Mathematics for the Millions

If Premier Ferenc Nagy and his fellow Cabinet members had paid their return trip from New York to London in Hungarian currency, it would have cost them 14,250,000,000,000,000 pengoes apiece.*In Hungary's abysmal inflation-- the worst in modern history--one U.S. dollar last week bought 38 trillion pengoes. Bookkeepers used a new word: "Mil-pengoe" (one million pengoes), because their figures no longer fitted the ledgers.

Some 4% of Budapest's citizens live in morbid, black-market-borne luxury, nightly jam the few remaining big hotels, famed restaurants like Gundel's or the Cafe Michel, theaters, cabarets and movie houses. For the rest of the people, food rations are down to 556 calories.

To get help a delegation of Hungarian Cabinet members has made the rounds of Washington, London and Paris. Head delegate was astute, affable, peasant-born Premier Ferenc Nagy, one of the founders of the middle-of-the-road Small Holders Party in 1930. Despite strong Russian pressure, the Small Holders had polled more than 60% of last year's election votes.

Nagy's chief co-delegate was Vice Premier Matyas Rakosi, a poised, sharp-tongued, veteran Communist who got his start as People's Commissar under Bela Kun's terror regime and spent years in Hungary's jails. In 1939, well aware of his importance to Hungary's future, the

Russians got him out in exchange for some old flags the Czarist armies had captured from Louis Kossuth in 1849.

In Washington and London the delegation made a poignant plea for democratic aid in solving Hungary's economic and political difficulties. Would the U.S. and Britain be willing to support Hungarian requests for a moratorium on the crushing $200 million reparations burden to Russia? Would the Western democracies side with Hungary on such matters as the revision of Transylvania's award to Rumania? Would the West press harder, against Russian reluctance, for the internationalization of the Danube?

Communist Boss Rakosi knew that the solution of these problems depended on Moscow, rather than Washington and London. Whenever the discussion touched Hungary's relations with Russia, middle-of-the-roader Nagy skirted skillfully, Communist Rakosi smiled a bland, gold-toothed smile.

To their bankrupt country the Hungarian delegation will bring:1) a U.S. promise to restore all property removed by the Germans from Hungary after Jan. 20, 1945; 2) a U.S. promise to return, possibly by Aug. 1, Hungarian gold (approximately $32 million) now held by U.S. forces in Germany, to help stabilize Hungarian currency; 3) some hope of a $10 million credit to purchase U.S. surplus trucks, jeeps, construction material, medical supplies, food, clothing.

On more important matters, Premier Nagy and his delegates got nothing beyond cautious sympathy. As long as the Big Power impasse paralyzed Europe, Hungary's problems would remain unsolved.

*Not including the 15% federal tax.

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