Amongst the shops selling Prada and Louis Vuitton on the Andrassy Utca in
Budapest is the former headquarters, interrogation centre and prison of the hungarian state police. Like all the other buildings on the street it is an handsome nineteenth century structure in the "eclectic" style. To mark out its former role it is painted entirely Grey and there is a large stainless steel sign on the roof that lets passers-by know this is the House of Terror, a museum commemorating the victims of the fascist Arrow Cross Party (of whom this building is the former HQ) and the later Stalinist dictatorships.
The museum itself is fascinating both in the information it gives about
the apparatus of state terror in Hungary but also about the attitude the
post Stalinist authorities want the public to have towards their past.
Although it is a museum dedicated both to the victims of fascism and
Stalinism only two rooms are given over to the fascist era, and the
persecution of workers, leftists, Jews and Roma by the Horthy regime for
over twenty years is entirely overlooked. Instead Hungarian fascism is
seen mainly as a German import brought in by the German occupation of
1944. most of the rest of the museum is given over to the propaganda and
terror apparatus developed under "Stalin's best Hungarian pupil" Matyas
Rakosi and the 1956 revolution and its aftermath. The venality and the
cunning barbarity of the regime is rendered starkly apparent especially in
the reconstruction of the cells and interrogation room of the AVH. However
when it comes to mentioning the opposition and resistance against the regime
there is a glaring omission. The working class of Hungary played a pivotal
role in the Hungarian revolution by occupying factories, setting up workers
councils and was at the forefront of the armed resistance against the red
army and suffered in due course from the murderous reaction.
This omission is not surprising. A narrative has been created and
propagated to explain Hungary's twentieth century history in a way that
bolsters the legitimacy of the nations ruling class. The party that has
ruled the county for most of the post 1989 period is the MSZP. This is a neo
liberal social democrat successor to the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party
that ruled Hungary from 1947 to 1990. Large numbers of its members and its
leadership were in prominent roles in the party during the Janos Kadar era.
An image of united patriotic opposition to the soviet occupation is painted in
which the church and the moderates or reformers in the party (Nagy and even
Kadar) are seen to be at the fore-front. But in the streets beyond glimpses
can be seen of the recent history of the Hungarian people: Sleeping in every
other doorway and every underpass are the elderly homeless. A queue for treatment snaking around the main hospital. Near the national football stadium people sell their belongings on blankets on the pavement for a few hundred Forint's(inflation has been rampant in Hungary). Many of the people who forced the populace to submit to goulash Stalinism forced the people to accept
capitalist shock therapy and all the misery that has brought. Yet the signs
of protest are there, Budapest is a city covered in graffiti. Anarchist
symbols and political slogans adorn wall after wall. A fly-poster on a
lamppost outside parliament read in English "End the Post Stalinist
Dictatorship of the MSZP". These may be signs that the working class in Hungary is claiming back its own history.