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Title: The Grapes of Wrath
Author: André Prudhommeaux
Date: 1956
Language: en
Topics: Hungary, revolution, Bolshevism
Source: Retrieved on 28th February 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/cfxr5z
Notes: Writing as André Prudhommeaux in Témoins (Zurich), No 14, Autumn 1956. From Un anarchisme hors norme (a collection of texts by André Prudhommeaux, published by Tumult https://tumult.noblogs.org/post/2020/02/15/un-anarchisme-hors-norme-andre-prudhommeaux/ )

André Prudhommeaux

The Grapes of Wrath

For ten years Hungary, once upon a time Europe’s bread-basket, went

hungry, whilst its new leaders had, after the ravages of occupation and

war, held out the promise of “tomorrows that sing”.

Ten years of hard slog to lift the country out of the poverty into which

it had fallen had simply thrust it deeper into the mire, because, as

fast as the work targets could rise, parasitism and the communist mess

bloated, sucking the marrow out of the country, under cover of

industrialization, collectivization, and the defence of Peace and mutual

assistance between the socialist nations.

The students, workers and very peasants had long trusted to the regime,

some because they had hopes to taking up their place in the ranks of the

rising elites, others to ward off any replay of the old seigneurial

feudalism, invasion and civil war. But – due to a level of

administrative efficiency that stood at zero and hid behind the most

derisory excuses (spying, sabotage, Colorado beetle infestations dropped

by parachute, etc.) – the new feudalism of Red policemen now masters of

factory and field was forced, in order to deck itself out in

revolutionary clothing, to don a veneer of idealism and

incorruptibility.

The country’s long-suffering patience ran out on the day when moral

repugnance was added to its economic distress: after Khrushchev’s

speech, the mask had fallen away from stalinism’s infamy and, far from

any stepping-up of concessions that might have created the impression of

substantial reform, the likes of Rakosi[1] and Gerö[2] simply took a

more hard-line approach in their position as swaggering martinets in the

service of a foreign power.

Empty bellies presented with empty shops, irked by the soviet-made or

American-made cars of the “Chevro-letariat”, harassed by work that was

proving increasingly pointless. The Hungarian workers now knew that they

had been lied to, that the Budapest trials had been the handiwork of

ermine-robed counterfeiters and provocateurs and that the regime had

disgraced itself.

All that was needed now to totally destroy the fiction of the Red tsars

as the “protectors” of the people, was the sight of “comrade ministers”

drafting in the help of soviet armoured divisions in putting down

demonstrations and of Russian tanks, at their command, crushing

thousands of corpses beneath their blood-stained tracks.

That final straw arrived and now, back under the yoke, the entire

population in Hungary – minus the “unforgivable” few trapped in their

lot as executioners and traitors – is now learning the new lesson of

unanimous, non-violent struggle against the direct rule of soviet

armies.

For a long time, it was uncertain where the Russian governments stood:

but one could make out two interchangeable strategic and political

options. One comprised the building of a solid cordon of forces around

insurgent Hungary, cutting her off from the other satellites and leaving

the country to “stew in its own juices”, in accordance with the tactic

of withdrawal practised by Thiers back in 1871. Whilst appeasement

offerings had been made to the Czechs, Poles, Yugoslavs, Romanians and

East Germans, by way of a reward for their political loyalty, a fresh

plan of attack would be drawn up for Hungary against the day when

deliberately fostered factional rivalries would have finished off the

putrefaction of a devastated, divided and demoralized Hungary. The other

approach amounted to proceeding immediately and forcibly against the

insurgents and using force to restore the authority of the pro-Russian

government, which could then be reshuffled according to the requirements

of the repression and a softening (or hardening) line. When all is said

and done those two tactics have been deployed one after the other or

both together with unprecedented duplicity and brutality.

But the fate of Hungary, as of all the countries behind the Iron

Curtain, does not hinge upon political and military measures alone. The

social and economic roots of the past revolutions, present troubles and

near or distant futures of those countries are traceable to the agrarian

problem, which is simultaneously a problem of subsistence. Despite all

of the efforts invested by bolshevism over nearly fifty years, first to

capture industrial countries and then to build an industrial empire that

has taken on the dimensions of an entire hemisphere, to this day Moscow

has dominion only over mostly rural, peasant countries, to which she has

brought the initial shock of lawful liquidation of land-owners as a

class by distributing the land, and then has steered them willingly or

by force down the byways of state control of agriculture, by

economically, politically and socially penalizing the family farm and

through the massive introduction of the bureaucratic and military

approaches recommended by Marx (the notorious “army of agricultural

production” mentioned in The Communist Manifesto). Now (despite the

German military authorities’ experiences in the occupied countries in

1914–1918, designed to replicate the system of the Pharaohs and Incas),

bureaucracy and militarism do not ‘take’ in farming: to this day, it is

the family farm, complemented by voluntary cooperative organization that

remains the normal and natural form of arable farming. To no avail, the

communist parties may strive to foist a barracks discipline on the

peasant masses by pitting them socially against one another and putting

them under the pressures of a planned economy, or political

discrimination and political terror. Until such time as they abandon the

kolkhoz[3] and sovkhoz[4] system once and for all (plus those Agritowns

so beloved of Nikita Khrushchev) – which is to say until such time as

they cease being communists in respect of agrarian matters – the

Marxists are going to run up against the huge contradiction whereby

agriculture’s technical requirements conflict with their social program

and they will reap nothing but the grapes of peasant wrath.

Over and above any political imperative, it is that wrath that is still

at work inside Hungary – and, alongside it, the vengeance taken by

things on marxian Promethean ambition. One does not plan farm

production, and above all, one does not bureaucratize it, unless one

means to kill it off. In order to bolster the dictatorship of the towns,

the soviets toil in vain to double their populations or boost it by ten

or a hundred-fold, thereby boosting the number of intelligentsia and

industrial workforce mouths that need feeding. In vain do they swamp the

very countryside with policemen, paper-shufflers and desk-bound types

charged with bringing the peasant sorts to heel. An enslaved, famished

and terrorized peasantry cannot decently feed either the industrial

proletariat that has been elevated to “ruling class”, or even the

“Chevro-letariat”, which is the profiteering segment of it. And sooner

or later, those two classes will have no option but to join the

peasantry itself in demanding that heed be taken of the natural order of

things and that they stop trying to work the soil on the basis of Karl

Marx’s cobbled together recipes from a hundred years ago, when he was a

complete ignoramus in matters relating to the land.

However the Hungarian crisis turns out, an economic “improvement” and

political “easement” can only be brought about through the practice of a

wholesome physiocracy. By strangling the Smallholders’ Party, which

out-polled it by three million votes in the last free elections in

Hungary (as against eight hundred thousand cast for the communists),

what Rakosi has done is kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, just

as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin did when they liquidated the Social

Revolutionary Party of the Russian “kulaks” which had won the last free

elections to the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly by a huge

majority. Will Beria[5], murdered by the Party’s top bureaucrats for

having sought to liberalize farming, and Malenkov[6], dropped from the

first team for having outlined a shift in that direction see their

successors adopting their de-collectivization policy? That is unlikely,

but until such time as that is done, the formula “All Quiet on the

Eastern Front” will sadly still apply.

[1] Matyas Rákosi – Hungarian Stalinist leader and instigator or purges

and show trials in Hungary in the early 1950s. He stood down in 1953 and

was replaced as government leader by Imre Nagy. When the Hungarian

uprising began in 1956 he fled to the USSR. Ejected from the Communist

Party in 1962.

[2] Erno Gerö – Stalinist Comintern operative active in Spain during the

Civil War as ‘comrade Pedro’. A feared and vicious stalinist hack, he

and Rakosi secured the Communist Party’s hold over post-WW2 Hungary by

racking up 150,000 political prisoners and (it is believed) 2,000

executions. He described the Hungarian insurgents of 1956 as ‘fascists’

and ‘terrorists’

[3] Kolkhoz – Soviet jargon for collective farms that peasants were

compelled to join, donating all land, livestock, seed and tools to it.

They were run along vaguely collective, cooperative lines.

[4] Sovkhoz – Soviet jargon for a state-owned and -run farming

collective in which there were no smallholders, merely waged labourers.

[5] Lavrenti Beria – Leading Stalinist secret police chief and official;

one of a triumvirate that took over the USSR after Stalin’s death in

1953. He was executed in 1953 following a secret trial.

[6] Georgi Malenkov – Former head of Stalin’s personal staff who joined

the Politburo of the Soviet Union in 1946. One of the triumvirate that

took over after Stalin’s death. In 1955 he acknowledged that his

agricultural policies had failed and stepped down as prime minister. He

was later denounced as part of an “anti-party” organization, dropped

from the Central Committee and ended his days as the manger of a

hydro-electric station.