András Mink

Kádár's Shadow

 

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For many, the heritage of the Kádár era stands for individual selfishness and indifference to public affairs. It also means corrupted political morals and the breakdown of national and community values. Some observers add to these maladies a number of unbroken and damaging historical traditions: a parasitical political elite and its clientele plundering public wealth, state paternalism, authoritarian tendencies and the related powerlessness of ordinary citizens. All of this was characteristic of the one-party state before 1989. They, however, were not created by the Kádár regime. At worst, it prolonged and strengthened them. These more recent views of Kádárism therefore signal disillusionment: in 1989-90, the country made only a semi-aborted attempt to dispose of these traditional social and political evils.
A final consideration: János Kádár was the greatest historical figure of the twentieth century, according to opinion polls of the late 1990s. He ranked third in the Hungarian pantheon after Saint Stephen, the king who founded the Hungarian Christian state, and István Széchenyi, the great nineteenth-century reformer. All in all, Hungarians still live in Kádár's shadow.

There are two pitfalls awaiting any biographer of Kádár: one is the danger of writing an apology for his system and attempting to justify unjustifiable criminal acts; the other is to engage in rancorous abuse that takes no consideration of the realities of the period. A Kádár biography is successful if it does not try to defend the indefensible and can accurately reveal the difference between what was possible and what actually happened. A description of Kádár's life cannot forego a utilitarian calculus, an examination of his hunger for power and a consideration of the realities of the Cold War. However, it would be a mistake to place these factors in the context of a neutral political pragmatism, ignoring the ideological nature of his regime and the way Kádár and his political elite related to the ideology of the system: communism.

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Indeed, before 1956 János Kádár simply did not exist as an independent personality in politics. He made no remarks, either publicly or in closed party-meetings, that reflected anything like an original idea or aptitude for independent political thought. Gough evokes one of his speeches at a Central Committee meeting in March 1956: "He had never, he said, slept so well as in the days when he had simply to divine the wishes of Rákosi and the 'quartet' and then carry them out." (p. 71.)
The Rákosi era did not exactly encourage the development of autonomous personalities, even at the top level of the Party. But this tabula rasa is perplexing: one of the cadres at the very top of the ruling Communist Party (quondam minister of the interior, member of the state security committee, deputy secretary-general of the Party) seems to have no intellectual history to speak of. His political career is, of course, more eventful. But any biographer would be hard pressed to find a connection between Kádár's political actions and his pre-1956 progress in the hierarchy, or with his imprisonment in the Fifties. Kádár was never promoted or dropped because he did something or represented something. He may well have advanced, as Gough suggests, solely because he was one of the handful of survivors of the pre-war underground Hungarian Communist movement and one of the few who were not Jews-something the men in Moscow were very conscious of. The personality which emerges seems neither of stature, nor of talent, nor engaging. This is all the more surprising since it contrasts with how many of his contemporaries remembered him: a charismatic, likeable personality, who may not have been highly educated but was of sound judgment.
Two major events marked Kádár's pre-1956 political career: his brutal and merciless role as interior minister in the Rajk show trial and his own stint in prison after trumped-up charges were laid against him in 1951. He was released in 1954 upon the initiative of Imre Nagy who, overcoming Rákosi's resistance, pushed ahead the rehabilitation of those Communist cadres who had previously fallen victim to show trials. Both of these events present Kádár in a bad light. The first shows clearly that Kádár was anything but a simple-minded and naive outsider unfamiliar with the system he served in the highest positions with such servility. After 1956 Kádár was often presented as someone who, like everybody else, was misled by the obsessions and manipulations of Stalinism. If we look at the records, this claim is hardly credible. Although he was not the initiator or architect of the Rajk trial, he was involved in its execution from the very beginning.
His behaviour during and after his release from prison in 1954 puts him in an even less favourable light. Unlike many of his fellow sufferers, it seems he failed to draw any conclusions about the nature of the regime that had treated him so unjustly. He was solely pre-occupied with his own sufferings and humiliation. He did not indicate, then or later, that, for instance, the Rajk trial was a crime, and there was no sign whatsoever of weighing his own responsibility for its preparation. Kádár never tried to promote the release of Communists imprisoned in show trials-excluding himself, of course. After his release he sought for support from Rákosi and, as Gough shows, turned against his former master only after he felt that the "compensation" offered him was inadequate. Although many in the party apparatus regarded him as one of Rákosi's potential successors, he did not openly criticize him, at a meeting of the Central Committee in July, 1956, until after Rákosi's fate had already been decided. All of this shows the reader a politician who lacked stature, had no particular moral principles and always kept the interests of his own career in focus. One might be forgiven the impression that little of Kádár's pre-1956 character could possibly foreshadow the politician who came to power after the 1956 Revolution.
Still, it is fair to conclude that by the end of 1955 Kádár had already realised that whatever came after Rákosi, his methods of exercising power could not be maintained any longer. First and foremost, the terror that kept all of society, including the party apparatus, under perpetual threat, had to be abandoned. As Gough puts it,

He urged further changes to the ÁVH [State Security Authority] and an effort to broaden the regime's base, building 'alliances' that would maintain party control while co-opting some social groups and prominent individuals. He wanted a more flexible system, but one whose essential pillars would remain unchanged. This would be the lasting core of what would become 'Kádárism'. (p. 75)

This kind of moderate reformism had two unshakable pillars: the unity of the Party and the maintenance of its hegemony in power. Both were questioned by the 1956 Revolution as it unfolded.

Kádár's role in the Revolution and his treachery are among the most discussed issues in recent Hungarian history. On November 2, Kádár shrewdly realized that he had been summoned before the Soviet Politburo not to be admonished, but to be assessed as the future leader of the country. Gough reconstructs in detail what happened in Moscow. The Soviet leaders were in disagreement; Khrushchev and others supported Kádár, while the Stalinist faction within the Politburo was in favour of Ferenc Münnich. Rákosi and his associates were actually sitting in the next room, hatching plans, certain of their return. Initially, and probably wholeheartedly, Kádár acted as the representative of the Imre Nagy government. At the first meeting he categorically objected to military intervention. The next day Kádár took Münnich's side and agreed to head a puppet government. He knew that his task was not the restoration of order, but to make it known that any kind of order was possible only under conditions dictated by the Soviets. Khrushchev opted for Kádár because he needed a politician who could establish order in Hungary without restoring the Stalinist system. He did not want his "secret speech" to the Soviet Party Congress and his policy of de-Stalinization to be discredited by the events in Hungary.
Hungarian historiographical debate usually centres around speculations that, given the available sources, are almost impossible to confirm or deny: was Kádár's treachery motivated by fear (if Rákosi returned, he would be hanged alongside Imre Nagy) and by his own hunger for power, or did he honestly believe that in the given circumstances his decision was in the best interests of the country, as the Soviets had already decided in favour of military intervention-a decision that Kádár had no influence on or responsibility for.
Gough offers a refreshingly clear and straightforward view of this issue: Kádár's choice could not be justified retrospectively by the argument that this was the only way to prevent the return to power of Rákosi and his accomplices. This, the excuse most frequently put forward for Kádár, sounds sophistical, since the Soviet leaders had never seriously considered re-establishing Rákosi. Gough has this to say:

Fear and ambition probably played a part too: acceptance meant that he would have at least some leadership, and he can have few illusions as to likely long-term consequences of refusal. Yet to view siding with Moscow as a betrayal is to use a moral calculus quite alien to Kádár. He was most unlikely to opt for martyrdom based on defiance of the Soviet Union. He may have doubted the wisdom of military action (...); but there was nothing in his thinking that made the Soviet intervention wrong in itself. (p. 97)

At this point Gough is sketching us a portrait of Kádár's political personality that connects his pre-1956 self to the one that surfaced after the Revolution. In this light, his shift seems less enigmatic.
However, this approach does not put aside the moral aspects of Kádár's choice. Kádár could not have prevented the Soviet intervention, but he could have influenced its outcome. There are no sources to suggest that his conciliatory promises-the offer of amnesty, the re-adoption of the Kossuth coat of arms, or reinstituting March 15 as a national holiday-were intended as eyewash from the start. Most probably, he hoped the country would understand there was no other option given the circumstances. However, his hopes were frustrated. His offer was rejected by everyone; only the former state security police and the Soviet army supported him. The two Politburo envoys, Suslov and Malenkov, supervised what he was doing from a nearby secret headquarters in Leányfalu, twenty-five kilometres from Budapest, and urged him to re-evaluate his "false" views on the nature of the "counter-revolution". In other words, they exerted strong pressure on him to use violence to break resistance in the country as soon as possible. Similar warnings came from the Bloc's other capitals.
Kádár was able to justify his decision to accept the deal he was offered in Moscow by claiming that he was the only one who was capable of consolidating the situation without resorting to terror. In this he failed. By opting for terror instead of resigning, he dealt a fatal blow to his own moral integrity. From this point on the utilitarian justification is void. We cannot tell whether Münnich (or anyone else) would have been more (or less) brutal than Kádár, but the fact is that this does not matter. Among other things because we certainly know retaliations went far beyond what was necessary for the restoration of order. There was no need to fire into crowds, or to carry out executions. Armed resistance, sporadic and weak in any case, had ceased everywhere by mid-November. Moreover, Kádár's anger at being rejected by Hungarians was palpable. "We must set up the people's court, and whenever we find Horthyists or other counter-revolutionaries who dared to do such dirty things we shall put them on trial one by one, sentence them to death and execute them one by one", he said to the Central Committee in April, 1957 on returning from a visit to Moscow.¹

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Like many observers, Roger Gough also highlights the peculiarity that, despite its bloody debut, the Kádár regime was remarkably popular for most its duration. This is far from being without parallel in Hungarian history. Francis Joseph also began his reign in bloodshed after suppressing the Hungarian attempt to achieve independence in 1848-49; he had became everybody's ferencjóska by the early 1870s. Similarly, Miklós Horthy, the inter-war Regent of Hungary, violently seized power after the post-1918 revolutions; soon most Hungarians were regarding him as the saviour of the nation. There is an analogous pattern in all the three cases. The leader's reputation rested on the fact that his rule brought relative peace and security after a long period of war, suffering, insecurity and distress. It is an attitude that is understandable and it partly explains the paternalist tendencies in Hungarian political culture.
If we compare Kádár's era to those of his predecessors, we may conclude that his achievements were probably not the lesser. They were, of course, highly ambiguous and contradictory. As Sándor Révész put it, his regime "opened the way for the majority in society towards the lifestyle, security and civilization model of modern Europe, and reconciled them to the paternalist dictatorship which alienated the country from the modern democratic Europe of welfare states."²
During the Kádár era, living conditions, infrastructure, the standard of living, consumption, the civilizatory standards, developed at a rate unprecedented in Hungarian history. On the other hand, this rapid growth, with a few (and extreme) exceptions, was characteristic of the whole of the Soviet bloc and socialist modernization lagged well behind the post-Second World War boom in the West. Yet, although Kádár's road was a cul-de-sac, the collapse of his regime was not followed by years of horror and misery, as happened in the wake of Francis Joseph or Horthy.
There are some other specific factors behind the popularity of Kádár's rule. Its legitimacy partly derived from the fact that, from the 1960s, the system that Kádár fundamentally restored and reconstructed had a kinder face than before 1956. From the early 1960s, it was the Rákosi period Kádár's regime wanted to distinguish itself from. It was no easy task. It had to be claimed that the Rákosi era had laid the foundations of socialism, fostered what was essentially a socialist system, and the post-1956 regime was its successor. Otherwise 1956 could not be called a counter-revolution. But it also had to be shown that the Kádár regime was not a continuation of Mátyás Rákosi's. The Kádár regime consequently acted as if it were simultaneously the same and different. In this sense, the memory of the Rákosi regime served to legitimise Kádár's.
Moreover, Kádár's regime was better both in comparison with Rákosi's and when measured against its own beginnings. The post-1956 retaliation was the last wave of Stalinist mass terror. Hungary's prime minister was hanged after a show trial, and the retribution targeted, consciously and with calculated cynicism, all layers and groups in society. No wonder that, in view of the violence of the retribution, everybody was expecting something worse. But, belying its devastating early years, this regime became the softest, not the hardest, dictatorship in the region.
However, continuity versus discontinuity was a fundamental difficulty for the entire Soviet bloc after the death of Stalin, and remained as such for Kádár until the end of his rule: how could one break with Stalinism, yet not break with the system? For a critique of Stalinism could not be a political critique, as Stalinism was not to be regarded as a political system, but a temporary slip that was the result of the personality and political temperament of a particular individual. This was why Khrushchev, and later Kádár, spoke exclusively of the personality cult. In a deeper sense, what had to be done was even more precarious: how to improve the efficiency and adaptability of the economy and to minimize political oppression without endangering the basis of the system, the absolute authority of the Party and the privileges of the nomenklatura. This was initially, as Gough clearly indicates, Khrushchev's programme. Since then, Communist and anti- Communist theoreticians have frequently pointed out that this was the squaring of a circle. The slogan, "Back to Lenin!" that resounded all over the Soviet bloc after the 21st Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1961 was both an illusion and a smoke-screen. The close, organic ties between the Leninist revision of Marxism and Stalinism were all too obvious. Theoretical attempts to redefine socialism from the early Sixties were made, without exception, on the margins of the system, then outside it and against it, in samizdat form. Their common feature was the questioning, whether in a cautious or a radical manner, of the one-party system. But the leading role of the Party was the essential thesis of the ideology of Leninism and not of Stalinism. Revising Stalinism should thus have implied a revision of Leninism and of Communist eschatology, which was impossible.
In spite of this, the system was apparently unthreatened by internal or external danger. The cold-war status quo seemed permanent. 1956 is now generally held to have been the Stalingrad of the Communist world order, the first jolt which set it off towards its grave. But after 1956 the opposite seemed to be the case. It was the crushing of the Revolution that made both the East and the West realize that the system was not transitory and that the Soviets would remain for a long time. This recognition also contributed to the quick suppression of resistance in Hungary.
Despite its stability, the system nevertheless seemed an interim one, as it was unclear where it was heading. People thought all this could last only as long as the Soviet Union existed and Soviet troops were stationed in the country. But no one had any idea exactly how long this would be. The fact that the ideology was losing its substance led to a strange form of hide-and-seek. Social order in the Kádár era rested on a scheme of communication according to which the parties involved- those in power and the general public-held opposing convictions, but it was not in the interest of either to openly express this discrepancy. Those in power pretended the people were supporting socialism and hence the regime, while the people acted as if those in power were doing their best to make the Soviet occupation more tolerable, an aim which deserved tacit support.
It is a commonplace that the Kádárian compromise was based upon two essential factors. One of them was a relief from everyday terror (as the slogan put it, "Those who are not against us, are with us"). The other was the guarantee of a modest, but continuous, progress in living standards (goulash communism). After the restoration of the system, it became obvious very soon that the latter could not be accomplished without reshaping the centrally planned economy. The history of the reform and its political aspects, the analysis of its paradoxical nature is one of the main strengths of Gough's account (he is an economist by profession).

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The Faustian legend of Kádár became popular from the early 1970s and remained influential even after 1989. It goes roughly like this: the goals of the 1956 Revolution, independence and democracy, were outside what constituted a possible reality, which were set by the conditions of the Cold War. The Revolution had to be betrayed and defeated. Kádár dirtied his hands and sacrificed his moral integrity in order to secure what would have remained unattainable within the given circumstances: material progress and relative freedom. Thus, Kádár and the Kádárist elite carried a secret, underground mission as they worked to accomplish the goals of 1956: no less than the gradual self-liquidation of the regime behind the Soviet leaders' back. Kádár vanished in June, 1989-into the eternity of historical memory-at the same time his victim, Imre Nagy, was reborn during a ceremonial and highly public reburial. It, indeed, sounds like a Shakespearian tragedy.
Gough leaves no doubt that the core of this legend is absurd. The hesitant steps towards imitating market conditions, the reconciliatory gestures towards the West, the efforts to integrate into the international economic system and gain access to the financial resources vital for survival, all served the same purpose: the stabilisation and consolidation of a system that was exhausting its own reserves at an ever faster pace. For Hungarian readers it may sound unusual that Hungary, a political colony of the Soviet Empire, ceased to be a colony in an economic sense after 1956. The Hungarian economy heavily depended upon the subsidies that arrived from the Soviet Union via transfers of energy sources and raw materials much below international prices. In this manner, the Soviets financed social peace in Hungary (and in Poland) which they did with an increasing reluctance as their economic difficulties also grew from the mid-1970s.
But Kádár remained a faithful and "good comrade"³ until the very end: he always opted for the interests of "the Party"; he was furious with the Soviets when, as he saw it, they were unable to understand that the system required fine tuning in order to survive; he regarded himself a cunning tactician in international affairs, who always promoted the cause of socialism. There is no doubt that he played his role as a Communist leader in dead earnest.
Kádár's authority and prestige was shaken during the last few years of his rule. Gough points out that his was a contingent reputation. It could be maintained only as long as the conditions provoking his rule existed and the Hungarians believed that he represented the best available option for Hungary. The Kádár regime lost ground when Gorbachev appeared on the scene and the end of the Soviet Empire appeared on the horizon. Kádár's former comrades tried to make him the scapegoat and hastily abandoned him. His famous last speech of despair in April 1989 reflected not only a sense of guilt but also loneliness and fear, and a sense of futility. His regime proved to be transient with no meaning for the future.
It is not due to his life and deeds that his reputation has partly revived since 1989. "To remember and to forget both mean to escape, more precisely, to attempt to escape," wrote László Márton in his novella Árnyas fôutca (Shady High Street), in 1999. It seems that many Hungarians wish to remember solely the halcyon days, forget about the unease, and have no idea where to escape.

¹ Tibor Huszár, Kádár János politikai életrajza (A Political Biography of János Kádár), vol. 2. Budapest, Kossuth Kiadó/Szabad Tér Kiadó, 2003, p. 45.

² Sándor Révész, "Gyászkor és aranykor" [An Age of Mourning and a Golden Age], in Beszélô évek, 1957-1968 (Talking Years, 1957-1968), Budapest, Stencil Alapítvány, 2000, p. 614.

³ I do not understand why the editors of the 2006 Hungarian version (Kádár János, a jó elvtárs?, Budapest, Alexandra) chose to add a question mark to this phrase.

András Mink
a historian, is Deputy Director of the Open Society Archives in Budapest and editor of the monthly Beszélő.