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A CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION BECOMES A LASTING LESSON
“encourages people to fight for peace and uses the means of satire to expose
the hypocritical lies and desperate manipulations of Western imperialists”.2*#
Focusing on Orpheus, who makes the earth sing and causes the twilight of
gods and the underworld alike, the production had a current political purpose:
it joined the peculiarly distorted trend of the international peace movement,
which began at the World Congress of Partisans for Peace in Paris in April
1949, and was transformed into a myth of communist fight for peace.””’ This
trend was driven by extensive armament that Hungary had to carry out on
Soviet orders, subverting all preliminary economic calculations.*° While
leaders of the Hungarian Working People’s Party tried to transform Hungary
into “the country of iron and steel” within a few years, “the wasteful draining
of resources for armament caused perpetuating deprivation for almost all of
society”.”°! Therefore, propaganda was desperately needed in all media, and
the premiere of Orpheus became part of it “in the current Cold War milieu”.?°?
In terms of its socio-political context, it was linked to two more campaigns.
The press found the miscarried goal of the unveiling of “a naive, benevolent
but objectively harmful pacifism” inherent in the production, and made it clear
that the pact between the Olympus and the Underworld “was mocking the
relationship between death factory workers [i.e. fascists] and right-wing Social
248 Péter Bacsó: Orfeusz. Bemutató a Fővárosi Operettszinhazban, Vol. 3, No. 11, Irodalmi
Újság, 13 March, 1952, 5.
24° Cf. “The phrase fight for peace must have appeared in Hungarian in 1950, after the World
Congress of Partisans for Peace in Paris.” Andras Kicsi Sandor: A békeharcrél, Holmi
3:5 (1991), 604. — Fight for peace became the central term of a book published in 1950,
including the writings of Mátyás Rákosi and József Révai. Harcolunk a békéért. A nemzetközi
békemozgalom útja (We Fight for Peace. The Way of the International Peace Movement)
projected the history of the movement back to the early 20th century in order to give Lenin
and Stalin key roles in it. At the second Congress of the Hungarian Working People’s Party
in March 1951, Rakosi described the international situation in terms of “our defending peace
and fighting against imperialist war arsonists”, and said that the communist parties of the
Soviet Union, the people’s democracies and some capitalist countries came to the fore in this
fight. Cf. https://filmhiradokonline.hu/watch.php?id=10779 (accessed 18 February 2021).
Cf. “In early January 1951, Stalin invited the communist party leaders of the allied states. At
this meeting in Moscow, the lord of Kremlin demanded the immediate launch of an arms
program of a volume and speed that all leaders considered unworkable by the scheduled
time, until the end of 1953. [...] Having returned from Moscow, under the supervision of
Soviet advisers in Budapest, they started to raise the appropriations for the first five-year
plan already underway at a rapid rate. [...] Historiography refers to this plan, corrected in
early 1951, as an ‘elevated’ or ‘intensified’ plan, primarily aimed at increasing the already
preferred military development. [...] Stalin’s new directive, which was almost dated to the
supposed outbreak of The Third World War — and the vehement propaganda associated with
it - demanded an absolute priority for arms industrial development.” Gyarmati: A Rakosi¬
korszak, 168 and 170.
351 Ibid., 171 and 209.
22 Ibid., 171.
251
S
* 60 °