HUNGARY: Communist Confessional

Rarely in the Communist world, where scuffles are generally muffled, has there been such an open, knock-down fight as in Hungary last week. It began 15 months ago when Hungary's Communist bosses admitted that they had overplanned, overcentralized and overcontrolled Hungary into chaos. They had blindly produced a big iron and steel industry but few consumer goods; they had made a statistical success of forced collectivization but the result was a fall in production and a shortage of food. The traditional granary of central Europe was on short rations and forced to import grain. Workers grumbled over low wages and the lack of consumer goods; peasants hid their produce.

Facing these unpleasant facts, Premier Imre Nagy had promised an end to "exaggerated industrialization," to forced agricultural collectivization, and to "disciplinary measures against workers." Such promises in effect required the Communists to stop being Communists, at least for the while. Last week Premier Nagy confessed: "We have failed. The New Course has not been carried out."

Old Habits. It had proved too hard for Communists to forgo their old habits and run the country with a light touch. Once they eased up on the compulsion, 51% of the collective farm members walked out, worsening the food situation. With penalties on workers abolished, output dropped. Said Budapest Red Chief Istvan Kovacs: "We are producing less, worse and dearer, and at the same time we want to live better." The Reds lopped off 200,000 civil servants from the top-heavy bureaucracy, but Hungary's industry, its initiative sapped by years of being told what to do, did not know how to employ the men, and they thronged the streets in idleness.

The Communists themselves fell to quarreling openly. Some complained that "the kulaks have become impertinent"; the Communist Central Committee had to announce that it would not tolerate the "recurrent anti-peasant mood." Pudgy, bullet-headed Old Bolshevik Matyas Rakosi, no longer undisputed boss of Hungary, decried the "danger of right-wing tendencies," but the party organ Szabad Nep criticized instead "the narrow-mindedness and sectarianism of certain left-wing individuals."

New Front. Last week, aware of their own party's unpopularity in the country, the worried Reds set up a super-Popular Front, the "People's Patriotic Front," and summoned 2,000 leading Hungarians, regardless of party, to Budapest for a two-day meeting. The meeting convened in a hall filled not with Red flags but with the red, white and green Hungarian national flag, and led off not with the singing of the Internationale but with the igth century anthem which begins, "God bless the Hungarian people."