During the collectivisation drive between 1959 and 1961, the Political Investigation Unit of the Csongrád County Police Headquarters conducted secret mail surveillance to intercept letters inciting against the campaigns. Among the letters seized, there were a couple of anonymous letters written in the same hand. The subsequent investigation identified 78 year old Szatymaz farmer, Imre Szüts, as the author of the letters. Szüts had been farming on 38 acres (appr. 15.4 hectares) of land until the 1950s when he was denounced as a ‘kulak’. By 1960 he was left with 2.8 acres (barely over a hectare) of vineyard and orchard. His letters differ from other anonymous letters written in the era which normally addressed the local administrators of collectivisation and their main aim was persuasion. Although these used argumentative means to some extent, they primarily deployed uncouth expletives and threats to dissuade the local forces of collectivisation. Imre Szüts’s letters, however, were not written to acquaintances and their aim went beyond a simple stab at pulling strings in the local campaign. Addressees included the protagonists and authors of propaganda articles published in the county daily Délmagyarország and the national Szabad Föld. These people were not known to him personally and in his letters Szüts addressed them to expound his opinion about collectivisation, the mendacious propaganda, and possible ways to help peasantry survive the impending ‘period of crisis’. The study attempts to reconstruct the personality of the writer and his motivation to overstep the safety limits of expressing his opinion about collectivization and make his voice heard by the establishment, that is, individuals who either consciously supported or indirectly facilitated collectivisation.

Through the personal stories of the eighty-three-year old Irén from Szatmár in north-eastern Hungary, the study examines the ways of constructing the past, including the 1930s-40s, and the rural life in the Rákosi and Kádár era, as well as her own role in shaping the events of the past. Observed in hindsight (the present being in the years following the change of regime in Hungary), the past appears in a nostalgic light in the narrative, where the golden age of a bygone era stands in stark contrast with the decaying world of the present. Although the sharpest break in the timeline is the collectivisation of the village in, 1960 instead of this period the narrator maintains that the present is the ultimate stage of decline. Instead of presenting herself as a mere passive observer of a decaying world, her narrative portrays her as an active protagonist who does not allow her life to be dictated by powers beyond her. The rebel-righteous attitude is a salient feature in her self-image. The most characteristic manifestations of this attitude are the socalled ‘justice stories’, which comprise the most interesting episodes of Irén’s narrative. Irén felt the need of retrospect narrative justice primarily in stories about the collectivisation and the first years of the cooperatives, as if she was trying to get even for past offences on a narrative level in the present. For example, her stories recounting the forced collection of crops do not focus on the practice of exploiting peasant farms, but the individual standing up against it to protect her farm and family by cunning subversive actions to evade crops collectors.

Similar to many Szabolcs-Szatmár County settlements at the time of the collectivization campaign in the winter of 1951, co-op organisers managed to get most of the farmers in Tyukod join the collective. However, the local farmers, together with those from the neighbouring village of Porcsalmás, almost immediately revolted against the Establishment transforming the traditional modes of agriculture by force: by March the co-op groups, which had been set up by painstaking efforts earlier, began to disintegrate as a result of the local population’s ferocious mass response. The Establishment was caught off guard by the ferocity of the opposition, and they could only repress the revolt by bringing in polic force from outside. The investigators of the State Police (ÁVH), analyzing the mass revolt against collectivisation, created a narrative in which the peasants of Tyukod were incited by the ’enemy’ (i.e. kulaks, gendarmerie, former civil servants, priests, etc.) against the socialist transformation of agriculture. In the person of the secretary of the Tyukod Council this concept found an enemy figure integrated into the system, working from within. By analysing the charges against him in the course of the collectivisation campaigns of the 1950s, this study is an attempt to unearth the opportunities and decisions of this person at the bottom of the hierarchy of power.

In the beginning of the period of extensive industrialization in Hungary (1949–1953), there was a powerful campaign launched for the recruitment of women as tractor drivers. Leaning on the increased labour-demand in industry and an exaggerated idea of gender equality as arguments, women were demanded in huge numbers in almost all professions, even in those, which were earlier only practiced by men. Behind the goal to set women on the tractor board was not only the motivation to mechanically copy the Soviet pattern but also the contemporary idea to base agriculture primarily on women – while men were rushing into industry. Being a tractor driver, which counted as heavy physical work, did not become a popular profession among women. The propaganda-produced favourable image of the woman tractor driver did not compensate for the lack of real attraction and true interest. The number of women working with tractors did not come near to the extent planned by those on power (50%), even at the peak of the campaign it reached only 8%. At the same time, with the figure of the tractorist girl wrapped in contemporary ideology, propaganda has created the most successful symbol of the era. Almost all tractorist girls came from that poor peasant layer of society that was accustomed to woman labour from earlier on. Probably, the machine station was only a short stop for them that they chose on propaganda’s influence and that they, seeing the difficulties, left for other jobs offered in great numbers by extensive industrialization (building operations, factories etc.).