Sándor Révész
One Day It Has to Come Out
Gábor Tabajdi & Krisztián Ungváry: Elhallgatott múlt. A pártállam és a
belügy. A politikai rendőrség működése Magyarországon 1956–1990
(Silenced Past: the Party-State and the Interior Ministry.
The Operation of the Political Police in Hungary, 1956–1990).
Budapest: 1956-os Intézet & Corvina, 2008, 515 pp.
János M. Rainer: Jelentések hálójában. Antall József és az
állambiztonság emberei 1957–1989 (In a Web of Reports. József Antal
and the Shattered Mirrors of State Security Men, 1957–1989).
Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2008, 295 pp.
[...]
János Rainer's book deals with the intensive activities that were engaged by
the secret police, from 1956 right up until the change of regime, directed at
József Antall. (Antall was later to be leader of the winning party—Hungarian
Democratic Forum, MDF—in the country's general election of 1990 and hence
prime minister of the first post-Communist government.) This was in spite of
the fact that such attention could only be said to have made any "sense" up
until roughly 1959, which is when the young Antall, then a charismatic teacher
at the Toldy Gimnázium in Budapest, was in a position to "infect" the pupils
and the teaching staff with his gestures of resistance. By the end of 1959 it had
been settled that his father's internationally recognised merits and highly
positioned contacts were strong enough to save Antall himself from being
arrested, though they were not sufficient for him to be allowed to stay in his
teacher's job in such close proximity to corruptible young people.
The efforts to recruit or incriminate them on the part of the security services,
with both father and son, were to no avail, but a satisfactory, long-lasting and
stable modus vivendi acceptable to both parties could be established, meeting
their respective needs for safety. That safety rested on the premise that both
father and son knew where the regime drew the limits of toleration. In private
life Antall was able freely to expound his anti-dictatorship views, but he just as
consistently refrained from voicing these to the alternative public of active
oppositionists as he did from demonstrations of support for the regime,
restricting his public activities to the politically neutral ground of his job, after he
had accepted a post in the regime's public service as director of the Museum of
Medical History. Thus peaceful co-existence was under no threat until the
Communist regime collapsed, a collapse which Antall had nothing to do with.
In short, the Antalls kept to certain rules of the game, but in spite of that
almost thirty persons in the informer network busied themselves around both Antall
Snr and Jnr from 1957 until the early 1980s, among them at least 24 agents… The said
24 persons in the informer network wrote a total of almost 480 reports about the Antalls,
who in their turn did not suffer any direct, demonstrable disadvantage attributable to
informer activity as a result of the confidential investigations that were pursued against
them… the duration, taken together with the ‘results', of the informer activity against
the Antalls throws a certain light on the thoroughness and efficiency of secret-service
work in the Kádár era… Essentially nothing was done with any of the information
brought to light by the group that was mobilised around them. (Rainer, p. 77)
Altogether, over a period of three decades, around one hundred secret-police
officers were involved at some time or other with the network of informers that
was put in place around the Antalls. Rainer is very careful in his choice of words
when he writes of "direct, demonstrable disadvantage attributable to informer
activity", because it was of course a disadvantage in itself that this family was
obliged to live most of its life under the eyes of the secret police, and that two men
who are cut out to be politicians both lost thirty years from their political careers.
However, none of this was directly due to informer activity but rather to the
regime that propped up that informer activity and was in turn propped up by it.
In the spring of 1967 Antall is recorded as having said, in his accustomed daydreaming
mode, on a train steaming from Győr to Budapest, something along
the lines that someone really ought to organise a "shadow government". That
light-hearted idea is recorded in a report by György Kiss, his travelling
companion and closest friend and, at the same time, the most diligent informer
against him. The secret police, however, spent over three years, from then until
1970, "investigating" this "shadow government" idea. In 1968 there were
days when half a dozen detectives tailed Antall around Budapest (Rainer,
pp. 225–232). Similarly, in 1980 Pál Tar, then living in Paris and in his late
forties and subsequently destined to become Hungarian ambassador to
Washington under the Antall administration, dropped a remark that he would
like to write a book about Hungary when he came to retire, and that his friends
Antall and Kiss could help him with collecting material for it. Kiss reported
even that; the secret police opened a separate file, and for a year and a half
were furiously busy investigating the gathering of material that was never
undertaken for a book that was never written (Rainer, pp. 68–69).
[...]
Sándor Révész
a historian and journalist, is an editor on the daily Népszabadság and the monthly
Beszélő. He is the author of Antall József távolról (József Antall, from a Distance,
1995). His latest book is a collection of articles on the four years of the centre-right
government led by Viktor Orbán (1998–2002), published in Népszabadság.
