>It is a supreme irony that the demands of today’s hard right—for an independent Hungarian-language state university in Kolozsvár, a Hungarian Autonomous Region in Transylvania—had been achievements (later suppressed) of the Stalinist era. There were not only privileges for people of proletarian origin, but also for minority cadres. The Leninist programme had encompassed the development of all ethnic cultures: the now warring regional or ethnic elites of the Soviet bloc had been created by the Party. National cultures that like harking back to a fictitious Middle Age had been endowed with a script—then a press, publishing, higher education, theatre—by literate commissars with romantic leanings, who believed in pristine folk cultures in the Urals, far away from decadent St Petersburg. Faust was translated into dozens of languages by poets who were themselves just one generation from general illiteracy. These nations are now watching pop videos on YouTube.
https://newleftreview.org/II/80/g-m-tamas-words-from-budapest