It has been not widely analyzed how intense emotions (both positive and negative ones) maintained the Cold War situation between 1945 and 1990: between the Blocks and inside a country (an example of this attitude: Biess, 2020). The topic of this presentation is a blind spot in the history of Eastern European education, namely the role and feelings of teachers and principals during the collectivization. In a one-party socialist system, every state employee (including teachers, managers, local officials, cultural workers, etc.) had to function as a propagandist (Slapentokh, 1989, 106–107); regardless of his/her commitment, and attitudes. Proving loyalty to the official ideology and the requirement to take part in socialist development (industrialization, collectivization, transformation of the culture) might cause conflicts of conscience for teachers, especially in rural areas, where these intellectuals were closely related to their communities.

The context of educators’ activities in mass mobilization campaigns in socialist societies (like collectivization) has already been elaborated (e.g. Fitzpatrick, 1994; Kligman & Verdery, 2011), but the personal views of these participants are mostly missing. I am going to present these through a special case study, showing the final phase of the collectivization in Hungary, in the early months of 1960. Originally, the process of radical change in agriculture was considered to be a field of historical investigation. Historians traditionally focused on the Party regulations, local implementation, and the reactions of the farmers (from collaboration to resistance), meanwhile, the other actors who were involved, remained in the shadow. On the other hand, scholars from the history of education were not interested in that topic, as it seemed to be too far from the issues of schooling, and belongs to the terrain of economic and political history. These all concluded in a forgotten and sometimes tabooed story of the dominant presence of schoolteachers in the collectivization: even the participants did not want to speak about it, because the persuasion of the individual farmers might connect with psychological and physical pressure.

My preliminary statements were the following before the analysis:

1. Education, as a content and activity was subordinated to different ideological and political intentions until the first half of the 1960s in Hungary. Teachers had to fulfil the Party-given goals at that time, with limited professional competencies.
2. Teachers’ (and other social actors’) involvement was enforced and manipulated by the Party, to take the responsibility down to lower levels (Ö. Kovács, 2012): the local staff had to agitate their own families, relatives, pupils’ parents, and so on. In an all-round movement, everyone was a link in the chain.
3. The communist project about social transfiguration was evaluated as a modernization program (even nowadays), and in this progress, the state educationalizes the whole society (Świrek & Pospech, 2021). Teachers had to educate not just the children, but their parents as well – and sometimes the educators needed an education too (Welton, 2014).
4. Propaganda and agitation made parallel universes in this world, where ideology immensely infiltrated everyday reality.

There are two broader dimensions surrounding this theme: the roles, possibilities, and limitations of intellectuals in an authoritarian, totalitarian system (Tismaneanu & Iacob, 2019); and the utilizing emotions in the history of education (Sobe, 2012). In this presentation, I will first outline the socio-historical background of the concrete case, and then comes the analysis of the complex interactions between teachers and their environment in the winter of 1960.

My study is based on unique sources, called ‘The Stories of Cooperatives’ (in Hungarian: Termelőszövetkezet történetek). The Cultural Department of Zala County (a western administration unit in Hungary) launched the call in 1960 to archive the final stage of collectivization on local levels. It was an obligatory task for teachers and principals, and the result was very special. We have reports from 85 villages, authored by 35 school directors, 17 teachers, 14 Party officials, and three leaders from the cooperatives, on 205 pages (some files are anonymous). We haven’t got such a corpus, which covered a whole county on the levels of small villages, through the individual perspectives of the local intellectuals, spoke about fresh experiences – except this ‘Stories…’. The most important questions for a researcher are the following: - What were the goals of ordering these reports? Why did the Party officials want to read these (hi)stories? The answer is rooted in the Soviet initiative by Khrushchev, which tried to create a socialist past, with local heroes and scenes. These descriptions followed the orders of the Party, aimed to legitimate the system, build communities with participation, and make new identities (Donovan, 2015). This genre was called Kraevedenie in Russian and may be familiar to us, if we with current trends like common/public history (Herman, Braster & Andrés, 2023), except about the context. These reports were politically influenced and used, orientating the local actors on how to create their histories. The narrative approaches provide a perfect methodological tool here, as the basis of the analysis is constituted by narratives and interpretations and not ‘raw’ data. According to the prominent work of Hayden White (1973), there are four significant models of the emplotment, how we (as historians, teachers, or both at the same time) construct narratives about our past. One is the so-called romance, with early problems (the resisting village, who didn’t want collectivization), a local hero (the agitator teacher, Party official, agricultural engineer), struggle and fight (convincing the villagers), and finally the success (everyone joined to the collective farm). I focused on the agency during the analysis (Tamura, 2011): Who were the authors and what are their goals to achieve with these stories? These are the characteristics/focal points of the different narrativization: - temporal dimension, - changing levels (space), - a new folklore, - rationalization, - and euphemism, absence.

‘The Stories of Cooperatives’ integrated the focal points: usually they started with a contrasting view between the undeveloped past and the bright socialist future. The local stories were embedded in a broad development of the world, sometimes in tale-like figures and motives to get closer to the audience. The writers rationalized their participation and the necessary progress, which was unavoidable. By doing this, they silenced or reframed the negative, forced elements of the collectivization, which didn’t belong to their good memories. “It was a humiliating task” – as one of them later confessed (Vincze, 2018, 58.). We are just three years after the 1956 Revolution, in which many teachers and students took part – these educators had to prove their competencies later, by doing agitation and work in the youth movement. The propaganda used and abused the traditions, against which the state fought: rural habits, language, and even religious symbols appeared in the texts. The target audience was the rural population, so teachers as cultural experts transformed folk songs into agitation, offering a new Heaven on Earth. Respecting the work of remembering, forgetting, and the mental mechanism of selecting between past events is a great benefit of this research, which can be a good starting point to reveal the forgotten local histories. Theories about cultural memory and school memory (Yanes-Cabrera, Meda & Viñao, 2017; Silova, Piattovea & Millei, 2018) give a good background to this later investigation.

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