Evening star., 1948-07-04
CoIIectivizine Huneory's Lond


The Communist-run government Of
Hungary has just announced that the
collectivizing of Hungary's agriculture will
begin this autumn. This announcement
is especially significant In view of what Is
happening in neighboring Yugoslavia. One
of the Cominform's sharpest denunciations
of Marshal Tito is that he has failed to
apply this feature of the Lenin-Stalin
creed, which holds that the land-owning
peasant must be "liquidated" to insure
the success Of communism.
Even in Soviet Russia, this liquidation
process was enormously difficult. Peasant
resistance was broken only after many
millions of objectors had been killed,
starved or sent to slave-labor camps. In
the satellite countries of East-Central
Europe, the task promises to be even
tougher. Yet their Communist masters
are being spurred on by Moscow to push
it through, because the peasantry there
are deemed the backbone of opposition to
communism. Tito's defiant deviation"
from the Communist "line" in this respect
presumably confirms Moscow in its con-
viction that no further temporizing can
be tolerated wherever its loyal agents are
in control. And Hungary offers a good
starting point, because conditions there
render the collectivizing of agriculture
technically more feasible than in some
other of the satellite lands.
Hungary is virtually all a vast, fertile
plain, similar to our prairie States. This
means that the land can be worked most
economically in large units growing staple
crops such as wheat and corn, harvested
by modern agricultural machinery. His
torically, Hungary has been land OF large
estates owned by aristocratic proprietors,
small peasant holdings having been rela-
lively few.
One of the first acts of the provisional
regime installed after the Russian con-
quest of Hungary in the spring of 1945 was
a division OF the big private estates into
small peasant holdings. But these hold
ings were made so small that they were
criticized as economically inefficient. There
is every reason to believe that, here as
elsewhere that was done deliberately to
prevent the peasants from benefiting by
the change and thereby make them more
amenable to the state collectivization OF
agriculture which was the ultimate Com
muniSt goal.
This final stage in the Communist pro-
gram is now in the offing. The plan Is
to reapportion the land In collectivized
units even larger than the former private
estates, individual peasant holdings being
abolished. It is possible that, to sweeten
the pill, these new units will take the form
OF producers co-operatives or collective
farms in which the members will have
a personal interest. That was the first
stage in Russian collectiviZation of agri-
culture, the so-called "Kolkhoz" But the
tendency in the Soviet Union has been to
transform these into the "Sovkhoz"
state farm, owned and operated by the
state with what amounts to hired labor.
That Is the logical completion Of the
peasants "proletarianization."
There is little doubt that the Hungarian
peasants know what is in store for them,
and that they can be counted on to put
up stiff opposition, especially since their
patriotic and religious sensibilities have
already been stirred by their Red rulers
fouting of national interests and persecu-
tion of the church. But the Moscow
backed regime appears ready for ruthless
methods. Already there are warnings in
the official press and radio of what will
happen to Hungarian "Kulaks'-peasant
die-hards who cling to their land and
refuse to enter farm collectives. The stage
may thus be set for grim struggle on
the Soviet pattern.