The Temporality of Money in Socialist Hungary, 1950s

• In Event: Social Histories of Money in Socialism: The GDR, Hungary, and the USSR

Abstract

While historians acknowledge that monetary factors were crucial in both the erosion of communism’s legitimacy and its rapid consolidation before and after the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, they have largely neglected to explain money’s influence on the country’s turbulent political transformation during this period. This paper takes money as a starting point to offer a new reading of how fiscally structured social and cultural dynamics shaped political changes in postwar Hungary. Rather than viewing money as a commodity guiding individuals to maximise value, the paper conceptualises it as a social relation and an instrument of power with inextricable temporal characteristics. Through socialist direct taxes, government bonds, credits, and lotteries, the paper examines how the communist state sought not only to centralise monetary resources and control the money supply to gain economic leverage, but also to shape citizens’ past memories, present conceptions, and future expectations of money’s purchasing power in an effort to bring them into new relationships with one another so as to synchronise the state’s own socialist historicity of money with that of society to achieve monetary stability conducive to economic growth. In doing so, the paper provides a new framework for understanding how the social dynamics of money in the immediate postwar period shaped the ways in which Eastern European communist economic growth strategies evolved in the late twentieth century, ultimately leading to the eventual collapse of socialism in the region.

Author

• Szinan Radi, U of Exeter (UK)