Hungarian Bulletin, 1951 (5. évfolyam, 86-108. szám)
1951-01-16 / 86. szám
Whatever part of the country we visit everywhere we come across the results of the first year of the Five Year Plan. If a western visitor crosses the Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom, the Austrian-Hungarian frontier station, his eyes immediately meet concrete, manifest results. Going towards Budapest, he sees from the windows of the car speeding bast, modern buildings, health centres, new dwelling units and culture centres. Travelling in the direction of Budapest from the border, he notices the new buildings of the State waggon factory, a new hospital and several-story tall, modern workers’ housing projects. He sees shop windows crammed with goods, brand-new Hungarian-made lorries, and everywhere scaffoldings and building sites. The abstract figures of the first year of the Plan have materialized in concrete and steel, have turned into textiles and baby carriages, silk and confectionary. Continuing our journey, we come to a new industrial plant and along it a new "Sooialist .town". Where a brief time ago fields stretched, now the buildings of the Danubian Alumina Plant rise,' This plant makes semi-finished aluminium from the bauxite which Hungary was once forced to export as raw material. Parks and forest belts separate the plant from the three-story houses with central heating where the workers, engineers and office workers live. This new factory and the workers’ town came into existence in the year 1950, just as farther to the south, the resort hotels on the shores of Lake Balaton or the sanatorium in the protected valley of thé Bakony mountain were born this year, Going further East, we get to the banks of the Danube. Hear the village of Dunapentele, on the willow-covered, rolling countryside, the outlines of the biggest project of the Hungarian Five Year Plan, of the .Danubian Iron Works and of a new city are talcing shape. The building of this new base of Hungarian heavy industry was begun here in 1950. In the place of scattered forests and sandy lowlands now scaffoldings stand, engine-driven concrete mixers, cranes and excavators are working. In a year or two, 30-55,000 people will work here, where before the beginning of the Five Year Plan the shepherds from the neighbouring villages herded grazing cows and the fishermen’s nets were put out to dry... • Whichever way we continue our journey in the Hungarian People’s Republic, we everywhere discover projects of the Five Year Plan. In the South, in the city of Szeged, the- new combined textile mill, equipped with Soviet-made cards and spinning mules, is already operat•ing. Towards the North, in Miskolc, hundreds of future engineers are studying at the University of Technology, which, when completed, will be four times the size of the London Parliament. In Budapest scores of new factories and public buildings were erected. The biggest bridge in Central Europe, the two-kilometre-long Stalin Bridge is an achievement of the first year of the Five Year Plan... The tunnel drilling machines are busy on several points of the city at once, working on the first, east-west, tube system of the underground. The beginning of this construction was also one of the events of the past year. Developments r that can Be Measured These were just dabs of colour from the all-over picture öf last year’s developments. In truth, these developments encompassed every aspect of_life. The output of Hungarian industry increased by over one-third in 12 months, exceeding double the 1958 production. - 2 -