Jenö Varga, The Hungarian Soviet Republic and the Development of Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union

Abstract

The paper explores – on the basis of archival sources, memoirs and interviews – the strange career of the economist Jenö Varga (1879–1964), an early Hungarian sympathizer of psychoanalysis. Varga became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association in 1918 and, in 1919, was appointed People's Commissar for Finances during the Hungarian Councils' Republic, the first Communist regime in the country. After the failure of the Commune, he emigrated to Soviet Russia. In the 1920s, he worked at the Soviet commercial mission in Berlin, and maintained contact with Freud until the late 1920s. Later, he became one of the leading economists of the Soviet Union, an expert on the political economy of capitalism. Though he never publicly opposed Stalinism, an ambivalent attitude toward the totalitarian regime can be reconstructed from his memoirs as well as from interviews with family members and friends.