This is a project in microhistorical macrosociology. I aim to explore the theoretical implications of a detailed reconstruction of a single extended event. My purpose is to throw light on the interplay among such ideas as art, performance, power, politics, progress, (inter)nationalism, aesthetics, ethics, intimacy, “Europeanness,” class, gender and “race” in the context of global cultural diplomacy.
At 8 am, September 7, 1956, the Performing Arts Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army—one of the gems of the Stalinist system of high culture at the time—left Budapest for a tour of China. This was a monster of a trip: 217 people, on a 14-day journey through the Soviet Union, in a chartered train, tracing the route of the Trans-Siberia Railway, followed by 104 performances in two and a half months in China and then, a two-week return through the USSR. The Ensemble consisted of three groups, each with its soloists: a dance troupe of 24 couples, with its own band, a large men’s choir, and a couple of opera singers, plus a full symphony orchestra. The tour was a resounding success.
In late October 1956, an uprising broke out in Budapest. Hungary exited the Warsaw Pact. A few days later, the Soviet Army returned, and the uprising was forcibly extinguished.
Members of the Ensemble learnt about the revolution from a BBC broadcast. The group convened an emergency meeting in the middle of the night and elected its self-government, referred to in multiple oral histories as “the Revolutionary Worker’s Council,” with men’s choir art director, Major Vass Lajos as its president.
Having worked on this project for over a decade, I have an extensive and unique set of cinematic, visual, and documentary sources: approximately 1700 pages of documents, gathered from the recently opened archives, including those of the secret police and the Foreign Ministry of the erstwhile People’s Republic of Hungary. I also have 1500 black-and-white amateur photographs taken by two members of the tour. In my talk, I will try to link the story of the tour with the concepts mentioned in the title. The presentation will also include screening of a short film by Miklós Jancsó—a documentary and newsreel artist at the time, who eventually became a leading art house director of Hungary of the 1960s and 1970s—a film that provides yet another narrative of the tour, as produced in the immediate aftermath of the Ensemble’s return in December 1956.