Tibor Hajdu

Yours Sincerely, János Kádár

Tibor Huszár (ed.): Kedves, jó Kádár Elvtárs! Válogatás Kádár János levelezéséboýl 1954-1989 (Dear Comrade Kádár!
A Selection from the Correspondence of János Kádár, 1954-1989). Budapest, Osiris, 2002, 871 pp.

 

... Kádár's secretariat functioned also as a national complaints office, so a petitioner could never know if his or her request would actually reach Kádár. The editor is in a position to know, and, as a general rule, he rightly prints only letters to which Kádár himself responded. But then again, the reader might fairly ask why, if Huszár publishes the perforce buttery covering letters that several dozen writers and artists sent, along with a copy of their latest work, to the person who might be able to help or, more importantly, block publication of future works, then why does he not publish all of them? Those whose letters have been exposed to public gaze might justifiably object to being made butts of ridicule when their colleague X or Y escaped. One might raise further methodological issues of this kind, but it is more important to establish that this is a very good selection because it makes available a huge number of astonishing and hitherto unknown letters that are both typical yet also fill gaps in our knowledge of Kádár and the eponymous era. Even the most thorough of treatises can be no substitute for this sort of documentation: the letters themselves are not abbreviated or otherwise 'edited', they reproduce their writers' style in all the original awkwardness as they strive to supply what they wish to convey with a suitable preamble and garnishing. A gifted novelist is able to achieve the appearance of originality, but readers are still keen to see the genuine article. They get that in plenty here, the only question being whether they have the stomach for it.
The volume gives no support to the notion, fairly widespread nowadays, that Kádár was the great Hungarian politician who is crying out to be recognised in a monument to the twentieth century (there is, in fact, a left-wing movement pushing for a Kádár statue), nor to its converse: the customary image, touted by the right-wing press, of the evil lieutenant who sustained an evil régime. What can be discerned between the lines of these letters is the bored face of a mediocre, uneducated man, who had no desire to better himself, avoided the company of creative intellectuals and, indeed, unfamiliar company of any kind, did not like travelling either, showed little interest in new developments or innovations, and whose thinking too moved within narrow confines. That is in no way to diminish his political merits - that in place of the ravings of the highly cultivated, clever and versatile Rákosi, who held even his own followers in perpetual terror and uncertainty, he produced a state of peace and boredom, to the considerable satisfaction of the petty bourgeoisie that makes up the majority at all times and in all places. The era found in him a man in its own image, whilst he understood his role and played it well. Not that he strove to project himself as any more than what he was: on the contrary, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, or the mala fides-neighbours mistrustful of anything Hungarian, could rest assured, they had no reason to fear him, of all people. The speeches he made at meetings of the leadership or confidential conversations show him to have been much more astute than do his terse and evasive letters.
This is an almost completely one-sided correspondence. For the most part Kádár is only responding, and briefly at that, to long letters addressed to him. It is much less usual for him to turn to somebody; after all, he was able to communicate face to face with those he was most likely to interact with, his own more intimate entourage. To whom, then, did he write on his own initiative? To Soviet and other foreign leaders, or to the Soviet ambassador, when he wanted something from them. On rare but unavoidable occasions, to old acquaintances to offer condolences or congratulations. Or if they turned to him indirectly, as when the state President István Dobi drew his attention to an article written by a seriously ill Béla Kovács, former Secretary General of the Smallholders Party, who had spent eight years in the Soviet camps:

...as I read the article... I thought of the Béla Kovács who you were 13 or 14 years ago.
I am not ashamed to write that it seems to me there must already have been more good features in the Béla Kovács of that time than we, Communists, were able to see in you. For it could only have been with the help of those good features that you were able to do what, alas, all too few people are able: you triumphed over yourself, over what had been the bad features within yourself in earlier times, that is, over what bound you to the past, the old world. I know, as few others know, how peculiarly hard were the years, how peculiarly hard the circumstances, under which you did that. What I also like about the writing is that it speaks in the tone of a self-assured and self-aware man. I offer you my congratulations on your article, not out of courtesy but from the heart, with inner delight. It saddens me to hear about your health problems... (23rd February 1959)

An odd chime with that is a letter Kádár wrote in response to István Kovács, an old companion in the illegal Communist Party, when the latter grumbled over the minor posting he, a once powerful member of Rákosi's Politburo, had been offered:

You are still over-inclined to belittle people as well as posts. According to you, perhaps the manager of the Adria Silk-Weaving Mill does not even work for Socialism... For many years you held a position like few other sons of the Hungarian people: you were able to evolve your capabilities to the fullest extent, you were able to show what you can do to the fullest degree. You did so, and many saw that, nor have they forgotten it either! What is your complaint, then? For my part, I have not forgotten, even now, the István Kovács who you once were, back in the conditions of illegality - a man I esteemed highly. It seems, however, that you yourself are the one who buried and forgot that former better self many years ago. But then don't blame us but yourself for that. (21st April, 1960)

The dismissive tone of that letter is no doubt motivated by Kádár's bitterness that his old friend, when an influential member of the Party leadership, had not raised a single word against his, Kádár's, imprisonment, but more significant is the full awareness of power that can be sensed from the very style of the letter. Breaking its own imposed time limit of starting in November 1956, the volume prints two important letters from Kádár to Rákosi, dated 1954 and 1955. Huszár likewise makes a big point in his biography about those letters that tell us how purposefully Kádár, on his release from prison, strove for power, and, one could add, how naturally he adopts an uncharacteristically humble tone with Rákosi (as he was to do later on with Khrushchev and Brezhnev), the holder of power. Then, when he himself is in power, how equally natural his air of superiority is towards those who have fallen from grace - whether that be István Kovács or, later on, the former Social Democrat György Marosán, or his own confidant and chief of his secretariat, József Sándor.

That awareness of power is even more evident when he adopts a tone of superiority in responding to people such as the great writers Gyula Illyés and László Németh, or Gyula Ortutay, the distinguished ethnographer, the rector of the University of Budapest, and quondam minister of culture, whom he might well have felt were not nobodies. All the same, there is a change when it comes to his relations with intellectuals, and that denotes a certain stylistic shift as well after he had proclaimed the "he that is not against us is with us" slogan. Considering that he had heaped insults on Ortutay in 1960 and 1961 for supposing, when he was Secretary General of the Patriotic People's Front, that the Front should support Tibor Déry, the ex-Communist novelist who was jailed after 1956, Gyula Illyés and other 'politically dubious' writers ("you squirmed [then] like a grass-snake when they tread on its tail"), or the way he merely sent word to the philosopher György Lukács in 1960, when the latter wrote personally in hope of getting clearance to publish his works: "insofar as he feels his creative freedom is not assured in Hungary, the PB [Politburo] sees no obstacle, in the event he should seek to leave the country, to his submitting such a request to the competent state bodies" - by 1970 he was already thanking Lukács for the book the latter had sent him, even congratulating him on the award of the Goethe Prize, and moreover addressing Déry as his "honoured friend".
More than just a stylistic change, a change of substance in his thinking can also be discerned during the Sixties and Seventies. To quote one of the most important of these from a letter he wrote to Willy Brandt, the German chancellor, with the knowledge that although Kádár too, in his younger days, had been an active member of the Social Democratic Party in pre-war Hungary, he had long harboured an antipathy towards its sister parties and their leaders:
I consider the way in which relations between Communists and Social Democrats have evolved - as was already touched upon in the course of our discussion in Budapest - to be an issue with historical repercussions. The specific experiences of the past decades have likewise convinced me of the benefits of collaboration, as well as the harmful consequences of confrontation, of carrying on a political fight against one another. It is my firm opinion that the most fundamental problems that humanity is confronted with will not be soluble without cooperation between the two great tendencies in the labour movement, especially in a European context... the concerted or parallel actions of our parties, however, can in my judgement bring us closer to a solution to the flash points that threaten the existence of human civilisation... (31st July 1978)

 

 

Tibor Hajdu
books include A magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság (The Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1969) and a biography of Count Mihály Károlyi.