Making the Hungarian Communist
Political Agitation, Mass Mobilization, and Everyday Life, 1948–1953
Heléna Huhák author David Robert Evans translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Indiana University Press
Publishing:7th Jul '26
£42.00
This title is due to be published on 7th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
How do political parties integrate propaganda into ordinary citizens' lives? After coming into power in 1948, the communist Hungarian Workers' Party (MDP) drew on tried-and-true Soviet methods of political outreach, mobilizing a network of agitators to circulate communist ideology and report their observations back to party leadership. These agitators produced maps, searched homes, and taught "petty bourgeois" self-criticism and "party-conform" love and hate.
Making the Hungarian Communist studies communist propaganda through the everyday actions of these rank-and-file agitators, offering a nuanced portrait of mass mobilization. Through extensive archival research and personal interviews, Heléna Huhák traces the formation of the agitators' network, the training they received, and the often-gendered language they used to connect communist ideology to people's lived experiences. As the dialogue between the state and ordinary citizens developed through these interactions, the boundaries between political issues and private family life began to blur for both citizens and agitators: far from the state's initial vision of one-way political influence, homes also became a space for advocacy, complaint, and bargaining. Communist Hungary was thus shaped not only by propaganda, but also by the experiences and interests of agitators and even "agitated people."
By focusing on the negotiations between local party functionaries and ordinary people, Making the Hungarian Communist reveals how the practices of agitation and propaganda mutually shaped Hungarian society and politics.
"Persuasively argued and meticulously researched, Making the Hungarian Communist restores human agency to what has often been described as state-imposed and formulaic propaganda campaigns. Through compelling stories of individual agitators and their diverse audiences during the Stalinist period in Hungary – including rural communities, middle-class urban residents, women, and Holocaust survivors – Heléna Huhák reveals how central social relations, private spaces, and intimate conversations were to the construction of communism from the ground up."—Malgorzata Fidelis, author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland
"Heléna Huhák's masterful analysis of everyday agitation offers fascinating insights into the functioning of the Stalinist propaganda machine in Hungary in the 1950s. Rather than focusing on how propaganda was constructed, the book investigates how the messages of the communist party were distributed by individual agitators. By focusing on the lower rungs of propaganda, the book shows the limits of dictatorship, highlights the agency of agitators, and sheds light on the significance of everyday interactions between propagandists and their audience in the micro-milieus of Hungarian Stalinism."—Balázs Apor, author of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc
"Huhák's work gives us a new understanding what the Communist Party was, not by examining the characters, thoughts, and actions of the primary leaders . . . but by looking at the numerous functionaries."—Peter Kenez, author of Before the Uprising: Hungary under Communism, 1949–1956
ISBN: 9780253076014
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
366 pages