1957 - The Year After

I am unable to write about the year 1957 - or indeed of 1958 - with a historian's detachment. It would be much easier to write about 1956, because then there were still camps contending with each other and real opportunities for choices and action. By 1957, however, the game was being played in one half of the pitch and the triumphalism of power and, month by month, the desire for revenge of communists so utterly and recently humiliated was growing.

[...]

The new year started ominously right away. The first days of January saw the communist leaders of Eastern Europe hold a three-day summit in Budapest. Khrushchev and company confirmed the HSWP description of the external and internal causes of the 1956 "counter-revolution" and urged their Hungarian comrades to take more energetic steps towards "pacification".

Soon after Chou En-lai arrived in Budapest, the first important official visit to legitimize the Kádár government and its policy with China's weight and prestige. The Chinese comrades must have had another reason for their haste. In the previous year, 1956, with their conflict with the Soviet leadership looming, though still secret, they had failed to take an unambiguous position on the Polish-Hungarian crisis; now they tried to produce the semblance of having always firmly condemning "counter-revolutionary" action.

For me, another, non-official, visit early in 1957 was much more memorable. On their way to Moscow, Yves Montand and his wife Simone Signoret stopped off in Budapest to boost the still mournful atmosphere with their singing, and to render some comradely help to the Kádár regime. In her memoirs, Simone Signoret later recounted how they harshly rebuked Khrushchev in Moscow for the intervention. This may be true. For us, however, that visit to Budapest and Moscow meant that the West, and the non-communist left in the West, which in November 1956 had announced a political, moral and artistic boycott against the Soviet Union, had already started to forget and to accept "realities", to let us down.

It was on January 19 that the merciless roughness of the new regime, the degree and the desire for a reckoning became obvious to me. This was the day of the execution of József Dudás and of Uncle Szabó of Széna tér, the suspension of the Writers' Association, and the arrest of the first large group of opposition writers and journalists (Gyula Háy, Zoltán Zelk, Balázs Lengyel, Tibor Tardos, Sándor Novobáczky and Pál Lõcsei).

This twin, simultaneous, blow made it clear that they wished to call to account both the radical anti-communists in the Revolution (national-conservative, armed insurgents) and what was called the Imre Nagy line. Dudás's appearance late in October was obnoxious, indeed frightening to me, just as his slogan for Hungarian Independence ("We do not recognize the present government!") was meant to reject or weaken Imre Nagy, to rally the up till then unorganized and directionless right-wing and to shift the whole revolutionary process to the right. My reaction to Uncle Szabó and his Széna-tér lot was also somewhat ambiguous given the militaristic and commando overtones; however, on the morning of November 4, after Imre Nagy's radio appeal, when I went to ask for weapons at the police barracks in Böszörményi út, I clearly put myself under the orders of the Széna tér headquarters. I felt the insidious execution of the two men - their case had been held in camera and there had been no preliminary communiqué - to be outrageous. So too was the arrest of the journalists and writers, whom at the time I hardly knew personally if at all, but what they had written made me think of them as my comrades. Their arrest was the obvious start to reprisals against opposition activity before the Revolution as well. Nor could it be doubted that the arrest of Tibor Déry was only a question of time.

[...]

The first half of March 1957 was spent waiting and preparing for MUK ("Márciusban újra kezdjük," or We Start Again in March). Actually, it has been impossible up to this day to clarify whether the slogan was originally coined by passionate and naive young freedom-fighters and only later exploited by a revengeful regime to step up its retaliation, or whether it was a police provocation from the start. Two things are, however, certain. One is that no serious movement would have had any chance at all; this was obvious to every clear-thinking person on both sides, and so the restored neo-Stalinist system was not threatened by any new danger. Secondly, while practically no major action took place, the political police used these days for an unparalleled wave of detentions. There was not enough room in police cells for the several thousands held, and a wing of the remand prison in Kõbánya, the largest of its kind, was vacated for them. There, during the coming weeks, the "operative department", under Ervin Hollós, dealt with them until their individual cases were decided on. This major "pulling in" had a treble goal: 1) intimidation, 2) to filter out the active elments of the Revolution or the resistance movement, intern them or launch "legal" action against them, and 3) to recruit the largest possible proportion of those who could be released. We knew of several (because they themselves told us) or suspected that this was what happened to some of our acquaintances.

This recruiting would deserve a separate chapter, but historians have still been unable to discover really authentic material or directives. So it is only personal and collective experience that produces the conclusion that the main purpose of this mass recruitment might have been not so much to acquire more sources of information, but to penetrate society, to crush backbones and heighten general distrust and uncertainty.

When it comes to methods of organizing the enlisting of informers, it is obvious that possibilities for blackmail had never been more available to the police than after the Revolution, when huge numbers dreaded arrest or dismissal. Consequently, we were in little doubt about the real reasons when some people notoriously active during the revolutionary weeks got away practically scot-free, some weathering the critical times in the country, where they were supposed to be out of the way. We were well aware that in this small country everybody could be found, indeed that you could be found even abroad: I met several people in prison who had been drugged and brought back from Austria.

[...]

On May 25 I was picked up, though not yet by the "real ones": officers of the operative department of the Ministry of the Interior. It was men from the 13th district police station who took me to the detention quarters of the Teve utca police station in Angyalföld. During my interrogation on the following day, it turned out that my main crime was to obstruct the setting up of the YCL in my school; making use of some damning evidence coming from informers (taking up arms on November 4, anti-regime statements), they "withdrew me from circulation for six months", as the district police captain informed the head of our school. Two weeks later I began to experience the regime's retaliation and how it was carried out in the Kistarcsa internment camp in person.

"Did they beat you up?" asked my fellow prisoners in No. 2 barracks of Tower F, when the door was closed on me. When I proudly answered, "That would have gone too far!" I was almost beaten up by them. It turned out that almost everyone had been beaten up, especially those from the country and the subtler treatment applied for the Pest intellectuals was the exception.

[...]

By the summer of 1957, the prisons were crammed and the whole prison world had its own history and continuity. A previous inmate of my Fõ utca cell had been, as we were told, the red-haired Miklós Gyöngyösi, who had been one of the accused in the Ilona Tóth trial. He had been taken there after the lower court had given him a death sentence. There were constant transfers between Fõ utca, the public prosecutor's prison in Markó utca, the prison infirmary in Mosonyi utca, the internment camps of Kistarcsa and Tököl, and the various holding places; constant too was the flow of news and messages about arrests, sentences, informers, stool-pigeons and, of course, about political information "from reliable sources". Sometimes it took weeks or even months for a message to reach its destination, but there and then a different chronology reigned. People had ample time.

[...]

Preparations for the Imre Nagy trial were already well advanced. We know from the Soviet documents Boris Yeltsin handed over to Hungary that in August 1957, Béla Biszku, the Minister of the Interior presented an "indictment" to Andropov in Moscow, in which eleven defendants figured, of whom seven were selected for the "severest punishment". (The only two to survive were Ferenc Donáth and Béla Király, the latter having fled abroad.) By then it was the Kádár group that was urging the "extraction of the fang", the Soviet leadership, for international considerations, would have delayed it. Setting a date of the trial had to be first postponed because the UN General Assembly in September had the "Hungarian question" on the agenda; it was further put off because of the Moscow meeting of communist parties in November (to mark the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution). This shows that they knew in advance what a world-wide outcry the hanging would provoke; yet they could not retreat. "In order to prepare" public opinion at home and abroad as Andropov put it in his report, they were first to bring to trial the group of writers who had been in close contact with Imre Nagy (Tibor Déry, Gyula Háy and others).

All this was going on off-stage.

[...]

The autumn months were dark and ominous. October started with a successful launch of the first Soviet sputnik. Miklós Vásárhelyi later told us that when his interrogator proudly told him of the event, he immediately understood that this would provide a new and fatal momentum to our case, which had been shunted aside, as the strategic opportunities inherent in the sputnik would fill the leaders of the Soviet block with self-confidence.

Despite this, the Kádár regime was seriously in fear of the first anniversary of the Revolution, and the more so as it almost coincided with traditional visits to the cemetery on All Souls' Eve, which were simply impossible to ban. Commemorations were held in some schools and universities, and elsewhere too, but the main locations were the cemeteries, on which the police concentrated their attention and manpower, not least in the form of mounted policemen. According to recently disclosed minutes taken of a meeting of the chief of police György Sós with the Budapest Party Committee, they actually discussed whether to disinter the "communist victims" in commemorative graves. The idea was ultimately rejected but the ribbons and wreaths in national colours were removed.

[...]

The Pest sense of humour was not lost even in those days, though it functioned more and more as gallows humour. It might be worth while to list in detail the events of a single day, that of December 21, as literally spent under the gallows in the last days of 1957.

This was the day when Géza Losonczy died in remand, either as a result of his hunger-strike or because of force-feeding.

It was the day when the Communist Party Central Committee decided to "allow free course to the legal proceedings" in the case of the Imre Nagy group.

And it was the day when the Special Council of the Military Committee of the Supreme Court condemned to death the theatre manager Gábor Földes, Lajos Gulyás, a parish priest, Árpád Tihanyi, a teacher, along with Antal Kiss, Lajos Cziffrik, László Weintrager and Imre Zsigmond in the trial concerning events in Gyõr and Mosonmagyaróvár in 1956.

The same day also marks the date of a memorandum written in Budapest by the French cultural attaché Guy Turbet Delof, for the French Foreign Office. In connection with the detention of Domokos Kosáry and the seizure of the documents he had collected on 1956, Turbet Delof asks his superiors: "Should not France answer the challenge Soviet propaganda had thrown to justice?" He suggests that a "documentary and research centre dealing with the history of the Hungarian October Revolution" should be set up in Paris, which would preserve the writing and printed material, the fullest possible historical source material, on this event of world-wide interest.

Thus, contrary to what many thought, the French diplomat believed that the final word in judging the 1956 Revolution was not to be that of the Kádár regime.