Toth_Judit_A_falun_teljes_erovel_dul_az_osztalyharc

“Class struggle is raging with full force in the village, and who will defeat whom is yet to be seen”: The Impact of the 1949 Elections on Agricultural Propaganda

Abstract

As the Hungarian Workers’ Party (MDP) aimed to turn the May 15 parliamentary elections in 1949 into a referendum in favor of the party, it deployed a wide range of agitation and propaganda tools to persuade every social group to join their side. One of the greatest challenges was winning over the peasantry, as the marginalization and persecution of farmers labeled as kulaks had been ongoing since the summer of 1948, and collectivization was already underway. The total mobilization of the 1949 election campaign is primarily known from the works of István Feitl. He also noted that the leadership of the ruling party decided to suspend “anti-kulak” and cooperative propaganda to win over the peasantry. The first part of the present study is a quasi-snapshot, providing an overview of the character of the MDP’s rural policy in the months leading up to the elections. However, the main objective is to answer how and to what extent the aforementioned suspension of previous strategy directly changed the party’s policy towards the peasantry in the weeks leading up to the elections, that is, during the campaign. In addition to archival sources, the study answers the research questions based on the contemporary press, especially the MDP’s central newspaper, Szabad Nép (Free People).