BER EB

T is a sad csmment on the present state of publishing iences.

in Britain, and on the real feelings about the And thirdly—and, to the best of my knowledge, unlike any Hungarian workers’ struggles and sufferings of many cther British journalist who saw the Hungarian revolution and its aftermath; and for that matter unlike any other of those who claimed to support their revolution in British communist who was there, Coutts, Russell and Fryer 1956, that far and away the best book yet to appear included—Dora Scarlett learnt the Hungarian language. about that revolution could find no London publisher.

Not only that. She spoke it and understood it very well Many of the well-printed books that came out about these indeed—and, so equipped to talk to people, overhear their events were of only ephemeral value; one at least—Noel conversations, make friends with them and understand them, Barber's—was tripe from beginning to end.

she travelled widely outside Budapest as a radio reporter and Dora Scarlett’s ‘Window onto Hungary’,! for all the austerity on her holidays during the three years and nine months she of its duplicated pages, stands head and shoulders above worked in the country. these—indeed, above any other eyewitness account of the upThis fact alone makes her evidence of unique value. She rising and its suppression that exists in English.

did not merely go about the city and stand in queues and It does so for three reasons.

crowds during those days of great hope and great despair: she caught the mood of the people; she was alive to practically every nuance of their thinking; and she conveys not what she or anyone else thought the Hungarians ought to have MATURE REFLECTION. First, it is not a testimony put been thinking and saying, but what they were in fact thinking down straight after the events it describes, and still glowing and saying, before, during and after the uprising. white-hot with their impact, but the fruit of mature reflection.

Perhaps its comparative lateness was what the publishers objected to—the market is cold, you see, and there have NOT A MORSEL, No wonder that when Miss Scarlett, been so many books on the subject.

on her return to London, went to see John Gollan and told Secondly, Miss Scarlett’s account of the revolution is prehim what she had seen, he smiled politely and thanked her ceded by a careful, detailed and exceedingly readable account —and noi a morsel of her evidence found reflection in the of Hungary’s history, and of economic, social and political statement issued by the British Communist Party’s executive conditions under the régime of Matyas Rakosi.

committee or December 15-16, 1956.2 The British Stalinists did not want the truth. They wanted statements backing up their reading of the Hungarian events as an imperialist plot and a counter-revolution.

SOLIDLY FACTUAL. This is far more interesting than Though Dora Scarlett nowhere conceals her love for the the conventional type of ‘background’ information, often so Hungarian people and her. admiration for their heroism, her dull and so stereotyped. It is writing at once solidly factual book is quite sober in tone. Its easy, conversational style —and enriched and enlivened by Miss Scarlett’s own experl Broadacre Books (Bradford), 15s. Copies can be obtained 2 Miss Scarlett was kind enough to let me use her comments from New Park Publications Ltd, 266 Lavender Hill, Lon- on this statement in my pamphlet ‘Hungary and the Comdon, S.W.11.

munist Party’ (1957), pp. 36-40. PROTEST AT ARRESTS OF COMMUNISTS IN each day.

The bosses’ real reason is that it saves them taking on a new gang for whom they would have to pay a minimum of carries conviction: again and again the argument is clinched contrary, ‘the general expectation was that the large concerns with some homespun story. at least would remain public property, with the revolutionary This book brings out even better than Fejté’s does—and councils playing a decisive part in running them’. his is the one with which it really merits comparison—the Dora Scarlett does not give the exhaustive analysis of the atmosphere of rule by security police, the gradual swelling origins and methods of work of these councils that someone of popular resentment till the torrent burst its banks, the will have to undertake one day, and that will add tremendcrumbling of the party, the way new organs of working-class ously to our knowledge of the soviets as forms of workingdemocracy sprang up and assumed control. class organization.

There is no attempt to conceal the brutality of the hunt What she does do is scarcely less valuable. She takes us for AVO men, or of the retribution that was visited on them. into the meetings of the particular revolutionary council that But the book makes nonsense of the tales about white terror. she attended, the one in the radio, and shows how it disThe people were jealous of the good name of their revolu- cussed and decided things.

There are points of detail here and there with which I tion:

would disagree, but Dora Scarlett knows so much more about Hungary than I do that I do not want to press them.

Her book says so much that I should have liked to be HOUSEWIFELY CARE. ‘An old lady, with housewifely able to say, but through ignorance of the language either care, looked at some cakes in a broken window, and said had not realized or had not got in proper focus, that I can she would take them out and use them before they spoiled. only urge every socialist to get it, read it and learn from The passers-by would not allow it; better let a few cakes it, as I have done. spoil than set an example which might look like looting.’ There are some who say, along with the bourgeois pubWere communists being massacred? Dora Scarlett shows lishers, that the Hungarian story is over, and there are more how in fact the revolution was led by anti-Stalinist com- important things to read about and think about these days. munists.

Had the situation deteriorated in the week before the second Russian intervention? She shows how in fact Budapest was returning to normal, how the buses had started running INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY. But the struggle of the again on the Saturday, how work was beginning again in workers of eastern Europe against bureaucracy and terror the factories. needs our understanding and support, if international solidParity means anything at all.

Hungary’s communist and socialist martyrs are now being slandered by the same men who slandered the victims of REVOLUTIONARY COUNCILS. Did Mindszenty encour- the Moscow trials in the thirties—men like D. N. Pritt, for age fascism in his broadcast? No, nine-tenths of it was ‘just instance, who writes in the January issue of New Hungary: what might be expected from the head of the Church’ and ‘I say Nagy was a guilty man.’ ‘the one paragraph in which he dealt with the social structure Pritt and Co. have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. is so vague and apparently self-contradictory that no one Dora Scarlett’s book shows who in fact are the guilty men. knows exactly what it means’, It helps to redouble our resolve that the workers will one Was the restoration of capitalism in prospect? On the day settle accounts with them.

and do not want to belong. Rank-and-file members of the ‘blue letter to the party membership calling upon them to expose union’ have no confidence in officials of the ‘white union’. this unprincipled alliance which is based on the struggle