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RED TERROR AND PURGES IN
HUNGARY, 1945-1956 Excerpt from “The Black Book of Communism”
(Harward / 1997) Ehrhart Neubert*, Joachim Gauck* |
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(pp. 396-423) … In
Hungary, there were 140,000 military losses and more than 300,000 civilian
deaths… But the great terror of the war did not
come to an end with the German defeat. With the arrival of the Red Army, the
fighting arm of the Communist regime, populations underwent "national
cleansing," which had a quite specific character in this region.
Political commissars and counterintelligence units in this army, under SMERSH
and the NKVD, were deeply involved in such operations. The repression was
especially severe in the countries that had sent troops to fight against the
Soviet Union — Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia — where the NKVD deported
hundreds of thousands to the Soviet gulags. Their exact number is still being
calculated. According to new studies in Hungary and
Russia published since the opening of the archives — studies that are quite
conservative regarding the exact figures — hundreds of thousands of people
were deported: soldiers and civilians, children as young as thirteen, and old
men of eighty. Approximately 40,000 were taken to the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, which had belonged to
Czechoslovakia but was occupied by Hungary in 1939 in accordance with the
1938 Munich agreement and then annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944. From
Hungary, which had a population of about 9 million in 1944, more than 600,000
people were deported (the Soviet figure of 526,604 is based on the number of
people who arrived at the camps; it does not take into account those who died
in transit camps in Romania). There were camps in Brasov, Timisoara, Sighet Marmatiel, Moldavia,
Bessarabia, and Sambor; around 75 percent of all
deportees passed through these. Among the deportees were Jews who had been
engaged in the work battalions of the Hungarian army. Two-thirds of these
prisoners were sent to forced-labor camps and one-third to prison camps,
where the mortality rate, as a result of epidemics, was twice as high.
Current estimates suggest that around 200,000 of these deportees from Hungary
— including people belonging to the German minority, Russians who had arrived
after 1920, and French and Poles who were living in Hungary — never returned. Some of these purges were carried out by
"popular" or "extraordinary" courts. At the end of the
war, and in the first months of the postwar period, violent extrajudicial
action was common, including executions, assassinations, torture, and the
taking of hostages. This was facilitated by the absence of, or the failure to
respect, international conventions regarding prisoners of war or the civilian
population. Purges under the influence of the Red Army
brought about a generalized fear in the societies concerned. The purges
affected not only those who had actively supported the Nazis or the local
fascists, but also many others who were innocent or had simply refused to
take sides. The Communist parties were instrumental in
the new violence. Their leaders and disciples were often faithful followers
of the Bolshevik doctrine, "enriched' 1 in the Soviet Union under the
leadership of Stalin. As we have seen in previous chapters, the goal of all
their actions was quite clear: to ensure by any means necessary that the
Communist Party had a monopoly on power, and that the Party played the same
leading role that it did in the Soviet Union. There was never any attempt at
power-sharing, political pluralism, or parliamentary democracy, even if the
parliamentary system was formally retained. The doctrine in place at the time
presented the Soviet Union as the glorious victor in the struggle against
Nazi Germany and its allies, and the principal force and universal guide
toward worldwide revolution. Naturally, local Communist forces were expected
to coordinate and subordinate their activities to the center of world
Communism, in Moscow, and its chief, Stalin. In other countries in Central and
Southeastern Europe, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, the prewar
Communist parties had been marginal forces, with only a few thousand members.
In Bulgaria, for instance, the Party had been an important force from 1919 to
192.1 and had then been forced underground (although it did play an important
role in the resistance). Throughout the region, Party leaders were convinced
that the moment was right and that they had the support of the Red Army. They
quickly emerged as an important political force and joined the new
governments. Almost everywhere Communists took charge of the ministries in
charge of repression (the internal affairs and justice ministries) and of
those that might be used in a similar manner, such as the defense ministries.
In 1944-45 Communist parties held the Ministry of Internal Affairs in
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania; the Ministry of Justice in
Bulgaria and Romania; and the Ministry of Defense in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.
The ministers of defense in both Czechoslovakia and
Bulgaria, Generals Ludvik Svoboda and Darnian Velchev, were
crypto-Communists. Communists were also in charge ot
the state security or secret police (the Durzhavna Sigurnost in Bulgaria, and the Allamvedelmi
Osztaly, or AYO — later the Allamvedelmi
Hatosag, or AY hi — in Hungary) and of the
intelligence services in the armed forces. Everywhere the Communists strengthened
their grip on the apparatus of terror, The need for absolute control of the
AYO was stressed by Matyas Rakosi,
the secretary general of the Hungarian Workers (Communist) Party: "This is the
only institution of which we must keep total control, categorically refusing
to share it with any other parties in the coalition, regardless of the
proportion of our respective forces."* In Central and Southeastern Europe this
strategy was identical with the Bolshevik practices used in Russia in 1917,
and repression followed the tried ami tested Soviet
pattern. In the same manner that the Bolsheviks had eliminated their initial
allies such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Central and East European
Communist parties eliminated their coalition partners. Analysts have
discussed the "process of Sovietization"
in these countries, and the strategic plan laid out in Moscow. It was Stalin
himself who ordered the rejection of the Marshall Plan in the summer of 1947,
and who instigated the creation of the Communist Information Bureau (the Cominform) in September 1947 to increase his control of
the parties in power. There were, of course, many differences in
the trajectory of events in these various countries. But everywhere it was
the aim of the Communist parties to eliminate their actual or potential
adversaries and to crush all political, ideological, and spiritual
competitors. Marxist-Leninist doctrine demanded that therivals
be wiped out for good, and all means to that end were considered legitimate,
including death sentences, execution, long prison sentences, and forced exile
in the West. The last of these options was a less cruel procedure, but it was
very effective at breaking down resistance, and its importance has been
generally underestimated in the analysis of the history of these countries.
After all, the right of abode and the right to a home are fundamental human
rights. In addition, in 1944-45 tens of thousands of Hungarians, Slovaks,
Poles, and other nationals fled their countries in fear of the Red Army. The first tool used in the panoply of
repression was the political trial of non-Communist leaders, many of whom had
been resistance fighters and had suffered in the prisons and camps of the
Nazis or fascists. Under the direct control of the Red Army, the trials began
first in the countries that had been allies of Nazi Germany, notably Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria. In the interAllied
commissions that were created in 1944 and existed until 1947, the Soviet
military was a dominant force and often forcibly imposed its own point of
view. In Hungary the Smallholders Party, which
had been the great victor in the 1945 elections, gaining 57 percent of the
vote, became the target not only of considerable political wrangling but also
of large-scale police operations. In January 1947 the Ministry of Internal
Affairs, under the control of the Communist Laszlo Rajk,
who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain and been a leader of
the resistance toward the end of the war, announced the discovery of a plot
against the state involving the Hungarian "Community" group, which
had been set up in secret during the war to fight the Nazi invaders. The
police arrested a minister and several deputies from the Smallholders' Party;
the alleged ringleader, Gyorgy Donath,
was sentenced to death and executed; the others received long prison
sentences. In February 1947 Bela
Kovacs, the secretary general of the Smallholders, was arrested by the Soviet
authorities for "plotting against the security of the Red Army. He was
detained in the Soviet Union until 1956. The number of victims rose rapidly,
for in Hungary, as everywhere else, the Communist secret police believed that
every plot must include a large number of people. The result of all this was that two years
after the end of the war what had been the most important party in Hungary
was ''decapitated and decimated. Like Bela Kovacs,
its main representatives — Ferenc Nagy, the
president of its council; Zoltan Tildy, his predecessor; Bela Varga, president of the National Assembly; Jozsef Kovago, the mayor of
Budapest — and dozens of deputies and other party members were all either in
prison or in exile. Between late 1947 and early 1949, both the Independence
Party and the People's Democratic Party were dissolved. In what was known as
the salami tactics 11 later recommended by Matyas Rakosi, the secretary general of the Hungarian Workers
Party, who had returned from Moscow with the Red Army, opponents, such as the
Smallholders 1 Party, were eliminated in successive slices. The belief was
that a few slices at a time would never result in violent indigestion.
Matyas Rakosi, ca. 1936 In February 1948 the persecution of the
Social Democrats in Hungary continued with the arrest of Justus Kelemen, under secretary of
state to the minister of industry. In Hungary violent confrontations between
the government and the Catholic Church began in the summer of 1948, with the
nationalization of numerous religious schools. 12 Five priests were sentenced
in July, and more in August. Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty, the indomitable primate of Hungary, was
arrested on 26 December 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 5 February
1949. He was accused of plotting with various accomplices against the state
and of espionage for foreign imperial powers, including the United States. A year later the government occupied most
convents and monasteries, expelling the majority of the twelve thousand monks
and nuns. In June 1951 Monsignor Jozsef Grosz, the
archbishop of Kalocsa, leader of the episcopate and
a close friend of Mindszenty, met the same fate as
the primate. Persecution of the churches and religious orders in Hungary did
not affect only Catholics. The Lutheran and Calvinist churches were
considerably less numerous but were also affected and also lost pastors and
bishops, including an eminent Calvinist, Bishop Laszlo Ravasz. In Hungary several hundred thousand people
were prosecuted in 1948 - 1953, and, according to different estimates,
between 700,000 and 800,000 were convicted. Most cases were trials for
"crimes against state property." Here, as in other countries,
administrative internments carried out by the secret police should also be
included in the figures. ……… This mass terror cannot be explained as
"natural for those times," or as part of the Cold War that began in
1947 and reached its height with the Korean war of 1950-1953. The opponents
of Communist power inside these countries, despite their huge majority,
demonstrated almost no interest in violent or armed struggle (Poland is a
notable exception, and there were also armed groups in Bulgaria and Romania).
Their opposition was often spontaneous, unorganized, and quite democratic.
Some of the politicians who had not immediately emigrated believed that the
repression would be short-lived. Armed resistance was rare, and when it did
occur it was usually a case of the secret services settling grudges, or of
underworld killings being passed off as political murders, rather than a
result of genuine political opposition. Thus
there is no way to explain the violence of the repression by pointing to
violence in society or the scale of opposition. The "class
struggle" was highly orchestrated, and opposition networks were
sometimes deliberately established by agents
provocateurs from the secret police. Occasionally those agents were in turn
killed by the secret services. People still try to explain away the
history of Communism with reference to the "spirit of the moment"
or the "context of the time." But such attempts are part of a
specifically ideological approach to history and a revisionism that does not
correspond to the facts as they have now come to light. Scholars and others
should pay closer attention to the social dimensions of the repression, and
concentrate more on the persecution of ordinary people. The Trials of Communist Leaders The persecution of fellow Communists is one
of the most important episodes in the history of repression in Central and
Southeastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Neither the
international Communist movement nor any of its local branches ever ceased to
denounce "bourgeois justice and legality" and fascist and Nazi
repression. Undoubtedly, there were thousands of militant Communists who died
as victims of Nazi and fascist repression during World War II. But the persecution of Communists did not
stop with the progressive installation of "people's democracies,"
when the "dictatorship of the proletariat" took over from the
"dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". In Hungary in 1945 the secret police
imprisoned Pal Demeny, Jozsef
Skolnik, and a number of their friends. All considered
themselves to be Communists, and it was under that label that they had led
underground resistance groups, to which they had often recruited young people
and workers. In the industrial centers, membership in their groups was higher
than that of Communist groups who had sworn allegiance to Moscow, and who
considered competitors like Demeny to be
Trotskyites or "deviationists." When the moment of liberation
finally arrived, Demeny met the same fate that
befell those he had fought against, and he was imprisoned until 1957. …….. A second show-trial in the anti-Tito series
took place in September 1949 in Budapest. The accused was Laslo
Rajk, who had fought in the International Brigades
in Spain. Rajk had been one of the heads of the
resistance and as a minister of internal affairs had carried out severe
repressions of non-Communist democrats before being made minister of foreign
affairs. After his arrest in May 1949, Rajk was
tortured and blackmailed by his previous colleagues, who told him that he
would not be killed if he helped the Party. He was ordered to confess in
court and to reel off a string of accusations against Tito and the Yugoslavs
as "enemies of people's democracy." The verdict of the Hungarian
court was reached on 24 September, with no right to appeal: Laslo Rajk, Tibor
Szonyi, and Andras Szalai
were condemned to death, and the Yugoslav Lazar Brankov
and the Social Democrat Pal Justus were given life sentences. Rajk was executed on 16 October. In a subsequent trial a
military court condemned four high-ranking officers to death.
Laslo Rajk In the repressions following the Rajk trial, 94 people in Hungary were arrested,
sentenced, and interned; 15 were executed; 11 others died in prison; and 50
of the accused received prison sentences of more than ten years. The total
number of deaths in this affair was about 60, including a number of suicides
among prisoners, their relatives, and judges and police officers caught up in
the affair. Animosities within the leadership, and the
zeal of the general secretary of the Party, Matyas Rakosi, and the chiefs of the secret police, influenced
the choice of victims and their leader, Laszlo Rajk.
These and other factors, however, should not obscure the essential fact that
many of the main decisions were made in Moscow by, among others, the heads of
the security forces and intelligence services responsible for Central and
Western Europe. This had been the case since the earliest waves of
repression. Soviet leaders were preoccupied with discovering a huge
international anti-Soviet conspiracy. The Rajk
trial played a key role, particularly through its main witness, the American
Noel Field, who was secretly a Communist and helped the Soviet Union, as has
recently been proved in the archives. Click HERE to read the whole
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