MUSIC-HUNGARY: Communism Returns to the Hit Parade

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Miklos Vamos (*)

BUDAPEST, Aug 4 1998 (IPS) - Would you believe a simple march tune performed by a symphonic orchestra, with an enlarged drum section, and sung by a strong male choir could be on any country’s hit parade in 1998?

You’d better believe it, because a new compact disc, called “Best of Communism”, a selection of the best-known, or rather most notorious, revolutionary songs and marches of the communist period, has reached the best-seller lists in Hungary.

Typical lyrics go like this:

Oh, a member of the Workers’ Guard Body Ought to have three lives, not just one One for his wife, another for his country, And a third one for his beloved gun.

I have to admit that in my childhood and teens I sang this, and similar refrains, in the school choir – as did practically everyone in Hungary and the rest of the Eastern Bloc in the 950s, 1960s, 1970s, and even in the early 1980s. And I sang them with pleasure because it felt so good to sing along!

I never focused on the lyrics and never really understood them. Therefore it’s even more weird to hear them today.

Most of the selections on the CD are in mono, not stero or even hi-fi. Still the old tunes have gone as high as number seven on the industry charts, and people who once detested these songs now buy them for the “educational entertainment” that a sticker on the cover promises.

It has become a popular gift among friends (I confess that I received it as a birthday present.) The recording has sold at least 15,000 copies here, a hot seller for the Hungaraton-Gong label.

Listening to it, you can enjoy the Internationale, the basic psalm of the international labor movement, written by Frenchmen Pierre Degeyter and Eugene Pottier. Authors of the lyrics and music of most other songs are Russian-Soviet, that is-including the National Anthem of the Soviet Union. The 22 original recordings were digitally remastered so the lyrics are clear but so is their stupidity.

The only non-musical pearl on the disc is the second track: speakers of Russian can enjoy a short speech by Vladimir Lenin. Who else? He’s got quite a nice voice-strong and enthusiastic. It’s a pity that he is shouting.

These songs were sung and heard every day in the Communist era. They were frequently on the radio and performed as we celebrated every festive socialist holiday, such as 1 May, 4 April (Russian troops liberated Hungary on that day in 1945), and 20 August (Constitution Day).

They were also played at opening- and closing-day celebrations of the semesters in every school, and during political gatherings, feasts, rallies, and marches. Our monthly factory and office meetings would start and end with the same routine, as the party secretary would call upon us: “Comrades, let’s stand up and sing the Internationale! And so we did. In every school there was a choir-under the popular assumption that “music belongs to everyone.”

Matyas Rakosi, the first socialist dictator, and his successor, Janos Kadar, were enthusiastic supporters of this method of social enlightenment. The repertoire of the school choirs contained 60 percent Socialist marches and 40 percent traditional choral music.

They were everywhere, but not many people knew the full text, maybe just some lines. The rest were simply hummed. I think most of us believed that was OK-the other guys knew the words.

This phenomenon was similar to the first amateur performances of Anglo-Saxon rock’n’roll, which were sung very often during the same excursions and organized youth evenings.

When rock ‘n roll – especially songs by the Beatles – hit Hungary and the rest of the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, the authorities considered it dangerous, a cunning message of the wicked West. They tried their best to prohibit rock, but it could be heard on Radio Free Europe and on Radio Luxembourg.

Their broadcasts were scrambled by the authorities, and very often we could hear only noises. Thanks to that and to general ignorance of the English language (only Russian was taught at school), the first Hungarian rock groups performed the Beatles songs with not particularly authentic lyrics.

The public address systems and equalizers were so homemade that it wouldn’t make a big difference even for English-speaking audiences, and there were no English-speaking audiences. Later, the leaders of the party recognized that they should learn to live with rock because they could not ban it.

By then young people knew the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other groups’ songs by heart, the same way they knew the obligatory songs of the communist movement. A couple of words here and there, and the rest was la-la-la.

“Best of Communism” has not only landed in the best-seller charts, but also has become a kind of cult object. It would be understandable if that were only among older people who like to take a musical journey through their youth.

As one now-retired friend of mine put it: “older people listen to this music because they think that it is better to be young in a bad political system than to be old in a better one.”

But the success of this selection cannot be explained only by nostalgia, because young people are also buying the compact disc in great numbers and listen to it at parties, trying to sing along. A schoolmate of my daughter once asked me: “did you actually dance while listening to this crap?”

For them, mocking the deceased socialist system simply feels good. So they sing along on parts of the infamous Thanksgiving Song of the Young Pioneers, in thirds:

Thank you, Comrade Rakosi for everything you do, We throw flowers on the road wherever you go, Just you go and trust us, we’ll always follow you! Ever since you led us, our enemies are blue.

Try to sing it aloud in a sweet childlike voice. On the compact disc, it is performed by the Central Pioneer Choir of the Eighth District of Budapest and the Symphonic Orchestra of the Hungarian Radio (1953). It’s so good that the singing of the song is not obligatory anymore. It’s become a musical joke, an audible reminder of our recent past.