By Stephen Sholl
Friday, December 25, 2020
When the Soviet-backed Communist Party came to power in
Hungary after the Second World War, it had a monumental task ahead of it: It
had to transform Hungary into an idyllic proletarian dictatorship. This
transformation was political and economic, to be sure, but it was also cultural
and spiritual. Everything that existed before had to be erased and replaced
with a state-sponsored culture, history, and belief system.
The Communist Party was on a direct collision course with
Christmas.
First and foremost, Christmas was a holiday that brought
together many Hungarians each year to contemplate and reflect on their faith,
and thus a direct threat to the regime’s militant atheism and its ongoing war
on Hungarian churches.
Second, Christmas represented a tradition far older than
the regime, and thus tied Hungarians to their past. According to tradition, the
first king of Hungary, St. Stephen, was crowned on Christmas Day in 1,000 AD.
This and other “tales of the glories of Christmases long ago” were an
unacceptable irritant to the Hungarian People’s Republic.
Third, Christmas was already associated with the sort of
commercialized capitalism that Communist dogma frowned upon.
Faced with a holiday that embodied the three major sins
of Communism — religion, tradition, and capitalism — the regime had a problem.
The simple solution would have been to ban celebrations and try to erase
Christmas from history. The Communists, however, knew better than to attempt
such a solution, which would have further alienated a population that did not
support them to begin with while driving Christmas celebrations underground.
Instead, they engaged in a systematic process of subversion. In lieu of
destroying Christmas, they tried to replace it with their own creation, free of
any problematic features.
This process began as early as 1948, when the regime
chose the day after Christmas to arrest the leader of the Catholic Church in
Hungary, Archbishop Mindszenty. The next year, in 1949, the Communists replaced
Christmas celebrations with a week-long celebration of Stalin. But this was
just a stop-gap measure. Going forward, the regime chose to coopt the symbols
of Christmas, endeavoring to imbue them with new, Communist meaning.
Thus, the Christmas tree became the central focus of
Christmas, which was transformed from a religious holiday based upon the virgin
birth of Christ to the Pine Festival, in which good Hungarian socialists would
express gratitude to each other and the Communist Party.
Renaming Christmas and refocusing holiday celebrations
helped the regime solve the problem of religion. It also helped with the
problem of tradition, by divorcing the holiday from the past and making it into
a celebration associated exclusively with the People’s Republic.
The regime had less success in curbing the rampant
commercialism associated with Christmas. The best the authorities could manage
was encouraging Hungarians to buy their presents from the Soviet bloc, with
toys purchased for children touted as proof of the great prosperity Communism
had brought the nation. And even then, gift-giving posed an additional
challenge: In traditional Hungarian culture, it is the Christ-Child who brings
the gifts, a clear problem for those wishing to desacralize Christmas. The
solution came in adopting the Soviet model of Santa Claus, Father Frost.
Although Hungarians traditionally celebrated St. Nicholas on December 6, the
Communist authorities attempted to merge it with Christmas to further supplant
Christ’s role in the holiday. Father Frost would now be the bringer of gifts to
children, and those who still used traditional Christmas phrases such as, “What
did Jesus bring you?” could be reported to the authorities for dissident
behavior.
The radicalness of these changes, which subverted and
diminished the traditional religious character of Christmas, was only matched
by their ineffectiveness. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the Communist
authorities slowly began retreating from its campaign to redefine the holiday,
knowing that the population had for the most part rejected the changes they’d
sought.
Imre Nagy, during his first term as prime minister,
quickly restored the day after Christmas as a holiday, in the first sign of
reversal. Following the 1956 revolution, in which Nagy was eventually deposed
and executed by the Communists, the authorities continued to become more
permissive of traditional Christmas practices and celebrations. In the mid
1960s, the state even announced official toleration of those who celebrated
Christmas as a religious holiday. Even then, the regime maintained its official
rejection of the holiday’s religious connotations for decades. Christmas Mass
was not televised until 1987, and all official events referred to Christmas as
the Pine Festival until the end of the dictatorship in 1989.
What can we learn from all this? The first thing to note
is that Communism often chooses to subvert preexisting cultural traits rather
than destroy them. This provokes less outward resistance, and weakens what
resistance there is. The second thing to note is that these widespread policies
only had superficial effectiveness. While they succeeded in publicly converting
Christmas into a Communist-flavored secular holiday, they failed to convert the
hearts of the Hungarian people. The gradual loosening of the rules from the
late 1960s onward was an admission of defeat, and the regime and its
secularization of Christmas both ended up in the dustbin of history.
For those who live in the free world, that is certainly
reason to be thankful this Christmas — but it is also reason to be vigilant,
for there will always be those who wish to subvert culture to suit their own
political ends.
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