Hungary 70 [antikvár]

Twenty-Five Years of HungarianForeign PolicyThe year of 1970 marks a jubilee in Hungary. Twenty-five years earlier, on April 4th 1945, the entire territory of the country was liberated. That was the day when the last German troops and their Hungarian arrowcross accomplices were driven from Hungarian soil across the Austrian border to the West, by the soldiers of the liberating Soviet army.This quarter of a century brought with it the most profound changes of any period in the over one-thousand-year-old history of the Hungarian people. As the exploiting classesthe capitalists and big landlordslost all their economic and political positions, not only was the structure of society completely transformed, but the foundations of a socialist society were laid in Hungary, and with this, in recent years the development of the country entered a new phase, the period of the complete building of a socialist society.Workers and the Results of Their WorkThe present class structure of Hungarian society can hardly be compared with that which existed in 1945. The extent of the development and changes that occurred can best be measured by making a comparison with the year 1949, the year of change to a socialist construction after the liberation of the country. During the period that has passed since then, the number of people employed in socialist industry has nearly trebled, increasing from 521,000 to 1,480,000; the total number of administrative and manual workers increased from 1,630,000 to 3,400,000; the membership of agricultural cooperatives sharply jumped from 10,000 to 1,150,000, and the number of people in craft cooperatives increased from 8,000 to 192,000. On the other hand, the number of small producers decreased from 2,322,000 to 142,000, and the proportion of people engaged in agriculture declined from 52 per cent of all working people to 31 per cent. In other words, exploitation ended, and today there are only working classes in Hungarian society.