THE LAND & THE PEOPLE

ACCORDING to legend, the Hungarians are descended from Noah's grandson Magyar. The Magyars of Hungary bear no ethnic kinship to their Slavic neighbors in the Balkans, and of all Europe's peoples are related only to the Finns and Estonians. Latecomers to Central Europe, fierce fighters and skillful horsemen, they were driven southward over the centuries from their early home on the slopes of Siberia's Ural Mountains, and in 895, under the leadership of their tribal chief Arpad, crossed over the Carpathian Mountains into the great plain that is now Hungary.

Crossroads. A vast (100,000-square-mile) basin watered by two great rivers, the Danube and the Tisza, and completely ringed around by mountains, the Magyars' new home was a richly fertile and well protected fortress, but no sheltered hideaway for the shy or the meek. Located at the crossroads of the historical highways along which the crusaders of Christendom would press toward the East and raiding Asian conquerors would drive south and west in endlessly repeated waves, the Danube basin had already been overrun and evacuated by dozens of conquerors before Arpad arrived. To ensure their own survival, fierce Magyar expeditionary forces soon extended their realm far over the mountains to cover what is now most of Russia's Balkan satellite empire.

By 1000 A.D. Hungary's powerful rulers had become Christian, and in that year Pope Sylvester II gave Arpad's great-great-grandson King (later Saint) Stephen the Holy Crown which, its cross knocked askew through the ages, is still Hungary's most precious treasure. (After World War II it was taken in custody by the U.S. Government.) In 1222, only seven years after the barons of England forced King John to sign their Magna Charta, the freemen of Hungary made their own King Andrew sign a comparable document known as the Golden Bull, the first charter of human rights on the European continent. But Hungary, unlike insular England, was set like a bastion between the conflicting civilizations of East and West, and under the strain of constant warring, the rights guaranteed by the bull and the crown had to be fought for again and again. Democracy as it is known in most of the West today has never found Hungary congenial for long.

Rebellion. The Turks ruled the Magyars for 170 years, and when at last in the 17th century they were driven out, the remaining Magyars found themselves a vassal state in the empire of the Austrian Habsburgs.* In 1848, when all Europe was arumble with the thunder of revolt, young Poet Sandor Petofi and Lajos Kossuth, the lawyer son of a Magyarized Slovak family of the Hungarian petty nobility, together sparked Hungary's most successful revolution. Poet Petofi died in the fight. Lawyer Kossuth went on to proclaim himself the head of an independent Hungary, but his triumph was short-lived. Skillful players at the old European army game, the Habsburgs invited the Russians to move in from the East while they themselves bore down from the West. Between these two juggernauts, Kossuth's puny armies were mercilessly crushed.

Kossuth's revolution resulted in the relative emancipation of Hungary's serfs, and the unrest it engendered helped to bring about, some 20 years later, the establishment of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which, in principle at least, restored the territorial integrity of the Hungarian nation, but rifts within the nation's borders still endured.

Hungary's "magnates" (the aristocratic heads of the great families) were Europe's most lavish hosts and its gayest dogs. Theirs was a world of beautiful women, schmalzy music, dashing guardsmen and fox hunts. But Hungary's peasants, whose ranks were filled with the Magyarized descendants of conquered peoples, were more downtrodden than any in Europe.

Fighting on the wrong side in World War I, Hungary emerged from the peace shorn of most of its ancient conquests. The new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created out of what had once been St. Stephen's realm. Rumania got a large slice, and the Hungarian nation was reduced to a puny third of the Carpathian basin where Arpad had made his home a millennium earlier. Its predominantly Magyar population of 8,354,400 was 75% Roman Catholic, 20% Calvinist, and the balance Greek Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Jewish. In 1919, amid the anarchy of defeat and humiliation, a disciple of Lenin named Bela Kun, freed from a Russian prison camp and sent back to Hungary on a false passport, was put at the head of a reign of Red Terror that lasted almost four months.

The fanatic Kun nationalized all estates of more than 100 acres, abolished servants, ordered all jewelry seized, and decreed that a man could own no more than two suits, four shirts and four pairs of socks. Kun's strong-arm methods and inflationary money found no favor with the peasants, who boycotted the markets. Meanwhile, Hungary's military and aristocracy were rallying to another banner, that of Admiral Nicholas Horthy, a former naval aide to the Emperor Franz Josef and a naval hero in World War I. Horthy organized a counterrevolution to oust Kun, and Kun was forced to flee to Vienna (he later turned up in Russia, where Stalin executed him in 1938).

Iron Paternalism. The victorious Horthy entered Budapest on a white horse, proclaiming. "I've come to punish this sinful city." The Red Terror became a counterterror, much of it directed against the Jews (Kun was Jewish). Though Horthy's country had been shorn of its seacoast and had no navy, he still used the title of admiral. As self-styled regent for an unoccupied throne, he ruled until 1944. During the early years of his long reign, under the premiership of Count Stephen Bethlen, Hungary was ruled by what was called an iron paternalism, but the iron gradually became more pronounced than the paternalism. The magnates continued to dominate the land: one-third of Hungary's rich acres was owned by 1,000 wealthy nobles. In 1941 Horthy took his country, crying for its "lost provinces," into the war alongside Hitler. By 1944 Horthy wanted an armistice: the Germans seized him and occupied Buda. He was later released by the U.S. Seventh Army from Nuernberg prison, now lives in Portugal, and at 88 has recently written his autobiography. Once again, as the Germans withdrew in 1944, conquerors swept down from the East to overrun the Hungarian plain, to rape, to pillage and to lay waste the once-gay Danube city of Budapest. This time they were Russian Communists, and close behind them as they marched came another army of political agitators, experts of the secret police, and a parasitic host of Hungarian expatriate Communists. In the first post-war election held on Nov. 4. 1945, the Communists came in a bad third, with only 800,257 votes to stack up against the 2,688,161 votes of the democratic Smallholders Party, which was led by Bela Kovacs and Ferenc Nagy.

But with the Red army in control of Hungary, bulletheaded Communist Party Boss Matyas Rakosi, a onetime Kun lieutenant, set out to grab power. Using what he called salami tactics--a slice at a time--Rakosi cut off his opponents. Kovacs was sent to Siberia (where, after nearly nine years, he was released a few months ago). In 1947, with his four-year-old son held hostage, the Smallholders' Premier Ferenc Nagy, the last hope of a free Hungary, was forced to resign and flee into exile.

Last July, after nearly a decade of Red tyranny, Rakosi himself was forced to resign as party boss after a youth club in Budapest proclaimed openly that "it is high time an end be made to this regime of bureaucrats and gendarmes." Three months later that wish came to reality with the fury of gunfire in Budapest's streets.

* Among Hungarians, or their descendants, who have made names for themselves: such musicians as Franz Liszt, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly, Eugene Ormandy, Joseph Szigeti and Sigmund Romberg; such theatrical personalities as Alexander Korda, Ferenc Molnar, the Gabor sisters, Ilona Massey and Leslie Howard (real name: Arpad Steiner); such scientists as Nobel Prizewinner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (discoverer of vitamin C) and Mathematician John Von Neumann; such public figures as David Lilienthal, onetime chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, H-bomb Pioneer Edward Teller, Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

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