Salami Days

The way to get control of a country Matyas Rakosi once wrote, is to demand a little more each day, like cutting up a salami, thin slice after thin slice." Rakosalami tactics made Hungary one of the most useful of Soviet satellites. Slice by slice, Hungarian agricultural productivity was cut down to make way for industrial projects. Forced collectivization of farmlands drove farm workers into the factories, and the fertile country, once one of Europe's breadbaskets, had to import grain. But Hungarian steel and aluminum fattened the Soviet war potential and bulletheaded Boss Rakosi was so well regarded in Moscow that he escaped the cosmopolite" purge which carried off Czechoslovakia's Slansky, Rumania's Pauker and other Jewish Communist leaders before Stalin's death.

Talking Big. When Malenkov took over, Rakosi was ordered to get away from the salami. He yielded the premiership to rotund Imre Nagy (rhymes with budge), another oldtime Hungarian Communist, who was a Hungarian language broadcaster in Moscow during World War II. Nagy talked big: "The decision to make Hungary a country of steel and iron was an expression of megalomaniac economic policy." Past faults of the party he ascribed to "one-man leadership which relied on a narrow circle, and the silencing of criticism and self-criticism." Nagy ordered more consumer goods, relaxed police controls and let the collectivization program lapse. Peasants, given the chance to leave the collectives if they wanted to, left in droves. The theory of rewarding them with incentives did not pay off. An economic report issued at the end of 1954 showed that after two years of the Nagy (or Malenkov) "new course " Hungarian production was down in all departments.

Switching Fast. After Malenkov's demotion and Russia's switch from consumer to heavy industry last month, a similar switch in Hungary was only a matter of time. Last week it came in the form of a 6,000-word article in the party organ Szabad Nep denouncing Nagy and all his works. It accused Nagy of deceiving "the working classes with cheap demogogic promises" which caused them to loll idly "waiting for the plums to drop into their mouths," charged him with "rightist deviationism" and with "encouraging nationalism and chauvinism." The language of the communique might have been Rakosi's, but the message was straight from Moscow.

At week's end reports were leaking through of widespread arrests among Nagy followers in Budapest. As for Nagy a few days after Malenkov's fall, he had taken to his bed with a "serious heart condition."

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