Ár­pád Popé­ly: Role of the Hun­gar­i­an Com­mit­tee in the cre­ation of the Új Szó and the Cse­ma­dok

The study dis­cuss­es the his­to­ry of the Hun­gar­i­an Com­mitte at the Slo­vak com­mu­nis­tic party lead­er­ship, and with­in this main­ly the role of Új Szó party peri­od­i­cal and the Hun­gar­i­an cul­tur­al organ­i­sa­tion in the estab­lish­ment of the Cse­ma­dok. The role of the com­mit­tee set up in No­vem­ber 1948 was to help party lead­er­ship to re-in­te­grate Hun­gar­i­ans liv­ing in Slo­va­kia and that lost their rights into the polit­i­cal, social, and eco­nom­ic life of the coun­try, to pre­pare and imple­ment deci­sions of the party relat­ing the Hun­gar­i­an minor­i­ty. Although the Hun­gar­i­an mem­bers of the com­m­mit­tee (Ma­jor Ist­ván, Lőrincz Gyu­la, Fábry Ist­ván, Kugler Já­nos, and Rabay Fe­renc) were all old party work­ers who had the con­fi­dence of the par­ty, the dis­closed archive doc­u­ments evi­dence that they opposed to the Slo­vak party lead­er­ship in many issues, and/or to the Slo­vak mem­bers of the com­mit­tee (Daniel Okáli, Ondrej Pavlík, and Ladislav Novomeský), that after its less than one year of its exis­tance, in Octo­ber of 1949 led to the can­cel­la­tion of the Hun­gar­i­an Com­mit­tee.