.) Still another step toward rehabilitation came during the liberal "thaw" of the l960s, when in 1963 "discriminations" in general had been condemned with the other so-called "illegalities" of the l950s. Slovak thinking on the "Hungarian question," however, shows no change. The nationalist myths of the l940s live one. They are kept alive by Slovak historiography and translated into a policy against the Hungarian minority by the authorities of the Slovak Socialist Republic, an equal state, since January 1, 1969, with that of the Czechs, within federated Czechoslovakia.

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority