Dr. Pál Veres managed to become socialist Hungary’s favorite sexologist—without actually being a sexologist. He was a press photographer, a journalist, and a high-school teacher of Hungarian and history. He only obtained a medical degree much later in life, at the age of 56, by which time he was already well-known for his popular science articles in Ifjúsági Magazin (Youth Magazine). He became famous because, in his radio shows, he dared to call a shag a shag.
Once, a listener asked him whether it was possible to masturbate with a vacuum cleaner. Uncle Pali’s answer was short and to the point:
“Depends which end you use—the one that sucks, or the one that blows?”
In socialist Hungary, the standard of living was higher than in other countries of the Soviet bloc. People nowadays credit János Kádár for this, but in fact it was due to the New Economic Mechanism, created by an intellectual workshop brought together by Rezső Nyers from economists and reform-minded, progressive functionaries (Lajos Fehér, Jenő Fock, György Aczél, Miklós Ajtai, Imre Párdi and others). Admittedly, they operated with Kádár’s approval.
Collective farms in the Kádár era
Of course, the socialist collective farm was nothing other than the communist hijacking of the cooperative movement. In the Soviet Union, for example, forced collectivization was such a “success” that in the early 1930s some seven million people starved to death. This was due not only to politics, but also to drought—and, of course, to Stalin’s lapdog, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
Lysenko had peculiar ideas about plant breeding. He denied Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, the existence of chromosomes and genes, and rejected the achievements of Western plant breeding. He imagined that both plants and people could be trained through “hardening.” For instance, if you didn’t water a plant, it would adapt and become drought-resistant. Well—it didn’t. Neither did the plants adapt to drought, nor the peasants to hunger.
During Mátyás Rákosi’s rule, Hungary also attempted to implement Lysenkoism. Traces of this remain in places such as the overgrown ruins of the Tihany “lemon grove” on the Sajkod hillside, or Újhelyi Farm (near Nagykálló), which until the regime change bore the name Lysenko Settlement.
By the Kádár era, however, collective farms were very different from Soviet kolkhozes. They enjoyed far greater autonomy, managed their own affairs, and their members had a direct stake in the profits. Cooperatives also ran small industrial ventures and their own side businesses. Soon Western technologies appeared, and by the late 1970s and 1980s, Western machinery as well. By then John Deere, New Holland, and Claas tractors were working in Hungarian agriculture—and their utilization rates were about one and a half times what they typically were on American farms. And, of course, there was also “Ede’s monster machine”: the RÁBA-Steiger 250, weighing 12.5 tons.
Ede—Horváth Ede, to be precise—was the general director of the Rába Wagon and Machine Works, a confidant of Kádár, and a member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Nevertheless, he managed his factory on rather capitalist principles, and did much for Hungarian-American relations as well. Behind his back he was nicknamed the “Red Baron.” Kádár, for his part, cared more about results than about ideology.
Yet, the Hungarian cooperatives like the Soviet kolkhozes, they were largely self-sufficient in many respects. For instance, they didn’t hire construction companies to put up their buildings—they built them themselves. The stables, chicken houses, and granaries were indeed designed by professional planning offices, but the client, the general contractor, and the technical inspector were all the cooperative itself.
I believe the most significant result of the Hungarian regime change was the dismantling of the collective farms. Not a good result, but a significant one. The new land distribution benefitted only the speculators. The small peasant farms that emerged could do nothing with the huge machinery of the cooperatives. Some people’s plots were narrower than the cutting width of a John Deere combine. But machines were still needed, so enterprising Italian dealers and their Hungarian friends flooded the peasants with smaller, repainted, second-hand tractors that had already been discarded elsewhere. On credit, of course.
But let’s not jump ahead! Let us stay for now in those years when modern grain silos, chicken hatcheries, and dairy farms were being built all over the country.
By the 1980s, the collective farm of Crackpot-on-the-Moor (in reality, a small Transdanubian village with a name that sounds even sillier) had embarked on the construction of a new dairy complex. It was meant to be a thoroughly modern facility, equipped with every kind of technical innovation. They even sent a delegation to America to study the farms there. It was an adventurous building project, far from trouble-free, but in the end—though with a shockingly large budget overrun—the dairy complex was completed, along with the gleaming new milking parlor.
As for what sort of cows the delegation found in Clark County—where there’s mostly desert—well, best not to dwell on that. After all, it isn’t all desert over there! Las Vegas, for example, has some very fine fountains…
And this is where Uncle Pali Veres enters the picture. No—don’t imagine that the pheasant dinner degenerated into an orgy! The joint sessions of the KISZ committees were on other occasions; this would not have been that kind of party. But in fact, there was no party at all. It was canceled. And it was canceled because our protagonist had not listened to Uncle Pali’s radio broadcasts.
The Texas Gate
The delegation did not return home empty-handed. They didn’t win anything in the casinos, but they did bring back the blueprints for the Texas Gate.
The Texas Gate is a clever contraption. Its purpose is to spare the tractor driver, moving between the enclosures, from the endless business of climbing down, opening and shutting gates, all while worrying whether a cow might slip past the tractor and make a run for it. Instead, he can simply drive straight through.
The “gate” is in fact a concrete pit, spanned by steel beams. The tractor, even with its trailer, rolls over the grating with ease. The cattle, however—seeing the gaping depth between the beams—take fright and refuse to set foot on it.
At least, that’s the theory.
In practice, however, it is not enough to slavishly copy a piece of equipment; one must also understand the principle of how it works—and the little details.
What seems to have happened here was that the Hungarian cattle hadn’t read the manual for the gate (or, if they had, they didn’t understand it, since they didn’t know English). Unaware that they were supposed to be frightened of the terrifying depths between the beams, they simply walked onto them. Then they slipped, their legs fell between the bars, got stuck—and broke.
The result was mass emergency slaughter.
Note: Such gates are still in use today, but with slightly different dimensions: the animal’s hoof can’t slip between the pipes. That’s the trick. Of course, this means you need more pipes—and perhaps there wouldn’t be any left over for “private use.” I wouldn’t be surprised if, back then, compared to the American plans, fewer pipes were actually built in. When the Budapest–Vác–Szob railway line was constructed (the first railway in Hungary, built between 1845 and 1847), the sleepers were laid 33 cm apart instead of 30. The “savings”—ten percent of the timber—were stolen. That, too, is part of the folklore in Hungary.
The Vanished Utilities
The dairy’s story had already begun turning into a horror tale with the gates, but the worst was yet to come. After the pens and barns, it was time to build the milking parlor. The interior tiling was nearly finished when they got to the utility hookups.
Only—the utilities had vanished! No sewer, no water, no electricity could be found where they were supposed to be.
The initial shock was followed by an on-site inspection. They summoned the designers, the surveyors, even officials from the Ministry in Budapest. The Hungarian People’s Army sent along a bomb-disposal unit with mine detectors—because you never knew. Perhaps it wasn’t imperialist saboteurs who had spirited away the pipes and cables. Perhaps, for once, even the scrap-metal collectors were innocent. Maybe the earth-moving machines had simply buried the manhole covers under the mud. If so, the detectors would surely locate them!
But they didn’t.
The great and the good stood around in confusion, the bored sappers among them, when along came old Uncle Józsi. The crafty moustached veteran and the cooperative’s chairman didn’t see eye to eye, but they did share one common bond—pears. The pears in question had long since been turned into pálinka, which had calmed tempers after a certain quarrel.
Now the old man needed no encouragement. Seeing the assembled experts scratching their heads, he addressed them:
“God bless, Mr. Chairman, may I ask a question? Do the engineers happen to know which way north is around here?”
“Probably that way,” one of the surveyors ventured, pointing toward a poplar tree.
“Well then, gentlemen engineers, with your permission—this drawing here ought to be turned around, because when we were in the army, they taught us that this arrow in the corner must point north!”
With that he took the site plan from the engineer’s hands, spun it 180 degrees, and gave it back.
At once, enlightenment! The utilities had to be on the other side of the milking parlor. They tramped over, and lo and behold—there they were.
Only now the milking parlor itself seemed a bit odd: as if it had been built… backwards.
With a Vacuum Cleaner?
The milking parlor had been staked out backwards, and so it was built—rotated 180 degrees according to the plans. Now, a dairy farm is a complex technological system, of which milking is just one part. Every day the cows come from the barns and pens, are milked in the parlor, then return.
Anyone who has ever seen a cow before milking knows how restless they can get. Fresh arrivals cannot simply be herded together with those already milked. But the position of the cow barns was fixed; that’s where the animals were coming from. And in the milking parlor the technology also has a set direction: there is an entrance and an exit.
If the parlor stands backwards, you have a curious topological problem. Originally the animals would have made a neat circle from the barns to the parlor and back again. Now the circle was deformed into a figure-eight. Either the incoming and outgoing cows crossed each other’s paths, or an overpass had to be built. That latter solution was quickly rejected—though it would have been a remarkable and eye-catching feat of architecture!
Instead, they chose to “reverse” the milking parlor. The building itself remained, but half of it was torn apart, and the equipment was rearranged in the opposite direction. The operation cost the collective an extra nine million forints—a serious sum in those days, considering the average monthly wage was about four thousand. Even the workers’ changing rooms were sacrificed to the cause.
Still, in the end it worked. There was a successful trial run, official inspections, everything by the book. All that remained was the grand opening. And such an event at a cooperative farm was never just a ribbon-cutting and a few dull speeches, but always crowned with a serious pheasant dinner.
On the appointed morning the distinguished delegation set out from Budapest in black Volgas, with drivers, dressed to the nines. We must not forget, however, that in the 1980s there were no mobile phones and no 24-hour news channels. Thus, the blood ran cold in the veins of the dignitaries when, instead of the smiling chairman and the women’s choir, they were greeted at the dairy by blue-and-white Ladas and uniformed policemen.
The officers sensed the consternation and hastened to reassure the guests:
“There’s nothing to worry about, gentlemen, no one is going to be detained. Nothing to see here, just an accident during the night…”
What had happened was this: the young herdsman on night duty, after the successful trial run, grew terribly bored. Alone in the quiet, he wondered what he might do with himself. Now, thinking can be dangerous for someone unaccustomed to it!
The notion took root in his head: might one perform self-gratification with a milking machine? And once the idea had taken root, it sprouted quickly.
He found the control key, opened the door, and figured out how to start the machine. Then he left the glass control booth, stepped into the milking stall, and took one of the four teat cups.
But this was no backyard milker! The vacuum unit was centralised, not beside the cow. Only the pulsator hose and the milk line reached the stall. There was no emergency stop there—after all, the designer had never imagined a situation in which the cow itself might need to halt the milking.
A milking machine imitates the calf’s sucking, but in many ways it works differently. Inside the cup is a long, bell-shaped rubber liner. A constant vacuum draws the milk into the collector and then into the pail. Between the liner and the shell, the pulsator alternately admits air and vacuum, causing the rubber to squeeze and release rhythmically—stimulating the udder as if a calf were licking.
The vacuum inside the liner is quite strong—less than 0.05 atmospheres of pressure. The rubber is heat- and chemical-resistant, highly durable. The stuffing tube is strong, reinforced with wire, so it can’t be torn.
But there is one crucial structural difference: a cow’s teat is not the same as a man’s private parts. It was, as it turned out, an exceedingly unfortunate combination. The cup clamped on—and would not come off. To shut down the machine one had to reach the control panel back in the glass booth. And that was far away. Very far.
The first workers found the poor fellow in the morning. By then he was already quite blue. He must have struggled for a long time before he bled out.
Attention! Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental! The characters in this tale are entirely fictitious. Even János Kádár and Rezső Nyers are but products of the imagination—just like that Transdanubian village whose real name has been replaced here with Crackpot-on-the-Moor. In fact, the village’s actual name sounds just as silly, only without making any sense at all. What is real, however, is their pheasant—now that they do superbly.