Department of History of the USSR at the University of Budapest: Essay on the Sovietization of Hungarian Science and Higher Education in the 1950s

Abstract

The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe in the second half of the 1940s. predetermined large-scale changes in the scientific and educational life of the countries of the region. One of the common features of Sovietization was the emergence departments in Soviet history, Soviet literature and Soviet law in the universities. Moreover, these departments were created according to the Soviet model, implying an appropriate staffing schedule, distribution of teaching assignments, etc. The article is devoted to an important episode in the history of the Sovietization of Hungarian humanities and education in the late 1940s — mid-1950s. This is activities of the Department of History of the USSR at the University of Budapest in 1953—1957. It was shown that creation this Department was connected with the work of the so-called Lenin Institute within the structure of the University of Budapest. On the one hand, Sovietization was carried out with the participation of specialists sent from the USSR, such as, for example, A. N. Kitushin, the Head of the Department of history of the USSR. On the other hand, a significant role was played by communist historians who returned from Moscow (J. Révai; E. Fazekas, E. Andics, D. Nemes, etc.). In the first year of the Department’s work, its employees developed a program on the history of the USSR, which was subsequently used in all major universities in the country — in Budapest, Szeged and Debrecen. The emphasis in teaching was on “key moments of historical ties between the Hungarian and Russian peoples”, especially in the 20th century. The same topic formed the basis of the Department’s research work. Its employees were compiling a collection of documents on the history of the USSR during the feudal period. They also participated in the translation of Soviet educational and scientific literature into Hungarian. Under the influence of the revolutionary upheavals in the autumn of 1956, Hungary’s intellectual agenda was adjusted. The aggressive Sovietization of humanities education has been suspended. In 1957, the Department of History of the USSR was transformed into the Department of History of Eastern Europe. The appendix to the article contains important documents from the Archives of the University of Budapest and the Archives of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, reflecting the process of Sovietization of Hungarian historical science in the early 1950s.