ABSTRACT
The origins of the command economy in Hungary go back to 1947. The most important features of the Soviet model of transportation were the following: total state control over transport vehicles, party oversight, the merging of control and implementation, central command, the economy of shortage and Stakhanovite labour competitions. In the 1950s, the centrally planned system and extensive industrialisation changed the country's pre-war production structure without an antecedent. One of the results of the structural changes was that the ratio of transportation expenses in the total cost of one unit of national product became far larger than before 1938. The cargo shipment plan constituted the most important element of the transportation plan, which summed up the shipping indicators for industrial, agricultural, mining and other sectors. Hungary's Sovietisation resulted in a rapid growth in the performance of cargo shipping. Hungary's leaders in the 1950s were not people who thought in terms of long-term problems of transport policy or geopolitical strategy.
