Gábor Murányi
Portrait of a Tyrant
Árpád Pünkösti: Rákosi a hatalomért (Rákosi Fighting for Power). Európa, 1992, 368 pp.; Rákosi a csúcson (Rákosi at the Top). Európa, 1996, 572 pp.
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The book under review is once again a journalist's work. Árpád Pünkösti is on the staff of Népszabadság, the former CP daily, now in private hands, which underwent self-privatization and later ideological "transformation" as well, to remain the most widely read among the daily papers. He started to research his book in the eighties, when all archives, including CP archives, still carefully guarded their secrets. Making the best of things, Pünkösti plumped for an oral history methodology of sorts, questioning innumerable witnesses in the hope of tiny morsels of the truth. Those of Rákosi's former associates who were still alive mainly closed ranks and held their tongue. Pünkösti therefore had to obtain the stones of memory for his mosaic from politicians of the third or fourth rank. Such a grassroots perspective is not without interest, but do these entertaining and often absurd stories carry out Pünkösti's original intention - stated in the preface to the first volume which appeared in 1992 - to show through Rákosi's biography that the Rákosi and Kádár system, which appear so totally different, are nevertheless essentially the same?
In my opinion this tenet is neither borne out by an analysis nor is it made explicit by the so far incomplete trilogy. (The second volume, published in 1996, brings us to 1953, at the time of Rákosi's first, not yet final, failure.) Indeed, it seldom offers more than what we can glean from the already published memoirs and reminiscences of contemporaries associated with Rákosi. To be fair, Pünkösti nowhere promises a scholarly discussion, and consequently it is scarcely proper to draw attention to its absence. The fact is, however, that there is an obvious disproportion between the energy invested in the book and the result, bearing in mind the options which opened up after 1990, when much previously secret material became accessible. It is thus the more the pity that Pünkösti showed himself incapable of switching methodologies. Crucial documents often merely put in a walk-on appearance as footnotes to history, but pages on end are filled by the retrospection of cooks and drivers.
These volumes therefore are jumping off points for a future authoritative biography - not that such a work appears to be in the pipeline. Pünkösti nevertheless has the merit of trying to unravel fact and legend which, in Rákosi's case, were hopelessly intertwined in the imaginations of the valet-historians as they were in the mind of their protagonist. Such desires to magnify the past turn Rákosi, Deputy People's Commissar for Commerce in 1919, into the leading figure in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, replacing Béla Kun, who was liquidated by Stalin in 1937. Thus Rákosi, arrested and imprisoned, is turned into a paradigm of heroism and Rákosi, the pot-bellied, bald dictator looking like a minor bookkeeper, into the Leader of Workers and Peasants, the Father of Hungarian Cotton, and Father of Hungarian Steel. That list could be continued, almost ad infinitum.
Let us look at the facts. Mátyás Rákosi was born on March 9th 1892 in Ada, a village in County Bács, as the fourth son of a petty trader, a Jew. His mother was to give birth to seven more children. The boy soon gave evidence of a keen mind, and a talent for languages. Following studies at the Commercial Academy, scholarships took him to Hamburg and London. As an officer of the reserve, he served in the Great War, the end of which found him a prisoner of war in Russia. It was said that at this time he - along with many others - showed himself receptive to socialism, the century's new ideal. He came back to Hungary as a militant of Bolshevik propaganda and held office in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. His career truly took wing in the 1920s, as a Comintern organizer and agitator in Italy, Germany and Czechoslovakia.
All these were still years of preparation. Bitter internecine struggles were part of the history of Hungarian communism throughout. Rákosi sided with the Béla Kun faction, the leader of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, an association he later denied for tactical reasons. Kun secured Rákosi's rise in the Party hierarchy. By August 1925, he already headed the Hungarian secretariat. Rákosi was of stocky build, physically unattractive, balding, with idiosyncratic speech, all features that rendered him highly unsuitable for undercover activity. A number of historians have suggested that they were mindful of this in Moscow, that the aim was that Rákosi should come to the attention of the Hungarian authorities as soon as possible, and that their reaction should then be exploited for propaganda purposes. After the excesses of the 1919 Soviet Republic, the courts in Hungary, dreading communism, sentenced Rákosi first to eight years of imprisonment and then, in 1935, to life. This excessively harsh sentence was used by Bolshevik propagandists to build up the image of Rákosi, the future leader.
In this, the truth mattered the least, or what Rákosi himself wanted. Pünkösti is probably right to note that Rákosi owed his life to being imprisoned in Hungary. His patron, Béla Kun, and just about all his associates, the entire Kun faction of the Hungarian CP, were liquidated by Stalin in Moscow in the late thirties. Rákosi thus escaped liquidation, and "that great militant of the international working class movement", was exchanged for some flags in 1940, and thus saved from "Hungarian Fascist prisons" by the Soviet Union.
Posterity differs in its judgement on how Rákosi stood up to his prison years. Some attribute his pliant conformism to them, others again trace back his implacable thirst for revenge to that time. Either way, the fact is that these sixteen years served in prison were rewarded with the leadership of a Hungarian Communist Party directed from Moscow. When, late in 1944 and early in 1945, the CP leadership was exported to Hungary, their first duty was to set things right amongst those Communist factions in Hungary who dared to question Moscow suzerainty.
Communists in Hungary between the wars, few in number, were far from united. The first victims of the first "internal" purge were Pál Demény, along with three to four thousand followers, a number of times greater than the handful of members of the Moscow directed Communist Party. Rákosi, of course, after 1945, never relied on the masses but on Soviet tanks, removing possible competitors as they emerged, through use of his ever successful "salami tactics".
There is a story that Gábor Péter, who later headed the State Security Office, which did so much to make his and Rákosi's name a byword for fear and terror, sentimentally had Pál Demény, an old comrade from the undercover days, fetched up from his cell on the 1st of May 1945, saying: "I could not let it happen, Comrade Demény, that you of all people should not witness the first free May Day."
With the intensifying of the class war on Moscow's order, such sentimentality soon vanished from the political stage. In three years, backed by Soviet bayonets, and employing methods most foul, Rákosi liquidated the limited multi-party people's democracy.
How Rákosi, after his return in 1945, managed so quickly to create an aura of confidence around his person, how he could persuade people that he had a mind to take democracy seriously and that he meant to abide by its rules, is a conundrum historians have not addressed yet. That he had credibility is backed by the evidence of contemporaries and by numerous memoirs. Rákosi, totally lacking public charisma or rhetorical skills, was able to create a much better impression in private. He regularly surprised those whom he negotiated with by the thoroughness with which he had done his homework. Casually dropped remarks about the life and circumstances of those he talked to created the impression that every little detail mattered to him (as it did, there could be no secret withheld from him).
When, in 1947, the leaders of the East European Communist parties were given the signal to further harden their regimes, Rákosi, as if everything that had happened before had just been preparation for this, tackled the new task, which was much more to his taste - with great élan.
The August 1947 parliamentary elections, the "blue-ticket elections", were a turning point. At that time the CP, exploiting a provision of the electoral law, provided many thousands of ballot papers for absentee voters. These were then used by gangs of their own men, travelling from village to village on the backs of trucks. No one so far has been able to establish the precise scale of the fraud. Some maintain that the CP owed its place at the head of the polls to it, others claim that it added only one to two per cent at the most. It is certain, however, that the concentration of power into one pair of hands considerably accelerated after this electoral manipulation, directed by László Rajk, member of the Political Committee and Minister of the Interior, who later became one of Rákosi's victims. Rákosi's actions included having Béla Kovács, one of the steadfast leaders of the only serious rivals of the CP, the Independent Smallholders' Party, arrested by a Soviet State Security unit, "legitimately stationed in Hungary" on the basis of an international agreement. This, on the one hand, again created anxiety, on the other, as Rákosi cynically put it, "it strengthened the Smallholders' Party's readiness to cooperate." Another ploy of Rákosi and his team, Rajk, Gábor Péter, Ernõ Gerõ, Mihály Farkas, and József Révai, was to place their own men in the other parties, or else to work on suitable members of their leadership, threatening, cajoling, blackmailing, or using more refined methods. In the middle of 1948, they succeeded in amalgamating with, or rather absorbing, the Social Democratic Party, whose traditions and membership commanded respect, and nothing stood in the way of bringing into being what posterity - and indeed contemporaries - called the Rákosi regime.
All this went hand in hand with the Cold War, with "the escalation of the international class struggle". The years 1948 to 1953 were the time of permanent vigilance and liquidation. It was part of the essence of the dictatorship that literally nobody should feel secure. The show trials were not the sole manifestations of this atmosphere. People there arraigned included members of the old coalition parties, the class enemy (clerics, owners of estates, the ci-devant aristocracy) as well as Social Democrats forced into close cooperation with the Communist Party, not to mention the inner-party opposition accused of "undermining" it. The trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty, Prince Primate of Hungary, was headline news in the international press. (See the excerpt from the book under review on pp. 86-98). A confession was literally beaten out of him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in open court. The confession László Rajk made and obtained by brutal torture (for some time he had been reckoned to be the second man in the Party hierarchy), was also used by Rákosi to enforce vigilance. That trial was conceived in the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. When Rajk the "Trotskyist Yugoslav and American spy" was hanged, Rákosi's only possible potential rival within the Party was out of the way.
Over and beyond these trials, the ever more bloody dictatorship made itself felt through internment camps, forced domicile, deprivation of rights, kulak lists, brutally enforced delivery of produce by the peasantry. There could not have been many families in Hungary that were not affected. All this was accompanied by surrealistically idiotic propaganda, which pretended to the world that what was being done in the supposed interests of socialism, was the will of the people and not just that of the dictator and his associates. Even food rationing was boasted about as "a serious blow to the imperialists".
The era of the "personality cult" in Hungary was the cult of Mátyás Rákosi's personality. A highly grotesque demonstration of it was the celebration of Rákosi's 60th birthday in March 1952, which as a public event was only exceeded in Hungary by Stalin's 70th birthday. On that March 9, the Party daily Szabad Nép devoted all its pages, from the first to the last, to Rákosi. Rákosi's life was on display in an area of several hundred square meters of palatial splendour in the Museum of the Working Class, housed in what had been the building of the Curia, the supreme court of the Kingdom of Hungary. Even more space was given to all the gifts which "the most loyal son of the Hungarian people," who was simultaneously its "wise teacher" had obtained on the occasion. The purpose of the exhibition - visited by 50,000 on the day it opened - not all of whom were there entirely of their own free will - was to demonstrate how "unquenchable" was the love and gratitude the Hungarian people felt for their "father" and "teacher".
Light years separated the show and reality. What you could find in the country was not a repeatedly stressed prosperity and happiness, but fear and trembling to which Rákosi, unattractive in appearance as he was - short, fat and as bald as a billiard ball - contributed more than his fair share. Memoirs dealing with those times tell of numerous cases when Rákosi visited the chosen victims on the day before their arrest, playing cat and mouse with those - high-ranking Party apparatchiks - who had earlier executed his orders. He would smile jovially, put his arm around them and assure them of his complete support - on the way to execution.
Rákosi did not only know how to make people fear him, he not only had a penchant for sadistic theatricality, he could also charm people. His memory was ex- cellent, and he was a workaholic, needing no more than a few brief hours of rest.
Pünkösti devotes much space to an event probably unique in the biography of a politician in Hungary, a psychogramme to which Rákosi submitted in 1947, early on in his ascendancy. Flóra Kozmutza, the psychologist wife of Gyula Illyés, the poet, gave him a Rorschach test. This was evaluated many years later by another psychologist who was not told who the subject of the test had been, and although we may suspect that her judgement may have been influenced by knowing when the test was given, there is much of interest in the report. This man "cannot give but wants to win and obtain. He is petty and stubborn. He incorporates and magnifies whatever favours him and presents this favourable image of himself to the world. He knows how to persuade and enjoys influencing people. He pretends to a sense of humour but is, in fact, incapable of handling ambiguities."
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Gábor Murányi
is on the staff of Heti Világgazdsaság, an economic weekly.
