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Soviet Hungary offers a totally different picture of the course of development taken by the revolution. Here, small-scale landed property was left untouched, whilst the large and middle holdings were disappropriated by decree without, however, any distribution of the land to the peasants being carried into effect. Matters could take this turn in Hungary because there the peasants were as innocent of any active role in the revolution as newborn babes. Varga describes this as follows:
"In Hungary there was no revolution in the proper sense of the word. Power fell into the lap of the proletarians, so to speak, legally and more or less overnight. In the countryside there was no more than a minuscule revolutionary movement, but on the other hand also no armed resistance. For this reason it was possible to carry out a legal disappropriation of holdings without any opposition, and the large landed estates were retained intact. ... We emphasise the word legal, since it must be openly admitted that, in the majority of cases, disappropriation was carried out by purely legal means, and that in many cases this brought about so little social change that the population in the countryside often possessed no clear understanding that disappropriation had taken place at all ... In those cases in what the former estate owner remained in command of the disappropriated estate as a state-employed manager, for the time being at least no change whatever took place. The former estate owner remained in the same superior dwelling, drove with the same coach-and-four, permitted himself to be addressed as before as 'Sir'. The whole consisted merely in the fact that he no longer possessed the power of his former property as he wished without let or hindrance, but was compelled to follow the directives of the estate administration. Of this, the agricultural worker noticed very little; the sole significance the revolution held for him was that he was now in receipt of a much higher income than before." (E.Varga: Die wirtschaftspolitischen Probleme der proletarischen Diktatur, p.103).
However, matters did not take the same course everywhere. Some of the large landed estates were declared to be productive associations, in which there was a semblance of management and administration having apparently been placed in the hands of the workers.
"The separate estates were formed into production cooperatives. The cooperatives of a given district were combined under a common district management. All such production cooperatives were combined to form the 'Provincial Management Centre of the Agricultural Production Cooperatives', which then came directly under the control of the Department for Arable Cultivation of the Supreme Economic Council. This particular form of production cooperative was chosen on account of the social backwardness of the agricultural workers. Had we declared the large estates to be simply state property, the wage demands of the workers would have been limitless, whilst the intensity of labour would have fallen to a minimum. By adopting this method, however, the possibility of exerting pressure for a certain level of labour discipline and intensity was obtained, on the grounds the net yield of the estate accrues to the workers themselves. Another result of adopting this method was that the demands of the agricultural workers that legal title of the land should become their own personal property was satisfied to some degree. ... These concessions possessed little significance in practice, since the accounting procedures (book-keeping) were held under central administration. The intention, of course, was that, after a period sufficient for the educational enlightenment of the workers had passed, the disappropriated landed estates would be openly declared to be state property and the workers to be state employees, with exactly the same status as the industrial workers". (E. Varga: ibid, p.105).
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