Hungary through the magnifying glass of the CIA
Hungary was considered a Catholic, conservative country where 90% of the people were anti-communist, but even after that the intelligence officers did not believe that more resistance to the Soviets was needed than the Hungarians – this is also evident from the CIA files, the Cold War Hungarian and foreign experts talk about Hungary and more about the events of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium training center in Miskolc.
Zoltán Szalai, Director General of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, says at the event that it is good to see that so many people came to the event, as the MCC also aims to have rural centers as a kind of intellectual workshops with exciting lectures from excellent professionals. not the students of the college, but also the general public of the city.
Those interested in the professional event could find out how they reacted to American intelligence, and through them the American leadership, to Hungarians, what they thought about Hungarian society and culture, and what the CIA thought of a possible resistance. Historian Áron Máthé, a sociologist, vice-chair of the National Remembrance Committee, and Stephen Sholl, a visiting lecturer at MCC, spoke on the topic. The latter studied hundreds of CIA files on Hungary last year, from the 1950s to the 1980s.
According to the expert, the files show that Hungary was considered a Catholic, conservative country, where 90% of the people were anti-communist, but even after that, the intelligence officers did not believe that there should be more serious resistance to the Soviets than the Hungarians. The intelligence was quite careless about what happened in ’56, and — as this will show in later files — they themselves felt humiliated for being so misjudged about the situation at the time.
Until the mid-1960s, the CIA feared another outbreak of a similar uprising in ’56, but this view was destined around 1965: with the advent of the Kádár era, Hungary was seen as the most humble and strongest Soviet ally, and Kádár he was considered a reformer to whom the country owes development, modernization. Áron Máthé spoke about the fact that the reality in Hungary was completely different from the CIA reports. The Western press considered our country to be the “happiest barracks” in the socialist “camp,” which was a certain truth, as people could shop for their money in shops, get to countries like Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, but importantly the Iron Curtain limited us, and here had the highest rates of alcoholism or suicide.
Those interested could also learn from the experts that although we Hungarians always considered ourselves to belong to the West, this was a rather one-sided view. World War I looked at Hungary as a strong European nation, but this later, as the CIA files show, changed us and made us a non-Orthodox, non-Slavic, traditional conservative, and problem country in the socialist camp.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) is a talent institution that provides free, socially useful, community-based training across the Carpathian Basin, from young people in primary and secondary school to those in higher education or graduates. The MCC is a knowledge center, which, in addition to training, intends to participate in the development of public dialogue and culture for the rise of all Hungarians with its events, conferences, books and public announcements.