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CHAPTER FIVE
The Creation of the Hungarian People's Democracy, 1945-56
THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND TO THE GRADUAL COMMUNIST
TAKEOVER, 1945-48
With the expulsion
of the last Wehrmacht units on Hungarian soil on 4
April 1945 and the country's complete occupation by the Red Army the war had
come to an end. Yet it was a long time before Hungary achieved the stabilisation necessary to create a democratic order and
overcome the immense damage caused by the war. In many places the Soviet
soldiers had been greeted as liberators, but excesses like rapes,
indiscriminate arrests and the deporation of over
250,000 persons to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union soon changed the civilian population's
perceptions. The piecemeal dismantling of plant and installations to pay for
reparations and the unlimited power accrued by the chairman of the Allied
Control Commission, Marshall K. E. Voroilov, made
people adopt a more realistic attitude as the character of the new régime
began to emerge more clearly. Around 400,000 Hungarians had been killed in
the Second World War. Direct damage to property was estimated at about 22
billion pre-war pengé, a figure which represented
about four or five times the national income for 1938 and about 40 per cent
of the nation's total wealth. The destruction of all the bridges over the
Danube and the Tisza and heavy losses in the transport sector, amounting to
35 per cent of Hungary's railway installations, over 80 per cent of its
rolling stock and the entire Danube fleet, had a particularly damaging
effect. A quarter of all dwellings had suffered shelling and bomb damage. The
housing stock in Budapest
had been particularly badly hit. According to initial estimates, 50 per cent
of the country's industrial installations and plant had been totally destroyed.
As a result of these losses and shortages of raw materials, production in May
1945 reached only 30 per cent of its pre-war levels. Agriculture had lost
half of its livestock and a third of its machinery, with the result that the
grain harvest in 1945, also affected by the radical land reform, produced a
yield of only 30 per cent of the pre-war average. Galloping inflation, caused
by Germany
running up a debt of 1.5 billion Marks by the end of 1944, took off in the
spring of 1945. Since Hungary's
financial reserves were soon completely exhausted, food could eventually only
be obtained by bartering with objects of recognised
value.
Under the Soviet occupation the Communists,
who had been banned ever since the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in August
1919, tried immediately -- and very successfully -- to exploit the collapse
of the Horthy régime and its political, social, administrative and judicial
institutions. The party leaders returning from Soviet exile in early November
1944 could depend on the support of two to three thousand Hungarian
Communists, who were not, however, given any influential positions in the
provisional Central Committee of the revived Hungarian Communist Party (Magyar
Kommunista Párt -- MKP) led by its chairman, Ernő Gerő, and his
deputy, Imre Nagy. The "'Programme
for the Democratic Reconstruction and Future Development of Hungary'",
published in Debrecen on 30 November 1944, was all but unanimously adopted by
the Hungarian National Independence Front (Magyar Nemzeti
Függetlenségi Front) which had been founded
with active Communist assistance and thus became the basis of the Provisional
National Government's policies. In this government Communist Party members at
first secured only the ministries of agriculture, industry and transport and
social welfare. But the interior minister, Ferenc Erdei, who nominally belonged to the National Peasants'
Party -- which, in the meantime, had been strongly infiltrated by the
Communists -- was a crypto-Communist who saw to it that the 'Political Police
Section' set up in late 1944 (originally ÁVO, later ÁVH) could be used as an
instrument of the Communist Party. By exploiting their control of the police,
whose economic section was used to intimidate the 'class enemy', and by
controlling meetings and assemblies, the postal and telegraph services, the
radio and the movement of people and goods, together with granting material
privileges under the guise of 'social welfare' and implementing a popular
land reform, thus creating new dependencies, the Communists gained a degree
of influence in the country which far outweighed their actual numbers and
former political significance.
As dislike of the occupying Red Army grew
among the vast majority of Hungarians, the Soviet troops soon did not bother to
conceal their open support of the Communists. The preferential backing which
the Soviet occupation power gave to the Communists benefited them immediately
after the cessation of hostilities when they began taking over control of the
administration and local government in the name of the Independence Front in
order to replace the traditional political institutions with national
councils at all levels. They also benefited from being given places on the
councils as equal partners alongside the older-established and more popular
Social Democrats and Smallholders, and frequently took over the key position
of chairman. The call to safeguard the unity of the working class and join
forces in the process of reconstruction proved inadequate in making the
representatives of the olderestablished Social
Democrats and the Trade Union Council go along with the Communists who had to
rely on the support of the National Peasants' Party. But the increasingly
employed threat of asking the Soviet occupation power to intervene, together
with Communist control of the political tribunals and people's courts, soon
achieved the desired effect of discouraging or totally silencing potential
opponents.
However it was only when the veteran
Communist, Mátyás Rákosi,
returned to Hungary in
February 1945 with detailed instructions from Moscow that the Hungarian Communist Party
committed itself totally to Stalin's party line. The Central Committee of the
Budapest Communist Party, led by Rákosi, which had
come out of illegality on 19 January, merged with the Debrecen party headquarters on 23 February
and Rákosi declared himself General Secretary. At
the party's national congress on 20-21 May 1945 the Communists employed
extremely nationalistic language when they announced their readiness to cooperate
with all democratic elements in the task of national reconstruction, seen as
the most urgent problem facing the country. The attempt to combine
nationalism and Communism by stressing popular national issues, especially
territorial ones like northern Transylvania and Slovakia, was justified by
the argument that the heightening of nationalist feelings was merely an
intermediate stage on the way to true internationalism and any denial of
national interests simply meant that the class enemy would be able to exploit
these for his own political ends.
This policy direction was a concession to
the views held by most of the country's home-based, nationalistically minded
Communists. Unlike those members who had returned from exile in Moscow, they had experienced
the war and its accompanying persecutions at first hand and in their own
country. They did not view Hungary as a territory occupied by the Red Army
and a mere satellite of Moscow, but as a country which would have to undergo
a revolution inspired by their own national motivations and carried out by
indigenous elements, if necessary with the backing of Soviet troops. They
stressed the need to mobilise progressive
democratic social forces in order to develop Socialism within the framework
of a 'new democracy' and geared their domestic political programme
to implementing long-overdue political, social and economic reforms. These
would not necessarily have to be doctrinaire measures, but would be intended
to deprive their political opponents of their power base. Thus the overriding
priority for Hungary's 'homegrown Communists', as they were called, was to
create an effective political organisation which
would consist of a nucleus of disciplined supporters at the centre of a
larger number of affiliated groups who sympathised
with most of their short-term aims.
It was to be expected that the 5,000 or so
members of the group which made up the Moscow
'Apparatchiks' or 'Muscovites' would seek to establish much closer
ties with Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party. The prevailing view amongst
this group was that only the powerful backing of the Soviet
Union's experienced and purposeful political leaders as well as
the presence of the Red Army could prevent the disruptive possibility of
foreign intervention before they had had time to carry out a national
'revolution'. Only the Soviet leaders could, in their view, obviate the
national animosity that existed between Hungary
and its neighbours, especially Rumania and Czechoslovakia. Stalin had also
known how to ensure a high degree of obedience towards the Soviet Communist
Party's dictates because the leaders he designated and made personally
responsible to him were a mixture of revolutionary heroes, martyrs and Stalinist
bureaucrats who were relatively inexperienced and isolated from the
population and even within their circle of party colleagues in Hungary
itself. Their insecurity and aggression, which they had developed as a result
of their long period of imprisonment, exile or membership of an ethnic
minority, their lack of popular support and, despite outward party
discipline, often barely concealed personal animosity within the small party
leadership, guaranteed that Moscow's instructions would be faithfully carried
out. In the cease-fire agreement of 20 January 1945, the USSR had reduced Hungary's
sovereignty to a minimum -much more than was the case with Russia's
other enemies. This allowed the Kremlin to deploy its own Soviet experts in
the process of restructuring the government and to place Hungarian adherents
completely loyal to Moscow in all key positions in the civil service, army
and police to ensure that the Soviet Communist Party's absolute power to
command and the Hungarian Party's unconditional subordination to Stalin's
personal rule were guaranteed. The growing tensions between individual groups
within the Hungarian Communist Party, between the hard core of Hungarian
Communists -- later called 'national Communists' -- the 'Muscovites', Spanish
and Chinese civil war veterans, suspected of being 'Internationalists',
western émigrés and the victims of German concentration camps, were at first
of little political significance.
Thanks to Stalin's backing Mátyás Rákosi ( 1892-1971) was
able to take over the party leadership unopposed. After a period as a
prisoner of war in Russia
during the First World War, he had joined the Hungarian Communists after his
release and during the Soviet dictatorship had held various posts in the
provincial party organisation, assuming overall
command of the Red Guard in its final days. He had made his way to the Soviet
Union via Vienna
and had been employed latterly as a party secretary on the executive
committee of the Comintern. Entrusted with the task
of reconstructing the Hungarian Communist Party, he returned to his homeland
in 1924, only to be arrested a year later and eventually sentenced to life
imprisonment. It was not until 1940 that he was expelled to the Soviet Union. In February 1945, he returned to Hungary to
find Ernő Gerő
already there. Gerő had similarly spent a long
period in Soviet exile, but, in contrast to Béla
Kun who fell victim to the purges in 1939, had survived Stalin's reign of
terror and, thanks to his work for the Comintern in
France, Belgium and Spain, had a good knowledge of
international affairs. Imre Nagy ( 1896-1958) had
also been in exile in Moscow.
He, too, had been won over to Bolshevism whilst a prisoner-of-war in Russia and after years of working underground
in Hungary had reached the
Soviet Union from Vienna
in 1928. During the Second World War he had been put in charge of the
Hungarian broadcasts of 'Radio Kossuth' and during his time there had worked
alongside József Révai (
1898-1959). Révai was widely regarded as the main
ideologue of the Soviet dictatorship in 1919 and who, interrupted by a spell
in prison between 1931 and 1934, had tried many times to revive the Communist
movement in Hungary. As a political journalist and editor-in-chief of the
party newspaper, Szabad Nép (A Free People), and finally
minister for national education, he was given the task of imposing
ideological conformity on Hungary.
László Rajk
( 1908-1949), a former teacher who had been expelled from the university of Budapest for his Communist activities
in 1932, had a different experience. As a member of the National Federation
of Hungarian Building Workers he had been involved in organising
nationwide strikes in 1935 and had taken an active part in the Spanish Civil
War as party secretary in the Hungarian Batallion
of the International Brigades. After a spell of internment in France he had escaped to Hungary where
he was again interned until the end of September 1944. For a short time
thereafter he was one of the original organisers of
the Hungarian Front. Imprisoned once more and deported to Germany he took no further part in active
politics until May 1945 when he built up a very powerful position as
secretary of the Budapest
party organisation, member of the Central Committee
and Politburo, deputy General Secretary of the Communist Party and interior
minister. Of the Communists who had spent the war in Hungary only János Kádár, born in 1912,
gained prominence. Imprisoned for two years in 1935 following his early
involvement in the Communist Youth League, he held an important party post
between 1940 and 1941, and, as a Central Committee secretary, had taken part
in rebuilding Hungary's banned Communist party from the beginning of 1943
onwards. Although he was promoted to the new Central Committee and Politburo
in February 1945 and rose as secretary of the Greater Budapest party organisation to become deputy General Secretary of the
Communist Party in 1946, he was undoubtedly a second-rank member of a party
hierarchy dominated by the 'Muscovites'.
After a highly unscrupulous recruiting
campaign the Communist Party was eventually able to win support for its aims
from sympathisers and idealists, opportunists and
fellow-travellers, fascist converts and frightened
civil servants, former Szálasi supporters and
members of thelumpenproletariat. Also, some
of the mainly Social Democratic workforce and rural poor now joined the party
out of conviction. In February 1945, it had 30,000 members and by July of the
same year this figure had risen to 225,000 members. By January 1946 it had risen
further to almost 610,000. Thereafter, membership increased only gradually
from 660,000 in December 1947 to 887,472 in June 1948. But, despite these
impressive figures the Communists had no hope of coming to power by legal,
democratic and parliamentary means, although they were constantly able to
extend their sphere of influence thanks to the support and backing they
received from the Soviet-dominated Allied Control Commission regardless of
objections from the American and British commissioners.
The main opposition to the Communists came
from the Independent Party of Smallholders, Agricultural Workers and Citizens
(Független Kisgazda,
Földmunkás és Polgári Párt) which was refounded in Soviet-occupied Szeged on 23 November 1944. Its Supreme
National Council entrusted the Calvinist
Reform Church
pastor, Zoltán Tildy (
party leader), and Ferenc Nagy ( chairman), with
the party leadership on 19-20 August 1945. This party, which numbered more
than 900,000 members by the summer of 1945 and had advocated a greater
measure of political democracy, social justice and a 'firm new national
policy on land' since 1930, was fully prepared to cooperate with any socially
relevant groups within the framework of the Hungarian National Independence
Front. However, it saw itself increasingly as a party which stood above
social class differences and combined a belief in the bourgeois-democratic
way of life, defence of private property and
freedom of worship with the aim of creating 'a genuine democracy to be built
upon Hungary's democratic traditions and imbued with the spirit of Hungary'.
Although the Smallholders continued to work within the Provisional Government
and the Independence Front, the Communists never tired of denouncing these,
their strongest political opponents, as disguised heirs to Horthy's brand of
fascism. They attempted to weaken them by provoking secessionist defections
and putting pressure on their popular party leaders through slanderous
accusations, intimidation and police action.
The Communist Party also manipulated the
left wing of the National Peasants' Party which had grown out of the populist
movement and had been founded as far back as June 1939 (Nemzeti
Parasztpárt). Centred
on the newspaper Szabad Szó (The Free Word), this radical
Socialist party led by left-wing intellectuals and representing the agrarian
proletariat, first began to be more politically effective within the
Hungarian National Independence Front. Its plans for land reform, published
on 14 January 1945, called for the breaking up of all estates of more than
100 hold (i.e. 57.5 hectares), and formed the
basis of the decree issued on 17 March 1945 which abolished the large estates
and provided for land to be redistributed for the benefit of the rural poor.
All the Smallholders Party's attempts to achieve closer cooperation with the
National Peasants' Party, which numbered 170,000 members in the summer of
1945, failed because of opposition from the latter's chairman Péter Veres and its leaders who
leaned heavily towards the Communists. The efforts of its General Secretary, Imre Kovács, to remove
Communist sympathisers from the party's
headquarters, also proved unsuccessful, especially after the party's
incorporation into the "'Left-Wing Bloc'" on 5 March 1946. Thus,
the National Peasants' Party drifted more and more into the Communist camp
and began to advocate 'the development of a people's democracy', the nationalisation of industry and collectivisation
of agriculture without being able to prevent its cessation of independent
political activity in the autumn of 1948 and self-inflicted dissolution a
year later.
The Social Democratic Party, which had been
driven underground during the Second World War, had been able to reactivate
over 350,000 members, mainly industrial workers, by the end of 1945 with its
slogan 'Democracy today, Socialism tomorrow'. It supported the idea of a
people's republic, radical democratic reforms, the nationalisation
of key industries and the confiscation of the great estates. Under Árpád Szakasits, who was
elected General Secretary in August 1945, and a majority of leaders from its
left wing, the Social Democratic Party found it increasingly difficult to
resist the Communist call for working-class unity and, as part of the
'Left-Wing Bloc', increasingly espoused the latter's aims more openly. The
party leadership frustrated both ex-minister Károly
Peyer's attempt early in 1946 to return the party
to a more independent line and the negotiations, held in the autumn of 1947,
aimed at achieving the closer cooperation of all anti-Communist groups under
the leadership of the Smallholders' Party. By February 1948, Social Democrats
who supported the idea of the party pursuing its own independent policies had
been expelled and after a thorough purge the party was forced to merge with
the Communists on 12 June 1948 to form the Hungarian Workers' Party (Magyar
Dolgozók Pártja -- MDP).
From early 1946 onwards, divisions deepened
between the unequal partners in this new coalition as to which political
direction the country should take and which principles it should adopt in
economic and social policy. However, these played only a secondary role in
the months immediately after the war. A large degree of consensus existed
between the groups represented in the provisional National Assembly and the
Provisional Government. They agreed that the armistice conditions -- to
strive for Hungary's
democratic reconstruction and bring the supporters of Horthy's régime and
representatives of Szálasi's reign of terror to
justice -should be carried out to the letter. This, together with the payment
of reparations, was a precondition for the speedy conclusion of a peace
treaty and subsequent withdrawal of an increasingly unwelcome occupying
force. There was also unanimous agreement on the need to implement land
reform, repair war damage, stimulate the economy and raise the nation's
standard of living. However, since there was also considerable disagreement
between the political parties as to which practical measures were most
appropriate to deal with these urgent tasks, their willingness to compromise
was increasingly strained. This in turn steadily raised the potential for
conflict and encouraged increasingly serious internal quarrels.
Although all the responsible parties recognised the need for a solution to the agrarian
problem, agreement on land reform, the first incisive, though somewhat
precipitate measure to be carried out, was not easily achieved. At the end of
the war almost half of Hungary's
9 million inhabitants still earned their living from agriculture. Of these,
about two-thirds, i.e. 3 million people, did not own their land or possessed
holdings of less than 5 hold (i.e. 2.8 hectares). In contrast,
about 10,000 families controlled almost half the country's arable land, the
1,000 wealthiest families owning over a quarter of all land under
cultivation, and the Catholic Church owning over half a million hectares.
Since all previous attempts to redistribute land more equally had failed or
been sabotaged by the large-scale landowners, it was agreed that the land
reform legislation and the principles it would observe regarding the extent
of expropriation and redistribution should be prepared thoroughly in advance
by a committee of experts. However, correctly estimating the extent of the
rural poor's growing impatience, the Communist Party adopted the National
Peasants' Party's proposal of 14 January and, by referring to pressure from
the Soviet occupying power, forced the other parties to endorse the decrees
of 17 March 1945 abolishing the great estates and reallocating the land to
the village poor.
Accordingly, land which had been owned by
'traitors to the fatherland' and 'Horthy fascists', including all estates of
more than 575 hectares, was expropriated within the space of six weeks. The
maximum amount of land allocated to Peasants for their individual use was
fixed at 115 hectares. Otherwise it was redistributed in parcels of 100 hold (i.e. 57.5 hectares). Apart from
11,500 hectares which were spared, Church lands were completely confiscated
along with that owned by banks and other enterprises. Forested land of over
ten hold and orchards and vineyards of over
twenty hold also had to be handed over. In all,
3.222 million hectares of Hungary's
8.3 million hectares of cultivable land (i.e. 38.8 per cent), was eventually
expropriated. The law provided for compensation, but this was paid out only
in exceptional cases and was practically worthless in view of the country's
rampant inflation. Contrary to the aims of the Smallholders' Party to create
small viable farms, the Communists and the National Peasants' Party followed
a policy of allocating a share of land, where possible, to all interested
parties. Of the 1.874 million hectares earmarked for reallocation (i.e. 22.5
per cent of all the land under cultivation), 642,000 people, including
110,000 former farmhands, 261,000 agricultural labourers,
214,000 dwarfholders, together with smallholders
and village tradesmen, received a share of land which generally did not
exceed five hold (i.e. 2.8 hectares). This meant that about two-thirds of
rural households possessed plots of one to five hold, making up 23.1 per cent
of the country's total arable land. A fifth of the peasants owned between 5
and 10 hold(i.e. 18.9
per cent of cultivable land) while just on a tenth owned between 10 and 20 hold(i.e. 22.4 per cent). The
3.4 per cent of peasants who owned middle-sized farms of up to 50hold and the 0.6 per cent of richer
peasants who owned smallholdings of up to 100 holdcontinued
to control a good quarter of the country's arable land (18.3 and 8.9 per cent
respectively). Some 1.348 million hectares of expropriated land became state
property. After the land reform up to 95 per cent of Hungary's rural
population owned small plots of land whose yield was still, however, often
insufficient to feed their large families. The latifundiaeand
more profitably productive middle-sized holdings, which had previously
satisfied the country's food needs and provided considerable employment, were
broken up. These changes in the structure of ownership also resulted in a
complete transformation of the social structure in the countryside.
Helped by the officially appointed Land
Redistribution Committees, which were entrusted with implementing the reform
at a local level, the Communist Party tried to gain a political foothold in
the villages and extend its influence among the National Councils which were
the local organs of the National Independence Front. The party activists did
not tire of extolling their achievement of having 'given the land to the
peasants'. They rejected as a malicious slander any suspicion of wanting
eventually to nationalise all available arable land
and proclaimed it was their intention that the new owners of land would
rapidly 'acquire wealth'. When allocating farmland or the livestock and
inventories of the great estates, or when the Soviet army distributed seeds
and fuel, special preference was given to peasants willing to cooperate as
middlemen and agents. The Communists believed that only by these means could
they halt the considerable drift in rural support to the Smallholders' Party.
Their strategy of appearing as benefactors to the rural poor did win the
support of the smallholding peasants at first. But, because cultivation of
the redistributed fields had been undertaken with insufficient means and to
some extent too late, the result was a disastrous harvest in 1945. Poor
yields caused by a drought throughout 1946 and 1947 forced Hungary, a
country which had once specialised in agrarian
exports, to cover its food needs to a great extent by imports.
Certain of the backing of the
Soviet-dominated Allied Control Commission, the Communists also called for
drastic economic measures to be implemented at their first national congress
held on 20-21 May 1945. The workers' low real wages, which were being
steadily eroded by inflation, the shortages of raw materials, the inadequate
provision of food to the big cities and the Soviet occupation power's
interventions in the economy, demonstrated clearly the need to carry out a fundamental
transformation of the economy. However, the Smallholders, the right wing of
the Social Democrats and the National Peasants' Party had no wish to support
the radical nationalisation measures and state
control advocated by the Communists. Ferenc Nagy,
who was appointed minister for reconstruction on 11 May 1945, opposed the
Communist Party's demands, which were accompanied by growing criticism of
their coalition partners. Following the resolutions passed by the Supreme
National Council of the Smallholders' Party on 19-20 August 1945 the
Communists accused their more popular competitor of providing a rallying
point for the right-wing opposition representing capitalist interests, the
clergy and the wealthy landowners and cited as evidence the Smallholders'
call for an inquiry into abuses arising from the land reform and for the
economy's consolidation on the basis of private capitalism. Among the Social
Democrats, in contrast, the upper hand was gained by the party leadership
faction which was openly sympathetic to the Communist call to defend the
unity of the working class in its struggle against reactionary elements and
attempts to restore capitalism.
When Ernő Gerő visited Moscow
on 27 August 1945 and signed an agreement pledging economic cooperation with
the USSR
beyond the guidelines set out by the cabinet, he provoked an internal
political crisis. Even the American and British governments intervened, since
they saw their own citizens' property interests threatened and wanted to
prevent Soviet domination of Hungarian foreign trade which was becoming
increasingly obvious. The unilateral resumption of full diplomatic relations
between Budapest and Moscow, announced before the conclusion of a peace
settlement on 25 September, and Soviet foreign minister Molotov's
uncooperative attitude at the Conference of Foreign Ministers, which met in
London on the 11 September to prepare the peace treaties with the wartime
coalition's former enemies, placed an even greater strain on the western
Allies' relations with the Soviet Union. Only when the Kremlin agreed to
allow the holding of free elections with the participation of all
'democratic' parties, was the American government prepared to establish
diplomatic relations with the Provisional Government on 2 November 1945. But
the western Allies' realisation that they did not
have the means to back up their diplomatic protests to the members of
Communist governments or the Allied Control Commission produced a situation
in which the American and British governments raised fewer and fewer
objections to Stalin's view that Russia's former enemies in eastern Europe
had been tacitly handed over to the Soviet sphere of influence at Teheran and
Yalta.
But those groups which opposed the
Communists with growing reservations and criticism could also claim
successes. From the 5 to 13 September 1945 the provisional National Assembly
met in Budapest to legalise retroactively the
decrees passed by the Provisional Government under General Béla Miklós de Dálnok after, the 22 December 1944. The parties of the
political centre, strengthened by deputies from the western half of Hungary,
succeeded in enabling the passage of an electoral law based on liberal
democratic principles. The large increase in its own membership had led the
Communist Party to misjudge the mood of the country and it did not,
therefore, raise any fundamental objections. The deputies of the single
chamber parliament were to be elected on the basis of a universal and direct,
secret suffrage extended to all citizens over the age of 20. Those citizens
who faced expropriation proceedings or had been incriminated by tribunals of
enquiry or involved in an important capacity in the 25 banned right-wing
radical organisations were disenfranchised, as were
all of Hungary's
ethnic Germans. But in the Budapest
municipal elections, held on the 7 October 1945, the single list of Communist
and Social Democratic candidates suffered a serious defeat, polling only 42.8
per cent of the vote. In contrast, 50.5 per cent of 'the electorate supported
the Independent Party of Smallholders which had never previously contested an
election in the capital. The result, which was more a rejection of the
Communists and their Soviet backers than an endorsement of the Smallholders'
political views, had a major effect on the national elections held on 7
November 1945. Marshall Voroilov, the Soviet
chairman of the Allied Control Commission, once more attempted to propose a
single list of candidates which would have given the Smallholders only 40 per
cent of the vote and 47.5 of the contested seats. But this move, together
with the Communist Party's various efforts to postpone the election failed as
a result of the western Allies' objections and the opposition of the other
parties. Even the Social Democrats had withdrawn from the single list with
the Communists. When the votes were counted after the freest and least rigged
elections ever held in Hungary,
57 per cent of the electorate (i.e. 245 seats out of 409) had supported the
Smallholders' Party programme. 17.4 per cent (67
seats) had voted for the Social Democrats, 6.9 per cent (2 Seats) for the
National Peasants' Party and 1.6 per cent (2 seats) for the
Bourgeois-Democratic Party, representing the urban middle class. The
Communist Party had won only 797,040 votes, representing 16.9 per cent of the
electorate (70 seats), which meant that the Communists had suffered a serious
electoral setback. The main reasons for this reverse at the polls were: the
widespread anti-Russian feeling caused by the Red Army's excesses and
wholesale dismantling of plant and installations as reparations, the growing
disillusionment of the smallholding peasantry following a poor harvest, the
fear of too radical a transformation of the country's political and
socio-economic structures and the Communist Party's inability to present
itself as the champion of national interests following the new loss of
territories returned to Czechoslovakia and Rumania.
After this clear election result many
Magyars expected that Hungary
would develop along the lines of a western liberal democracy despite the
presence of the occupying Soviet troops who had to be tolerated until the
signing of a peace treaty. But Marshall Voroilov
made it plain that the Soviets would stick to their policy of tolerating only
a government coalition composed of all parties while safeguarding the gains
already made by the Communists. But although the victorious Smallholders, led
by Zoltán Tildy, who
belonged to the party's left wing and supported closer cooperation with the
USSR, supplied the premier and half the government ministers, the Communists,
for whom Imre Nagy took over as minister of the
interior, showed themselves to be superior in tactical skill and political
ruthlessness. Proclaiming the class struggle and the final destruction of the
reactionary structures of fascism, they began a war of attrition aimed at
slowly eroding the power of their political rivals under the cover of
'collective cooperation'. In a phrase which was to gain general currency. Rákosi later described this as 'salami tactics'. By using
the 50,000 strong political police to intimidate and eliminate actual or
potential opponents the Communists managed steadily to gain ground.
They also benefited from the fact that the
'left-wing' leaders of the Social Democratic Party under the deputy premier, Szakasits, shared many of their short-term aims and
developed initiatives which undermined the policies of the majority in
parliament. Thus, the new parliament, constituted on 6 December 1945,
unanimously approved Communist legislation which placed the mines and power
stations under state control - amounting in practice to nationalisation.
Apart from the interior ministry, which László Rajk took over from the ill Imre
Nagy, who disapproved of illegal radical measures, on 4 February 1946, the
Communists provided only the deputy premier ( Rákosi)
and the ministers of transport and social welfare. Since they, therefore, had
no direct means of influencing economic policy, they initiated the creation
of a Supreme Economic Council on 9 January 1946 which was able to circumvent
the cabinet. Empowered to grant loans, distribute raw materials and intervene
in the decision-making of large enterprises, this body allowed the Communists
to apply their economic policies. The workers' committees in the big
factories, which were being increasingly infiltrated by Communist Party
members, not only tried to influence general trade union policy to further
promote the Communists' aims, but acquired a substantial say in determining
wages and price levels. The inflation which had been spiralling
out of control since December 1945 led to a depreciation of the currency in
the first half of 1946 on a scale, unprecedented even in international terms.
The result was that by the middle of July a gold pengé
was worth 1.4 quadrillion pengé at 1938 values.
This allowed the Communists to demand and justify a greater degree of state
intervention in the economy. The introduction of a new currency based on the
forint (florin) on 1 August 1946 enabled the government eventually to halt
the depreciation of the currency. The government's subsequent policy of
austerity which aimed at a modest availability of consumer goods and helped stabilise prices encouraged a growth in confidence in the
new currency and facilitated a gradual economic recovery. In 1946, the
government was more or less able to achieve its limited goal of raising the
workers' real wages to about a half of their 1938 value and productivity to
60 per cent of its pre-war level in 1939. Under the terms of a reparations
agreement signed on 15 June 1945, Hungary
was obliged to deliver consignments of goods to the Soviet
Union. In 1946, the value of these amounted to 26.4 per cent of
the state's total expenditure; in 1947, it was still as high as 17.8 per
cent. Comprising 71 per cent of Hungary's
total exports, these consignments severely curtailed Hungary's
economic recovery. The volume of goods which had to be produced to cover the
country's reparations debt amounted to 82 per cent of its foreign trade with
the Soviet Union, 91 per cent of its trade with Yugoslavia and 49 per cent of
its trade with Czechoslovakia. Hungary's foreign trade with the
West, which had stood at around 90 per cent before the war, fell to just 53
per cent.
The goal of all parties to achieve a high
level of production as quickly as possible through a systematic economic
recovery and a living standard comparable with the pre-war levels could only
be brought closer by initially encouraging private initiative and the profit
motive. The need to reinvest 20 per cent of the national income and limit the
production of consumer goods in favour of
developing Hungary's
staple products meant that the population had to continue to make sacrifices.
The serious damage of the two drought years of 1946 and 1947, the lack of
skilled workers, the failures of training programmes,
shortages of raw materials and frequent production stoppages caused by a lack
of spare parts or energy shortages put a great strain on the economy. The
Communists cited these problems to justify the cabinet decree of 22 November
1946 which placed the country's biggest ironworks (the Rimamurány
Ironworks, Ganz & Co., the Manfred Weiss Steel
and Metalworks) under state ownership. On 28 May
1947, the Communist-dominated Supreme Economic Council placed all the major
banks under state control until they were later formally nationalised
on 21 November 1947. The National Assembly decision of 1 July to launch a
Three Year Plan for the entire economy by 1 August 1947 subsequently gave the
Communists the opportunity to take over control of the most important areas
of production. On 6 February 1948, the National Assembly finally approved
legislation which nationalised the bauxite industry
and aluminium production and also agreed to the nationalisation of all industrial firms employing more
than 100 workers. On 4 April, it also approved the disbanding of the
employers' organisation, the National Federation of
Factory Owners. A government decree of 18 December 1948 on the organisation of cooperatives, the adoption of a Five Year
Plan on 10 December 1949 and the law of 28 December nationalising
firms with more than ten employees and foreign-owned factories were the
outwardly visible signs of the complete assimilation of Hungarian economic
life to the obligatory Soviet model.
This was the culmination of a development
which had begun on 27 August 1945 when Hungary
had signed a long-term trade agreement with the Soviet
Union. Since the volume of Hungarian exports remained relatively
small after the end of war and imports were necessary in order to revive
industry, the Soviet Union saw the chance of orientating Hungary's national
economy more towards the Soviet Union by stepping up deliveries of raw
materials and increasing the volume of Hungarian goods for the Russian
market. The Russians combined the confiscation of German property, which
affected almost all large businesses on account of their multifaceted
involvement with the German banks from 1940 onwards, with the demand that
Hungary repay Russia the debts it owed to the defeated German Reich
regardless of the fact that Hungary's credit with the German authorities
meant that the balance had been essentially in Hungary's favour.
After the initial wholesale dismantling of some branches of industry and the despatch to the Soviet Union of the machinery thus
acquired, the Soviet government soon recognised
that a reorganisation of the most important key
industrial enterprises into mixed Soviet-Hungarian concerns under Soviet
management offered a number of important advantages: they could save on the
costs of dismantling, transporting and reinstalling plant, gaining also from
its immediate operational use, as well as the more efficient use of Hungarian
labour working for Soviet interests and, finally,
more effective control of the Hungarian domestic economy. After considerable
agreement had been reached in negotiations of 9-18 April 1946 on economic
cooperation, the Soviet Union found a way of financing its own enterprises
more comfortably by investing its share of war spoils in six mixed-ownership
companies set up between May and August 1946. A civilian airline, a Danube
shipping line (4 May), oil exploration company (23 July) and crude oil
refining company (25 July) were set up, followed on 6 August by a company for
mining, bauxite extraction and aluminium production
as well as a mixedownership company for the design
and construction of plant for the bauxite industry. These companies, which
were effective monopolies in their own sectors of industry, were supraterritorial and exempt from rates and taxes. The
Soviet Union declared their goods to be 'Soviet-produced' and conducted a
brisk transit trade which reduced the sales market of those branches of
industry linked to these enterprises which had remained in Hungarian hands.
The transfer of profits thus acquired
enabled the Soviet Union to drain Hungary of over a billion US
dollars until 1954 when pressure from Imre Nagy's
more self-confident government made the Russians agree to transfer the
mixed-ownership companies to Hungarian state ownership for a substantial
payment; the only exception being firms mining uranium. These economic
practices which involved direct exploitation and the fact that before 1948
many prisoners-of-war and civilian internees were sent to Russia as forced labour stirred up the Hungarian populations' latent antiRussian sentiment and made the work of the Communist
Party that much harder.
In contrast, the expulsion of Hungary's ethnic Germans in January 1946 under
the terms of the Potsdam
agreement proved popular with the public. By 1948, around 240,000 German
Hungarians had been forcibly resettled in the American and Soviet sectors of Germany. A
few were also settled in Austria.
The emergency measures passed against the remaining 250,000 ethnic Germans in
Hungary
were revoked in 1950. The Czechoslovak government's intention to repatriate
approximately 650,000 Magyars living in Slovakia failed because of the
Allies' veto. A treaty between Prague and Budapest, signed after lengthy negotiations on 27
February 1946, proposed an exchange of populations between equal numbers of
Slovaks settled in Hungary
and Magyars resident in Slovakia.
Approximately 70,000 people were affected on each side and a further 20,000
may well have left Czechoslovakia
voluntarily. As a new and more sympathetic policy towards the national
minorities began to emerge, the 50,000 or so Hungarians, who had been
forcibly settled in the Sudeten areas abandoned by the Germans in 1945 were
allowed to return to their villages once relations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary had returned to normal.
On 1 February 1946, following an initiative
of the Social Democrats and entirely in line with Communist intentions the Hungarian Republic was officially proclaimed
(Law 1 of 1946). Tildy, who had been premier up
until this point, was made its first president. Thus, the thousand-year-old Kingdom of St Stephen, having survived Turkish
rule, revolutions, foreign domination and Horthy's Regency, came to an
inglorious end. In the new parliamentary republic far wider powers were
vested in the president, although Tildy, fearing
the Communists and soon worn down by their pressure, failed to make
sufficient use of them. On 4 February, the new premier, Ferenc
Nagy, a former party official in the wartime Peasant Federation and now
chairman of the Independent Party of Smallholders presented his cabinet. The
appointment of László Rajk
as the new interior minister was to prove especially significant. As minister
for reconstruction and, from November 1945 onwards, also chairman of the
National Assembly and National General Council, Nagy had made it clear that
he had no intention of giving in to the illegal actions of the Communist
Party or the interventions of the Soviet occupying power. He was regarded as
secretly pro-American and a politician who, while introducing a western-style
parliamentary democracy, would even have been prepared to preserve the
monarchy.
But Nagy also had to watch helplessly as his
interior minister, Rajk, deliberately set out to replace
around 50,000 to 60,000 state officials with obedient yes-men within six
months. In the 'public meetings' called by the Communists these officials,
who had been the pillars of the old system, were forced to resign as a result
of the 'people's judgement'. By 1950, probably
about 120,000 state employees had lost their jobs. This 'popular movement',
which Rákosi praised as 'primitive democracy',
helped the Communist Party establish a firmer footing, especially in the
countryside and smaller provincial towns. The activities of the People's
Courts, which prosecuted the politically exposed representatives of the
Horthy régime, excited the general mood of the country further. On 12 March
1946, Ferenc Szálasi and
several members of his Arrow Cross government were executed. They were
followed by the former prime ministers Bardossy, Imrédy and Sztójay who were
executed as war criminals. In all, as many as 25,000 people may have been
sentenced as war criminals by the highly arbitrary People's Courts and the
death penalty carried out on about 500 of them. At the same time, between
January 1945 and March 1948, there were almost 40,000 political prosecutions,
resulting in over 20,000 people being sentenced.
In January and February 1947 a show trial,
in which prominent members of the Smallholders' Party were accused of
conspiring against the republic with the aim of restoring the Horthy régime,
spread fear and terror and helped the Communists step up the process of
weakening their opponents. Several groups opposed to the régime - Magyar
nationalists who deplored the erosion of the old Hungarian Kingdom's
traditions, landowners and rich peasant farmers who feared for their economic
survival, religious groups which opposed the Communists' official atheism --
provided the excuse the latter were waiting for by joining forces in a secret
organisation called the 'Hungarian People's
Community'. Its aim was to establish a coalition government on the western
parliamentary model under Horthy's last prime minister, General Géza Lakatos, following the
signing of a peace treaty and the subsequent withdrawal of Soviet troops.
Since the ministers who belonged to the Smallholders' Party, Albert Bartha (defence) and András Mistéth (reconstruction)
and leading right wingers ( General Secretary Béla Kovács, Kálmán Saláta, etc.) had known about the planned overthrow of
the government, the Communists were able to exploit the affair by denouncing
the whole of democratic opposition and diverting attention from their own
violation of civil rights.
The Party of Smallholders had already begun,
however, to break up in January 1946. When the Communists introduced draft
legislation for a state protection law designed to give a semblance of
legality to arbitrary police actions, its critics, led by the lawyer, Desző Sulyok, were branded
as reactionaries' and 'fascists'. The Communists demanded that the larger
coalition partner should purge its own ranks, threatening to leave the
government if this was not carried out. Since the leaders of the Smallholders'
Party feared an intervention by the Soviet occupation power if the coalition
collapsed just at the point when decisive negotiations on a peace treaty were
imminent, they agreed to the Communists' demand and expelled Sulyok and his sympathisers
from the party. Thereupon the latter founded the Hungarian Freedom Party ( Magyar Szabadság
Pdrt) as an 'anti-communist party of national
resistance'. The Communist Party's initiative in creating a Left-Wing Bloc (Baloldali Blokk)
on 5 March 1946, which, alongside the Communists, included Social Democrats,
the National Peasants' Party and the Trade Unions Council, and which organised a 400,000-strong demonstration on the main
square of Budapest on 7 March, had created a united counterweight to the
weakened Smallholders' Party, which tried to give more weight to its demands
by mobilising popular support, capitalising
on popular sentiment and openly flouting the law.
When the Smallholders' Party's left wing,
led by István Dobi and Gyula Ortutay, openly espoused
the policy aims of the Left-Wing Bloc and forced the party executive on 12
March 1946 to accept the demands of the Left, which were heavily influenced
by the Communists, the party leadership was placed further on the defensive.
Though they managed to secure some advantages when the coalition was
renegotiated through President Tildy's moderation
on 5 June 1946, they failed to halt the Communists' advance. The latter were
also able to block the Smallholder's intensified efforts in the autumn of
1946 to renew their old wartime alliance with the Social Democrats and bring
about a merger with the National Peasants' Party. The Smallholders were
forced to expel several of their deputies who were involved in an alleged
conspiracy which was the subject of a show trial, an event which led their
dynamic General Secretary, Béla Kovács,
to resign. On 26 February 1947, he was arrested and abducted by the Soviet
security police who charged him with spying for a western intelligence
service. The affair finally broke the moral backbone of the Smallholders
Party. During he spring of 1947 about another 50 deputies were forced to
leave the Independent Party of Smallholders. Led by Zoltán
Pfeffer, they founded the Hungarian Independence
Party ( Magyar Függetlenségi Párt) on 18
July as a rallying point for the conservativebourgeois,
anti-Marxist opposition. Of their former 245 seats in the National Assembly,
the Smallholders still held 187, but also lost their absolute majority.
The prime minister, Ferenc
Nagy, also eventually fell victim to the increasingly open attacks made on
liberal democratic politicians by the state security authorities, encouraged
and supported by the Communist minister of the interior. Following a cabinet
reshuffle which increased the Communist Party's influence, Nagy, who was
taking a rest cure in Switzerland
at the time and had been officially informed that charges were being made
against him in connection with the anti-government conspiracy, announced his
resignation on 30 May 1947. Among the other prominent politicians who, like
him, chose exile was the President of the National Assembly, the churchman, Béla Varga. The new General
Secretary, the Roman Catholic priest, István Balogh, who took over in February, was probably subjected
to Communist blackmail and resigned from his post and that of secretary of
state to the prime minister. His resignation, together with the founding of
the Independent Hungarian Democratic Party ( Független
Magyar Demokrata Pdrt)
accelerated the collapse of the Smallholders' Party. The Communists could
well rejoice, for the fragmentation of their opponents improved their chances
of becoming the strongest political force in the country. Although they
managed to enhance their position further in the government formed by Lajos Dinnyés, briefly defence minister and Smallholder's Party member, on 31
May 1947, they were the most vocal group in calling for the parliament -- now
again renamed the 'Országház' -- to be
dissolved and demanded the holding of fresh elections for 31 August 1947. A
new more restrictive electoral law which denied the franchise to 350,000 of
the 5 million citizens previously entitled to vote prepared the way for a
Communist victory over opposition groups which lacked funds and were still
unfamiliar to the electorate.
But, as in November 1945, the second
post-war elections again proved disappointing for the Communists. Despite a
massive election campaign and probably also a considerable degree of rigging
results, the Communist Party won only 22.3 per cent of the vote, giving it
only 100 of the 411 available seats in parliament. The Social Democrats won
14.9 per cent of the vote and 67 seats. Only 8.3 per cent of the electorate
voted for the National Peasants' Party which won 36 seats. The Smallholders,
now led by the left winger, István Dobi, still managed to attract 15.4 per cent of the vote
and returned the second largest parliamentary fraction comprising 68
deputies. Balogh's Independent Hungarian Democratic
Party obtained 18 seats from its 5.2 per cent share of the vote, Pfeiffer's
Independence Party was rewarded with 49 seats from its 13.4 per cent and the
Democratic People's Party (Demokrata Néppárt), which had broken its close ties with the
Smallholders in the spring of 1946, managed to win a substantial 16.4 per
cent of the vote and was returned as the biggest opposition party with 60
seats. Splinter groups like the Christian Women's Party, led by mother
superior, M. Schlachta (1.4 per cent and 4 seats),
the Bourgeois-Democratic Party (1 per cent and 3 seats) and the Hungarian
Radical Party (1.7 per cent and 6 seats) were an insignificant factor.
When the anti-Marxist opposition's attempts
to form a coalition government with the Independent Party of Smallholders against
the Communists and Social Democrats, failed because of opposition from the
Smallholders' left wing, the Communist Party did all it could to remove its
political opponents quickly. Rákosi, who was
confirmed as General Secretary at the Third Congress of the Hungarian
Communist Party, held between 29 September and 1 October, had a firm grip on
the party and had no wish to stage show trials against the leaders of the
opposition, preferring instead to adopt a softer approach. By announcing that
preparations were underway to put them on trial and that their parliamentary
immunity had been lifted, he encouraged them to flee to the West.
Following the departure of D. Sulyok, whose Hungarian Freedom Party had already been
dissolved in July 1947, Zóltan Pfeiffer also
emigrated to the West on 4 November 1947. His Hungarian Independence Party
was subsequently banned on 20 November 1947. After its founder, István Barankovics emigrated,
the Democratic People's Party, too, had to dissolve itself, although this did
not happen until 4 February 1949. In each case, the parliamentary seats of
the outlawed parties were immediately declared vacant. A merger did take
place between the BourgeoisDemocratic party and the
Hungarian Radical Party to form the Radical Democratic Party Alliance, but
this lasted only until 3 March 1949 when the new grouping then merged into
the reorganised Hungarian Independence-Popular
Front and, thus, into the Communist government camp. In May 1949, István Balogh's Independent
Hungarian Democratic Party also had to cease its activities when it, too, was
incorporated into the Popular Front.
With the disappearance of the
bourgeois-democratic opposition the majority of the Social Democrats expected
a more determined stand from their traditional party against the Communists'
dictatorial, totalitarian aspirations. But the party leadership, already
heavily infiltrated by Communist supporters, was as little able to organise opposition to the omnipotent Communist Party as
the remaining small group of Smallholders, which was torn apart by internal
squabbles. On 13 September 1947, its Supreme Council had emphasised
the need to continue the coalition with the parties of the Left-Wing Bloc
despite the perceived threat of Communist domination. In Dinnyés'
second government, reorganised on 23 September, the
Smallholders still provided four ministers, while all the other ministries of
any significance were already controlled by the Communists. Alongside Rákosi, who was appointed deputy premier and minister of
state, Rajk (interior), Gerő
(transport) Erik Molnár (foreign affairs) and Károlyi Olt (social welfare),
the members of the cabinet who nominally belonged to other parties, i.e. Szakasits ( deputy premier and minister of state), Erdei ( minister of state), József
Darvas (public works), Péter
Veres (defence) and Gyula Ortutay (education and
culture) could be regarded as loyal Communist Party supporters.
On 1 July, the Communist Party won
parliamentary approval for a Three Year Plan to be implemented on 1 August.
The banks, together with the 264 industrial and commercial enterprises which
they controlled, were nationalised on 29 November
1947. This was followed by the nationalisation of
almost 600 industrial firms with more than 100 employees on 25 March 1948.
Henceforth, 85 per cent of all employees worked in state-controlled
enterprises, while many private commercial firms were allowed to continue
operating. The Communists attributed the slow rise in living standards, which
had been encouraged by a relatively good harvest in 1948 and the slow closing
of the gap with industrial production levels of 1938, solely to the decisive
measures they had taken in the interests of the country and its workers, the
emasculation of profiteering capitalists and the end of the restrictive
influence of foreign capital.
The Communists also tried to overcome the
population's continued rejection of its arbitrary and coercive measures by
stepping up its campaign for working-class unity and a merger of the two
Marxist parties, which it saw as inevitable. When the 'right-wing' Social
Democrats opposed a merger which would involve the loss of their political
independence, their spokesmen, who included the former government ministers, Károly Peyer, A Kéthly, F. Szeder and A. Bán, were expelled following an internal party struggle
which lasted until February 1948. At a dubiously convened party meeting at
the beginning of March the go-ahead was given for a merger, which was
prepared on all levels by ajoint political and organisational committee and took place on 12 June 1948
at the Communist Party's Fourth Party Congress and the Social Democratic
Party's Thirty-Seventh Congress. At the First Party Congress of the new,
united Marxist-Leninist party, held on 13-14 June 1948, the former Social
Democrat, Szakasits, was appointed chairman of the
new Hungarian Workers' Party ( Magyar
Dolgozók Pártja -- MDP) which now numbered over 1.1
million members. Rákosi was made General Secretary
and the Communists, János Kádár
and Mihály Farkas, were
appointed his deputies. The main priorities for the party were: the complete democratisation of the state apparatus, the preparation
of a new constitution, an 'improvement in living standards by developing
productive forces', the abolition of the 'education monopoly of the
propertied classes', state control of church schools, the spread of the class
struggle to the countryside, the strengthening of Hungary's international
standing and the deepening of relations with the Soviet Union and the new neighbouring 'People's Democracies' of eastern Europe.
The assimilation of the Social Democrats
into the system and the destruction of the opposition meant that the
Communists had successfully concluded their 'Socialist revolution' in the
spring of 1948 and achieved an unchallenged monopoly of political power. They
could now set about destroying the last vestiges of freedom and erode the few
remaining bastions of anti-Marxism. They could also concentrate on achieving Hungary's assimilation into the 'Eastern Bloc'
and force Hungary
to emulate an obligatory Soviet model which ran entirely counter to Magyar
national traditions. There was now no need to take any account of opponents
at home or western public opinion.
The peace treaty, whose main principles had
been already laid down in the autumn of 1946, was signed in Paris on 10 February 1947 and became
effective on 15 September 1947. With its signing the western Allies
surrendered their only means of applying diplomatic pressure to halt or, at
least, delay the spread of Socialism in east central Europe and the Soviet Union's incorporation of countries occupied by
the Red Army into its direct sphere of influence. To the great disappointment
of all Magyar patriots, Hungary
was again obliged to accept the frontiers laid down in the Trianon Treaty of 1920 and cede a further 40 square kilometres of territory opposite the Czechoslovak
bridgehead city of Bratislava.
The country's population of 9 million Magyars had to adjust itself once more
to an area of 93,030 square kilometres of
territory. The Hungarians felt particularly annoyed that the Soviet foreign
minister, Molotov, clearly supported the Rumanians on the question of
Transylvania, which was still the object of the rival claims of Budapest and Bucharest,
and had defended the Czechoslovak government's harsh policies towards its
Magyar minority. The danger posed by the latter was subsequently removed by
the forced resettlement of Slovaks, exchange of populations and expulsion of
Hungarians regarded as disloyal or incriminated by their wartime activities. Prague's alliance and treaties of friendship with Belgrade and Bucharest
had also aroused Hungarian fears of a revival of the Little Entente. Thus,
the Hungarian government took a close interest in Tito's initiative to create
a Danubian Confederation or Balkan Union which they
felt would provide better protection for their national interests than a
hardening of the old attitudes associated with the idea of the nation state.
Most Hungarians were very disappointed that the occupation of their country
did not end with the signing of the peace treaty. In order to secure its
supply routes to Austria's
Soviet Zone, the Red Army, which did not shirk from intervening openly on
behalf of its Communist protégés, continued to station troops in Hungary.
After 1945, the Hungarian government also
tried to re-establish friendly contacts with the western Allies. However,
their diplomats in Budapest
and representatives in the Allied Control Commission soon resigned in protest
at massive Soviet interference and the illegal actions of the Hungarian
Communists. Between 8 and 25 June 1946 a Hungarian government delegation
visiting Washington and London had submitted its proposals for
peace negotiations and formally requested economic aid. The members of the
delegation drawn from Hungary's
democratic parties also asked for moral support. When in January and February
1947, however, the Communist Party began to destroy the democratic opposition
by staging a show trial against members of the Smallholders's
Party, a protest by the western Allies and the freezing of a 15 million
dollar loan by the US government could no longer halt the Soviet Union's
measures to force Hungary's incorporation into their sphere of influence over
the eastern European 'People's Democracies'. The Hungarian government's
intention to take part in the European Economic Conference, due to be held in
Paris on 12 July 1947, at which America's proposed Marshall Plan for Economic
Aid and Reconstruction was due to be discussed, had to be withdrawn after the
Kremlin abruptly rejected this programme for
European recovery.
Through an economic and loan agreement
signed on 15 July 1947 the Soviet government, for its part, tried to tackle
Hungary's anticipated economic problems by implementing the Three Year Plan
and guaranteeing the country's incorporation into the eastern European
economic system increasingly centred on Moscow. The
foreign trade relations of all the eastern European countries were
subsequently reduced to a political lever controlled by the Soviet
superpower, with the result that, while strengthening its own economic
potential, the Soviet Union was able to strengthen its political domination
to the point where it could unite those countries which shared its political
system and ideological aims into a 'Socialist world empire'. Moscow's influence on the Hungarian economy
was a major factor in establishing Soviet political control over the country.
In recognition of the good work done by the Hungarian Communists on their
takeover of power, but also because, according to Marxism, exploitation could
not exist among Socialist states, the Soviet government halved Hungary's
remaining reparations debt up to 1 July 1948. Despite this help, Hungary may well have paid compensation to the
USSR
amounting to a total of at least 250 million US dollars according to world
market prices in 1955.
The impetus which came from the first
conference of the Communist Information Bureau, which met between 22 and 27
September 1947 at Szklarska Porcęba
in Poland, was of major
importance for the internal political changes imposed on Hungary and
its incorporation into the Socialist Bloc. Outwardly, the Cominform
was only supposed to support the struggle of the European Communist parties
to improve the situation of the working class, maintain peace and defend the
independence and sovereignty of its member states. In legal terms it was not
supposed to be an above-party institution, but a coordinating forum with no
coercive power over members. In de
facto terms, however, the Cominform became a command headquarters controlled by the
Kremlin, against whose decisions no appeal was possible in practice. Like the
other leaders of eastern Europe's Communist parties, who, even after the
complete emasculation of their opponents, found their dependence on the
Kremlin leaders of World Communism increased because of the radical changes
imposed upon them against the opposition of most of their populations and the
intensification of conflicts arising from the Cold War, Rakosi
generally welcomed the founding of Cominform. For
the party faithful, schooled in the USSR, the conformity which Stalin
demanded brought with it a certain degree of security. There was no more need
in future to disguise the decisive influence of the Soviet Communist Party on
the direction taken by the Communist parties of eastern Europe. It was no
longer necessary to give the impression that the creation of the Socialist
Bloc's monolithic unity, which Stalin henceforth demanded, had to be achieved
by joint discussion of the methods and external and internal policy aims of
the various Communist parties and the democratic expression of opinions.
When, by invoking Article 53, para. 1 of the United Nations charter, the Soviet
government concluded a friendship treaty pledging support for Hungary on 18 February 1948, it merely
amounted to legally formalising Hungary's
already existing dependence in a treaty which symbolised
the purely formal equality of Communist countries on an international level.
The signatories to the treaty pledged themselves to support all efforts to
maintain world peace and especially to resist any aggressive plans by West Germany
-- which was rearming -- and its allies. Beyond this, the treaty also
envisaged close economic cooperation. It is doubtful whether Stalin was
really prepared to respect the expressly included positive declarations of
'friendship' between the signatories: namely mutual
respect of sovereignty, non-intervention in internal affairs and complete
equality of status. There was no explicit mention of the ideologically
crucial role of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the
treaty, which was soon followed by bilateral agreements with the other
members of the Socialist Bloc ( Yugoslavia on 8 December 1947, Rumania on 24
January 1948, Poland on 18 June, Bulgaria on 16 July and Czechoslovakia on 16
April 1949). The Soviet and Hungarian Communist party press saw it, at any
rate, as embodying a new kind of relationship between Communist states which
confirmed Stalin's view that a new social structure also demanded new
political forms: namely, a community of interests based on the same
socio-economic forces and a new approach to international relations.
THE PERSONAL
DICTATORSHIP OF MÁTYÁS RÁKOSI
The imposition of a 'united front from
below', which signalled the 'organic union' of the
Communist Party (MKP) and a Social Democratic Party, decimated by purges and
expulsions, resulted in the creation of the new Hungarian Workers' Party
(MDP). By the summer of 1948, this development, together with the
establishment of extensive Communist Party control at all levels of
political, social, economic and cultural life, marked the completion of the
Communist takeover in Hungary.
The Communist Party's establishment of its monolithic rule was marked by new
legislation, which included intensifying the class struggle and carrying it
into the countryside, exposing the remaining opponents of the new system and
intensifying relations with the Soviet Union at the expense of Hungary's own
national interests. Stress was now placed on transforming the state, society
and the economy from within. During this transition from the 'phase of
consolidation' to that of 'Socialist construction', Hungary's Communists,
while loudly proclaiming their loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalin, were
quickly prepared to demonstrate the doctrinaire uniformity and total
conformity expected of them, partly from fear and the need to toe the line,
but partly also for the sake of their own careers and personal safety. The
experiences and political practice of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union became a rigid dogma. Personal loyalty and
the desire to accommodate Soviet desires became the single most important
criterion in judging a party functionary or someone's political views at a
time when Tito and he Yugoslavian Communist party were successfully opposing
this degrading form of subservience and blind obedience. Although some
prominent comrades, while acknowledging the need to intensify the class
struggle and rapidly change society, held firmly to their conviction that
they would have to take national conditions into account in promoting the
'people's democratic revolution', they were branded as political 'deviants'
and accused of an apparently inadequate understanding of Stalin's views and
the Soviet Union's ideological and political leadership role.
The Communist Party's officials after 1948
were expertly skilled at maintaining themselves in power. Those deemed to be
the most reliable and most willing in the eyes of the Soviet Communist
Party's Central Committee occupied all the key positions in the executive
branches of the state, the management of industry and mass organisations like the trade unions, womens'
and youth organisations, cooperatives and cultural organisations. Structured according to the principles of
'democratic centralism', the new MDP claimed to be 'the leading nucleus of
all the workers' organisations in the society and
state'. Modelling all levels of Hungary's system of training and education on
that of the Soviet Union, the Communists
aimed at rapidly creating a new intelligentsia schooled in Marxist-Leninist
principles, re-educating bureaucrats willing to cooperate and strengthening
the ideological commitment of the party secretaries. Whereas difficulties
were increasingly placed in the way of middle-class citizens, the reformed
and standardised school system was designed to
ensure positive discrimination for children from workers' and peasant
families. The organisation of the press, radio and
publishing, all of which had already been subject to considerable state
control since 1945, was restructured. Comprehensive censorship measures were
further refined and 'Socialist realism' became the artistic norm. In Budapest and the other
major cities the monumental Soviet style of architecture was enthusiastically
taken up by architects. Following the nationalisation
of Church lands, the conflicts which had already been provoked with the
Christian churches, especially the Catholic Church, were heightened by the
struggle over church schools. The Catholic Church's apparent dependence on
the Vatican
and its role as the 'vanguard of American imperialism' provided an excuse for
interfering in its internal administration and imposing restrictions. The
expansion of the planned economy and the forced collectivisation
of agriculture were not only necessary to raise the standard of living and
promote rapid industrialisation; they also served
to neutralise politically the peasants who were considered
conservative and reactionary, destroy traditional social structures and
facilitate social control. Control of the already infiltrated armed forces
and ubiquitous secret police fell to party officials who enjoyed the
Kremlin's special confidence and were, moreover, often Soviet citizens.
Because of the prevalence in Hungary of
traditional anti-Russian attitudes and newer anti-Soviet attitudes which had
been reinforced by the experience of occupation, the Kremlin thought it vital
to allow only those comrades to reach the top echelons of party and
government who had proved their loyalty towards the Soviet Communist Party
over a long period, whether as émigrés in Moscow, propagandists of the Comintern, in the service of the NKVD or as keen
advocates of Stalinist methods. Stalin's idealisation,
the myth surrounding his person as the architect of Socialism, victorious
field marshall and towering statesman, helped the
Kremlin chief to stamp his impression on Communist Hungary's social order and
political system. The Soviet leader may well have been comforted by the
thought that the leading officials he chose enjoyed no real support among the
Hungarian population which the war, the chaos of its aftermath and Communist
interference had left completely demoralised and
insecure. Despite the existing ties of personal loyalty, almost a feudal
relationship, Stalin always let his place men in Hungary feel a degree of
insecurity in order to exert an even greater influence on their country's
internal development. The psychological element present in their relationship
with Stalin, which is not easy to grasp, caused Hungary's Communists to make most
of their decisions in anticipation of the possible wishes and orders of their
Kremlin boss both out of a sense of devotion and loyalty, as well as fear for
their lives. However, Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 marked the end of an era
in which an individual's decisions had been able to cause abrupt changes in
the policy direction of the Socialist countries. His heirs, largely paralysed by the internal Soviet power struggle to find a
successor, were forced to witness how Stalin's system of informal and
indirect control could no longer function and how the people's democracies,
left largely to their own devices, underwent a period of instability during
the period of a power vacuum. The shattering events which befell Hungary in
the autumn of 1956 seriously questioned the Communists' whole range of
achievements. The subsequent 'triumph over counter-revolution' was only made
possible as a result of the intervention of Soviet troops.
The successful Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia
on 25 February 1948 also encouraged the Hungarian Communists to ignore
internal protests and press on with their 'Socialist revolution' according to
the Kremlin's guidelines. Following the creation of a single Socialist party
and the elimination of the parliamentary opposition the Council of Ministers
was able to implement the measures required to effect change mainly by the
use of decrees, without encountering any parliamentary objections. On 1
February 1949, the remaining rump parties, now branded the 'reserves of the
class enemy', were forced to merge with the newly founded Hungarian
Independence-Popular Front (Magyar Függetlenségi
Népfront), as members of which they were
allowed to take part in the parliamentary elections held on 15 May 1949
before being forced to dissolve. With the disappearance of the Independent
Party of Smallholders, the National Peasants' Party, the Independent
Hungarian Democratic Party and the Hungarian Radical Party, the MDP, styling
itself 'spearhead of the dictatorship of the proletariat', remained the only organised political force in the country with 71 per cent
of the 402 deputies in parliament. Despite the single list of candidates
'only' 95.6 per cent of electors voted for the Popular Front, a fact which
'clearly' demonstrated the need for strengthening the inculcation of
ideological values and purging the party of the working class of its
'unreliable elements'. By January 1950, around 300,000 members had been
expelled from the party, reducing its total membership to 828,695.
In December 1948, the former agricultural labourer and Smallholder party politician, István Dobi, took over the new
government in place of his party colleague, Dinnyés.
Ten of the fifteen members of the new cabinet were Communists, of whom the
most prominent were Rakósi, who became deputy prime
minister, János Kádár,
who took over the interior ministry after August 1948, and László Rajk, who became foreign
minister after the same date. Apart from Dobi, the
minister for education and culture, Ortutay, and
the minister for trade, József Bognár,
had been members of the former Party of Smallholders, while the minister for
reconstruction, Darvas, and the minister for
agriculture, Erdei, had belonged to the National
Peasants' Party. The highest office in the land, that of President of the
Republic, was filled by the left-wing Social Democrat and Communist fellow-traveller, Árpád Szakasits, who replaced Tildy
after the latter's resignation on 30 July 1948 following attacks on him by
the Left. Szakasits, however, despite his holding
of high office was unable to prevent his own arrest and imprisonment in April
1950.
The new régime's disregard for legal rights
was of great importance in establishing its rule in the Hungarian People's
Republic. The country's judicial system had remained essentially intact after
1945, although the creation of new 'People's Courts' to track down war
criminals and 'elements hostile to the people' represented the undermining of
legal principles. These special courts, which comprised lay-judges supplied
by the political parties and trade unions, were empowered to pronounce the
death sentence. A confession by the accused obviated the need to prove his
guilt on the part of the court. After the creation of the Left-Wing Bloc and
the Communist Party's successful infiltration of the trade unions, the
People's Courts increasingly became institutions for condemning the 'class
enemy'. Introduced in 1947, the Workers' Courts, or 'profiteer courts' as
they were called, pronounced sentence on 'crimes' committed by former owners
when firms were nationalised or 'economic offences'
committed within private companies. These courts served the political aims of
the Communists. A law of March 1948 gave the minister of justice full powers
to dismiss judges who had fallen from favour or
were deemed politically unreliable, and the subsequent dismissal of over 10
per cent of Hungary's
judges marked an end to judicial independence. After 1949 more and more
'peoples judges' sat in court cases where they gave the content of the judgement, while the formally trained judges remained
responsible for overseeing court protocol. This politicisation
of the judicial system meant an end to the principle of equality before the
law and the courts, and signified the introduction of a party-political
'class justice'.
Section VI of the new constitution of 20
August 1949 confirmed the independence of the judiciary and the Supreme Court's
control over legal judgements. But since, at the
same time, control of the judiciary by the State Prosecutor's Office was
imposed and responsibility for the appointment, accountability and suspension
of all judges made subject to the 'guidelines to electors', issued by the
party, little remained of judicial independence. The 'control of Socialist
law' was brought under the direction of the highest legal authority, the
State Prosecutor's Office (Law 13 of 1953). Administrative justice had
already been transferred in 1948 to the arbitration boards of factories and
councils, the parliamentary court and the State Prosecutor's Office. The new
criminal law code of 1950, which extensively adopted legal principles applied
in the Soviet Union, also introduced the concept of 'Socialist law' in Hungary. In
future class justice dealt with the accused and sentenced him primarily
according to his social class membership. This resulted in crimes which by
definition could be committed only by the class enemy. Under this system a
lawyer was permitted only to defend interests which the courts deemed 'just'.
The independence of the legal profession ceased as lawyers were placed
directly under the minister of justice. In place of the People's courts
special courts attached to the Budapest Criminal Court were eventually
entrusted with staging political trials which paid scant attention to the
official rules or the rights of the accused.
The secret police played a vital role in the
process of 'exposing the class enemy' and preparing political trials. From
the beginning the Soviets had given it assistance. By training émigrés,
defectors and 'turned' prisoners-of-war during the Second World War according
to NKVD and NKGB instructions (the People's Commissariats for Internal Affairs,
i.e. state security) had prepared the way for using them in a later Communist
takeover. Before 1949, a political department of the Hungarian general staff,
headed by Colonel György Pálffy-Oesterreicher
and supported by forty Soviet advisers, carried out the functions of a
political police. The political department of the gendarmerie (ÁVO) existed
alongside this. After 1950, the dynamic Gábor Péter reorganised the various
police organisations with the help of Soviet
experts. In the new ÁVH he developed a perfect technique of fabricating
appropriate conspiracies and confessions at the most opportune moment to
exploit a political situation. Thanks to its purges, the secret police,
comprising sixteen departments holding records on over a million citizens and
relying on some 300,000 informers, was able to remove itself almost entirely
from party control during the latter part of the Stalinist era. It became a
semi-autonomous institution which eventually could only be directly
controlled by Moscow.
At the same time, the Soviet police kept its own independent secret police
apparatus in Hungary.
During the period of the great purges and the show trials which violated
'Socialist law', neither the Soviet security service, the MVD, nor Stalin
were beyond sending incriminating material about certain officials to the
Hungarian party leadership with the instruction that the local security
police should follow up the case.
In the armed forces, too, reliable
Hungarians, who were proSoviet and devoted to the
Kremlin, were also given key positions from the time of the country's
liberation onwards. The creation of a large army had to wait at first until a
cease-fire agreement had been concluded, with the result that in the autumn
of 1945 only 10,000
men were available
for the defence of Hungary's frontiers. This force
remained poorly equipped, moreover, because of Soviet anxieties concerning
their reliability and operational ability. The mass demobilisation
carried out immediately after the end of the war had made it possible to dismiss
all full-time officers suspected of anti-Communism on the grounds that they
had actively supported the war against the Soviet Union.
However, a small superbly trained and politically reliable group of officers
had returned home in the wake of the Red Army, most of whom had emigrated to
the Soviet Union in the inter-war period and had proved their commitment in
the Rákosi batallion of
the International Brigades in Spain or in special units behind the front in
the Second World War. The defence minister who
initially belonged to the Smallholders' Party could not prevent these
'Muscovites', along with PálffyOesterreicher,
Lieutenant General Gusztáv Illy
and László Sólyom, from
occupying the key positions in the general staff. When, after the signing of
the peace treaty which allowed Hungary a standing army of 65,000
men and an air force of 5,000 trained specialists, the government pressed
ahead with a build-up of the armed forces, Communist sympathisers,
were given preference in joining the army as full-time professional officers.
The creation of a new officer corps, trained at Soviet military academies or
by Soviet military instructors, whose members were recruited from the
socially less well-off classes and thus thought less susceptible to bourgeois
democratic and pro-western views, resulted in a situation in which by 1954
52.8 per cent of Hungary's
officers were of 'proletarian' or 'peasant' origin. As for the generals, 52
per cent had risen from the working class and 21 per cent from the peasantry.
The system of political policing and control, emulating the Soviet model and
carried out by 'politruks', i.e. instructors
attached to each commanding officer, and the steady increase in political
instruction in dialectical materialism of each officer corps intake, was from
the outset part of the process of political and ideological re-education. But
the modernisation of arms systems led the Kremlin
to ensure that only those comrades were put in control of the armed forces
whose absolute loyalty to the Soviet Union
left no room for doubt. The defence minister, Mihály Farkas, and his
successor, General István Bata, were Soviet
citizens as was the air force chief, Sándor Házi, and the chief of the general staff, János Tóth. On the Kremlin's
instructions, they increased the number of troops to over 100,000 men by
1950, with the result that more than 1 per cent of the entire Hungarian
population was permanently under arms.
These major changes
were only partly endorsed by the government's new written constitution (Law XX
of 1949). Approved by the united Socialist party in parliament on 18 August,
the Basic Law, as it was called, came into effect on the 20 August 1949, the
traditional national holiday in honour of St
Stephen, which was referred to as 'constitution day'. Although it underwent
several significant amendments, the same constitution remained in force until
the collapse of Communism. In January 1949, the commission appointed to
produce a draft of the new constitution had visited Moscow in order to find inspiration in the
Soviet constitution of 1936. Their draft, published on 15 March, was, again
following Soviet practice, discussed in the various party organisations.
Of the 67 proposed amendments, six were incorporated into its final form.
According to this constitution, which revealed little originality, the
'Hungarian People's Republic' was 'a state of workers and peasants' in which
'the nation's workers' were engaged in gradually abolishing 'the elements of
capitalism' and deliberately constructing 'the Socialist economic order'. The
constitution created a surrogate parliament in the Presidium (Elnöki Tanács) which comprised
twenty-one members elected and controlled by the country's parliamentary
deputies. This functioned not only as a collective head of state, but assumed
parliamentary powers during the long periods between the plenary sessions of
the wider assembly. Thus, the legislative centre of gravity shifted to
official decrees issued by the Presidium. Since the principle of the
separation of powers was abolished, the Council of Ministers also had the
power to legislate. The constitution also gave the administration increased
autonomy and thus prepared the way for the introduction of a system of
soviets which was officially implemented by Law 1 of 1950. These soviets were
elected by all citizens entitled to vote for candidates nominated by the
party. In the event of the electorate's wishes being ignored, the voters
retained the right to remove from office the new organs of state power which
were supervised by the Presidium, the Council of Ministers or the superior
soviets at local and regional level. The administration's former independence
was abolished and replaced by the principles of 'democratic centralism' and
'double dependence' on both party control and that of the voters. The
Independence Front, which was re-named the 'Patriotic Popular Front' in 1954,
was given responsibility for organising elections,
thus guaranteeing the continuation of the party's direct leadership and
control. Of the 220,000 delegates elected to Soviets for the first time in
October 1950, over a third belonged to the MDP.
Many Magyars were particularly offended by
the constitution's abolition of the state coat of arms from the Kossuth
period, which was replaced by a 'hammer and sickle on a round field of azure,
supported on either side by wheatsheafs' with a
'five-cornered red star in the upper half of the field', 'emitting rays on to
the field' with 'a folded band of red, white and green underneath'.
After depriving the workers of political
power within the framework of a united Socialist party, removing the
democratic parties' scope for activity and usurping the control mechanisms of
the state and the economy, the Communists thought the time had come to deal
with the last remaining opponent of any significance, namely the
'reactionary' Catholic Church, in particular, its hierarchy. The conflict
dated back to the beginning of 1945 when Cardinal József
Mindszenty succeeded Cardinal Serédi
as Hungarian Primate. This passionate, devout and highly conservative prince
of the Church had openly and publicly expressed his rejection of dialectical
materialism and Communist aims. When the MKP began to attack the two
foundation stones of the Church's influence in Hungary, i.e. landed property and
the education of youth, it ruled out any prospect of establishing a modus vivendi between the Catholic bishops and the MKP. Mindszenty, who had been imprisoned by the Arrow Cross
while Bishop of Veszprém, openly supported the
return of the monarchy and a cautious approach to any change in Hungary's
social and economic order, which he believed could only be achieved by
evolutionary means. The Christian Democratic People's Party, (Keresztény Demokrata Néppárt) which had been founded by Count József Pálffy on 13 October
1944, was able to count at first on the support of broad sections of the
clergy. As a broad, conservative Catholic movement, its programme
adopted Mindszenty's views, demanding that the
creation of a new political, social and economic order be based on natural
law, the moral teachings of the gospels and social policy as proclaimed in
papal encyclica. On 17 March 1945, it also demanded
'genuine compensation for the Church's confiscated properties' and called for
'the clamour of party-political disagreements to be
kept out of the schools'. As a result, the Communists successfully excluded
the clergy from participating in the November elections of 1945. The militant
Primate took his revenge on 18 October by issuing a committed pastoral letter
in which he condemned the 'Marxist evil' and called on the faithful to
support the Party of Smallholders at the elections. Their subsequent success
was almost certainly due to this open intervention by the Church on their ehalf. When, despite the Church's protests, the republic
was proclaimed on 1 February 1946, Mindszenty
defiantly revived his former title of 'Chief Excommunicator of the Realm'.
During 1946 the Communists exacted thier revenge by conducting a policy of minor harrassment for which the interior minister, Rajk, was chiefly responsible. Church institutions were
subjected to petty chicanery, the activities of the church press were
obstructed by rationing newsprint and searches were carried out in
denominational schools, which on several occasions resulted in the discovery
of 'arms caches'. Church youth organisations and
the Catholic Student Federation, which was accused of involvement in the
murder of two Soviet soldiers, were banned. When the Communists also
campaigned for the abolition of compulsory religious instruction the conflict
escalated. Mindszenty called on all churchgoers to
stage mass demonstrations and succeeded in temporarily forcing the MKP to
exercise restraint. After the rigged elections of August 1947 and the
destruction of the democratic opposition the Cardinal forbade the ringing of
church bells 'as long as Hungary
is ruled by excommunicates'. An attempt at mediation by two prominent laymen,
the composer, Zoltán Kodály,
and the historian, Gyula Szekfű,
proved unsuccessful. It was predictable that the MKP's
infuriated leaders would take revenge at the earliest opportunity. In
February 1948, attacks against the churches and their denominational schools
were stepped up. The Catholics, along with the Calvinists and the Lutherans
were now targetted by government propaganda.
Following the government's announcement of its intention to bring all
denominational schools under state control, Cardinal Mindszenty
tried to prevent the carrying out of this threat to the Church's activities
by a series of petitions, sermons and pastoral letters. The less
hierarchically organised protestant churches, on
the other hand, representing about a quarter of the country's practising Christians, failed to resist the pressure for
long and handed over their 2,000 schools to state control. On 16 June 1948,
the Hungarian parliament, unimpressed by the Catholic clergy's vigorous
protests, approved the programme to establish state
control over all denominational schools. The Catholic Church was dispossessed
of some 3,000 educational institutions. The Cardinal was not, however,
prepared to give in, and ordered the 2,500 priests and nuns in the affected
schools to stop teaching immediately. The government then began a campaign to
force the militant cardinal to resign and be replaced. But since this
pressure failed to achieve its objective, Mindszenty
was arrested on 23 December 1948 and put on
trial between 3 and 8 February 1949, charged with subversion. Although the
Cardinal made several confessions under the pressure of psychological
torture, his alleged confession of guilt, circulated in a government
publication before the trial opened, was a crude forgery. In his skilfully worded, reconciliatory final speech at the
trial the Cardinal admitted that the Church had made some mistakes in the
pursuit of its political aims. But apart from his illegal contacts with the
American ambassador and irregularities in the handing over of foreign aid
donations -- for which he could hardly be held responsible -- the prosecution
was unable to furnish proof of any 'crime against the state'. Nevertheless,
he was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, the removal of the Cardinal,
who was so much feared by the Communist leadership, did nothing to break the
influence of the Catholic Church among its adherents. The party ideologues
must have found it disquieting that after religious instruction had been made
optional 95 per cent of Hungary's
parents still opted for their children to take it, despite the obstacles this
placed in their way. The new Hungarian Primate, the Archbishop of Kalocsa. József Grősz, had a much more conciliatory nature than Mindszenty, but he, too, showed that he was not prepared
to accept any further encroachment upon the Church's rights without a fight.
As a result, the government embarked upon a new round in its struggle against
the Church in June 1950 by arresting a number of priests and laymen,
confiscating most of the monasteries and evicting 12,000 nuns and monks.
These measures forced the bishops to sign an 'agreement between the
government of the Hungarian People's Republic and the Catholic Church' on 30
August 1950. Under its terms the Council of Bishops was obliged to recognise the régime and the republican constitution. It
also agreed to condemn any subversive activity against the people's
democracy, to appeal to the faithful to do their utmost in 'the great work
which the entire Hungarian people is performing under the leadership of the
régime' and to support the aims of the Communist-inspired world peace movement.
In return, the government promised to guarantee the Church's 'freedom of
action', return eight Catholic training colleges to Church control and lift
the ban on the four orders of Benedictines, Franciscans, Marists and the
teaching order of nuns. It also agreed to compensate the church for its
economic losses for 18 years until it was again able to maintain itself by
its own means. The Hungarian bishops were not prevented from taking any
disciplinary measure against the so-called 'peace priests' who had sided
with the régime. The Calvinist Reformed Church, for its part, had already
been obliged to sign a similar agreement.
Since the internal political climate in Hungary was,
however, increasingly deteriorating, the Catholic hierarchy soon found itself
subjected to new pressures. The Church's discreet neutrality no longer
satisfied the régime which sentenced the interim primate, Grősz,
to fifteen years imprisonment in July 1951 after a show trial which ended in
the accused making a full confession and incriminating himself to an
unbelievable degree. Further trials led to heavy sentences being meted out to
the Catholic Bishop of Csanád, Msgr. Hamvas, the Lutheran bishop, Lajos
Ordass and the presbyterian
bishop, László Ravasz,
although, unlike Mindszenty, all were eventually
officially rehabilitated in 1956. From now on the newly created State Office
for Church Affairs had little trouble in persuading bishops and priests to
take an oath of allegiance to the People's Republic on 21 July 1951. The
activities of the 'peace priests', petty harassment and constant secret
police surveillance forced the churches to come to terms with the limited
scope for action left to them and their increased exclusion from public life.
The establishing of state control over church
schools was accompanied by an increasing imitation of Soviet methods and
values in the educational sector and cultural life in a way which was
completely alien to Magyar traditions and which aroused strong objections. In
1941, 6 per cent of Hungary's
population, i.e. 466,180 people over the age of ten were still registered as*
illiterate. It had therefore been an urgent government priority after the war
to overcome this lamentable state of affairs which resulted from the
country's backwardness and traditional social structure. By awarding grants
the government attempted to increase the number of students from workers' and
peasant families who made up only 5 per cent of the total student population.
It also encouraged prospective students to take up the study of the natural
sciences. In the period after 1947, an impressive number of higher
educational establishments, including vocational and technical schools,
universities and technical faculties, were set up in record time in order to
train new personnel for the party, the bureaucracy, industry and scientific
research. These institutions also offered evening courses and correspondence
courses for anyone in full-time employment. In 1951, the selective awarding
of grants supported 24,000 students in Hungary, who, however, had to
accept, increasing restrictions being placed on their freedom to choose a
career.
The proposed increase in student numbers,
envisaged in the first Five Year Plan, was greatly exceeded. The number of
secondary school pupils, which had been expected to rise by 45,000, rose by
77,000. Instead of the expected figure of 8,000, the number of students
matriculating at universities and other higher education establishments
showed an increase of 30,000. In 1951 alone, 17,000 new students applied for
places, with the result that 33,000 young people in all received a university
education (compared with 11,500 students in 1938). In the same year, 1.25
million children attended elementary school and a further 93,600 pupils were
enrolled in further education. The government tried to cope with the
unexpected flood of students by speeding up the completion of the new
Technical University of Heavy Industry in Miskolcz,
the Agricultural
College in Gödöllő and the College for the Chemical Industry in
Veszprém. In addition, a Department for Transport
Studies was set up in Szeged and a Foreign Languages
College established in Budapest.
The party was also able to announce proudly
that as many as 57 per cent of students and 68 per cent of secondary school
pupils already came from a working-class or peasant background. But when many
gave up their studies after a short period owing to adverse external
circumstances and major ideological difficulties 'bourgeois' professors were
blamed for discouraging the students through their examination system. A
great deal of interference in curricular development and training methods in
which greater stress was placed on a knowledge of dialectical materialism
contributed to a rapid decline in teaching standards and a breakdown in
discipline. Although the minister of education, Darvas,
admitted to the party newspaper Szabad Nép on 29 August 1951, 'Our students are very weak in
Mathematics, Hungarian Language and Literature and Physics', adding that
'only all too often proper education is neglected in favour
of senseless politicisation', little was done at
the height of the Stalinist era to overcome the system's acknowledged
inadequacies and liberate Hungarian education from its Soviet model.
As chief spokesman on cultural affairs during
the Rákosi era, József Révai also let it be known on 6 September 1951, that 'the
ultimate aim of our national education is to inspire people wholeheartedly
with the truth of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin'.
Accordingly, those responsible for journalistic and cultural activities were
given the task of convincing the adult population of the blessings of the new
state ideology by full-scale attempts to influence opinion, alter the popular
consciousness and disseminate a new ethos. This was accompanied by a cult of
the USSR
and a drive to promote the learning of the Russian language, carried out
principally by the Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society with over 1.2 million
members. Under the MDP's supervision it pursued its
mission of eradicating the Hungarians' deep reservations towards the Soviet Union and of demonstrating the country's close
ties with the Soviet people and their great leader, Stalin. In schools and
youth organisations, too, a policy of cultural russification was intended to inculcate a spirit of
national subordination for as long as it took to instil
recognition of the Soviet Union's
pre-eminence and to promote a genuine and voluntary solidarity within the
Socialist bloc. The official party newspaper Szabad
Nép, which had a daily print-run of 800,000
copies following the dismantling of Hungary's once varied press,
shared these goals. It sanctified the 'USSR's peace policy' and 'great
success in constructing Socialism', at the same time praising Stalin and his
Hungarian 'viceroy', Rákosi. Cultural centres, cinemas, theatres and public libraries, set up
at considerable cost throughout the country, were used to promote the party's
political aims with considerable educational zeal.
As part of the struggle waged against
'bourgeois objectivism', Hungary's
creative artists also found themselves under pressure to toe the official
party line. The growing tendency to prescribe dogmatically the subject matter
of artistic activity and scientific research produced disastrous results,
however, since many intellectuals and artists who opposed Stalinist norms
preferred to go to prison or a labour camp rather
than serve Socialist realism and do their 'duty to partiality' in the
humanities and 'optimistic' art. 'The party demands that our writers supply
the nation with positive heroes', Révai stated at
the Hungarian Congress of Writers in May 1951. But, despite greatly improved
working conditions and considerable social advantages, only mediocre artists
were prepared to take up his call. Since the government was not merely
content with submission and obedience, but constantly expected enthusiasm,
life was increasingly poisoned by deception, cynicism and opportunism.
In order to pre-empt organised
opposition, the régime forced about 38,000 citizens, mainly members of the
upper classes and intellectuals, including 14,000 citizens of Jewish origin,
to leave Budapest
in May and June 1951 after completely confiscating their property. Throughout
the whole of Hungary
about 70,000 people may well have been affected by these deportations.
According to official information from the time,
the forced resettlement included 6 ex-princes, 52 counts, 41 barons, 22
ministers and state secretaries of former governments, 85 generals, 324 staff
officers, 30 factory owners, 46 bankers and 250 magnates. Like the others,
they were forced to earn a living as agricultural labourers,
barred from leaving their prescribed place of residence. But the régime not
only acted against the 'class enemy'. Following Stalin's call for an
'intensification of the class struggle', it was also ruthless in dealing with
its alleged internal enemies. As a result of genuine or feigned Soviet fears
of the effects of Titoism in the shape of
National-Stalinism, 'left-wing deviance', or its right-wing 'bourgeois'
variant, 'revisionism', Stalin had initially allowed purges to be conducted
in Albania, Bulgaria and Poland which spilled over into Hungary in the summer
of 1949. Taking the form of a never-ending series of public and secret trials
against opponents of the system they were intended to give the party a
monolithic unity and secure the unconditional loyalty of all its members.
Those found guilty of minor offences were expelled from the party and often
sent to prison camps where they they faced high
work norms or were made to serve in punishment battalions. Veteran Hungarian
Communists with long party service suddenly found themselves accused of being
Gestapo agents and Horthy fascists. Men who had fought in Spain and China were suddenly charged with
being 'cosmopolitan traitors'. Jews were accused of being 'hirelings of
Zionism'. Even some of those who had spent the inter-war period in Moscow were not safe
from fabricated charges. László Rajk,
who had already been considerably stripped of power when he was transferred
from the ministry of the interior to the foreign ministry in August 1948, was
arrested in May 1949 at the instigation of the 'Muscovites' around Rákosi, Gerő, Révai and Farkas. At his trial
held in May 1949, he, together with his Hungarian and Yugoslav co-defendants,
confessed to 'nationalist deviance' and admitted to having fought in Spain as an
'agent of imperialism'. His unbelievable self-deprecation went so far as to
confirm the prosecution's fantastic charges aimed at exposing Tito and other
National Communists. The trial, which was conducted along the lines of the
great Moscow
show trials of the 1930s, ended on 22 September 1949 with the pronouncement
of death sentences against Rajk, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai, who were duly executed
on 15 October. The remaining accused were given life sentences or long-term
imprisonment. The military who were similarly charged, i.e. Pálffy-Oesterreicher and Korondy,
were given a military trial and shot by firing squad.
rotests against the flagrant
violation of the conditions on human rights as expressly laid down in Article
40 of the peace treaty with Hungary were submitted by the US and British
governments as early as 2 April and 31 May 1949. But these were rejected by
the Hungarian government and the USSR as interference in the
internal affairs of a sovereign state. The United Nations Organisation's
condemnation of the show trials on 5 October and 3 November 1950, together
with further measures such as a refusal to allow Hungary to join the United
Nations (lasting until 1955), could not halt the purges, nor prevent the
régime's excesses which were later to be euphemistically described as
'contrary to Socialist legality'. Rákosi and his
closest colleagues knew how to use the purges to remove potentially dangerous
rivals for power and establish Rákosi's personal
dictatorship all the more firmly in Hungary. The political police,
the ÁVH, which had been created as the 'shield of revolution' to protect Hungary's
people's democracy against any subversion, slipped from party control and
established itself as a ,state within the state', feared by the population
and party officials alike. Among the 4,000 former Social Democrats who fell
victim to the purges in early 1950 were leading figures like Szakasits, György Marosán and István Ries. They were followed by about 5,000 trade union
officials whose removal provided the régime with the opportunity of reorganising the unions so that they could be used in
future primarily to oppress the workers in the interests of fulfilling the
government's economic plans.
Disgusted by the mass arrests and campaigns
of personal revenge, leading Communists like the 'Muscovite', Imre Nagy, and the celebrated literary theorist, György Lukács, withdrew from
political life. Others, who, like the interior minister, Jáinos
Kádár, and the head of the ÁVH, Péter,
bore responsibility for the Rajk trial, themselves
fell victim to the wave of purges they had initiated. In April 1951 the group
of home-based Hungarian Communists, which had been active underground during
the war and included foreign minister, Gyula Kállai, secretary of state, Géza
Losonczy, and Ferenc Donáth, who had been in charge of Rákosi's
personal office for a time, were arrested along with Kádár
and charged on the basis of confessions extorted after severe torture. Ká?dár was given four years in prison and Donáth two years, while the death penalty passed on Kállai and Losonczy was
commuted to life imprisonment by an act of clemency. When the new interior
minister, Sándor Zöld,
learned that proceedings were being instigated against him personally, he
shot his family and then committed suicide. The purges continue when almost
half of all party officials were removed from their positions in October and
November 1951. When the party's Central Committee declared war on 'Social Democratism' in June 1952, even the new chairman of the
Presidium, Sándor Rónai,
was removed from office in August. The preparations instigated by Stalin a
few weeks before his death, to put the Kremlin's mainly Jewish doctors on
trial, caused antisemitism, disguised as
'anti-Zionism', also to spill over to Hungary, despite the fact that Rákosi and most of his circle of party leaders were
themselves of Jewish origin. Among the victims of this third wave of purges
which lasted until well into 1954 were also such experts in torture and
law-breaking as the ÁVH chief, Péter, and the
former minister of justice, Gyula Décsi. The exact number of middle and high ranking party
officials arrested and sentenced is unknown but, certainly, several thousand
may have fallen victim to these purges. In addition, more than 350,000 party
members lost their party membership by August 1954, which in most cases meant
that those affected were subjected to tangible political and economic
discrimination.
Rákosi, who, for good or
ill, was entirely at the mercy of Stalin's pressures and increasingly hated
by his own countrymen, had been able to establish his personal dictatorship
in Hungary
only by spreading fear and terror and building up his own personality cult
after removing all his rivals. On his 50th birthday, 9 March 1952, he was
enthusiastically honoured by both party and state.
The public praise and sycophantic fuss accorded him were surpassed only by
the Stalin cult. Under Rákosi, the chairman of the
National Economic Council, Ernő Gerő, had established a strong position assisted by
two other 'Muscovites': the chairman of the State Planning Authority, Zóltan Vas, and the Central Committee Secretary for
Economic Affairs, István Friss.
Gerő's willingness to carry out any order
reliably and zealously also allowed the defence
minister, Mihály Farkas,
to rise in the party hierarchy and the minister of culture and party
ideologue, József Révai,
also belonged to the party élite for a time. Absolutely loyal to the Soviet
Union in the first place and only then to Pákosi,
these men took care to follow to the letter the Kremlin's instructions on Hungary's
Socialist transformation in their respective spheres of operation. When Rákosi, Gerő and Farkas created a ' Defence
Committee (Honvédelmi Bizottstág)
as a direct result of the Korean War in November 1950, they also created a
coordinating authority which became de facto the real centre of power in
Hungary, as the Politburo and the party's Central Committee were increasingly
stripped of their prerogatives. At the MDP's Second
Party Congress held in Budapest
between 25 February and 2 March 1951, the leading positions in the party were
filled only by those comrades who blindly followed the 'Muscovite' line and
unquestioningly accepted Rákosi's position as party
leader. When Rákosi also assumed the premiership on
14 August 1952, his power seemed complete, even though the economic policies
he had pursued had caused a profound crisis in Hungary.
At Stalin's behest, Hungary's
national economic development was forced to follow a path of rapid and
thorough industrialisation in all sectors. This was
accompanied by moves to spread the class struggle to the villages and tackle
the problem of rural poverty at the same time as breaking the opposition of
the wealthier peasants. Although the nationalisation
of industry and large parts of the service sector had placed almost 90 per
cent of the means of production under state ownership by 1948, the legacy of
old ways and Hungary's traditionally evolved social structure had still to be
broken up by a programme of forced industrialisation and reduced dependence on the world
market. The régime also hoped that industrialisation,
public works and the mechanisation of agriculture
would remedy the problems of overpopulation, underemployment and a low
standard of living in the countryside. The steady growth in agricultural
production, required to supply the rapidly growing industrial centres, also appeared to be the best way of reducing the
peasants to the level of wage-earners, thereby enabling food distribution to
be made subject to state control. Only thus could the régime divert funds
needed for industrial investment away from the agricultural sector and
exclude the conservative and reactionary peasant farmers from exercising any
political influence.
A Three Year Plan, prepared with the help of
Soviet experts and introduced on 1 August 1947, pursued the overall aim of
eradicating the last traces of war damage and increasing production by at
least 10 per cent over its 1938 levels. For military reasons maximum emphasis
was also placed on developing heavy industry, which received most of the
available investment funds, to the neglect of other sectors. By 31 December
1949, after almost superhuman efforts and enormous sacrifices, some important
sectors had even managed to exceed the plan's quotas, with the result that on
10 December the National Assembly was able to launch the first Five Year Plan
as from 1 January 1950. Its main aims were to accelerate the programme of 'Socialist industrialisation'
and improve the country's defence capacity. Of the
investment target of 35 thousand million forints, 17 thousand million were
earmarked for industry. To ensure the plan's success, the Presidium decreed
on 29 December 1949 that all firms employing more than ten workers and all
foreign-owned firms would be nationalised. At the
same time, the workers' productivity norms were increased and their
party-controlled trade unions entrusted with maintaining work discipline in
order to meet the plan's targets. Following the Soviet example, economic
affairs were regulated by legislation designed to deprive employees of all
freedom of action. State control over the direction of labour
was reinforced by the abolition of the right to choose one's place of work
and the right to strike. Further nationalisation
without compensation, which in February 1952 included, among other things,
rights of home ownership (with the exception of small family houses), led to
a sharp increase in discontent among the workers, especially since the
leadership's unrealistic revision of the Five Year Plan's schedule
contributed to a constantly declining living standard. Although the economy
showed all the symptoms of a major economic crisis, the economic Tsar, Ernő Gerő, announced
self-confidently at the MDP's Second Party Congress
that he would transform Hungary from a backward agrarian country to a modern
'country of iron and steel' within four years.
The new direction which nationalisation
and industrialisation gave to the economy was also
accompanied by the 'Socialist transformation' of rural life. The aim was to collectivise agriculture, thus organising
the peasants in a way which would make it easier to exert control over them.
This also meant loosening up the existing social structure in such a way that
the MDP would in future be the only point of focus and cohesion for the
community. In the summer of 1948 the régime began a propaganda war against
'Kulaks', by which it meant peasants who owned more than 25 hold (approx. 14
hectares). However, every citizen whom the party deemed politically
undesirable could be accused of being a Kulak and subjected to harassment
before being sent to a prison camp and having his property confiscated. After
this attempt to take the class struggle in to the villages had proved largely
unsuccessful Rákosi launched a recruitment drive in
August 1948 to set up voluntary agricultural cooperatives. In May 1947, he
had already promised the small holding peasants who clung to their land 'that
no power in the world will succeed in expropriating land from the
beneficiaries of land reform as long as the Communists remain in power'. To
persuade them to accept their forced participation in cooperatives, they were
initially allowed to hold on to their private plots. This was to be followed
by a number of planning stages, at the end of which all land, together with
its livestock and inventories, would be collectivised.
The peasant would eventually retain only a small plot of up to half a hectare
for his own private use. By the 1 December 1950, however, only 76,887
families, including 120,000 workers, could be persuaded to join one of the
established 2,185 cooperatives.
Because the government still held back at
first from imposing compulsory measures, and opened up the market to
agricultural produce after rationing had ended in 1949, there was a distinct
improvement in the general food situation. But the fact that the national
income rapidly outpaced the production of consumer goods led the Soviet
economist and theoretician, Evgenij Varga, who was of Magyar origin and had been attached to
the Hungarian government as an adviser, to demand that the 'consumption
fever' should be brought to an end by depressing real wages and forcing collectivisation. In the autumn of 1950, poor harvests,
low state-regulated purchase prices and the threat of expropriation caused
many peasants to slaughter their livestock and invest their ready cash in
consumer goods. Food supplies to the towns were consequently reduced to the
point that all foodstuffs had to be rationed again until 30 November 1951 and
all meat and animal fat until 30 June 1952. Since over a million workers were
already employed in industry and contributed 55 per cent of the national
income compared with the agricultural sector's 23.9 per cent, priority had to
be given to supplying food to the large cities and industrial concerns. The
government also had to introduce coercive measures in order to push ahead
with its collectivisation programme.
These measures were at least successful,
inasmuch as some 300,000 families had joined the cooperatives by 30 June
1953. But although the number of collectives had now grown to 5,224, there
were still only 375,000 workers engaged in this kind of agricultural
production. Many family members devoted themselves exclusively to more
profitable private economic activities or moved to industry which witnessed a
marked increase in the number of women workers in particular. A shortage of labour and the limited use of agricultural machinery
which was exclusively allocated to the so-called Machine Tractor Stations
also led to a series of bad harvests which began as early as 1951 and forced Hungary, once
a foremost exporter of agrarian produce, to import foodstuffs in order to
cover its domestic needs. Neither the cultivation of fallow land, nor the
speeding up of collectivisation, nor the extension
of state ownership to take in around 12 per cent of all arable land,
fulfilled the government's modest hopes of improving yields. An increase in
the supply of artificial fertiliser and more
agricultural mechanisation also achieved little,
with the result that the agrarian sector continued to be the main constraint
on the government fulfilling its high economic targets.
Although 29 per cent of Hungary's foreign trade was already directly
transacted with the Soviet Union, Budapest was
greatly disappointed by the initially limited success of the Council for
Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) set up in Moscow on 25 January
1949. Despite its undertaking to guarantee 'mutual fraternal aid' on an equal
basis, the Soviet Union, which had virtually achieved autarky, was able to
use Hungary's great dependence on supplies of raw materials and energy,
deliberately to fix a low price on goods which Hungary had to supply to the
Soviet Union under the terms of Comecon's long-term
trade agreements while at the same time it steadily increased its demand for
high quality. Since a resumption of Hungary's former trade with the West was
inconceivable at the height of the Cold War, there was no alternative but to
retreat into the Soviet-dominated economic bloc and continue the programme of industrialisation
demanded by the Soviet Union which concentrated solely on heavy industry and
measured progress in terms of heavy tonnage at the expense of consumer goods
production. The West's economic blockade also provided an excuse to blame any
economic deficiencies and setbacks on the enmity of western capitalists who
were 'envious of Socialist industrialisation and
its successes' and to avoid being blamed by the workers for their
considerable sacrifices and continually deteriorating living standards.
Since the consolidation of the Soviet
Union's east European imperium was central to Stalin's
foreign policy, Hungary
was denied the opportunity to develop any of its own diplomatic initiatives.
The founding of NATO and the creation of the German Federal
Republic was used to
increase dramatically the population's fear of aggressive imperialism. The
conflict between Stalin and Tito had resulted in Hungary
completely freezing its formerly close relations with its southern neighbour and, on the Soviet Union's
instructions, responding increasingly aggressively to the Yugoslav
Communists' successful attempts to resist pressure from the Kremlin. World
opinion's rejection of the persecution of the churches, the terror rials and the purges froze Hungary's minimal contacts with
the outside world even further. The outbreak of the Korean War increased fears
of a total confrontation of the superpowers almost to the point of hysteria. Hungary's
adoption of the Stalinist system of institutional and ideological conformity
offered only the possibility of developing bilateral contacts with the other
Socialist countries of eastern Europe and sharing in Soviet initiatives such
as the world peace movement. The aims announced at one of the last major
conferences of the World Peace Council, held in Budapest in June 1953, that,
'Every nation has the right to determine freely its way of life and must
respect that chosen by other peoples' in order to 'facilitate the necessary
peaceful co-existence of different systems and allow relations between the
nations to be shaped to the advantage of all' still had only limited validity
in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence in eastern Europe.
THE FAILURE OF THE 'NEW COURSE' AND THE POPULAR UPRISING OF OCTOBER
1956
In the final weeks of his life Stalin, who
was increasingly intransigent in demanding ideological conformity, urged
further purges and even closer economic cooperation between the Soviet Union and its east European allies. His
unexpected death on 5 March 1953 spared Hungary the incalculable
consequences of this intended Soviet interference in its affairs. Because of
internal rivalries within the Soviet leadership and their weaker position,
Stalin's successors did not dare intervene in the internal affairs of the
east European People's Democracies to the same degree of ruthlessness as
their predecessor. Despite all attempts to preserve a continuity in relations
and to continue using traditional disciplining methods, the new Soviet
leaders were obliged to leave the leading party officials in fellow Socialist
countries more to themselves than previously. Molotov, who had emerged from
the leadership struggle still firmly in charge of Soviet foreign policy,
supported continuing Stalin's policies, unchanged in form and content.
However, after the elimination of the interior minister, Beria, Stalin's
actual successors, Malenkov and Krushchev,
prevailed with their argument that Soviet interests were best served by a
policy which would be more flexible in form, but similar in content. The Soviet Union's domination was no longer to be secured
by terror and the methods of the police state nor by the undisguised
exploitation of the east European economies, since there was always the
danger of a sudden outbreak of open opposition. The National Communist
parties, weakened by the purges and internecine struggles of the previous
four years, would not be able to deal effectively with such opposition. The
view of the new Kremlin leaders that economic concessions would have to be
made in order to raise living standards and their recognition of the need to
raise Communist morale and the will to succeed by allowing the parties more
autonomy was linked with the hope that this would enable the National
Communists to achieve greater respect and popularity in their own countries.
The need to scale down police terror and
remove comrades known to be Stalin's closest disciples out of the firing line
aroused the suspicion of Rákosi and his closest
colleagues, although, with typical obedience they let themselves be persuaded
of the absolute necessity of the 'New Course' advocated by Malenkov. Because
of severe food shortages and inadequate housing conditions, the first Five
Year Plan's emphasis on encouraging heavy industry and the policy of
compulsory agricultural collectivisation had caused
general dissatisfaction to rise to boiling point, despite the régime's
repressive measures. Hungary's
citizens continued to experience the arbitrary use of political power, as
their government tried in vain to reverse the downward economic trend and
overcome cultural and spiritual stagnation. The government and administration
were overcentralised, the bureaucratic state
apparatus entirely subject to the party's directives. Civic rights were
trampled upon. Excluding officials responsible for the economy, the inflated
bureaucracy had grown to 320,000 civil servants. The party with upwards of
850,000 members was administered by 40,000 senior officials. The state
security services may well have employed as many as 10,000 and over 150,000
soldiers served in the armed forces at any one time. The populations growing
sense of realism after campaigns, appeals and compulsory measures designed to
educate them to selfresponsibility, no longer
allowed itself to be conciliated by the party's unbelievable propaganda.
In order to mobilise
the population for the parliamentary elections due to be held on 17 May 1953
the largely inactive Popular Front committees were revived as the common organisation linking party members with the politically
affiliated, but failed to bridge the gulf which existed between the
leadership and the population. A week after the outbreak of the workers'
rising in the German Democratic Republic Rákosi, Gerő, Farkas and Imry Nagy, who had meantime become acting deputy prime
minister without any real influence, were summoned to the Kremlin. After
heated exchanges with their Soviet comrades, Rákosi,
who was mocked as the Jewish King of Hungary', felt obliged to make do with
the post of First Secretary of the MDP and handed over the running of the
government to Nagy who had not been implicated in the purges. At the plenary
executive meeting of the Central Committee on 27-28 June fierce criticism was
levelled at the policies which the régime had
pursued up to this point. The personnel of the Politburo and Secretariat was
replaced and decisions made on the basic direction to be followed by a new
government programme which Nagy submitted to
parliament when presenting his new cabinet on 4 July 1953. In order to
improve living standards, he announced that consumer goods production would
be encouraged at the expense of heavy industry which had hitherto been given
preferential treatment. Collective farmers were to be allowed to leave the
agricultural cooperatives and take their own property with them. He also
promised a revision of judicial practices which had offended 'Socialist law',
together with the closure of internment camps and an end to arbitrary police
methods.
Nagy made it clear in due course that he
wanted to eradicate what remained of the subordinate role Stalin had imposed
on Hungary
and would follow a policy which no longer ran counter to its interests. He
found the idea of a world divided into two military power blocs and the
consequent need of the Socialist countries to defend themselves -- which
naturally implied the Soviet Union's leadership -- unacceptable because it
imposed sacrifices on Hungary
at the expense of its own economic development and social transformation. In
anticipation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, formulated later
at the Bandung Conference of the non-aligned countries, he expressed the view
that respect for national independence, sovereignty, equality,
self-determination and non-interference in internal affairs had to be applied
also to the Socialist countries: 'It is the sovereign right of the Hungarian
people to decide which form of international status is the most favourable for guaranteeing national independence and
peaceful development.' Nagy, the spokesman of a small 'liberal' minority
within the MDP was tolerated by the new Kremlin leadership despite
reservations concerning the practicability of such heretical ideas. The
Soviet leaders hoped that it would be possible to reduce the Hungarian
population's hatred of Rákosi's Communist Party and
overcome the country's economic difficulties. It soon became clear, however,
that Rákosi and his 'dogmatic' followers were not
prepared to surrender their position without a fight, especially since they
were able to hold onto their bastions of power in the planning authorities
and economic administration and could push through Ernő
Gerő's appointment as interior minister.
Despite this obstacle, Nagy, who was able to rely on the support of the
intelligentsia, the majority of bureaucrats and Magyar nationalists, tried
very hard to establish control over the omnipotent state security service,
the ÁVH. He hoped essentially to reduce its status to that of a much smaller
state security department under the interior ministry in order to prevent it
becoming a political factor in its own right. Most of the 150,000 inmates of Hungary's
prisons and prison camps were released. However, the process of
rehabilitation took a long time and by the end of 1954 had benefited only 100
veteran Communist Party members. The régime's alleged opponents, who had been
deported to the countryside, were allowed to return to their home towns. By
the end of 1953 more than 500 collectives had been dissolved and the
notorious 'Kulak list' abolished. Only 200,000 peasants contined
to work in the cooperatives which owned just on 18 per cent of the country's
arable land. The redistribution of investment meant that heavy industry was
allocated 41.1 per cent fewer funds compared with the previous year. However,
the desired speedy economic recovery failed to materialise,
since the removal of compulsion was accompanied by a decline in work
discipline and, hence, productivity. It soon became apparent that the reform
measures which Nagy's political opponents had avoided were unlikely to fulfil the régime's over-exaggerated expectations, even
approximately. Nevertheless, in order to fulfil the
plan to some extent, increasing pressure was put on the workers to reach
their targets by the end of 1954 and the peasants were again called upon to
join cooperatives.
Although the Central Committee of the MDP
had deliberately decided to continue the 'New Course' on 31 October 1953,
this did not deter the group around Rákosi from
consistently undermining Nagy's policies. The support which the Soviet
leaders gave the Hungarian premier on his visit to Moscow in January 1954 and the Kremlin's
rejection of Rákosi's policies when the latter
addressed them at the beginning of May did nothing to prevent his supporters
continuing their delaying and blocking tactics. At the MDP's
Third Party Congress, held in Budapest
between 24 and 30 May 1954, Rákosi even managed to
increase his support among the 70 members of the Central Committee and fill
the Politburo, apart from Nagy's post, and the secretariat entirely with his
own supporters. The detailed work which went into the preparation of the
second Five Year Plan also provided Rákosi with the
opportunity to establish national economic priorities in accordance with his
own ideas on the subject. Nagy's attempts in October 1954 to counter the
growing influence of his opponents within the party by reviving the Hungarian
Independence-Popular
Front as part of the Patriotic Popular Front failed to produce the desired
effect. After his mentor, Malenkov, was dismissed from his position as
chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the 8 February 1955, he
succeeded in remaining as head of the Hungarian government only until 18
April 1955. Four days previously he and Mihály Farkas, who had up until now supported Rákosi, were stripped of all their party offices. Reduced
to the status of a political non-person, Nagy was expelled from the MDP in
November 1955 and accused of bearing sole responsibility for all the
shortcomings and mistakes of the past.
Rákosi did not enjoy his
success for long. Krushchev, who was interested in
avoiding an East-West confrontation because of the Soviet
Union's growing economic problems, would no longer tolerate a
return to violent Stalinist terror methods. The efforts of the Kremlin's
strong man to normalise relations with Yugoslavia as well as eradicate the effects of
Stalinism in the Soviet Union increasingly
threatened the position of Stalin's most faithful Hungarian paladin who was
also mainly responsible for the campaign against Tito. But Nagy's brief
period in power before the premiership was handed over to Rákosi's
younger and dependent supporter, Andrés Hegedüs (b.
1922), had succeeded in reducing the population's fear of intimidation and
persecution by the secret police and had extended the limits of personal and
intellectual freedom. Despite his objections, Rákosi
failed to prevent Cardinal Mindszenty being
transferred from prison to a more tolerable form of house arrest in July
1955, nor the clergymen sentenced along with Archbishop Grósz
from being released from prison in October. When Rajk's
widow was also set free, the question as to who should bear political
responsibility for the régime's purges and judicial murders could no longer
be suppressed. At the plenary executive meeting of the Central Committee,
held in June 1953, Rákosi had already admitted once
to having set all the ÁVH's operations in motion.
Now, two years later, all he could do in mitigation of his offence was point
out that the actual behind-the-scenes organiser,
the ÁVH chief, Péter, had been sentenced to life
imprisonment by a military court on 13 March 1954.
Since, under Krushchev,
priority was once more given to the expansion of heavy industry, Rákosi did not hesitate to return to the principles of
the old Stalinist 'moon economy'. Once again the gap increased between the
iron and steel sector, on the one hand, and light industry, consumer goods
production and the agricultural sector, on the other. Nevertheless, during
Nagy's period in office the Soviet-Hungarian owned companies were returned to
full Hungarian ownership. The Soviet government also granted a loan, albeit a
modest one, amounting to 25.7 million dollars. On 7 and 8 June 1955, a
plenary executive meeting of the Central Committee decided upon the wholesale
collectivisation of agriculture in the hope of
raising production by 25 per cent. But, despite the government's powers,
complete collectivisation could be achieved only
gradually, since the peasants, feeling insecure and hostile to the policy,
offered passive resistance and refused to work on fields managed by the cooperatives.
In addition, the hopes of tackling Hungary's economic difficulties
more effectively by increasing economic cooperation within the framework of Comecon were only fulfilled to a limited extent. The
Kremlin's demand for a 12 per cent increase in defence
expenditure, despite Krushchev's policy of peaceful
co-existence, placed yet another heavy burden on the Hungarian economy.
The population was particularly disappointed
when the signing of the Austrian State Treaty on 15 May 1955 did not result
in a withdrawal of the Soviet troops still stationed in Hungary for
the purpose of securing the Red Army's supply routes. When the Federal
Republic of Germany had joined NATO on 6 May, the Soviet Union had used this
as the pretext for the People's Democracies to sign a multilateral agreement
on friendship, cooperation and mutual support in Warsaw on 14 May, but its terms did not
exclude a priori the stationing of Soviet troops on
the soil of a co-signatory. Since the Soviet leadership initially showed
little desire to transform the Warsaw Pact into a genuine advisory and
decision-making body of equal partners, it must have come as a serious blow
to the Hungarian 'national' Communists, in particular, to have to come to
terms with the loss of some of their sovereignty and freedom of action. In
the event of a defensive action against NATO, their armed forces were to be
subordinated to a common Supreme Command. They also had to accept the
continued presence of Soviet units as a force intended to preserve internal
political order and, hence, the Kremlin's right to intervene militarily.
Thus, Hungary's
entry to the United Nations on 14 December 1955 did little to raise the
nation's sense of injured self-esteem.
Because of its refusal to follow the Soviet
example of openly acknowledging its share of responsibility in the anti-Tito
campaign and to do anything to rehabilitate the victims of the terror trials,
the Rákosi régime was increasingly subjected to
intensive attacks by Yugoslavia
from the summer of 1955 onwards. Krushchev could
barely conceal his approval. The result was a slow but steady change in Hungary's
internal political climate. Released victims of the purges, younger party
officials and activists joined Hungary's intellectuals and
artists in demanding a revision of the official party line. They also wanted
officials guilty for the purges to be exposed and punished. As the gulf
deepened between the population and the Stalinist régime, Rákosi
felt obliged to make minor concessions in order to prevent exacerbating any
tensions. Journalists were given a modicum of freedom which resulted straight
away in more readable newspapers and magazines. When the censor ordered the
confiscation of an edition of the weekly newspaper of the Writers'
Federation. Irodalmi
Ujság (Literary
Journal) in September 1955
on account of an article critical of the government's cultural policy, the
editorial board resigned and 59 well-known writers signed a pointed protest
resolution addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The
state security services responded immediately with a punitive action. In
March 1956, the party leadership felt moved, however, to allow a student
discussion circle calling itself the 'Petöfi Club'
(after the freedom poet of the 1848-49 Revolution) to meet in Budapest and
tolerated the expression of alternative opinions to a limited extent, since
even the party newspaper Szabad Nip had spoken out against the rigid
imposition of intellectual conformity.
At the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet
Communist Party, held on 24 and 25 February 1956, Krushchev
had denounced some of the crimes of the Stalin era as part of his campaign
against his internal party critics and had sanctioned the possibility of
different 'national paths towards socialism' as one of Lenin's original
principles. For the Soviet Union and the
other Communist countries of eastern Europe, the Kremlin leader's
denunciation of Stalinism contained a potentially explosive time bomb,
although this was not recognised at the time. Krushchev's vague formula of a 'limited multiplicity in
unity' contained the hope that Communist régimes might emerge which were able
to look after their own interests without fundamentally weakening the
solidarity of the Socialist Bloc. Closer economic ties and the unifying power
of an ideological discussion of contemporary relevance would make up for the
renunciation of terror and dictatorship. Krushchev's
limited understanding of the consequences of this for national political
leaderships attempting to gain mass support or, in Hungary's case, facing the united
opposition of their population, proved as serious a misjudgement
as his false estimation of Tito's ambition and the aims of the Chinese
Communists.
Krushchev, who also faced
growing problems in the other People's Democracies, believed that the First
Secretary of the MDP, though heavily implicated himself, should personally
press ahead with the process of destalinisation in Hungary.
Tito, on the other hand, uncompromisingly demanded that his arch-enemy, Rákosi, be stripped of power. However, a problem arose in
that Rákosi's only successor as party leader was
the similarly implicated'Muscovite', Gerő. The former tried to use the breathing space
created by the exchange of views between Moscow
and Belgrade
to pin the blame for the violation of 'Socialist legality' exclusively on the
secret police, the ÁVH, and its former chief, Gábor
Péter. On 27 March 1956, he announced Rajk's posthumous rehabilitation. Only three weeks later,
however, he also had to admit publicly to his share of responsibility and
complicity. By the beginning of July more than 11,000 people had been
released in batches from prison. The cooperation between rebellious
intellectuals and discontented workers achieved by the Petöfi
Club forced the government to embark upon a limited resumption of the 'New
Course' by making material concessions and agreeing to respect legal norms
more strictly in future. But when this failed to end the mounting popular
discontent, Rákosi believed he could restore calm
to the country by reverting to the old tried-and-tested methods of
repression. In a Central Committee resolution of 30 June he mounted a fierce
attack on Nagy and his intellectual sympathisers,
and went on to announce 'a complete liquidation of Nagy's conspiracy' at a
full meeting of the Central Committee on 12 July. But by now the point had
been reached when the Kremlin felt obliged to intervene directly.
The reason for Soviet intervention at this
juncture can be found in the riots which broke out among workers in the
Polish town of Poznan
on 22 June. By 28 June, the unrest had escalated into a political conflict
which assumed a distinct anti-Soviet bias and had to be crushed by regular
troops. The affair had made the Soviet leadership aware of the pent-up
feelings of bitterness and the extent to which these nurtured the potential
for revolution. Thus, Rákosi's untimely actions had
conjured up the danger of another, even more dangerous explosion in Hungary.
Several Magyar Central Committee members, disturbed by the party leader's
blind rage, had, in accordance with the usual procedures, turned to the
Soviet ambassador, Yuri V. Andropov, with a request for guidance from the
Kremlin. Anastas Mikojan,
whom Krushchev used as a 'troubleshooter' during
the months that followed, was given the job of bringing the revolutionary
outbreaks under control. He arrived in Budapest
on 17 July, entrusted with the task of ensuring Rákosi's
replacement. On the following day the First Secretary resigned 'for health
reasons' and went into Soviet exile where he remained until his death in
1971. His successor, Ernő Gerő,
immediately found favour as a loyal spokesman for
the pro-Moscow faction. In order to achieve his main aim, which was to put an
end to splits within the leadership and maintain Soviet domination, he wanted
to make material concessions to the workers, force the pace of industrialisation even further and continue with the programme of agricultural collectivisation.
He also wanted to isolate 'subversive and oppositional elements' both inside
and outside the party and rehabilitate party members who had been wrongfully
imprisoned. Nagy, whom the Soviets also regarded as a sympathiser
of the now deposed Malenkov and the person actually responsible for creating
unrest, was not allowed to be reinstated to the MDP leadership. Instead,
prominent victims of the Rákosi period, such as J. Kádár, G. Kállai and G. Marosán, were appointed to the party secretariat and
Politburo.
This half-hearted Soviet intervention did
indeed discredit the Stalinists in Hungary, but could satisfy
neither the internal Hungarian opposition nor the sceptical
Yugoslavian Communists who at first had no wish to accept the veteran
Stalinist, Gert, as head of the MDP. Reconciliatory
gestures, such as the burial with honours of Rajk's mortal remains on 6 October, could not conceal the
fact that the new party chief had no clear policy and was unable to stamp out
the sparks of revolution. With the continued support of the once more
conspicuous secret police, the army and the Soviet occupation forces, but
with only a small basis of support within a party in turmoil, he tried to
resist mounting pressures from below. Soviet gestures of support, such as the
approval of a loan of 100 million roubles and
Tito's willingness, communicated by Krushchev, to
boost their prestige by receiving Gerő and his
premier, Hegedüs, in Yugoslavia, were no longer
sufficient to strengthen the former's basic position. Following lengthy talks
in the Kremlin with Mikojan and the party ideologue,
Suslov, in early October 1956, Gerő
and his companion, Kádár, who accompanied him on
the visit, saw the possibility of influencing the course of internal events
in Hungary,
only if Nagy were allowed to rejoin the party. Whereas the transfer of the
party leadership to the rehabilitated National Communist, Władysław
Gomulka, in the presence of Krushchev on 19-20
October had stabilised the internal political
situation in Poland, the
situation in Hungary
grew more acute by the hour. From the 20 October, meetings were held at Hungary's
universities at which students formulated their ideas in a short programme which consciously imitated the Twelve Point programme of 15 March 1848. They demanded a free press,
the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops, the creation of a genuine
multi-party system, guarantees of civic rights and personal freedom, an end
to the country's economic exploitation and the punishment of those
responsible for the terror of the Stalinist era. When, on the afternoon of 23
October, a demonstration of solidarity with the Poles attracted 100,000
people to the memorial of the Polish general and Hungarian freedom fighter, Józef Bem, the ÁVH responded
with force. The demonstrators flooded into the city centre where, joined by
police and soldiers, they set in motion an uprising which soon took on an
anti-Soviet character. The helpless party leadership, which had been caught
unawares, sought Moscow's
permission to appoint Imre Nagy to the premiership,
for it was believed that only his personal credibility and moderating
influence could help end a general strike which had been called and stop
attacks being carried out against the hated security forces and -- for the
first time -- Soviet installations. Marosán, a
member of the Politburo, former Social Democrat and only recently a
rehabilitated victim of the Rákosi period, turned
to the Kremlin for military assistance to put down the 'counter-revolution'.
Despite disagreement on which course to adopt, a majority of members in the
Presidium of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to
the use of Soviet troops in the hope of being able to nip the disturbances in
the bud without creating a sensation. Mikojan and Suslov were also despatched to Budapest to repress the
popular rising on the spot.
Following the proclamation of a state of
emergency the struggle for liberation, which was concentrated mainly on Budapest, was at first
quickly brought under control. This was due largely to the Hungarian army's
initial passivity and the massive intervention of Soviet troops which caused
an unnecessary bloodbath. At the same time, the Soviet negotiators put it to Gerő that he should hand over his position as First
Secretary of the MDP, by now in complete dissolution, to the popular victim
of the Rákosi period, János
Kádár, and, like his predecessor, leave Hungary
immediately. The new leadership of Kádár and Nagy
appealed to the population to observe law and order in return for a promise
that they would try to persuade the Soviet troops to return to their barracks
while negotiating with the Kremlin for their final complete withdrawal from Hungary. The
announcement of a new government, including prominent non-Communists, on 27
October, together with the withdrawal of Soviet armoured
units beginning on the 28th and Nagy's promise, given over the radio on 31
October 1956, that Hungary would remain Socialist but leave the group of
one-party states and declare its neutrality triggered off a misguided
euphoria among the population.
Click on the map for higher resolution
Nagy's utterances reinforced Moscow's reservations.
Not only the Kremlin's emissaries, but ambassador Andropov and the Supreme
Commander of the Soviet troops 'provisionally' stationed in Hungary, Grebennik, took the view that the Hungarian Communists
could not be left solely responsible for stabilising
the Communist system. Despite its still under-developed infrastructure, Hungary's bauxite deposits, uranium resources
-- regarded as the richest in Europe --
together with its geographical situation and population of over 9 million
possessed a strategic value which the Soviet leadership was not prepared to
surrender, given the incalculable effects such a move would have on the
cohesion of the Socialist Bloc. It is probably wrong to assume that the
Kremlin only agreed to Nagy's appointment and reform programme
because it was in any case intent on military intervention in Hungary and
was merely buying time in order to reinforce and regroup its troops stationed
there. The first intervention, which the Soviets justified on the basis of Marosán's appeal for help in 'crushing the rebels by
using the forces of revolutionary order', made it possible for Nagy to form
his government and enabled a change in the party leadership to take place
which brought about a return to normal conditions in Hungary. This was
optimistically praised by the Soviet press, while the Soviets own
contribution to the 'elimination of counterrevolution' was played down. The
'Soviet Government's Declaration of the Principles of Development and Further
Consolidation of Friendship and Cooperation between the Soviet Union and
other Socialist States', published on 30 October, expressly stated the
principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of fellow Socialist
countries, although it was couched in such a way that it was open to a wide
variety of interpretations.
The MDP had been deprived of its most
prominent Stalinist leaders, but when it continued to show advanced signs of
collapse, despite its reorganisation under Kádár and immediate change of name to the Hungarian
Socialist Workers' Party ( Magyar
Szocialista Munkáspárt -- MSzMP),
and Nagy came out in favour of a multi-party system
and Hungarian neutrality, the threshold of tolerance which the Kremlin
leaders had been hitherto prepared to grant Hungary was reached. From the
evening of 1 November, Soviet units again moved rapidly towards Budapest from their
forward bases in the Carpatho-Ukraine where they
had been redeployed. It was only on 2 November that the Soviet media began to
launch their all-out attacks on Nagy and the 'clique of
counter-revolutionaries who had come to power' in Hungary. Therefore, it can be
assumed that the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist
Party, encouraged by the combined British, French and Israeli attack on the Suez canal, took the decision around All Saints Day to
employ military means finally to force a consolidation of power in their
interest. Only after protesting to the Soviet ambassador against the Soviet
advance on Budapest and threatening to terminate the Hungarian government's
Warsaw Pact membership 'if the new reinforcements were not withdrawn to their
previous positions' had proved futile, did Nagy decide to declare Hungarian
neutrality on the night of 1-2 November and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Thereafter,
the Kremlin immediately showed that it was prepared to enter into sham
negotiations on the details of troop withdrawals.
While the Soviet Supreme Command dragged its
heels in the negotiations on troop withdrawals with a Hungarian delegation
led by defence minister, General Pál Maléter, in Tököl near Budapest, Kádár, who as party chief was still a member of the
cabinet, tried to form a rival government at Szolnok on the River Tisza. In this he was
encouraged by the Soviets and actively helped by ambassador Andropov. On the
morning of 4 November, after the Hungarian delegation had been arrested and
Soviet troops had begun the fight for Budapest with over 2,500 tanks, Kádár announced the formation of a new government which
had appealed to the Soviet Union for military assistance: 'The Hungarian
Government of Revolutionary Workers and Peasants requests the assistance of
the Soviet Army Command in helping our nation smash the dark forces of
reaction and restore law and order to the country in the interest of our
people, the working class and the peasantry.' Nagy, who spoke for the last
time on Radio Budapest at 5.20 a.m. on 4 November, reported that the aim of
the fighting was, 'to overthrow the legal and democratic government of the
Hungarian People's Republic'. Afterwards, he sought political asylum in the
Yugoslav embassy along with his closest colleagues, including György Lukács. Almost 200,000
Hungarians escaped across the Austrian border. Despite a general strike and
fierce street fighting against superior Soviet armoured
units, against which large numbers of Hungarian soldiers also fought, Soviet
military intervention was effectively over by 10-11 November 1956.
The Hungarian government's official report
on the uprising later cited more than 3,000 dead and 13,000 injured as well
as over 4,000 destroyed buildings. Actual losses were probably higher. The
persecution of the 'counter revolutionaries' which followed, despite the
amnesty proclaimed by the Kádár government, may
well have resulted in over 20,000 people being sent to prison and thousands
to Soviet forced labour camps. Law 4 of 1957,
promulgated on 15 January 1957, provided for special courts to sentence
participants in the uprising to death without formal charges and speeded up
proceedings. Some 2,000 people were accordingly executed. Nagy's attempt to
exploit the country's revolutionary atmosphere in order to see a brutal
Stalinist dictatorship directly replaced by a national and Social Democratic
system had failed leaving behind it a heavy trail of blood and innumerable
painful scars.
The Kremlin had run a relatively small risk in ordering this
second military intervention in Hungary. The Red Army had been in
control of the situation throughout. The West, whose freedom of action was
restricted because of the Suez
crisis, made do with protests and verbal threats. The Soviet
Union made skilful use of its veto in the UN Security Council to
block any proposed diplomatic and economic sanctions. The People's
Democracies, from the German Democratic Republic to China, had no
hesitation in publicly defending the necessity of the Soviet military
intervention which even Tito and Gomulka carefully described as unavoidable.
The concern expressed, particularly in western Europe and in Communist
parties outside the Socialist Bloc, regarding Soviet military intervention
against a loyal 'fraternal state' insisting only on its obvious rights of
sovereignty, made no impression on the Kremlin. But the warning signs that
Soviet prestige had suffered a reverse and the accompanying signs that the
hitherto strictly observed power relationships based on Soviet hegemony in
eastern Europe were beginning to dissolve caused
growing concern in the Kremlin. Its willingness to tolerate 'national paths
to socialism' disappeared after Krushchev came
under increasing pressure from the Stalinist faction within the Soviet
Communist Party. In future, the first priority would be to consolidate the Soviet Union's dominant position of power in eastern
Europe and maintain the regions of political and economic stability.
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