This collection of Eugen Varga’s writings contains texts he published after having joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1919. Many of Varga’s publications were also published in English translation. In several cases, however, the Comintern omitted translating them into English. The Comintern’s language was German. The expanding Comintern bureaucracy in Moscow comprised mostly immigrants originating from Central Europe where German was the language of the educated layers of the population. This was certainly also the case in Varga’s native Hungary.
Varga was a prolific writer, dictating his articles to secretaries. Personal assistants were also conducting additional research for his publications. This explains why his scientific and militant production could grow enormously. In 1964, when Varga died, his bibliography contained more than 1,300 articles and some 80 books and pamphlets. Making a selection of them was a hazardous task. Having worked as a newspaper journalist, Varga used to assemble and mix texts. As Varga never pretended to be an ‘original’ thinker, but only a Communist militant serving the cause of the revolutionary proletariat, he can hardly be called the Comintern’s theoretician or ideologue. In the 1930s, when Stalin’s hold on the Bolshevik Party had become absolute, Varga would become the dictator’s propagandist and adviser. He authored policy papers largely based on actual economic reports, statistics and newspaper articles. Varga’s ‘industrial writing’ was nonetheless framed within a strictly Marxist context in which Marx’s Capital and Theories of Surplus-Value were many times quoted. Lenin and Stalin were also often quoted in order to stress the role of the victorious October Revolution and the revolutionary movements in the world.
This selection opens with Varga’s report Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship written in 1919–20 during his detention in Austria after the fall of the Hungarian Councils’ Republic. According to Lenin, this is probably the best account of the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary. This report would also establish Varga’s fame as an economic expert authoring all the economic reports to the Comintern congresses.
During the Second World War, Varga became Molotov’s expert advising the latter on postwar issues, especially with regard to the problem of German reparation payments and the recently founded international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, or the Marshall Plan. Varga’s academic and political disgrace in 1947 was the result of the so-called ‘Varga controversy’ breaking out and found its origins in the publication of his book Changes in the Economy of Capitalism Resulting from the Second World War in which he reported on the changing role of the capitalist state.
This selection of Varga’s writings is in some way a spin-off of my Varga biography entitled Stalin’s Economist: The Economic Contributions of Jenő Varga (Routledge), published in 2011.
For this publication, some additional research was nonetheless required. For checking Varga’s quotes and references, I spent much time in several archives and libraries. I only mention here the libraries of the University of Amsterdam, the University of Utrecht, the Library of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam or the Royal Library in The Hague. I could rely on the services of the RWTH Aachen Hochschulbibliothek, the Universitäts- und StadtBibliothek of the Universität zu Köln, the Universitätsbibliothek of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, the Arbejdermuseet & Arbejderbevægelsens Bibliotek og Arkiv in Taastrup, the AMSAB Archives in Ghent and Antwerp, the Library and Archives of the Institut Émile Vandervelde (IEV) and the Documentation and Archives Centre of the Communist Movement (DACOB) in Brussels, the Library of Congress in Washington, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, the British Library in London and the Library of Harvard University. Dr. Ludger Syré of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe informed me about articles Isaac Deutscher published in The Economist. With the help of librarian Zsuzsa Nagy, I could often consult the rich collection of the Corvinus University Library in Budapest. In addition, I did some more research at the Hungarian State Archives (MOL), the archives of the Institute of Political History – Oral Archives, the Open Society Archives (OSA), the György Lukács Archives, and the archives and library of the Institute of Political History in Budapest.
My greatest pleasure at the completion of this project is to thank publicly those who have contributed directly and indirectly, in a major or minor part. Maurice Andreu read the introductory chapter and commented on the texts chosen for this collection. The Varga family remained interested in the progress of this project along the way, while Mira Bogdanović did the same when I was sometimes struggling with Varga’s German-Austrian idiom. Without the help of the late Sergey S. Artobolevskiy this project would not have been completed.
André Mommen
Lanaken, July 2016