by Douglas Boyd
Yet, every now and again echoes of the suffering emerges to ripple the surface of the present. On 23 March 2014 the death was announced in Prague of Miroslav Štepán, aged 68. The name probably meant nothing to people outside the Czech Republic, but it meant a great deal to Czechs, who remembered him all too well as the KSC party boss responsible for brutally putting down the first demonstrations in 1988 and 1989. After a student demo in Prague on 17 November 1989, he made a famously ill-timed speech:
In no country, not even a developing country or a capitalist or socialist country, should one see kids of fifteen years old deciding when the president should go or who he should be.
He was speaking in a factory of a state company employing 50,000 workers, who were on strike in sympathy with the demonstrators. Few could hear his words clearly due to constant interruptions by whistling, foot-stamping and chanting of, ‘Nejsme deti!’ – We are not children! They also demanded the resignation of this man who commanded the people’s militia known as ‘the fist of the working class’, and sent in riot police to break up the demos – for which he was labelled People’s Enemy No. 1. A few days later, Štepán resigned all his political and public offices.
In 1990 he was the only high party functionary to be put on trial, and was condemned to two and a half years’ imprisonment for abuse of power in using water cannons and tear gas against the peaceful demonstrators in October 1988. After one year’s confinement he was released and created an extreme-Left party under the banner of Czech Communism, which had no success in elections. To his last days, Štepán remained convinced that his downfall was the result of a treacherous deal between the Kremlin and the West, and a great mistake.22
So, were the StB files all destroyed? Many Czechs think that they still exist but have been closed to the public and may only be consulted by the president or other high government officials investigating candidates for public office. Certainly Putin’s aphorism that chekisty always stick together is borne out in the Czech Republic, where an émigrée friend of the author was trying to gain custody of her teenage daughter, but could get no favourable judgement in a Czech court because the father had been a low-grade StB employee. According to her, his former colleagues still have influence in the right places and will use it for him. At the top of Czech society, Minister of Finance Andrej Babiš – the second-richest man in the country – is believed by many of his fellow-citizens to have collaborated with, or been an officer of, StB under the code name ‘Bureš’. In 2013 he sued the Slovakian Memory Institute for publishing this allegation, but neither he nor his witnesses ever came to court. After the elections of 2014, the trial was adjourned sine die.
Notes
1. Frolik, Frolik Defection, pp. 48–51
2. He was prime minister June 1970–February 1974
3. Frolik, Frolik Defection, pp. 41–2
4. Intel News, 29 June 2012
5. Frolik, Frolik Defection, pp. 58–9
6. Ibid, p. 60
7. L. Bittman, The Deception Game, New York NY, Ballantine Publishing 1981; L. Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, London, Brassey’s 1985
8. Deacon, Spyclopeadia, p. 271
9. Frolik, Frolik Defection, pp. 77–9
10. Or possibly Kleska, according to some sources
11. Frolik, Frolik Defection, p. 80
12. Ibid
13. Some sources give the code name as ‘Trianon’
14. M.D. Peterson, Widow Spy, Wilmington, Red Canary Press, 2012
15. Dobson and Payne, Dictionary of Espionage, p. 285
16. Changed to ‘Pley’ in 1972
17. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 403
18. Ibid, pp. 408–9
19. Ibid, pp. 402–3
20. Ibid, p. 423
21. Ibid, pp. 424–7
22. Ceský Rozhlas 7 – Radio Prague, 24 March 2013
17
AVO AND BLOODSHED IN BUDAPEST
Early in November 1944 Soviet forces drove the Germans out of the Hungarian city of Szeged, just twelve miles from the Romanian border. Even at this early stage, Stalin was leaving nothing to chance. Never mind the Red Army’s urgent need for every available aircraft for military purposes, three Hungarian NKVD officers were immediately flown in to prepare the ground for a pro-Moscow provisional government. The first act of Mihály Farkas, Erno Gero1 and Imre Nagy, who had been an NKVD agent code-named ‘Volodya’ for two decades,2 was to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
In January 1945, after the liberation of Debrecen, Stalin’s forces occupied two out of the three largest Hungarian cities. Into Debrecen flew another Moscow puppet, to set up the first government. Mátyás Rákosi, however, had been ordered by Stalin not to place himself in the government because he was (a) Jewish3 and (b) widely hated inside the country as a Communist extremist remembered for his involvement in the Red Terror of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet uprising under Béla Kun. The new party was called Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt (MSzMP) – the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party – with no mention of the word communism in order to distance it from Béla Kun’s Komunisták Magyarszági Párt, of which many older Hungarians had reason to hate the memory. The first Minister of the Interior in the provisional government was, however, an undercover Communist by the name of Ferenc Erdei, who took his orders from Soviet General Fyodor Kuznetsov. The only worry Erdei apparently had about this relationship was that Kuznetsov concentrated on the minutiae of organising the secret police and completely ignored the skyrocketing crime wave in the liberated areas.4
After the defeat of the Axis forces, Hungary was occupied under an Allied Control Council, headed by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who refused to consult his American and British colleagues on the council as he was officially obliged to do.5 Hungary also had to pay huge reparations to the USSR. With the currency changes, it is difficult to estimate exactly the cost to the Hungarian people, but it was about 17 per cent of GDP in 1945–46 and 10 per cent higher in 1946–47, dropping to a still punitive 10 per cent thereafter as it became apparent that the Hungarian economy was otherwise heading for complete meltdown. In addition, it had to bear the costs of the Soviet occupation forces, which came to another crippling 10 per cent of GDP.6
The NKVD clone which the new regime imposed on the Hungarian people was known as Allamvédelmi Osztálya (AVO), meaning State Security Division. For its HQ the Soviet occupiers selected the same building in Budapest7 that had been used by the torturers of the Arrow Cross fascists after they deposed the Horthy regime in favour of continuing to fight for the Axis. Although No. 60 Andrassy út was convenient in the sense of having fully equipped torture chambers, it seems likely that the address was chosen because it already terrified people before the AVO moved in.
The brief of the AVO under its NKVD bosses was, as in the other satellite states, to eliminate any resistance to Soviet hegemony. Some 200,000 civilians – including, under USSR State Defence Committee Order 7161, 44,000 Hungarians with German names – were deported and split up among 2,000 Gulag-style work camps as far away as Azerbaijan, the Urals and Siberia, where 400,000 Hungarian POWs already languished in labour camps.8 Of these, one-third died in captivity from dysentery, exposure and malnutrition; many of the survivors were released years later. But the arrests and deportations did not stop there: 23,000 members of the Arrow Cross fascists, ex-officers with pre-war service and members of Admiral Horthy’s Levente youth movement were rounded up, as were whole categories of people, such as innkeepers, shopkeepers, tobacconists and hairdressers – people who had large circles of acquaintances – because they had the possibility of disseminating hostile propaganda, anti-Soviet gossip or jokes.9
The most infamous camps were at Kistarcsa, Recsk, Tiszalök Kazincbarcika and Bernátkúton Sajóbábony. Although the names and whereabouts of the camps were widely known, nobody dared to speak of them openly. The above figures cannot be exactly verified because all records covering the early years were controlled by Soviet personne
l, never released to the public and were destroyed in 1956. Yet, even if each detainee left behind only one or two family members unprovided for, the scale of concomitant suffering among women, children and the elderly is impossible to imagine. Adding to the chaos, in February 1945 the Soviet authorities ordered all remaining Germans in Hungary to leave their homes and report for labour service at the front line, which they were unlikely to survive. Farkas admitted later what everyone knew but dared not say at the time: that he and his colleagues used all the classic tortures in their investigations – deprivation of sleep, humiliation, malnourishment, beatings; when these failed, the suspect was handed over to MVD ‘friends’, who would use more extreme measures to break the prisoner.
Hungary after 1945.
Yet, resistance to the Soviet occupation could not be stamped out, as witnessed by the voting in the November 1945 election, when the renamed Magyar Komunista Párt (MKP) – Hungarian Communist Party – received just 17 per cent of votes as against 57 per cent for the agrarian Smallholders’ Party, which enabled it to install its leader, Zóltan Tildy, as prime minister. This led to the establishment of a republic in the following year. A part of the reason for the MKP’s failure at the polls was that Hungarian primate Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty issued a condemnation of godless communism and called upon Hungarians to revert to traditional values: by supporting the Smallholders’ Party they could put the nation back on track after the turmoil of the wartime Axis alliance.
The year 1946 was a nightmare for virtually all Hungarians. Never mind the political situation, the country was suffering galloping inflation, which reached a peak where several billion pengos were required to buy a chicken and some vegetables for dinner in a market. In addition to Soviet occupation money, quadrillion-pengo notes were in circulation and sextillion pengo notes were printed but never issued. Wages were effectively so worthless when received that many workers survived on a daily meal in the factory canteen; others were paid not in money but food.10 On 1 August 1946 a new currency unit was introduced: one forint was equivalent to 400,000 quadrillion pengoes. That is 4 with twenty-nine zeroes. Contemporary photographs show street cleaners sweeping piles of worthless million-pengo notes out of the gutters for burning.
The first appointed director of AVO was Péter Gábor, tasked by his Soviet masters with destroying the Smallholders as a political force. Accusing the party of actively collaborating with the Nazis, he proceeded in typical NKVD/MVD style to use torture to extract confessions from his victims. However, in the August 1947 election, MKP still gained only 24 per cent of votes, despite the authorities having disenfranchised half a million people and a further 300,000 being too afraid to go to the polling stations. In addition, a number of ‘voting flying squads’ were transported in Hungarian and Soviet military vehicles to cast votes for the MKP in several districts, one after another. A Social Democrat called Sára Karig, who had been very active in the anti-German resistance movements, protested at this blatant abuse – for which she was arrested without trial, tortured and deported to a Gulag camp in the far north of Siberia, whence she returned only after Stalin’s death in 1953.11
Undeterred by the setback at the polls, Gábor continued the AVO reign of terror. Target groups to be destroyed were the Church, Jews (because of what Stalin called ‘their cosmopolitanism’), Freemasons and anyone who had been active in other political parties. In 1948 psychoanalysts too would be declared ‘enemies of the people’. As a Jew, Freud was totally discredited anyway, but his theories also conflicted with Marxism–Leninism and practitioners of psychoanalysis were stigmatised as bourgeois reactionaries who yearned for an American lifestyle.12
From time to time, news filtered out of the closed countries east of the Iron Curtain. On 16 June 1947 United Press reported from Budapest:
Colonel Istvan Zemes was arrested yesterday after his apartment had been searched and six or seven other members of the Smallholders Party of former Premier Ferenc Nagy [no relation of Imre Nagy] will be expelled from the party tomorrow.
On the third day of the mass trial of 44 alleged conspirators, former Smallholder deputy Paul Yacko admitted today that he had been in contact with ‘a secret organisation’, but he denied other charges. Yacko said that, as high sheriff of Vas county on the Austrian border, he attempted to establish escape routes for prominent men accused of conspiracy.
A Polish UB officer present as an observer in court noted the presence of a red-haired Russian MVD general, who appeared to be stage-managing the whole trial.13
The AVO had drawn up a list of top people now ‘revealed’ as saboteurs and spies, but whose only crime was to be less than 100 per cent pro-Soviet. It included the name of Interior Minister László Rajk. Tortured for twelve days, he eventually confessed after being promised personally by János Kádár that this would save his family from suffering the same fate. An AAP newsflash dated 25 September 1949 read:
A Budapest court yesterday sentenced Rajk, one of Hungary’s leading Communists and a former Foreign Minister, to death for spying on behalf of the United States and Yugoslavia and other acts of alleged high treason.
Despite the promise that Rajk’s family would not suffer for his ‘crimes’, they were all executed shortly after his death. The lesson was not lost on a later Interior Minister named Sandor Zold, who murdered his whole family before killing himself after falling foul of the party in 1952. In the second purge of the Hungarian Party, approximately 40,000 people were arrested, tortured and executed or given long terms of imprisonment and several hundred thousand people were dispossessed and deprived of their livelihoods.14 In 1949 even the primate, Cardinal József Mindszenty, was arrested, tortured and forced to make a patently false confession that ‘justified’ his sentence to life imprisonment for treason, while the party recreated the Church under the banner Pacem in Terris – or ‘peace on Earth’ – and appointed obedient puppet priests to its hierarchy.15
Dr Istvan Ries served as Minister of Justice for three years from July 1945. Living through the 1917 October Revolution while a POW in Russia, he had fought in the Hungarian Red Army after his return home and had to leave the country for two years before he could return and take up his law practice, specialising in defending labour activists and joining the Social Democrat Party in 1924. He spent most of the Second World War living underground and emerged with the Soviet ‘liberation’ to take office as minister, but when the MKP manoeuvred the non-communists out of power in 1947, he resigned.
In 1950 the AVO changed its title to Allamvédelmi Hatósag (AVH), meaning State Security Authority, but so little else changed that it continued to be referred to by people as ‘Avo’, and was hated just as much. Ries was clinging to office, assisting in the merger of the Social Democrats and MKP to form Magyar Dolgozók Párt (MDP) – the Hungarian Workers’ Party – headed by Mátyás Rákosi. The Russian ‘advisers’ in Budapest sneered that the leaders of MKP had been practising ‘salami communism’, slice by slice for the sake of appearances, but the result was the same in the end. Although Ries’s legal background was useful in the drafting of a new, Soviet-style constitution of 1949, he was arrested on 7 July 1950, while still in office, and died in Vác prison after excessively violent torture during interrogation. Like many other victims of this stage of Hungarian Communism, he was rehabilitated in 1956.
In 1951 pro-Soviet Hungarian communist Rudolf Garasin returned from what he claimed was a stint working as manager of a printing works in the USSR, although indications are that he was actually employed in some capacity within the Gulag administration. This would explain why he was given the job of creating a directorate for public works, known by the acronym KÖMI, to run extremely low-cost state enterprises employing prison labour in quarries and on construction sites – in other words, a Hungarian Gulag. This was at first under the Justice Ministry, since it used convicted prisoners, but later moved under the aegis of the Interior Ministry, alongside AVH. In less than two years, Garasin was the boss of 27,000 work-capable prisone
rs confined in a nationwide network of work camps, including chaotic transit camps with little provision for the unfortunates stranded there or passing through.
The most infamous camp at Recsk was modelled on the Nazi Nacht und Nebel precedent. This prison had no number and the 1,700 inmates, denied any contact with the outside world, officially did not exist. They included members of the Smallholders’ Party, artists, journalists, Hungarians who had lived abroad and were therefore treated as Western spies, former anti-German partisans and many others who had no idea why they had been arrested. The first prisoners were set to building the fences and barracks, living in farm buildings shared with animals and their attendant flies and other parasites. With no mess hall, they ate the inadequate rations standing outside, whatever the weather. The ubiquitous mud prevented them sitting or lying down. An added misery was the excessive number of roll calls. Infraction of any regulation saw prisoners deprived of food and water and locked into a waterlogged cell where they could neither sit nor lie down in the knee-deep mud.
After a bad harvest in 1952, 400,000 peasants were arrested for failing to deliver their grain quotas to the state collection points, as they were in neighbouring Poland. Some went to prison, others to the concentration camps. In addition, as in the other Soviet-occupied states, people were required to report on their colleagues and were in turn reported on themselves. The scale of manpower devoted to any one case is illustrated by husband and wife journalist team Endre and Ilona Marton. They were among the last stringers for Western news agencies in Eastern Europe, he working for Associated Press and she for United Press. They were snooped on at home, had their telephones routinely tapped and were followed night and day. Their AVH dossier totalled 1,600 pages of reports when they were arrested in 1955 as ‘Western spies’ and interrogated about everyone they had met since 1945.16