Part Four
Nobel Thoughts and Noble Deeds
WHERE’ER A NOBLE DEED IS WROUGHT,
WHERE’ER IS SPOKEN A NOBLE THOUGHT,
OUR HEARTS IN GLAD SURPRISE
TO HIGHER LEVELS RISE.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW,
SANTA FILOMENA
CHAPTER 25
THE BLOOD OF THE HUNGARIANS
Rise, Magyar! is the country’s call!
The time has come, say one and all:
Shall we be slaves, shall we be free?
This is the question, now agree!
For by the Magyar’s God above
We truly swear,
We truly swear the tyrant’s yoke
No more to bear!
—SÁNDOR PETÖFI, “Talpra Magyar”
(Hungarian national poem, recited by
demonstrators in October 1956)
THE SPRING OF 1953 BROUGHT ANOTHER HISTORIC MILESTONE—REGIME change in the Soviet Union. After ruling the country for nearly three decades, Joseph Stalin died on March 5.
A five-member body of the Presidium assumed leadership of the country at first. After much maneuvering and intrigue, including the arrest and execution of one member who had been head of the secret police, Nikita Khrushchev eventually ascended to first secretary of the Communist Party, the de facto head of government, in September 1953.
After Khrushchev solidified his grasp on power, he signaled some potentially profound shifts in the USSR’s posture toward the West—away from the arms race and toward improving relations and “peaceful coexistence.” This thaw in the Cold War was made official policy at the ten-day-long Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in February 1956 in which Khrushchev played a starring role. Peaceful coexistence, Khrushchev explained, was “not a tactical move” but now “a fundamental principle of Soviet foreign policy,” derived from a position of the growing strength of Socialist states and Communism. He asserted his “certainty of the victory of communism” over capitalism, but also stressed that securing world peace and “the ending of the arms race remains one of mankind’s vital tasks.” Speaking of matters closer to home, Khrushchev earned prolonged applause when he pledged “to strengthen in every way our fraternal relations” with other states in the Socialist camp. He declared, “The stronger the entire socialist camp, the more reliable will be the guarantee of freedom, independence, and economic and cultural progress of the countries making up this great camp.”
After the formal sessions were over, a special “secret” session was called for the early hours of February 25 in the Great Hall of the Kremlin. Khrushchev again took the podium, but this time shocked the assembled delegates by launching into a speech denouncing Stalin for his “use of mass terror,” “brutal violence,” “cruel repression,” and other excesses. Recounting the purges of Party leaders, specific cases of false arrest and execution, and the nearly fatal blunders in preparing for and executing the war with Germany, Khrushchev blamed the “Cult of Personality” that had evolved around Stalin that had made him “akin to a god,” and believed him to be infallible. This worship led to “grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality” that Khrushchev spelled out for more than four hours in devastating detail. Khrushchev vowed in closing: “Our Party, armed with the historical resolutions of the 20th Congress, will lead the Soviet people along the Leninist path to new successes, to new victories!”
The first serious test of Khrushchev’s new path would come just a few months later during a political crisis in Hungary. The plight of Hungarians striving to free themselves from the Soviet sphere would become a cause in which both Camus and Monod would become deeply engaged. Ensuing events would validate Camus’s long-running and lonely condemnation of the totalitarian Soviet system, and prompt Monod to plunge into human smuggling.
A DARK HISTORY
After fighting on the side of the Axis powers in World War II, and then being invaded, defeated, and occupied by Russian forces at the end of the war, Hungary fell under the firm political, military, and economic control of the Soviet Union. By 1949, all non-Communist opposition had fled, been arrested, or been suppressed.
At the helm of the so-called People’s Republic of Hungary was the general secretary of the Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi. A great admirer of Stalin—he even described himself as “Stalin’s greatest pupil”—Rákosi was groomed for the Party boss position while he spent the war years in the Soviet Union. With unlimited power, Rákosi styled his regime after the Stalin model. There were no personal liberties. The regime was the most restrictive of all the Soviet satellites. Anyone straying from Rákosi’s dictates, whether the infraction was real or perceived, was dealt with very harshly. The Hungarian secret police, the Államvédelmi Hatóság (AVH), was run by the Party.
Agnes Ullmann, a married, twenty-nine-year-old biochemistry graduate student at Eötvös Loránd University’s Faculty of Science in Budapest had witnessed firsthand the excesses of the Rákosi regime, the brutality of Russian occupation, and indeed the entire sequence of calamities that had befallen eastern Europe over the previous seventeen years. A native Romanian, Ullmann was born in northwest Transylvania and raised in Arad, in west Romania near the Hungarian border. Romania first declared itself neutral at the outset of World War II, then joined the Axis powers in November 1940 and fought alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union. The tide of the war turned in 1944 when the Soviets invaded her homeland, pushed back the Germans, and then occupied the country.
Living in Arad during the war, Ullmann had to deal first with the German occupation, then bombings by American and British planes, and finally the Russian invasion. Seventeen years old at the time of the German occupation, she was not hassled by the occupiers. Indeed, with her long blond braids and white socks, she figured that she “looked like a Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth].” She was able to come and go without attracting interest from the Gestapo, a freedom that her father exploited and that offered Ullmann some wartime adventures.
After the war, Ullmann attended university for two years in Cluj, Romania, before moving to Budapest in 1947. At the university, Ullmann received a Soviet-approved curriculum. “The teaching was Michurin and Lysenko, and the biology courses were about that. That was it,” she later recalled.
She had her doubts, however, about Soviet dogma, doubts that were sown by the banning of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s music as “imperialist,” by the debates over “bourgeois science” brewing in the USSR, and by the insistence that all Western ideas were to be discredited.
“It was absolutely unbelievable … Nobody believed at that time what this Soviet propaganda said,” Ullmann later recalled. The students therefore could not distinguish good Russian science from worthless dogma. Ullmann taught a course in general chemistry and explained that the periodic table of the elements was the creation of Dmitri Mendeleev, a brilliant Russian chemist. Accustomed to fables about Soviet scientists, the students wanted to know who in the West had really developed the table.
It was very dangerous to share opinions with anyone except the most trusted friends. Ullmann had confided her doubts about Lysenko to a friend, Györgi Adám, an economist and committed Communist whose ties to the Party reached back to the days when the Party was illegal in Hungary. Ullmann trusted that he would not betray her.
As chief editor of an official Marxist magazine, Adám was one of the few with access to Western newspapers. One day in 1949, he showed Ullmann the issue of Combat in which Jacques Monod had published his critique of Lysenko, saying, “You know, you told me once that you have a bad feeling about [Lysenko].”
Monod’s article made an enormous impression on Ullmann: “It was a fabulous discovery for somebody to whom Western information was unavailable.”
LATER THAT VERY summer, Adám failed to show up for work at the editorial office of MTI, the Hungarian news agency. A colleague learned from Adám’s landlady that he had been taken away from his apartment in
the middle of the night by the AVH. The lifelong Communist had been deemed a threat by the Rákosi regime. Adám’s trial was held in secret, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Adám was just one of the many thousands of victims of Rákosi’s purges that swept up writers, intellectuals, and other card-carrying, loyal Party members on fabricated charges, including many who had fought against the Nazis. Ullmann was horrified. “It was absolutely awful … People were arrested. People were killed. People were hanged.”
Ullmann was working in a laboratory with a young Yugoslavian. At the time, Yugoslavia’s prime minister, Josip Tito, had enraged the Kremlin by daring to follow his own course, including accepting support from the West through the Marshall Plan. All Yugoslavians were thus suspected “tools of the imperialists” in the eyes of the Rákosi regime. Ullmann’s lab mate was arrested. And because working alongside a Yugoslav apparently made one suspect, she was arrested as well. After being taken at six in the morning from her home and interrogated for a day and a half, she was released.
Her lab mate was executed.
RÁKOSI’S REIGN OF terror was carried out by the AVH, which employed 100,000 police and a vast system of informants in order to root out anyone about whom there might be the slightest doubt regarding loyalty to the regime. These so-called class enemies, Zionist agents, or Party infiltrators were arrested, whether Communists or clergy, and sentenced in secret or in public show trials. Leniency was often promised to those who were willing to denounce others, so the cycle of arrests was perpetuated. Between 1949 and 1953, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people were arrested and sent to prison or forced labor camps where torture was commonplace; another 2,000 were executed.
The political witch hunts, however, depleted government ministries of competent management and forced many better-educated Hungarians into menial labor. The atmosphere of fear intimidated managers and workers from addressing problems at factories. Combined with the forced collectivization of peasant farms, the Hungarian economy crumbled. Food production fell, food shortages were widespread, and rationing was instated. Despite the miserable conditions, there was endless official praise and professions of love for the Soviet Union and Stalin. The populace was cynical and bitter.
Rákosi enjoyed a free hand while Stalin was in power, but after Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Soviet leadership moved to curb Rákosi. The lesson from their experience with Stalin was that no individual should hold so much power, so the Soviets moved to dilute the authority of government leaders in the USSR as well as in satellite states. At that time, Rákosi was both prime minister and secretary general of the Party, and held absolute command over Hungary. Rákosi was summoned to Moscow and instructed to replace his one-man rule with collective leadership and to bring into the government some of his most ardent critics, including his minister for farm deliveries and deputy prime minister, Imre Nagy.
FLICKERS OF HOPE
Nagy was appointed prime minister (technically the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Hungary) in July 1953. On his very first day in office, he stunned Rákosi, the Party, and the country by announcing a series of reforms, including putting an end to arbitrary police arrests, dismantling the forced labor camps, and promising to review the cases of all who had been imprisoned on political charges during Rákosi’s regime. Nagy proclaimed that he was reversing course from Rákosi’s farm and industrial policies, and added, “Intellectuals must be esteemed … We must display greater tolerance in religious matters. The foundation of the Socialist … state is a strict respect for the rule of law.”
Nagy’s “New Course” fanned hopes that Hungary was turning away from the past for good. In 1954, Nagy secured permission from Moscow to release thousands of Communist political prisoners, who were then able to tell their stories of the horrors of Rákosi’s camps and prisons. When people learned for certain what most suspected had been going on for years, many who had avoided arrest and served the regime felt terrible shame. One writer summed up the guilt of those who had conformed to the regime’s dictates: “In sleepless nights it is no sop to one’s conscience that one did not directly participate in murder and betrayal. Because responsibility lies not only with the one who bludgeoned but also with those who tolerated evil in whatever fashion—through the thoughtless repetition of dangerous theories, the wordless raising of the right hand, the half-hearted writing of half truths.”
In March 1955, spurred by Nagy’s New Course and the atmosphere of more open dialogue, intellectuals and leaders of the Communist youth organization (the Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, or DISZ) formed a discussion group to debate how to go about reorganizing the country. Summoning the spirit and legacy of the 1848 revolution, they named their group the Petöfi Circle, after the famous poet-martyr Sándor Petöfi. Ullmann attended the first meeting and became member number 21 of a movement that would grow into the tens of thousands, nearly all of whom were also Communist Party members who shared the hope of reforming, not overthrowing, the regime.
The wind changed direction, however, yet again, in Moscow. One of Nagy’s key supporters resigned and the Soviet Presidium wanted the reformer out. In April 1955, Nagy was removed as premier and excluded from the politburo. In November, despite being a longtime committed Communist, Nagy was kicked out of the Party altogether.
Moscow put Rákosi back in charge again, but the genie of reform had been let out of the bottle and Rákosi would find it very difficult to put it back in. The people now knew about his criminal excesses and economic failures. The press and public discourse had become much more open and critical.
The influence of the Petöfi Circle grew enormously, along with the hope of reform following the disclosure of Khrushchev’s “Cult of Personality” speech. Attendance at Circle debates in Budapest swelled into the hundreds and then the thousands in the months following Khrushchev’s bombshell speech.
Reports from the Petöfi Circle gathering made Rákosi furious. He condemned the “anti-Soviet nature” of the speakers’ statements and forbade further meetings of the Circle. He drew up a list of people to be arrested for their roles in the “anti-Party plot.”
But Moscow had Rákosi on a short leash. On July 18, 1956, before he could move on his detractors, Soviet deputy chairman Anastas Mikoyan arrived from Moscow and told Rákosi to resign because his methods were not acceptable to the Soviet leadership. Rákosi was replaced by Ernö Gerö, another hard-liner and one of Rákosi’s henchmen.
Gerö spent much of his first weeks in office consulting with the Kremlin and leaders of other Soviet satellites. He was not in the country for the next major act in the Hungarian drama. László Rajk was a foreign minister who had been officially “rehabilitated” the previous spring when Rákosi was forced to admit that the charges that led to his execution were false. Rajk’s widow insisted on a public reburial of her husband. Gerö went along with the idea, thinking the event would symbolize his new regime’s break with his predecessor.
On October 6, Rajk’s body and those of several others who had been executed along with him were dug up from a forest near Budapest, where they had been hidden for seven years, in order to be reburied in Kerepesi Cemetery alongside other Hungarian statesmen.
The weather was lousy—cold, rainy, and windy. Nobody knew how many mourners to expect. The government anticipated perhaps a few thousand.
Despite the grim conditions, Ullmann went to the ceremony. She was astounded to see the throngs of people lining the streets of Budapest—more than 200,000 by most estimates. There had been nothing like this in Budapest since the end of the war. But there was no shouting of slogans, or even banter. The crowd remained quiet and dignified as they followed the funeral procession and listened to the eulogies. The profound irony of the massive turnout was that Rajk had been very unpopular when he was alive and a member of Rákosi’s regime. Hungarians had come to bury more than Rajk. One speaker captured the crowd’s thoughts: “The hundreds of thousands who are now walking by
these coffins not only want to pay the dead their last respects; their passionate hope and immutable decision is to lay an epoch to rest. Lawlessness, arbitrariness, and the moral corpses of those shame-filled years must be buried for good, and the threat emanating from the Hungarian disciples of the law of might and personality cult must be banished forever.”
The funeral was a dress rehearsal for putting that passionate hope into action.
Hungarians march for greater freedoms, October 23, 1956. (AP Images)
DAY 1: OCTOBER 23, 1956
It was an unusually warm and sunny fall day in Budapest. The seventy-degree weather was perfect for a stroll around the magnificent capital, with its spectacular medieval Buda Castle and massive gothic parliament building facing opposite banks of the Danube.
It was also a perfect day for a march that would make history.
That afternoon, students were assembling on both the east bank (Pest) and west bank (Buda) of the city to demonstrate their solidarity with Poland. A few months earlier, a massive strike by workers in Poznań was crushed violently by Polish security forces, resulting in the deaths of several dozen workers and protestors. The Polish regime’s missteps led to its replacement by a less Soviet-dominated government. In mid-October, the Polish Party leader had managed to stand up against the Soviet Union and extract some concessions sought by the strikers that summer. The events in Poland had nourished Hungarian hopes for greater independence from Soviet influences. The evening before, the students had drafted a sixteen-point list of demands, including the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops, free elections, return of a multiparty system, and freedom of the press.
Brave Genius Page 36