Tibor Hajdu The Confession of János Kádár

We are publishing a translation of the text of Kádár János's last speech, taken from the minutes of the meeting of the Central Committee (CC) of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP) as the Communist Party of Hungary was then known. The ailing János Kádár addressed the CC three months before his death on 12 April, 1989.¹
It is no easy matter to understand the text in its original Hungarian, let alone translate it into another language. Nevertheless, for anyone with an interest in Kádár's role in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, it repays the trouble of puzzling out what he might have meant since, other than in broad generalities, he never spoke about this subject—not even to close associates or his official biographer. He felt obliged to speak up, not so much by his conscience, but by an anxiety that amounted to a persecution mania, a need to place his own version on record before he died and was made the defenceless scapegoat for a course of events that was not of his choosing. Anxiety, often raised to the point of madness, is the common destiny of dictators in the twilight of their rule. Precisely because they have suppressed freedom of speech, they have no way of knowing what fate will await them should they be toppled. It is conceivable that a Stalin or his Hungarian clone Rákosi, a Horthy or a Franco would not have clung so tenaciously to power if they had been able to hope that their enemies would show them any mercy. This is a mental condition that has become familiar to us thanks to Shakespeare's plays or Mussorgsky's operatic portrayal of Boris Godunov. Kádár's last soliloquy is in the same line.
Kádár's anxiety, or the guilty conscience that he was seeking to quieten, centred on a number of specific issues—that is blazingly evident even seen through all the tortured phraseology of his dissolving mind. He makes no apologies for the oneparty system of the Communist dictatorship, of which he remained an out-and-out supporter to the end; nor for what he considered the justified persecution of his country's pre-1945 ruling class; nor for the role of Russian lieutenant that he accepted in a historical situation that was predetermined.
Although he was no longer capable of distinguishing between what he wished to say and incidental matters (his own and his wife's illness, an interview about his career that he had been asked to give with the approval of his successor as Party General Secretary, Károly Grósz), the leitmotif of the confused text is to exculpate himself from his part in the events of the 1956 Revolution. This was an obsessive preoccupation by that stage of his life, but it acquired added force through the fact that the CC had agreed at its previous session of 20–21 February—after heated debate, but without consulting Kádár—that the events of 1956 should no longer be officially categorised as a 'counter-revolution' but as a 'popular uprising'—which may not have been quite the same as a full-blown revolution, but was considerably closer to that.

Hungarian public opinion was never able to accept the characterisation of the events of 1956 as a counter-revolution, but that was the term that was grimly clung to as late as 1989 by Kádár and all the others who held responsibility for the bloody reprisals—first and foremost, obviously, because otherwise they would have been obliged to view their own roles in a much darker light. If the popular unrest was not a counter-revolution, then by what right had they bloodily put it down? Might they not be held to account for that as the Soviet bloc collapsed?
Kádár was renowned for being the Soviet-satellite leader who strove most consistently over a long period of time, within the bounds of what was possible, to loosen the grip of Moscow—in order to win greater room to manoeuvre and to cultivate links with the West. After Brezhnev's death in 1982, one might have expected him to try to reduce that dependence even further. However, the opposite happened. The seventy-year-old Kádár was plainly alarmed by the premonitory signs of the Soviet bloc's collapse and a reordering of the international balance of power. Illness was a further contributory factor—or rather, it would be truer to say that fear and illness exacerbated one another. Though he did not speak about it, he became increasingly apprehensive about the possibility that he might have to answer for the fate of Imre Nagy and his associates, for the years of terror and political purges that prevailed in Hungary after 1956.²

Even during his final years, Kádár was unwilling to countenance the idea of revising the official line of referring to the events as a counter-revolution, though it has to be said that he also did not contemplate imposing any retaliatory measures on people who increasingly came forward in public with demands of that kind. He was just as unwilling to respond even to Gorbachev's reforms after 1985, which was why at the HSWP's extraordinary national conference in late May 1988, the more flexible in the Hungarian Party leadership apparatus successfully conspired to remove Kádár from his position, replacing him with Károly Grósz as General Secretary. True, Kádár was elected Party Chairman, but this was a post that had not existed before and was really a ceremonial title. The new leaders avoided any association with him, including discussion of any plans or actions, even though that was what he was expecting. In effect, then, they sought to isolate Kádár while Imre Pozsgay, one of the defining reformers in the new Party leadership, was placed in charge of a sort of program committee, one subcommittee which was to work out how the Party's historical path was to be reassessed.
The aim from the outset was to rescind the characterisation of 1956 as a counter-revolution. The preliminaries, however, progressed slowly—or rather, stagnated—due to worries as to how Kádár and his supporters—even Grósz— might react. In the end, Imre Pozsgay, in a surprise move while Grósz was paying a visit to Switzerland, chose to make the decision public before it had been submitted for CC ratification. (The lengthy report that formed the basis of this proposal was drafted by Iván T. Berend, then President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and also a CC member.)

Kádár was still in the CC chair at the start of the meeting on 20–21 February 1989, where the proposal was eventually accepted after a heated discussion; however, there was no way of knowing if he actually understood what the debate was about. All the same, clearly, the fact that the Revolution was being rehabilitated and the possible implications were troubling his murky consciousness.
Around then, András Kanyó, a staff reporter on the party newspaper Népszabadság and an old acquaintance of Kádár's, had asked him for an interview, with Grósz's knowledge. It is unlikely that there was any political objective behind this, except perhaps to give Kádár something to do. His unquiet mind, however, jumped to conclusions; and being the last person who would accept that his person and an interview with him no longer possessed any political significance, he may well have seen it as preparing the way for an impending impeachment. One sign of that was his forbidding the use of a tape recorder and asking that he be allowed to give written replies to the questions, as if he were seeking to spin the process by all available means.
Meanwhile, two days before the next scheduled CC meeting, on 12 April, Kádár asked Grósz if he could take part. It seems that what may have been bothering him was a recollection that, in the past, the CC had been in the habit of discussing the 'crimes' of disgraced former members in their absence—László Rajk, Géza Losonczy, Imre Nagy and, indeed, Kádár himself come to mind— thus prejudging the sentence that would be passed on them by the invariably pliant judiciary. Kádár was palpably striving in what he said to defend himself personally against the imagined charges. Grósz, who for his part did not have the slightest intention of initiating proceedings against Kádár, either at that meeting or later, tried to dissuade him from putting in an appearance, as it was perfectly obvious that his health and mind were deteriorating rapidly. The more he tried to talk him out of attending, however, the more Kádár insisted on being there, so that in the end, Grósz felt he could not forbid him. Kádár's personal physician, Professor György Rétsági, also advised him against being present, and especially against speaking, but no doubt those repeated pleas were also misconstrued.

Let us therefore turn to analysing the address that Kádár gave, bearing in mind that, by then, the tape recording of all CC sessions was long established practice. In the spring of 1989, the range of charges that could be levelled openly in Hungary, and against which Kádár sensed a need to defend himself, included:
1) his role in the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, in the subsequent reprisals and, above all, in the execution of Imre Nagy and his Communist associates;
2) the extent of his collaboration in these acts with the Soviet occupying power, his support for intervention, his flight from Budapest to the Soviet Union on 1 November 1956, and the betrayal of Imre Nagy and other cabinet ministers (on these charges, his tactic would be to shift as much of the blame as he could onto Nagy's shoulders);
3) in his own words: "...the main charge against me was that I was a Soviet agent. But I was not a Soviet agent, and I say this as responsibly as I possibly can— what is more, I can prove it to you." His emphasis on something that may seem just a fine point of detail today was clearly very important to him;
4) his role as Minister of the Interior, during 1948–1950, in the various show trials of that era—that of László Rajk, in the first place. His text is laced with attempts to excuse himself, and in doing so, he takes the very strange line that he was unaware of the true nature of the trials until as late as 1961.
The bulk of the confused, poorly phrased and incomplete statements can be interpreted, albeit only with some difficulty, in the light of the above considerations. Let me reiterate: no Hungarian politician was seeking to cause trouble for Kádár or call him to account; all that leading opposition and government politicians wished for was to rid themselves of his presence as quickly and smoothly as possible. (One feature of Hungary's 'soft' transition was that even after the 1989–90 change of régime, no legal charges were proferred against, let alone sentences passed on, leading political or police figures of the post-1956 period.) Kádár was not summoned to appear before the CC; quite the contrary, when he himself presented his demand that he be allowed to defend himself at the CC meeting against the charges that were tormenting him, his short-term successor Károly Grósz tried to talk him out of it. The CC had more urgent matters to deal with than what was preying on the mind of a sick old man, and it was only because they felt obliged by good manners that they heard him out.
The deposed dictator repeats in his extreme anxiety. "They can shoot me for all I care." "I wouldn't even care if somebody blew my brains out." Yet he is equally dismayed by the thought that no one is paying any attention to him as if he were irrelevant, as if he did not exist—he who for 33 years had been used to being the most important person in Hungary. As he complains in his speech, no one sought his advice and not only Grósz, but Grósz's secretary (Major) was unwilling to speak to him. He wished to stand in the spotlight one more time, at a meeting of the CC, in front of all those people who had hung on his every word for decades on end and were now ignoring him. Going against his doctor's orders, this is vital for him—the only thing that is. "I have become a scapegoat in the biblical sense," he says, as though even that function were better than nothing.
As yet, there is no consensus on Kádár's place in history. Some people consider him to be the outstanding figure in twentieth-century Hungarian public life. Even more attribute to him a superhuman role in the negative sense—as if he had invited the Russians into Hungary or detained them there, as if he had blocked the forces of progress during the 70s and 80s. For my own part, I take neither of those views; because, long though he was in power, Kádár did not initiate any new direction in Hungary's history; he brought no original concept into play. At first, during the Stalinist era, as one of the administrators of the policies laid down by the Party's General Secretary, Mátyás Rákosi, and later, after the fall of both Rákosi and Nagy, he sought to do no more than steer a middle course between the two, one that Moscow could accept. He, too, was Moscow's lieutenant at a time when the Soviet Union made a number of dramatic policy turns that he was invariably obliged to follow—and the truth is that, between 1945 and 1989, no one else who might have wielded power in Hungary would have been able to act differently. He did agree to shoulder that task, and whatever the considerable successes that can be pointed to, this limits his significance. Rather than a truly 'great man', he was more the right man at the right time.
Kádár himself is quite up-front about his lack of conspicuous personal qualities. "I am a simple man, I had little schooling," he characterises himself with debatable modesty, which in itself may be one of the traits that qualified him as the right man. The fact is he never really wanted to acquire any learning to make up for what he had missed out on in his youth, and the Soviet leaders with whom he mostly had to deal—Khrushchev and Brezhnev, in particular—were no better educated, so it may well have been advantageous to be seen as having a similar background. There is one place in the soliloquy where he admits that, after a while, he understood what was being said to him in Russian. (It was received knowledge that he had never lived outside Hungary and spoke no foreign languages.) Nevertheless, he thought it better to pretend that he needed the services of an interpreter. The "simple man" image helped at home as well. It is curious how—even long past the time when Hungary and, indeed, Communist officials themselves were heartily sick of ostentatiously highbrow Party intellectuals like Rákosi, Jewish and non-Jewish alike—the public at large was won over by this reticent, slow-talking Hungarian working man, simple even in his appearance, yet known to be fond of hunting and playing cards, even to be partial to the odd discreet dram of brandy—along with his even simpler wife. People just like us, as it were.
That very temperateness saved him from unnecessary excesses; indeed, there were times when, in the interests of avoiding excesses, he would cautiously stand up even to the Russians if need be. Still, the "slave to compromise", as he styled himself, more often found ways of driving a bargain. He had people put away, but no more than he considered absolutely unavoidable; and, the last years apart, his sleep was not troubled by any spectres. He felt he had done what had to be done. In the end, it was not an awakened conscience that plagued him, but fear of being made to answer for his actions. Kádár was never able to accept the re-evaluation of those actions. Indeed, he basically rejected it, was unwilling to condemn the role he himself had played, and had no regrets about it, seeking only to explain why he did what he did (unlike András Hegedűs, the Prime Minister between April 1955 and October 1956, who later exercised self-criticism to the extent that by the late 60s, he had turned himself into a leading reform-minded academic sociologist).

Thus, it is uncertain what Kádár meant by more than once saying "Bocsánatot kérek"—a turn of phrase that can be alternately translated as "Excuse me", "I beg your pardon", but even as "I apologise" or "please, forgive me." There are those who argue that using this simple phrase was Kádár's way of expressing, repeatedly in the text, a wish to seek forgiveness for his role in putting down the 1956 Revolution. For my part, I believe that the context and the way he says these words on the tape recording indicate that he only wanted to underline what he was saying or to get attention.
In my view, if there is any trace of self-criticism in the text, that is his assertion that he personally did not label the events as a counter-revolution (which is a vast untruth). "The only thing I said was that they opened the door to counter-revolution." This is a point to which he returns: "I can't help it if such questions arise after thirty-two years and so many Party congresses and conferences later. Please note, though, that no one has ever pronounced judgment whether it was called a counterrevolution or a popular uprising. When I gave my statement back then, I said quite clearly, a peaceful student demonstration, and then an uprising. I didn't characterise the events as some kind of counter-revolution. And I was referring both to the participants and the sequence of events. Otherwise no one will understand why I spoke the way I did". And, he argues, "when unarmed people... were murdered as in a pogrom... these people were killed well before Imre Nagy and his associates." It is clear that in saying this, he blames the latter for the isolated lynchings of security policemen and others that occurred during the upheaval.
That is not to say that the reprisals, including the executions, did not weigh heavily on his mind. It is striking that wherever possible, he does not refer by name to Imre Nagy (see the chilly phrase "the man who has since deceased") or to the others (such as Losonczy and Pál Maléter) who were murdered or hanged with him. He also avoids naming Tito and uses a very roundabout allusion to Petru Groza, the Romanian post-Second World War Prime Minister: "the first prime minister was a man with his home in Transylvania, where he founded a Romanian political party, and it would have been inconceivable for this man to persecute Hungarians...". He likewise does not use names in talking about Ceaus¸escu or Dalibor Soldatic´, the Yugoslav ambassador to Budapest in 1956—who was charged by his government first to grant the request by Imre Nagy and other members of his government to be given asylum in the embassy; and subsequently, to allow them to be abducted by Soviet troops. These are evidently all names that awaken painful memories. The thought of Romania in particular—the country to which Nagy and the others were deported on 22 November 1956—invariably reminds him of something else, such as the Babes¸-Bolyai University of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) "that they promised"— setting him off on all manner of digressions about his international successes, from the understandings he reached with Mrs Thatcher to the signing of the Final Accords of the Helsinki Agreement.
Behind these ramblings are a quite different promise, one to which he eventually turns: "these two men's request was that they be free to depart and return to their homes." Here he is presumably referring to Imre Nagy and Géza Losonczy, although there were also others in the group who were promised a safe-conduct to their homes if they would leave the Yugoslav Embassy. This was evidently especially troublesome for Kádár, because it involved an outright lie. He must surely have been aware that Nagy and the others in his entourage would be whisked away from the embassy entrance, and he certainly knew that he was in no position to give any guarantees about their being returned to their homes. All he had asked in return was that Nagy and his associates "issue a statement... you know very well what this means for people to whom the legality of government is important... affirming that the legality of the Party is most important"—or, in other words, requiring them to recognise the legality of the Kádár administration. Nagy, however, would not agree to do that, any more than he had been willing to make a written request for Russian military assistance on 30 October. A way round this problem was hit on by András Hegedűs, Nagy's predecessor as Prime Minister, who declared that if that was all that was at stake, then he would sign an antedated letter.
This is why Kádár says, "I see him [viz. Hegedűs] as a saintly man, whatever he writes, for he assumed all the responsibility back then. Because he knew, too, that the Soviet government, whether he was on Soviet soil or wherever, insisted on the prime minister's signature on the request for intervention." In 1968, when Hegedűs signed a written protest condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, Kádár treated this saintly man differently from Nagy. He expelled him from the Party and had him dismissed from his post as Director of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences—that's all. After all, "he assumed all the responsibility back then", he remarks. Quite.

On the matter of his flight to the Soviet Union on 1 November 1956 (along with Ferenc Münnich and others who subsequently became members of the Kádár administration), Kádár emphasises that he had felt obliged to take that course: "the four men in public positions who broke with Imre Nagy's government practically had to flee." By saying this, he is possibly rejecting the then widespread account of events whereby he was forcibly removed from Hungary by Münnich and the Russians, which means he is accepting that he switched sides, though he suggests that events after they landed took a different course from what he had anticipated. Thus, he was obliged to sign a declaration and was a de facto prisoner until he got back to Szolnok, "when I was again free to move about"... "My life and many other people's lives depended on my saying what I had to say," and that was why he promised what he did. The ensuing confused explanation concerns the declaration, as edited by Erzsébet Andics, which appeared in the Szabad Nép newspaper printed at Szolnok. Thus, he does not deny his defection, nor that he made the journey to Moscow.
What he denies most vehemently, though, is that he was ever a Soviet agent in any shape or form. Had he been, then he would have known about the show trials in Moscow and elsewhere much earlier, as he argues later on. It is conceivable that Kádár also wants to make clear that he did not belong to Hungary's Muscovite Communists—Imre Nagy among them—who returned to the country after the war and were so tightly sequestered from 'home-grown' fellow Communists that they never discussed Stalin's show trials prior to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in February 1956, where Khrushchev attacked the Stalinist cult of personality. It is even conceivable that the name of the game only began to dawn on Kádár in 1948–49, when he was actively engaged in laying the groundwork for László Rajk's trial in October 1949.³> However, it is rather farfetched to expect people to believe that he was unaware of the leaked contents of Khrushchev's 'secret' speech in 1956 (when these were being spread by American leaflets dropped from the air) and that it was only after the 22nd Party Congress (in 1961) that he came to know the truth about the show trials. Khrushchev had already said plenty in 1956; but even in 1961, there were still many things that he kept quiet about, including the fate of Communists who had fled to the Soviet Union from Hungary and elsewhere before the war. As Kádár notes: "I hope I'll live to see the day when Soviet leaders will indulge in a little self-criticism in this matter."

With this clumsy, pathetic misrepresentation, Kádár is seeking to mix up the chronology of events. The idea that he only started to stumble upon, as late as 1948, what he had become involved in as Minister of the Interior is just about plausible. There are eyewitness accounts of how sick he was while being obliged to watch the executions of Rajk and his fellow 'conspirators'. Still, even if that were true, he must have grasped what was going on, and how non-existent the legal basis for these trials was, when he himself was arrested in 1951.
What makes the post-1956 reprisals particularly gruesome is the fact that Khrushchev had denounced the flimsy basis of the Soviet show trials in February 1956, only months before the Revolution; so not only was this common knowledge, it was also a subject of discussion for years afterwards, which is no doubt why the successive Soviet Party Congresses of 1956, 1959 and 1961 became jumbled up in Kádár's increasingly disordered mind. The lessons from the Moscow show trials were drawn by Khrushchev and his colleagues in 1956. After that date, no leading Soviet politician was made to face execution. Yet, they still pushed Kádár, bequeathing the crime to him as it were, since the Kremlin played no formal part in the Hungarian executions. To that extent, Kádár truly was made a scapegoat.

The Rajk affair figures to a far lesser extent in Kádár's discourse—and thus, in his apprehensions and soul-searching—than does the trial of Imre Nagy and his associates. The arrests and sentencing of such people as Cardinal Mindszenty and other non-Communists during his term as Minister of the Interior do not receive so much as a mention. In order to understand the peculiar logic of these omissions, we have to try to see things from the point of view of the ailing Kádár.
That he played a leading part in the post-1956 retribution is obvious, and there is no point in his trying to deny it. At best, he can only seek to spread the blame to Khrushchev, Tito and Nagy himself, who he maintains could have extricated himself by agreeing to resign—unlikely though that seems. Kádár's role in the Rajk trial stank. It was important; still, it was not decisive, as the trial would have gone ahead without him. He had no say in the sentencing—he acted under the orders of, indeed was hoodwinked by, Rákosi and others. Rajk's rehabilitation— and his funeral on 6 October 1956, attended by 200,000 people—had enormous impact on the events to come. Since that time, however, while Kádár was in power, no discussion or publication of the details of the case were permitted and very little information was available, not just to the general public, but even to the historians and political scientists who dealt with the era. I personally, for instance, was aware that Kádár had participated in the interrogation of Rajk, and I was even familiar with the transcript of the destroyed tape recording with charges that Rajk 'confessed' to;⁴ yet, I did not know that Kádár had reported on Rajk's 'crimes' to the CC leadership at a point in time when no formal charges had been laid, let alone any court judgement reached. (These two reports, like much else that is held in state archives, are accessible, but have not been published to the present day.) In the case of Imre Nagy, by contrast, even if not all the details were known, the gist was public knowledge.
There is a psychological circumstance that should be noted. What counts before the court is the criminal act. Any injury that may have been inflicted on the accused counts, at best, as a secondary motive; and his fate after committing the crime is strictly irrelevant. Those who commit political misdemeanours may be judged by other standards if they personally happen to incur a similar fate subsequently. In most cases, those who also became victims of a Communist régime, expected to have expiated any earlier crimes of their own. From 1951 to 1954, Kádár was himself imprisoned as a victim of false charges; while his wife also faced persecution, being dismissed from her job and, as he does not fail to mention in this last speech, forced to undertake poorly paid manual labour. His point of view, then, is that having himself become a victim in 1951, that annuls his own previous transgressions. Though a court would not accept that as a defence, it was how a great many people still thought at that time—including, for example, individuals who had committed atrocities on the side of the Germans during the Second World War and later became Gulag inmates under the Communist regime. Nowadays, of course, no one would seriously argue that enduring a punishment acquits one of any crimes committed, least of all subsequently—in Kádár's case, his actions after 1954.

It is worth having another look at the stress placed on "I was not a Soviet agent." A Western reader might imagine there is no big moral gap between being minister of the interior in a Communist régime and being a Soviet agent. Apparently, it was not as simple as that. To the present day, we have no idea who exactly were the KGB's agents in Hungary— or anywhere else, for that matter. One can make guesses based on circumstantial evidence, but suspicions do not add up to evidence. The available facts suggest that the succession of Hungarian Communist Party members who became ministers of the interior after 1945—Imre Nagy, Rajk, Kádár and Sándor Zöld—were not Soviet agents. (One strong factor supporting this is the fact that Rajk, Kádár and Zöld, the three young 'homegrown' Party members who were not exiled in Moscow—and thus, never initiated into the secrets of the Muscovite camp—all sooner or later ran into conflict with the KGB's men and became its victims. Rajk was executed, Kádár imprisoned, and Zöld committed suicide just before his own arrest.) We do not even know for sure—though it seems reasonable to assume—that people like Gábor Péter, the head of the ÁVH, or General Mihály Farkas, the Minister of Defence, were in the KGB. The fact is that during the decade following 1944, Hungary's leadership circles were rather like the village of Kafka's Castle, where a chambermaid who belonged to the Castle was a more important and influential figure than the land surveyor or innkeeper who did not belong, even though there was no outward acknowledgement of that affiliation. One witness has related to me that Hungarian police chief András Tömpe (who was also a Soviet Red Army colonel) once contradicted Farkas in a meeting, whereupon Politburo member József Révai, who happened to be leaving the room, whispered in his ear, "Tömpe, are you out of your mind to get into an argument with Farkas?" As a result, Gábor Péter, for example, was formally an underling of the Minister of the Interior, but in practice his superior. It was Rajk's tragedy that he did not learn this; whereas Kádár, for his part, did try to adapt to this situation—but maybe not enough.
What about the other matters that this confused train of thought tries to draw together? All dictators would like to be able to nominate their successor. János Kádár did that insofar as he accepted Károly Grósz and managed to get him accepted by Gorbachev, who was unwilling to have traffic with any other selfappointed candidate. The Communists of Kádár's own generation had died out by then, and he presumably felt that, among the younger ones, Grósz most resembled himself. Therefore, he accorded him great respect, being disappointed only that Grósz did not seek his advice, which he duly trots out. Preserve Party unity, don't allow multiple platforms to be established and rule with a strong fist. He, Kádár, will follow the same line: as a disciplined Party member, he would accept whoever was elected by secret ballot.
Kádár has ill-defined fears about how far the changes were going to go ("Can we still use the word 'Comrade' here?" or "[are we] allowed to say Lenin's name"), but the momentous changes Hungary was undergoing in those months—the economic crisis, the by then inexorable need to introduce a multi-party system, preparations for the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation army—are not uppermost in his mind. As one might expect of a lonely, sick old man, his own fate is what lies at the forefront of his concerns.
By an irony of fate, János Kádár died on the same date—6 July 1989—when the Presidential Division of the Supreme Court began its retrial of the case of Imre Nagy and his associates.

¹ The best of all the publications about Kádár's post-1956 career are two books by Tibor Huszár: Kádár János politikai életrajza. 2. kötet. 1957. november–1959. június (A Political Biography of János Kádár, vol. 2, November 1957–June 1959), Budapest: Szabad Tér and Kossuth Kiadó, 2003, and Kádár — A hatalom évei 1956–1989 (Kádár: The Years of Power, 1956–1989), Budapest, Corvina, 2006.
² It is estimated that around 22,000 sentences for alleged offences relating to the Revolution were passed by Hungarian courts between 1959 and 1967. The majority of these were for long terms (years) of imprisonment. Many were sentences of death, 229 of which were actually carried out. In addition, something to the order of 13,000 individuals were held in internment camps without trial by any court, and that, of course, says nothing about the consequences for family members. During the few weeks that Hungary's border to the West was open, anywhere between 220,000 and 250,000 people are thought to have left the country.
³ Kádár was Rajk's successor as Minister of the Interior during 1948–1950. After Kádár's appointment, the State Security Office (ÁVH and later ÁVÓ) was removed from the Ministry of the Interior's jurisdiction as it laid the groundwork for the Rajk trial, with Kádár only becoming involved at the time of the actual arrests (in May 1949). Hence he would not have been aware of many of the details or the methods that were adopted, and he may only have learned something while the case was in progress. Since he did not belong to the inner circle of the KGB's network of Hungarian agents, Kádár would in some respects have remained an outsider even during the trial itself; however, he did attend some of Rajk's interrogation, was given certain information about the case, and on two occasions he used that information to provide progress reports on preparations for the trial to meetings of the CC.
⁴ See "The Party Did Everything for You. The Interrogation of László Rajk, 7 June 1949". Published with an introduction by Tibor Hajdu. The Hungarian Quarterly, Spring 1996, No. 141, pp. 83–99.

Tibor Hajdu's
books include A magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság (The Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1969) and a biography (1987). He also edited the correspondence (1990–91, 2002) of Count Mihály Károlyi.