The need to know. Information gathering and evaluation in Communist Party organizations of Hungarian universities (1948-1956)

ABSTRACT Based on the example of university party organizations, the article discusses the function of information scarcity in the daily work of lower-level functionaries in the Stalinist period of Hungarian state socialism (1948–56). In order to implement party policies efficiently, the functionaries of the Hungarian Workers’ Party needed to acquire information about the goals, possible methods and evaluative frameworks of their tasks and their social environment. The article argues that the uncertainty caused by the scarcity of reliable information from and about society could have been reduced by consistent orientation from the higher party levels. In the first years of open sovietization, the party leadership successfully presented itself as the only true and all-knowing guide towards communism, which provided stability when the Stalinist style of discipline, work and practice was introduced into the organizational culture. However, the contradictory and watered-down central interpretations about the modifications of the Soviet model during the New Course and after the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union proved to be insufficient to make sense of the party policies’ twists and turns and made functionaries unable to deal with the new challenges. The perception of not being adequately informed resulted in a gradual loss of loyalty towards the actual party leadership by the eve of the revolution of 1956. Elaborating functionaries’ confusion in the context of universities also shows how the control of students slipped through the party’s fingers and provides further explanation of why universities became hotbeds of opposition and resistance against the communist regime.