The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives

12. Changing Times: Kanadai Magyar Munk

12. Changing Times: Kanadai Magyar Munkás (The Canadian-Hungarian Worker) and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution Christopher Adam The refugee crisis following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution initiated a time of change, growth, and transformation for Canada’s Hungarian communities. The arrival of almost 38,000 refugees in 1956–1957 had a significant impact on the Hungarian-Canadian press, and newspapers found themselves with the possibility of attracting thousands of new readers from a group that reflected great cultural, class, educational, and political diversity. The Kanadai Magyar Munkás (Canadian-Hungarian Worker), the second-largest Hungarian weekly printed in Canada, one that was openly affiliated with the country’s Communist Party and was a supporter of Hungary’s post-war regime, found itself in a very delicate situation following the 1956 revolution. Canada’s two major anti-Communist, conservative weeklies were, at first, in a celebratory mood at the apparent fall of Hungary’s Communist regime, but this was followed by ferocious indignation after the Soviet repression of the revolt, on November 4, 1956. The Munkás, however, was unsure how to handle the situation and how, in retrospect, it would explain its jingoistic support for Hungary’s discredited Stalinist regime, as well as what approach it would take when faced with the wave of refugees arriving in Canada. At first, the Munkás found itself having to explain to its readers why the paper had been so supportive of a Stalinist regime, which by then had been discredited by Nikita Adam Changing Times: Kanadai Magyar Munkás 275 Khrushchev in his speech at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. This, however, was followed by a campaign aimed at encouraging the 1956 refugees to return home. The Munkás asserted that the refugees had been victimized by Canadian authorities and their Hungarian-Canadian collaborators, while trying to convince them that they were unwanted by the country’s working class and offering the asylum-seekers assurances that repatriation to Hungary was their best option. The primary goal of the Hungarian-Canadian press focused less on language maintenance and the preservation of the group’s cultural heritage and much more on infusing the community with specific political messages, relating to Hungarian politics. Hungarians were not the only ethnic groups in Canada to use their press as a tool to maintain a sense of patriotism among immigrants and to participate in political battles taking place in their home county. Joseph M. Kirschbaum, for example, argued that Slavic groups in Canada used their newspapers as a forum to vent grievances and present opinions about the political and social situation back home.1 A close examination of these newspapers revealed that Slavs in Canada were often divided along the same political and ideological lines as their compatriots living in the home country. Although most Hungarian-Canadian newspapers were nationalistic, just like Slavic papers, tension and conflicts between various Hungarian papers of different political stripes characterized the Hungarian-Canadian press. Conservative, liberal, and far-right publications competed with each other for the prized “ownership” of the 1956 revolution and its memory. Unlike most other ethnic papers, almost all Hungarian publications rallied around a single event, and each camp tried to interpret the legacy of the revolution in light of its respective ideology. The impetus behind the formation of Hungarian ethnic newspapers after 1956 and their raison d’etre also appears to be different from that of most other immigrant communities in Canada and the United States. Sociologist Susan Olzak argues that most white ethnic newspapers in the United States were established out of group solidarity, during a period of hostility toward the immigrant community on the part of both the majority population and other minorities.2 In the case of Hungarian-Canadian newspapers published after 1956, competing periodicals often arose and flourished not because of 276 The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Canadian and Hungarian Perspectives external attacks directed toward the community but due to pervasive ideological differences within the community itself and the complicated memory of a recently suppressed revolution, as well as the refugee crisis.3 As with most East European ethnic groups in Canada during the interwar period, Hungarian communities across the countryĐespecially those in industrial areas of southern Ontario and a few districts in WinnipegĐwere also home to declared Communists and Communist organizations. In the case of the Hungarians, however, the 1956 revolution and the arrival to Canada of tens...