CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Birkás, Anna Etelka |
|---|---|
| Title | Party History in the Making. Dilemmas of Party Historiography in Hungary between 1956 and 1958 |
| Summary | By 1956, in the communist party’s deepening crisis of the prerevolutionary and post-revolutionary contexts of Hungary, the intra-party expertise of party historiography shows its substantial characteristics. The first context was generated by party historiography’s reception of the 20th congress of the Soviet party. The initiatives of destalinisation elevated a liberated use of the documents of the party’s past for the experts. This signified certain academic autonomy of research for party historiography in charge of reconstructing the party’s authority. However, the context changed by October 1956, and the legitimacy-crisis of the Hungarian party excessively intensified. After November, when the recently disorganized communist party had to suit the reinstalled one-party system, even higher expectations were addressed to party historiography to facilitate the “recovery” of the party. At this politically demanding situation, the Institute of Party History was still experimenting with academic autonomy. By 1958, a conflict emerged between the Politburo and the Institute around the publication of the documents of the “counter revolution 1d;. The tensions reflect from a cultural aspect the afterlife of October 1956 in the party’s inner sphere, where ideological notions are created. The functional difficulties of this party institution points at the challenges of the party’s mental reconstruction as continuous in the course of destalinisation, culminating by the genealogy of the Kádár regime. |
| Supervisor | Gánor Gyáni, Michal Kopeček |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/birkas_anna.pdf |
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