Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  One branch was created from above, in Debrecen, along with the provisional national government, in December 1944. In theory, the provisional government was a cross-party coalition. But although the newly appointed interior minister, Ferenc Erdei, was technically not a communist, he was secretly loyal to the party, and his first documented comments on the new security services indicate that he knew which way the wind was blowing. In a report to his colleagues on his “productive” meeting with General F. I. Kuznetsov, the head of Soviet military intelligence in Hungary, Erdei declared on December 28 that they needn’t worry about security, because “Russian guards will help us until we can find enough trustworthy policemen with proper uniforms.”24 He worried, however, that General Kuznetsov was insufficiently interested in halting the crime and vandalism that had skyrocketed in the liberated half of the country: “We discussed far more about the political police, about which he had much general advice and many proposals.”25

  One of those proposals led to the appointment of András Tömpe to lead the new service. Tömpe was a Spanish Civil War veteran with longtime links to the international communist movement and a deep conviction that he alone had the authority to become the new Hungarian chief of secret police. He immediately began to organize his new force, requesting and receiving weapons directly from the Red Army. Thus prepared, he set out from Debrecen to Budapest, arriving in the eastern part of the city on January 28, even while fighting continued in the western suburbs.

  Unfortunately for Tömpe, he already had a rival. Just a few days earlier, the Budapest branch of the Hungarian communist party had also formed a political police department. Its leader was Gábor Péter, a member of the illegal Hungarian communist party since 1931 and a frequent traveler to Moscow in the years since. Throughout the 1930s, Péter had been in close contact with Béla Kun and the other veterans of the 1919 revolution in Moscow, as well as with Rákosi. His wife, Jolán Simon, would eventually become Rákosi’s private secretary.

  Péter had long links to the NKVD as well. Before the war, he had specialized in underground logistics, among other things helping to make contacts between imprisoned communists and their families in both Vienna and Budapest. By his own somewhat self-aggrandizing account, Péter had long planned to lead the postwar political police and clearly assumed that he had been promised the job. He may have had some justification for thinking this. For while Tömpe apparently had the support of Soviet military intelligence officers based in Debrecen, Péter, it seems, had the support of their political masters. Certainly it was true that in the middle of January—before Tömpe’s arrival in Debrecen, and before the siege of Budapest had ended—Péter traveled to Soviet army headquarters in the eastern suburbs of Budapest to renew his acquaintances.26 In February, at a presentation he made to high-ranking Hungarian party members, he sought to give the impression that he was already very much in control of things. He spoke of his ninety-eight employees (“87 workers and 11 intellectuals”), and already claimed to have arrested many “fascists.” In the archives of the Hungarian communist party, a Russian-language version of that report is attached to the original, perhaps an indication that he expected the report to have Russian-speaking readers.27

  Within weeks of the war’s end, Tömpe and Péter clashed. Tömpe suspected Péter of lacking sufficient ideological sophistication. Péter blamed Tömpe for providing him with inadequate office furnishings. Tömpe was angry not to be invited to an event at which the press would be present.28 Each later claimed to have been the first to set up headquarters in the gloomy building at 60 Andrássy Street, the headquarters of the Hungarian fascist police in the latter part of the war, despite the fact that this decision came back to haunt the Hungarian communist party. (The fact that both fascist and communist police used the cellars in the basement as a prison created an uncomfortable impression of continuity between the Nazi and Soviet regimes.)29 Within two years, this comic-opera dispute had been resolved in Péter’s favor. After the election of November 1945, the Interior Ministry was officially placed under the control of the communist party and the fiction of a neutral secret police force was dropped. In 1946, Tömpe “retired” to diplomatic service. He spent most of the rest of his career in Latin America.30

  Petty though this struggle may seem in retrospect, Péter’s successful struggle for power was an early and important defeat for Hungarian political pluralism. For one, this important debate about the nature of the new police force took place entirely within the confines of the communist party and was heavily influenced by Soviet officials in Budapest. Neither then nor later did any noncommunist politicians, even those operating legally at the time, ever have impact on the internal workings of the secret police. The nature of the victorious party—Péter and his “Budapest police”—mattered too, since the Budapest police force was in effect an extra-legal structure, controlled not by the Interior Ministry or by the government but by the communist party alone. From 1945 onward, in other words, the political police reported directly to the party leadership, flagrantly bypassing the provisional coalition government.

  The special status of the secret police force was clear enough to those who worked for it. Though Péter had deputies from the Social Democratic and Smallholders’ parties, he made no pretense of taking their advice, and no one in the department was ever fooled by their presence. A lower-ranking officer later remembered the noncommunist deputies being “isolated completely”: “It became common knowledge that their rooms were wiretapped so I had to be very careful during contacts with them what I said.”31 When Vladimir Farkas, Mihály’s son, went to work for ÁVO in 1946, he was explicitly instructed not to talk to Péter’s two noncommunist deputies: “I was not allowed to give them any information about my work, even if I received a direct order from one of them.”32

  Nor did the police force listen when noncommunist politicians complained about police behavior. In August 1945 a deputy minister from the Justice Department wrote a letter to the Interior Ministry complaining that the political police “arrest prosecutors, judges without my prior approval … The above-mentioned practice seriously damages the authority of the justice system.” ÁVO did not respond. A year later, a member of parliament made similar complaints, but by the time his letter came up for parliamentary discussion, he had fled the country. By 1946, such critiques were no longer considered safe to make at all.33 As in Poland, the Hungarian political police were accountable to no one except themselves. Also as in Poland, they grew quickly. In February 1946, Péter’s organization in Budapest employed 848 people. By 1953, the once again renamed State Protection Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or ÁVH) had 5,751 employees in its headquarters, and far more informers.34

  From the beginning, Soviet advisers stationed themselves throughout the organization. “Counselor Orlov,” whom one Hungarian Interior Ministry official described as an NKVD officer “dressed as a civilian,” installed himself at 60 Andrássy Street in February 1945. Three other armed policemen—these in full NKVD uniform—were on hand to help him.35 By March, a full chain of command had been established. At the top was General Fyodor Byelkin, officially a member of the Allied Control Council but in practice the head of the NKVD’s Eastern European intelligence command, which was based in Baden outside Vienna. From 1947, the NKVD additionally maintained a permanent representative in Budapest—variously known as Lieutenant Kremnov or Kamenovic—whose fraternal assistance was later essential to the organization of Hungary’s political show trials. Beneath them were a host of semipermanent advisers. Even in November 1952 there were still thirty-three Soviet secret police officers plus thirteen of their family members on the official payroll of the Hungarian ÁVH. Along with relatively high salaries, they were provided with furnished apartments; travel expenses; free sports facilities, including a swimming pool, chess, dominoes, and Ping-Pong table; and domestic staff. On the weekends they went hunting. According to one former interior minister these Soviet “advisers” received daily intelligence reports and w
ere involved in frequent meetings with their Hungarian counterparts. (Their advice was accepted, but it seems they were never convinced of the loyalty of the nation they had chosen to serve. On the night of October 29, 1956—when it seemed, briefly, as if the Hungarian Revolution might end in a Soviet withdrawal from the country—all of them, fearing the vengeance of the mob, boarded an airplane and flew back to Moscow.)36

  The bosses of the Hungarian secret police kept in close touch with their Soviet mentors. Péter was in daily contact with Orlov, according to Farkas.37 But the Russians also maintained other sources of influence in Budapest, via a small, mostly hidden but powerful community of Soviet or Sovietized Hungarians who had been born or had lived most of their lives in the USSR. One of them, János Kovács, an NVKD colonel of Hungarian origin, was Péter’s deputy from January 1945 until his death in 1948. An even more significant role was eventually played by Rudolf Garasin, a man whose official biography seems hardly to do justice to his later influence—and whose life story illustrates that for Hungarians there were also hidden paths to secret police power.

  Garasin had been born in Hungary but wound up as a political prisoner in Russia as a teenager, following the First World War. Radicalized by these experiences, he joined the Bolsheviks, enlisted in the Red Army, and took active part in the Russian Revolution and then the Russian Civil War. Afterward, he did not go back to Hungary—Béla Kun’s short-lived revolution had already come and gone—but settled in the Soviet Union.38 By his own account, Garasin’s subsequent career in the USSR was unremarkable. According to a memo he wrote for Hungarian party historians, he was active in the Hungarian exile community in the USSR, studied engineering, and then worked for the Soviet Ministry of Light Industry. He rejoined the Red Army as an officer during the war, but, following an injury, wound up working behind the front line. In the spring of 1944, he wrote, he was abruptly called to Moscow and taken to meet a political officer of the Red Army: “While drinking tea, an Interior Ministry lieutenant appeared with a blue cap and, without saying a word, accompanied me to a car that drove to Marx-Engels Square. There another lieutenant waited for me, showed me a door, which I entered, and left me there. There was nobody in the lobby.” Eventually, two figures emerged from the gloom and the mystery was solved: Rákosi and Mihály Farkas held their arms open to greet him.

  As Garasin recounts the scene, Comrade Rákosi jovially scolded Comrade Garasin for slipping out of sight for so long (“it had taken them half a year to find me”) and then asked him for help: he wanted Garasin to select volunteers from one of the “antifascist schools” in the USSR in order to form a partisan unit that would enter Hungary along with the Red Army, just as the Kuibyshev gang had entered Poland alongside the Red Army. “Anti-fascist schools” was a euphemism: these were POW reeducation camps, where captured Hungarian officers and soldiers were learning to become communists. Garasin did as he was told. He was introduced to the Hungarians at “Institute 101,” the renamed headquarters of what had been the Comintern. In due course he visited the “antifascist school” at Krasnogorsk, where he was impressed by the enthusiasm of the candidates. So eager were most to return to Hungary and fight their former German allies, he recorded, that they volunteered without hesitation. Garasin also met the “teachers” at the school, many of whom would later be leaders of the Hungarian communist government.

  Garasin’s attempt to form a partisan unit progressed rather slowly, Hungary and Hungarian partisans not being the Red Army’s priority in the summer of 1944. The volunteers found it difficult to get to Ukraine, just behind the front line, where their training was supposed to begin. The unit’s train was late getting started, there were mix-ups about clothing and equipment, and local commanders in Ukraine weren’t prepared for their arrival. Eventually they began training, however, learning to use explosives and competing against one another in mock battles.

  Occasionally the team received notice that someone higher up was interested in their progress. One day they saw a Soviet plane circling overhead, trying to land, and they chased away some cows so that it would have a clear runway. As the plane’s engine’s roared, one of the better-known Hungarian communist ideologists, Zoltán Vas, stepped out of the cockpit, immediately losing his glasses in the melee. Vas gave a highly detailed and longish lecture anyway, describing the promising situation at the front and encouraging the men to fight hard. As he prepared to fly back to Moscow, Garasin joked that Vas should, in the future, let the group know in advance when he planned to come, “so we could practice shooting at the airplane!” This was presumably what passed for humor on the Ukrainian front.

  The partisans shifted camp several times as the front moved, and various adventures ensued. In his unpublished memoir, Garasin confessed that he had an affair with a woman named Anna. He remembered constant difficulties with food supplies, resolved when the unit simply took over a local mill and confiscated its products, to the intense displeasure of the local peasants. Another low point came during a meeting with Rákosi, who attacked Garasin for having formed a “purely Jewish company.” Garasin was “so shocked I just stood there, I couldn’t believe it.” He mulled over this strange outburst and made a point later on of telling Rákosi—who, as noted, was Jewish—that he had been much mistaken. When he counted them up, there were only six Jews in the unit.

  Finally the moment of liberation arrived. At the beginning of February 1945, Garasin and his troops crossed the Carpathian Mountains and he entered Hungary for the first time in thirty years. By February 12 they had reached Debrecen, the eastern city that had become the temporary capital. And that was the end of the adventure. Garasin, a Soviet citizen, was immediately assigned to work with the Allied Control Council. He lost touch with his partisans, drifted into propaganda and printing work, and, according to the official version of events, returned to the Soviet Union.39

  Unintentionally, Garasin’s account of his life paints a witty and truthful picture of the Hungarian communist partisans. Later they would be lauded by future communist leaders as war heroes, but at the time the Red Army clearly treated them as an afterthought. Garasin’s story is also important for what it leaves out. In fact we don’t really know what he was doing in the 1920s and 1930s or where he was in the years immediately following the war, and many have long suspected that he was working as a senior officer of the Soviet NKVD.40 Later, Garasin would become known as the man who had “imported” the techniques of the Soviet Gulag to Hungary.

  Garasin’s life story also illustrates the important role played in Eastern Europe in general, and Hungary in particular, by secret police officials who were not merely local collaborators or recruits, as the Kuibyshev gang mostly had been, but by people who were Soviet citizens, and probably Soviet secret policemen, from the very start. Garasin was a Hungarian by birth, but by his own account he was totally integrated into Soviet life. He had a Russian wife, a Russian education, and between 1915 and 1945 he lived in Russia. Garasin was not merely favorably inclined toward the Soviet Union, he was Soviet himself. It is hardly surprising that when he took charge of Hungary’s labor camps in the early 1950s, he organized them very deliberately on Soviet lines.41

  As we have seen, the NKVD had already organized reliable cadres among the German communists even before they entered Berlin. They had already selected their most experienced officer to lead them too. In April 1945, General Serov bade farewell to Warsaw and traveled to Germany, where he immediately divided Berlin and the other cities of the Soviet zone into “operative sectors.” But he did not immediately give German policemen any real power. The Soviet officers considered Germans—even German communists—in need of far more tutelage than other Eastern Europeans. Ordinary German policemen were not allowed to carry weapons until January 1946. Even after German authorities took control of the civilian police, all personnel decisions still had to be approved by the Soviet Military Administration.42 Only in March 1948 did the Soviet Interior Ministry boss in the eastern zone even agree to inform the German
communist party leadership about whom it intended to arrest.

  Cautiously, and at first only on a small scale, the Soviet administrators did begin to set up a German political police force in 1947. Even then, not everybody approved of the idea. In Moscow, the Soviet interior minister, Viktor Abakumov, argued that a new police force would become a target of Western propaganda, and risked being seen as a “new Gestapo.” More importantly, he still distrusted the Germans, complaining that there “were not enough German cadres who have been thoroughly checked.” Recruitment began despite these objections, perhaps, as Norman Naimark suspects, because the NKVD had finally realized that its officers’ poor understanding of German and Germany was creating massive resentment. Even so, it took some time for this new department—known as “K5,” or sometimes Department K—to gain real power. Originally set up to keep tabs on the police force itself, the employees of K5 took direct orders from Soviet Interior Ministry officials, bypassing the nascent regional and central government structures.43 One of the few documents from that era to survive (most were removed by the KGB, or perhaps destroyed, in 1989 or before) mentions a departmental training meeting and includes a list of attendees. Topping the list is a group of Soviet advisers.44

  In this sense, K5 did resemble the political police in the rest of Eastern Europe: as in Hungary, Poland, and the USSR itself, this new political police force was initially extra-governmental, operating outside the ordinary rule of law. Only in 1950 did the new East German government pass a full-fledged “Law on the Formation of a Ministry for State Security” that created the Ministry for State Security.45 Even then the Stasi’s Soviet masters were cautious. They dropped Erich Mielke, the organization’s first boss—he had some suspicious holes in his biography, having spent part of the war in France—and put their own candidate, Wilhelm Zaisser, in charge of the new agency.46