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After World War II, socialist states developed a new schooling system aimed at building an egalitarian society. While there is a solid body of research discussing the relationship between the intent and effect of the egalitarian design of socialist school systems, the importance of school maturity assessments for the socialist project has received only minor attention. This article discusses how the introduction of school maturity assessments developed by experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy in 1960s Hungary and East Germany contributed to the visibility of children who were deemed immature. It shows that both socialist states developed institutional solutions beyond the standard school system for tackling the problem of school immaturity in children; these solutions, in turn, evoked different reactions from parents. As the article discusses, parents used various avenues to oppose the official expert assessments with which they disagreed. In both countries, parents increasingly voiced their opinions in complaint letters addressed to the state in a quest to overcome what they perceived as a severe threat to their children's 'normal' development. By tracing parental bottom-up initiatives, the article investigates how parental agency ultimately shaped state policies and expertise despite the asymmetrical power relations that were present in these authoritarian societies. To show the interplay of parental agency, experts, and the state, we employ a combination of two methodological approaches, the sociology of expertise and the concept of Eigensinn, for understanding the spaces of negotiation and the role expertise plays in it. This article thereby sheds light on parental agency and its impact on expertise and state policies concerning school maturity in two socialist states that offered very different institutional answers to the problem; bureaucratic approaches towards complaint letters also varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new findings on the perception of social justice in a country comparison of Austria with its three post-socialist neighboring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The analysis considers both, changes in the structure and perception of inequality. The first part of this article deals with the historical roots of the countries during the Habsburg monarchy and continues with the different developments after World War I and II up to the present. In the second part, socio-economic trends from 1960 to 2020, and the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys 1987 to 2019 are investigated. The findings show that most of the population in all four countries thinks that income differences are too large, while judgments are also subject to dynamic change. In addition, there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves higher than people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterized by small elite, while the mass of the people belong to the bottom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The purpose of the study is to present Hungary's first project related to today's co-housing model in many ways, and which was thus ahead of its time in terms of its social, technical, and economic aspects. The building was completed in 1979 at the initiative of architecture students in Miskolc, Northern Hungary, where young engineers were needed due to the forced industrialization of state socialism. For this reason, the city administration of the era accepted the novel initiative of a university architectural community and built the so-called Collective House, which created the framework for a form of housing previously unknown in Hungary. In addition to the unique use of space, the building was experimental in several ways, including the plans being prepared within the framework of participation, with the involvement of later movers. In addition, panel technology was used for the structure of the building, which until then was mainly typical for the construction of monotonous 5-10-story panel apartment buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the international genre of "retro" and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation's modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an "Iron Curtain" from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro "matters" the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the Hungarian agriculture in state socialism demonstrates two transsystemic transfers in one country in the Cold War era. The Eastern transfer transplanted the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture into a capitalist agriculture and in a short time triggered a serious crisis in terms of both production and supply, contributing to revolution of 1956. The post-1956 political leadership wanted above all to make peace with the peasantry to ensure a stable foodsupply and improving living standards. This “agrarian lobby” was able to transform peasant initiatives from below into policies which gradually turned Hungarian producer cooperatives away from the Soviet kolkhoz; and it also convinced the leadership not only to open up to the West but also to permit the transfer of knowledge and technology. As a result of the successful adaptation of the “closed production systems” (poultry and egg production, corn production) by the 1970s a specific hybrid agriculture emerged in Hungary and quickly generated a dramatic rise in production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing the output of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior's own film studio, which produced educational films between 1955 and 1989, this essay investigates the modes in which the border zone was represented during the decades of state socialism. Considering the vicinity of the border as an area, where ideological confrontations are battled out, the article argues that there is a significant difference between the films produced in the 1950-60s, and those from the mid-1960s onwards. The earlier pieces depict an emotionally charged border zone the defence of which is a social-political duty: father-type superiors teach rookie soldiers about this obligation in coming-of-age stories. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, the films seem to confine themselves to an instrumental mode of persuasion, which presents border protection as a merely technical question. The article briefly ties these shifts to the changing modes in official discourses during the decades of state socialist Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour's spatial fix has become a key term in labour geography scholarship in recent decades. The concept has been widely used to understand labour's agency in its own social reproduction in different historical and geographical capitalist social formations. Departing from the position that state socialism was part of global capitalism, this paper applies the concept of labour's spatial fix to the context of state socialist Hungary. The analysis differentiates between three dimensions of labour's spatial fix in social reproduction: wage work (with particular attention given to female employment), income from the "second economy" and housing. The interrelatedness of these dimensions of labour's spatial fix, as well as their different geographies, are shown in an analysis covering Hungary of the 1970s. It is argued that there is a need for more extensive research on how conditions for social reproduction are established in the concept of labour's spatial fix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circumstances and spatial patterns of social reproduction changed significantly during the 1970s economic crisis in Hungary. The changes were marked by falling numbers of manufacturing labour in general and upward trends in villages, the strengthening of the second economy and private agricultural production as well as new trends in demographics and housing construction. Based on a political economic approach to social reproduction, the study uses settlement statistics to examine the components of social reproduction in Hungary in the 1970s, which are distinguished by principal component analysis. The model with four principal components distinguished between manufacturing labour, the second economy as well as two principal components of long-term (intergenerational) social reproduction. Principal components showed highly differentiated spatial patterns, implying different mechanisms of spatial organization. The research confirmed several findings of previous regional research on the crisis in Hungary in the 1970s. Contradictory trends were revealed regarding long-term social reproduction: settlements and regions with both better and 'backward' positions were showing similarly high factor scores. This fact necessitates further scrutiny and a modification of the concept of social reproduction for the Hungarian state socialist context. Moreover, the analysis revealed significant differences in household-level and settlement-level mechanisms of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was there a state-socialist model of school sex education and if so, what characterized its form and content? What shaped the specificities and divergent characteristics of each country? The paper explores and compares programs of 'education for family life' as these became part of state-driven reproductive politics in late stages of state socialism in three countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary), with a particular focus on sexuality and gender. We analyze how sexuality was framed in these otherwise broadly understood programs, which aimed not just at discussing sex but also interpersonal relations within the family, forming the ways in which gender was to be understood, and sexuality was to be practiced. We show that school curricula for education for family life, which included sexual education, were introduced in the early 1970s in all three countries, and these programs displayed many similarities. We identify transnational influences in triggering the interest in such type of education and cross-border exchanges that shaped it further. Nevertheless, when analyzing the content of these curricula, national factors and peculiarities become visible, like the heightened focus on 'normal' family life in Czechoslovakia, the importance of ethnicity (Roma minority) in Hungary or religion (Catholicism) in Poland. As a result, we cannot speak of a universal model of state-socialist sex education. Methodologically, we follow the sociology of expertise that focuses on the ways in which expertise forms, links or disjoins, creating new areas of social life in need of expert intervention (Eyal, Rose, Hacking). Changes in expertise thus map onto broader social changes and analyzing the shifts in expertise can help understand societal processes of social reproduction and change. In our paper, we focus on sexological and pedagogical expertise, as these intersected on the issue of school-based sex education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores representations of homosexuality in the psychiatric and sexology literature between the 1960s and the 1980s in Hungary with special attention to women. The literature is indicative of how psy sciences interacted with the system of norms on gender and sexual orientation embedded within the social and political context of the era. Examination of these sources shows a predominantly pathologizing-normative discursive framework deployed by experts. The fundamental therapeutic aim was to achieve good social adaptation. In this process, psy experts were influential representatives of the heteronormative society, reinforcing gender norms and state-socialist family ideals. Within the psychological discourses on homosexuality, the case of women had some special characteristics. Their sexual choices were represented as more alterable than men's and linked to emotional factors in the first place. In women's case, there was usually no "need" for therapeutic conversion because socially prescribed gender norms worked strongly enough and the lack of sexual pleasure with men was not considered a significant problem. Professional and popular psychiatric and sexology literature on homosexuality indicate that whereas for men, transgressing normative (hetero)sexuality was the stronger taboo, for women, it was the unfulfilled order of marriage and motherhood that was considered the most serious deviance, and lesbian relationships had to be prevented for this reason. The psychiatric literature on female homosexuality in state socialist Hungary demonstrates a predominantly pathologizing-normative approach. Attempts of conversion were less typical for women because socially prescribed gender norms worked strongly enough. The study suggests that—in accordance and interacting with socialist gender norms—it was less lesbian women's sexual behavior but the possible transgression of their family roles that was considered a major "deviance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of feminist geography in Hungary coincides with the 25 year-long history of Gender, Place and Culture. Authorities denied the existence of gender inequality in the era of state socialism, which was the primary obstacle to the spread of gender studies. The political changes that had occurred after 1989 had removed most obstacles, but feminist geography emerged with a delay relative to other disciplines. Its first two decades was characterised by struggles and compromises within and against the geographical discipline in order for it to win recognition. The 25 year-long history of feminist studies has, however, been completely broken by legislation proposed by the current government suggesting a ban on masters programs in gender studies. In this article, I trace the situation of feminist geography in Hungary by applying the concept ʻcurved spaceʼ. This concept adapted from modern physics claims that mass creates a gravitational field, i.e. it bends 4-dimensional ʻspacetimeʼ. My argument is that the situation of feminist geography in Hungary can be interpreted as an embodiment of ʻcurved spaceʼ. Using this analogy, I argue that the current Hungarian government has amassed such a huge amount of power that has enabled it to curve the space of feminist geographical knowledge production. It has established a quasi-dictatorship that resembles the one that impeded the evolution of gender/feminist geography in the state socialist era. Therefore, only broad-based solidarity can help create opposition to the current government's attacks against gender studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses a body of scholarship which is little-known internationally, written in Hungary in the period between 1949 and 1989: the historiography on agrarian labour from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. This historiography was conceptually inclusive in that it explored the history of many groups of agrarian workers, the varied types of labour in which they were involved, including long-term contracts, day and servant labour, seasonal migration and non-agricultural forms of labour, the role of agrarian labour in socioeconomic development, and the political movement of 'agrarian socialism'. This historiography for a large part remained embedded in three adjacent research clusters: peasant studies, local and regional history, and the history of the labour movement. This study argues that scholarly approaches and interests, and institutional framings specific to each of these clusters, were of key importance in generating the extensive scholarship that is reviewed. The fact that Hungary had been a dominantly agrarian country before 1945, the Leninist vision of the 'alliance of the workers and the peasants' that was to bring about socialism in Eastern Europe and the state-condoned interest in the history of the labour movement and labour more generally were other important factors conducive to, and to various degrees putting their stamp on, this research. Given its findings within a Marxian or classical social-history framing, and its focus on an often neglected group of workers, the historiography on agrarian labour written in state-socialist Hungary deserves to be integrated into the historiographical canon. This study discusses this scholarship against the backdrop of present-day global labour history. In pointing to some of its area-, time- and contextspecific characteristics, the study aims to contribute to a global dialogue in labour history that is sensitive to and critically appreciative of different historiographical trajectories and traditions across world regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose a theoretical model of how occupational mobility operates differently under socialism than under market regimes. Our model specifies four vertical dimensions of occupational resources—power, education, autonomy, and capital—plus a horizontal dimension consisting of linkages among occupations in the same economic branch. Given the nature of state socialist political-economic institutions, we expect power to exhibit much stronger effects in the socialist mobility regime, while autonomy and capital should play greater stratifying roles after the market transition. Education should have stable effects, and horizontal linkages should diminish in strength with market reforms. We estimate our model's parameters using data from surveys conducted in Hungary during and after the socialist period. We adopt a micro-class approach, though we test it against approaches that use more aggregated class categories. Our model provides a superior fit to other mobility models, and our results confirm our hypotheses about the distinctive features of the state socialist mobility regime. Mobility researchers often look for common patterns characterizing mobility in all industrialized societies. Our findings suggest that national institutions can produce fundamentally distinct patterns of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the historic metaphor of hunting the essay examines the lifestyle of the dominant elites of Hungary between 1945 and 1990 on the basis of archival documents, private records, and oral history interviews. The analysis emphasizes the fact that there were interactions between the old, prewar aristocracy and the new state socialist elites. The co-incidence of lifestyles can be viewed through the lens of social and cultural change: new elements hit against the old, shaping and dissolving old behavioural patterns. The article analyses hunting in the contexts of social differentiation and social grouping. Using semiotics the author shows how, even during the era of state socialism, power and social distinctions were articulated on the level of lifestyles, and transmitted via the social, semiotic function of behaviours, patterns of taste, and forms of interaction. Thus, hunting evolved into a metaphor over time in Hungary: it was not only an indispensable part of the everyday life of the elite, but also became a symbol for belonging to it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses how gender and (homo)sexual relations were disciplined in Hungary during the 1970s, part of the Kádár era, named after János Kádár, the top political leader of the People's Republic of Hungary between 1956 and 1988. The first part of the article examines the widespread effects of the New Economic Mechanism of 1968 (which could not be rounded off by political reform) on critical thoughts on family formation, as well as some largely absent aspects of gender equality. The second part of the article presents pieces of empirical evidence on the social existence of sexuality in the context of a system of ‘tolerant repression’ celebrating asexual socialist reproduction. The article concludes that most Hungarians seemed to be able to negotiate their lives between the constraints of state socialism and their longing for enjoyable human relationships even in the ‘uniformly pallid’ 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses writing on women's and gender history in the pre-1945 period, written and published in Hungary under state socialism. Education, struggle for social change, legal history, and the history of work formed the four most important clusters in this rich body of historiography. Considering the position of these publications in the state-socialist or Cold War period and in Central Eastern European historiography and their uneasy relation to gender history as established since the 1980s, we can characterize them as a triply marginalized body of writing. The article pinpoints how the authors connected the history of women and gender to larger processes of emancipation, other categories of analysis, and transnational perspectives in historical writing, and explores their contribution to the historiography of women and gender in the twentieth century and to the intellectual history of state socialism. It also discusses why this historiography has fallen into oblivion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following 1989, the public discussion and examination of the history of secret police agents happened in an inadequate, unsatisfactory manner: Hungarian society was unable to come to terms with its former informers. This proved to be a loss not only for the victims, "the targets", but also for the "observers". The catharsis of asking and receiving forgiveness did not occur, although it could have lead to deliver provided relief also for those who were involved.The purpose of this essay is to describe the life story of E. V., who suffered a nervous breakdown when her fiancé was executed in 1957 during the post-revolutionary persecutions. Meanwhile the political police recruited her as an agent. Based on the available sources, it is possible to claim that after the Hungarian political transformation in 1989, E. V. reshaped her memory and her personal identity because she was unable to face her past. She claimed in her life history interview: "I am no relative or friend to anyone". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the construction of authenticity in three sites commemorating oppression under state socialism. I demonstrate that each of the sites aims to incorporate the physical involvement of the visitor as part of its educational programme. This observation is linked to the political potential of 'prosthetic memory', that is, bodily memory of events one has not experienced. The methods used to achieve this immersive visitor experience are assessed in each site and the potential impact on the individual consuming the exhibit is considered. I argue that the success of prosthetic memory depends not, or not only, on the authenticity of the artefacts, but also on the nature of the interpretation that accompanies them. An overpoliticized narrative, which does not allow the individual to make meaning for him or herself, is likely to focus attention away from the objects and may result in 'disinheritance' of particular visitor groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the changing relationship between paid work, unpaid work and paid care work and social services, and the struggle over this relationship and its implications, constituted key factors in shaping the 'state socialist' gender regime in Hungary from 1949 to the 1980s. The study is based on a wealth of recent scholarship, original sources and Hungarian research conducted during the state socialist period. It tries to give a balanced and inclusive analysis of key elements of women's and gender history in the state socialist project of 'catching-up development' in a semi-peripheral patriarchal society, pointing to constraints, challenges and results of this project. Due to the complex interaction of a variety of actors and factors impacting on and shaping the state socialist gender regime not all women were affected in the same way by state socialist politics and gender struggles. Women's status and opportunities, as well as gender relations, differed according to class, ethnicity and economic sector. As a rule, the gender struggle over state socialist family and gender arrangements in Hungary sought to reduce or temper tensions and conflicts by avoiding substantial or direct attack against the privileges of men both within the home and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issues involving the process of joining the European Union (EU) by Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. The countries became a member of the EU on May 1, 2004 to achieve a sustainable economic development and to establish an identity in the rural community. It identifies three main problem areas, including the causes and modalities of the European slowness capacity, pre-accession period that start about 1990 with the political discovery and the temporary conclusions and hypothesis that focuses on the development in the rural areas of the EU member countries.

The author reconstructs the figure of the trucker as an interesting figure in socialist Hungary's 'history of mentality'. The study outlines how the figure of the trucker and the popular meanings people associated with them, has constituted a post-Turnerian 'liminoid construction' that secured them the (ill-)fame of transgression of any kind of border, subversion against any kind of interest different from theirs, or simply just the fame of agents of change of Hungary's post-1956 everyday life culture. Their liminal character's representation had three major fields: Firstly, in books and movies truckers are usually at the threshold between everyday life of socialist Hungary,and life worlds of another countries, cultures, fields of knowledge and pleasures, between the feared and wanted, the unknown and the quotidian well-known. Secondly,their self-representation unveiled a strenuous way of life and continuous pressures represented by conflicting expectations of self-interest, the family, the profession, colleagues, the company, and social norms. Thirdly, an analysis of their usual life situations (on the road, at the border, at home, etc.), highlighted how these culturally constructed environments served as contrasting 'cultural landscapes' to the truckers' liminoid figure. An analysis of the role of motors and women in the representation of truckers gave an explanation of the popular appeal associated with truckers. The last section on truckers' contribution to the emerging Hungarian consumer culture in the 1970-1980s revealed major trucker missions such as supplying objects of desire and (perhaps more importantly) images of another cultures; the conveyance of 'at-hand' knowledge and skills about other cultures; travel itself; and performance at trendsetting 'habitual show' of doing petty business, and more generally, everyday risk-taking and decision making. Probably truckers' most important role was their contribution to the knowledge, attitudes and skills people employed in making up a Hungarian consumer society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]