“This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian
Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted
in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in
the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and
power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen – with
Soviet assistance – its political legitimacy among different national and
social groups.
The communist national policy
followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the
relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for
the German occupation and were denied political and even civil rights until
1948. The Hungarians of Transylvania were provided with full civil, political,
cultural, and linguistic rights to encourage political integration. The
ideological premises of the Hungarian Autonomous Region followed the Bolshevik
pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early
1920s. The Hungarians of Székely Land would become a “titular nationality”
provided with extensive cultural rights. Yet, on the other hand, the Romanian
central power used the region as an instrument of political and social
integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. The management
of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory
and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for
the far larger “nationalization” of the Romanian communist regime which,
starting from the late 1950s, resulted in “ethnicized” communism, an aim
achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. After the
Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian
individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. In 1960 the HAR also
suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being
replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. The decisive shift from a class
dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the
Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a
long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional
state-building ideologies.”
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