Imre Szakál1; 1 Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education, Ukraine
Discussion
The history of the left-wing movements among the interwar Hungarian minorities in the successor states of Austro-Hungary is underresearched. The interwar communist movement and the Transcarpathian Hungarians’ participation in it was almost completely removed from the collective memory of this community. The self-image construction of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia excludes the historical image of the participation of its members in the communist movement.
The success of a party is most often measured by its effectiveness in the elections. The elections in Transcarpathia between 1924 and 1935 show that the Hungarian opposition national parties were not the only ones addressing the Hungarian electorate. One of the most successful parties in the region's elections in the period was the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which in some cases not only competed with ethnically organized Hungarian parties or party blocs in Hungarian-majority settlements but managed to garner more votes than they did. Thus, the basic assumption of this paper is that in addition to the Hungarian opposition political movements which used a national discourse, a different kind of political community organization, the communist movement in Czechoslovakia, had success among the Hungarian minority. In my paper I would like to examine, how did the communist movement become a challenge for the national discourse of the new Hungarian minority elite?
