The Squaring of the Circle: The Reinvention of Hungarian History by the Communist Party in 1952

Abstract

This article analyses a document, published by the Hungarian Academy of Science as a gift for the dictator Mátyás Rákosi's sixtieth birthday in 1952. The document tries to legitimate governance by the Communist Party, which emerged victorious from the political struggles in the post‐war period (1945–1949). The Party had no tradition of public political life and its politics and ‘collective identity’ lacked national roots. For this reason, professional historians with leading positions in the Communist Party used raw material from Hungarian history in its attempt to achieve congruent communist and national traditions. They therefore introduced new heroes to the pantheon and removed others. This new narrative justified the elimination of potential enemies and promised a bright future for the nation. The article highlights the technique of realigning temporal references along a theoretical guideline, which is derived from a specific worldview, and examines the extent to which a new narrative can be successful when forced temporal references and the administrative creation of the past is too obvious. This article assumes that only closed societies enable such a ‘squaring of the circle’.