От советского до западного трансфера

In the Hungarian historical literature on socialist agriculture there are two narratives contradicting each other. According to one of them, a special Hungarian type of cooperative was formed in Hungary during the socialist regime. The other argued that through the forced collectivization, the Stalinist kolkhoz was planted in Hungary and it remained unchanged until the collapse of the socialism. To make any progress from these contradicting views, a new approach is needed. The aim of this article is to show the usefulness of comparative and transfer history especially for analysing differences and similarities between the Hungarian cooperatives and the Kolkhoz Model. The concept of transfer became the main analytical category of my research, as it can be used to present both Soviet determinants and Western influences. Although there was a brief period when Hungary, along with the other socialist countries, was so to speak hermetically sealed off from the Western half of Europe, this situation gradually changed after Stalin’s death. Following the defeat of the 1956 uprising, Moscow accorded greater room for maneuver in certain matters to the Hungarian leadership in order to prove the superiority and viability of the socialist system. The impact of this kind of “exceptionalism” made itself felt particularly strongly in agrarian policy. Food-supply became a strategic issue for the Kádár régime, which attempted to compensate for its lack of political legitimacy through promises to increase living standards. Thanks to the mediating activity of agrarian lobby a learning process from the West took place from the 1960s. As a result of modern technology and know-how brought into the Hungarian producer cooperatives, which became capable of integrating the developed structures of the capitalist agriculture of the time: closed production systems. By the 1970s internal food supplies became stable and Hungarian agricultural exports began to grow, both to Eastern and Western markets.