News

On the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death, the Nézőpont Institute and the Institute for the Research of Communism jointly conducted a public opinion poll on the communist leader and communism. This revealed that the majority of Hungarians (52 percent) consider Lenin to be responsible for mass murders, and three quarters (76 percent) disagree with the erection in Western Europe of statues of communist dictators.

 Lenin died one hundred years ago, on 21 January 1924. After the "Great October Socialist Revolution" – which was neither great, nor in October, nor a revolution – Lenin and his comrades embarked on the establishment of the most inhumane dictatorship in history: mass murders, forced labour camps, terror, misery and a previously unimaginable wave of hatred, which over the course of the following hundred years would lead to the deaths of around one hundred million people.

One hundred years after Lenin's death, and three and a half decades after the fall of communism in Hungary, the Nézőpont Institute and the Institute for the Research of Communism investigated whether Hungarians continue to believe in the cult of Lenin constructed by communist leaders.

The majority of Hungarians condemn Lenin: more than half of the respondents (52 percent) believe he was responsible for mass murders, although one in five (19 percent) have doubts. Among Hungarians under 40, who reached adulthood after the fall of communism, an above-average proportion (61 percent) say that Lenin was a mass murderer. The cult of Lenin and his comrades is not popular among Hungarians either. More than three quarters (76 percent) of those polled disapprove of the erection in Western Europe of statues of prominent figures related to communist dictatorships, and only one tenth (11 percent) approve of it. Hungarian perceptions of communism are more varied than those of Lenin. 52 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition that "communism was fundamentally a good idea, but its implementation was flawed", while 37 percent disagree.

Nevertheless, not all those who blame communism only for its implementation (52 percent  of all respondents) automatically believe in communism. More than half of those asked think that communism based on equal distribution of wealth is not even attainable (30 percent of all respondents), and only a third of them believe that, even though it failed in the twentieth century, communist ideology could be successfully implemented (18 percent of all respondents).

Thus, overall, 37 percent of Hungarians do not regard communism as a good idea, regardless of the attempts made to implement it, and another 30 percent do not believe that the idea can be transformed into reality. Hungarians are anti-communist, with only 18 percent believing that communism is a good idea and can be implemented. It is also worth pointing out that one in three respondents could not or did not want to give an opinion on the matter (32 percent).

Methodology

The latest opinion poll by the Nézőpont Institute was conducted from 15–17 January, based on telephone interviews with 1,000 people. As in all such surveys, the sample is representative of the population aged 18 and over in terms of sex, age, region, type of settlement and education level. With a sample size of 1,000 and a reliability level of 95 per cent, the sampling error is ± 3.16 per cent. Base = the adult Hungarian population.