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Kadar's very pliability has made him a failure as a puppet. Where a strong, though hated, leader might have pulled the remnants of the party and police state apparatus together and reimposed it on a defeated and distraught people, Kadar's weak half-measures (e.g., his arrest and then release of workers' council representatives) have merely served to strengthen the people's stand against him. The result is that half the collective farms remain in the hands of the peasants, coal miners still refuse to work, and much of the country's industry is at a standstill. Last week Kadar's government estimated that 200,000 workers were idle as a result of the coal shortage. Meanwhile, a new wave of slowdown strikes was rising ahead.
Everything Solved. Last week a four-man U.N. team at last got into Hungary, apparently so that it could report on the need of economic aid, which Kadar eagerly needs, "even if it comes from capitalist countries." But by week's end the U.N. team had not seen Kadar. That privilege was reserved for the two visitors from Moscow, Khrushchev and Malenkov. In Budapest's Parliament House Khrushchev, in effect, told the Hungarians that they could not expect the same measure of independence as the Poles were now enjoying. Whereas stiff-backed Wladyslaw Gomulka had been able to stand off the bullying Russians, in Hungary the Russians were dealing, not with a man, but with a creature of their torture cells.