Tito's Revenge by Sandor Kopacsi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In January 1955, the new Hungarian police force that had been created after the war was preparing to celebrate its tenth anniversary. As police chief of Budapest, it was my job to organize the banquet. I had invitations sent to the Minister of the Interior, the under-secretaries, the Soviet counsellors, and the top leaders of the armed forces and the AVO (State Protection Authority- the secret police). One day on impulse I called my private secretary, a young police officer who was a product of the party school.

    ‘Are you sure you sent invitations to all our dignitaries?’

    ‘Yes, I think so, Comrade Kopacsi.’
‘Including all the former ministers of the interior?’

    He showed me a protocol list.

    ‘Are you sure we haven’t had any other ministers? Could you list them all?’

    ‘There was Rajk. And Zold. But they are dead.’

    ‘Well, you’ve forgotten one. Someone who was on a list of traitors but who wasn’t a traitor. Comrade Janos Kadar*, Minister of the Interior in 1949, and currently first secretary of the executive committee of the thirteenth district’

    The young secretary’s jaw dropped. ‘You really want to invite him?’

    ‘Not only invite him but seat him at the head of the table next to the other ministers. Comrade Kadar has been rehabilitated and reintegrated into the party leadership and he must be given his due.’

    My secretary swallowed hard. ‘At your service, Comrade Colonel’

    At the time, Kadar was forty years old. Despite his suffering in prison, he radiated strength. If Imre Nagy was ‘a pure product of the peasantry’, Janos Kadar was visibly a product of the working class. Obviously, Kadar wasn’t a worker any more than Nagy was a peasant; both had spent most of their adult lives in the top ranks of the Communist Party, Nagy in the Soviet Union, Kadar in Budapest, at the head of the then illegal party organization. But both still bore the marks of their origin.

    I received Kadar at the entrance to the banquet hall and led him to his place on the dais, next to Piros, the current Minister of the Interior. The two men shook hands.

    ‘How are you  Comrade Kadar?’

    ‘Better, thank you, Comrade Piros, much better.’

    They exchanged smiles. Those were the only words and the only smiles they exchanged all evening long. But Kadar didn’t spend the ceremony in silence. My former minister, Arpad Hazi, despite his reputation as a hardline Stalinist, never stopped talking to Kadar, who he knew very well from the days when the Communist Party was illegal.

    What did they say to each other? The next day, Hazi phoned me. ‘You know, Kopacsi, it’s truly horrible what we did to that man. His so-called crime was no worse than yours or mine. The people in charge of security were truly monsters or idiots to go after comrades like him.’

    That wasn’t Piros’s viewpoint. He called me to his office where he received me in the company of his staff of senior AVO officers.

    ‘What got into you to invite Kadar? Who suggested that you do that?

    ‘No one, Comrade Minister. Comrade  Kadar has to be rehabilitated, so he is  once more on our protocol list.’

    One of the AVO officers laughed bitterly. ’Janus the Shit on the protocol list. He was the most miserable prisoner we had.’

    The minister called him to order and turned to me: Comrade Kopacsi, you must understand one thing. Yes, Janos Kadar has been rehabilitated. Yes, the party wanted to give him a post. That doesn’t mean he becomes what he was in the past. The rehabilitations now underway don’t mean that the comrades who were imprisoned were all knights in shining armor. They mean that we want to let bygones be bygones and start with a clean slate as Comrade Rakosi has said. I propose to give a verbal reprimand to the chief for his, let us say .  .  . ill-considered initiative.’

    On my arrival one morning at my office about six months after the anniversary dinner, I found the following message: ‘Urgent: Call Kobanya brewery.’

    With beer I had nothing to do. I was a wine drinker. But as Kobanya was in the tenth district, my fiefdom as deputy, I called the manager.

    ‘This is Kopacsi. You need me?’

    At the other end of the line, a familiar voice responded, ‘Yes, Comrade Deputy, urgently. We would like to know if you have decided to change your mind on the subject of your preferred beverage?’

     It was Czako, the public prosecutor.

    ‘Czako, what are you doing at a brewery?”

    ‘I’m the new manager. Hurry up if you want to sample some of our best products.’

    I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t an invitation to down a few beers but to hear some news. I hurried over to the brewery.

   ‘What does this mean?’ I asked Czako.

    ‘The day before yesterday, I was called to the Central Committee headquarters. Lajos Acs, who is on the Politburo, asked me to sit down and said: ‘Comrade Czako, do you know the percentage of alcohol in Giraffe beer?’ I said I wasn’t prepared for the question but that it must be between fifteen and eighteen. Why? Because, Comrade Czako, the manager of the Kobanya brewery must be able to answer such questions without hesitation. Here is your dismissal as public prosecutor and you appointment as manager.’
  “Congratulations, old pal. This job means a lot less hassle for you.’                

    ‘Yes, but that’s not all. I was given to understand that things are going to go backward in the courts. Everything is going to be the way it was.’

     ‘Are you kidding?’

    ‘And not only in our field, but everywhere. The emphasis on consumption is over, heavy industry is top priority again. The collective farm is mandatory again.’

    ‘Imre Nagy?’

    ‘In a few days, he will be kicked out as prime minister and maybe even out of the party.’

    Czako told me that Rakosi had just returned from along ‘sick leave’ in the Soviet Union, happy and full of news. Were we about to witness yet another radical change of direction by the Supreme Soviet? Everything pointed to it.

     In response to the decisions of the Western powers in favor of rearming West Germany, the Kremlin had decided to create the military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Army was said to be readying its Plan X, a surprise attack on West Germany followed by the occupation of Europe all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. It was the height of the Cold War and many people thought a third world war was inevitable.

    ‘You understand, in such a situation, there’s no more fooling around with liberalism, they’re not about to install reform regimes behind the front.’

    I couldn’t believe these rumors of war. But my friend was right in what he said about internal affairs in Hungary.

    Rakosi was on the way up again. He announced that the party was in danger because of ‘right deviationism, which meant the policies of Imre Nagy. He wanted the Prime Minister out, but Nagy put up a fight and asked the Kremlin to arbitrate. On January 7, 1955, Nagy travelled to Moscow with Rakosi once more, only to return repudiated by the same Soviet leaders who had directed him eighteen months earlier to undertake reforms.

    Rakosi excluded him from the Politburo and Central Committee and fired him as prime minister. He also took away his right to teach at the university where he had a post lecturing in agrarian science, thus depriving him of his livelihood. The dignity with which Nagy bore this treatment only served enhance his reputation and increase his popularity.

 

    Laid low by a heart attack, deprived of any income, Nagy was confined to the second floor of his house. Suslov, a member of the Soviet Politburo, came to see him at his bedside.

    “Comrade Nagy – note that I still call you ‘comrade’ – you need only admit your errors and you will be quickly be reinstated.’

    ‘Comrade Suslov, thank you for calling me ‘comrade’, but after forty years of struggle in the workers’ movement I can’t renounce the last eighteen months. I have let innocent people out of prison, authorized farmers to work individually, and worked to increase consumer goods – a series of reforms you suggested I make, that I agreed with, and that were all ratified by the Central Committee. It’ unthinkable for me to disown them now.’

 ‘That’s a shame. For You.’

    A few months later, Nagy was expelled from the Communist Party. But it wasn’t long before the pendulum would once again swing back in his direction.

    Between the night of February 24, 1956, and the dawn of February 25, something happened in the meeting chamber of the Grand Palace of the Kremlin that would turn the Communist world topsy-turvy. It was the pronouncement of Khrushchev’s famous ‘secret report’.

    Only about 1,600 delegates were present and they were sworn to secrecy, but it took only a few days before we found out what Khrushchev has sais. He denounced Stalin as an ‘ignorant and bloody monarch’ responsible for the gulags, the massacres of innocent people. And the liquidation of millions of peasants.

    The Stalinist leaders of eastern Europe tottered under the shock of these revelations. Bierut, the Polish chief of state, gave up the ghost  on the spot. The Cominform, the body that had pronounced the expulsion of Tito from the Communist International, was dissolved. Tito was rehabilitated. In Hungary, Rajk’s widow, Julia, emerged from hiding and demanded the rehabilitation of her husband. In newly founded clubs, especially the Petofi Circle, thousands of comrades demanded Rakosi’s resignation, the rehabilitation of martyrs, and the return of Imre Nagy to power.

I asked Iemelianov his opinion of the situation.

    ‘Old man not dead’, he responded in typical lapidary fashion.

    ‘You mean Rakosi?’

   The Soviet officer smiled. He explained that, in the language of Comrade Mao, the ‘old man’ meant the past; it still lived and had o be killed.

‘But it’s not up to us officers to do it,’ he added seriously. ‘We have taken an oath of loyalty to our leaders; politics is the politicians’ affair.’

    I found his reasoning a bit strange. We were officers, yes, but weren’t we also Communists? We had sworn allegiance to our leaders, but hadn’t we also promised in our youth to be Communists and to work in every circumstance for the good of all the people?

It was clear that Rakosi, the Hungarian Stalin, no longer belonged at the head of the nation. Worse, he himself didn’t realize it.

    On March 27 of the same year, at the request of the Minister of the Interior and the Budapest party committee, I organized a meeting of the Communist Party members on the Budapest police force. Some 1,200 people crowded into the police school on Boszomeny Avenue. Like all the speakers, I went to the podium clutching speech notes prepared for me by my superiors. But this time, I forgot to read them.

‘Comrades, do you know what the French word ‘renaissance’ means? It meant  ‘rebirth’. And a renaissance is what our party needs. It must renew itself because that is the only way to regain the people’s confidence – which we have lost. Yes, comrades, lost.’

  The audience was listening intently. For once, they weren’t being fed the never-ending litanies to the glory of the party. What I was about to say would astonish them even more.

   ‘Now, comrades, its necessary to discuss the problem of our first secretary, Comrade Rakosi.’

  I sense movement in the room. The ministry representative cast a worried look in my direction. Rakosi’s name was never mentioned except to praise it. Imre Mezo, the party committee delegate for the capital, stifled a smile. I understood that he supported me in what he sensed I was going to say.

   ‘My friends, Comrade Rakosi has made mistakes. And we know that when a Communist makes mistakes, he must recognize his mistakes. Yet this Comrade Rakosi has refused to do. We say to him: Comrade Rakosi, admit your errors, it may be your last chance to do so. Self-criticism will not diminish you; instead, it will make you greater. It is the only way to regain the confidence of the party and the people.’

   A thunder of applause greeted these words. It seemed every cop in the room wanted to have his say. These people, their party manuals in their pockets, were the sons of peasants and the sons of workers or former workingmen themselves, who had known the hardships of being part of wage-earning class that had borne the brunt of the regime’s mismanagement of the economy. There is no doubt that these comrades hungered for a national rebirth.

 

   At the annual state reception to celebrate the liberation, Rakosi greeted the guests at the entrance of the banquet hall. I was with my wife. When it was our turn to enter, Rakosi did not extend his hand and looked away from us. I wasn’t particularly concerned but Ibolya was offended.

   ‘What have you done now?’

   ‘I said out loud what everybody was thinking.’

   That same morning,  the newspapers has published the Soviet government’s telegram of good wishes to ‘the great veteran of the worker’s movement, our highly respected Hungarian comrade, Matthias Rakosi’.

   This was, undoubtedly, a last-minute salvage by Rakosi, his team, and the few friends they still had at the Kremlin. But it was too late. The old was already condemned by the majority of his party, not to mention the public at large.

 

   His principal and most dangerous enemy was Josep Broz Tito. The Yugoslav leader wanted the head of the Hungarian dictator who had mounted the false trial as of Rajk and Kadar in which everybody had been ‘agent and spy for Tito’s clique’. In May 1956, this former ‘runing dog of imperialism’ was was invited to the Soviet Union as one of many unorthodox Communists and social democrats with who Khrushchev was seeking a modus vivendi. Chance had it that a holiday trip to Russia that Ibolya and I had planned and paid for a year earlier coincided with the arrival of Tito, dozens of European Communist and social democratic delegations, and the hundreds of journalists covering the event.

   It was the first time that Social Democrats had been invited to the Soviet Union. The first words spoken by Guy Mollet, the French socialist leader, were later noted with interest in the embassies: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, or if you wish, comrades . . .’  Could one be so flip before a Soviet audience?

   Our group as following the same itinerary as a group of English trade unionists on a tour of Georgia. Their plane took off before ours, but when it arrived at the airport in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, it was ordered to turn back. Despite the perfect weather, out plane received the same order. I asked our interpreter what was going on.

   ‘It’s nothing’ he replied, embarrassed. ‘A slight irregularity in traffic.’

   But one of the journalists was from Budapest, a young man attached to police headquarters, gave me a poke with his elbow. ‘Look below,’ he said.

   In the bright sunshine, the streets of Tbilisi were totally empty except for some objects that looked from above like little toy tanks but were actually real tanks. The tanks were giving off flashes of light that made me think of flakes of cotton wool.

   ‘Tell me, Comrade interpreter. What’s happening down below?’

   ‘Uh . . . maneuvers, Comrade. Those are probably maneuvers.’

   They weren’t maneuvers. The next day, reports from the Hungarian party daily told us that we had witnessed the last phases of the suppression of an armed uprising in the Georgian capital. Several days earlier, some Russian officers had been murdered  by a crowd. The Army and KGB troops had moved in swiftly to crush the rebellion.

   The uprising had nothing to do with the visits by Tito and the Western delegations. We were told that it had been sparked by a new austerity policy in Georgia, which, under the regime of its native son, Stalin, had once been the showcase of the Soviet Union.

   Journalists are a gossipy bunch and I couldn’t help joining in. We speculated that Khrushchev’s change of direction was proving too abrupt in a country with so many nationalities, a country in which, Ibolya observed, it was impossible to find in the stores even a tenth of the merchandise commonly available at home.
   While Tito headed south to Crimea, we contented ourselves with a tour of Leningrad, where Ibolya stood riveted for an hour on the bank of the Neva River at the same spot where the destroyer Aurora fired its historic cannon shots in the direction of the Summer Palace, the first shots of the revolution. ‘Despite everything,’ she said, ‘the Revolution was really something, wasn’t it?’
Speaking of the revolution, on our return to Budapest, we found ourselves in the midst of unusual excitement. My friend and neighbor Joska Szilagyi welcomed us with open arms and a jocular reprimand; ‘History with a capital H is happening here and you’re busy amusing yourselves abroad.’

Joska lived near us, in a modest lodging. He was no longer in the armed forces or at the Central Committee headquarters on Akademia Street. He had a small job in the state grain and seed enterprise and spent his free time analyzing the recent works, available only in manuscript form, of that great Marxist theoretician, Imre Nagy.

“I’d very much like you to drop in tonight. We are going to receive some interesting friends,’ said Joska with an air of mystery. We accepted. Arriving at Joska’s place, we saw other guests we knew, including a young writer, a policeman from Debrecen, and a civil servant from the Ministry of Foreign Trade. I was shocked to see two that we had never met - Imre Nagy and his wife.

‘Comrade Nagy. I’m delighted to meet you. Your speech to Parliament in 1953 was truly a revelation for me. My life has changed since then.’

   ‘Mine too,’ replied Nagy with a smile/

   ‘Especially yours. Rakosi destroyed you, and we all watched from the sidelines.

‘During your trip, Comrade Kopacsi, ‘ said the writer, who had been listening, ‘the balance has shifted. Rakosi is on the way out.’

 We learned that at public meetings held by the Petofi Circle, the philosopher George Lukacs and the famous writer Tibor Dery had been openly dissecting the defects of the party leadership. Although the Petofi Circle was an adjunct of the official; Young Communists, part of its leadership backed the Nagy reforms. The Literary Journal, the publication of the Hungarian Writer’s Union, was publishing virulent attacks on the crimes committed by the Rakosi regime. The opposition had become powerful within the party. As a result, the dictator was losing his head and was readying some old-style repression, complete with mass arrests, newspaper and theater closings. He had already suspended certain clubs, including the famous Petofi Circle.

Imre Nagy smiled. ‘Do you think we could talk of something else? I’d love to know how the beautiful Mrs. Kopacsi enjoyed the Soviet Union.’

‘Moscow not at all. Kiev, yes. Leningrad, a terrific city.’

‘That’s true,’ said Nagy. ‘Leningrad is Europe.’
  Nagy and his wife smiled as Ibolya described a scene we had encountered in the streets of Kiev: people seated on the sidewalk in front of a store in the process of trying on and exchanging among themselves pairs of shoes they had just bought. In the face of interminable line-ups, the store required its customers to choose their shoes and take them away without trying them on.

   Nagy took off his pince-nez, wiped them, and remarked to his wife, ‘You see, unfortunately things haven’t changed much since we lived there . . . and those were the hardest years of the war.’

    To my great surprise, Nagy aid he planned to travel to the Soviet Union. Ambassador Andropov (Ibolya couldn’t repress and exclamation of ‘Oh, that one!’) has called him in for a friendly conversation. According to Andropov, Nagy’s problem with Rakosi and his exclusion from power hadn’t in any way changed the Kremlin’s esteem for him. The Soviet leaders wanted an exchange of ideas with Nagy. At the same time, there was interest in the publication of a Russian edition of his writings during his time ‘in the desert.’

   “But, Ibolya, what did you have to say about Andropov?” some asked.                      ‘That he was an excellent dancer. And a real gentleman to boot.’

   Ibolya told the story of her evening with Andropov, and of how, the day after, colonel Petofi (’You know, these counsellors call themselves anything at all but some of them have good manners, too’), on a mission from Andropov, asked Ibolya to go home (‘Can you believe it, in the middle of the day!’) where he brought her a basket of white roses, the like of which she ‘had never seen in my life’. That wasn’t surprising: the daughter of a workingman and wife of a metalworker didn’t often have occasion to enjoy white roses. What refinement! What luxury!

   Nagy smiled. ‘Russia is an immense Byzantine empire where the manners of the former great landlords are strangely mixed with revolutionary traditions. Sometimes also with barbarism. You have to have lived there to understand it and love it.’

 

In mid-July, I received an urgent phone call from some of the members of the party organization for Budapest. I was to get down to their headquarters on Koztarsasag Square on the double. A sudden death? The Third World War? I asked George to step on it and to hell with the speed limit.

   ‘What’s up?’ I asked, charging breathlessly into the party office.

   ‘What’s up is that the party needs your famous underground.’

   ‘For What?’

   I was informed that several old comrades, including Imre Nagy, were ‘in danger’, that they  needed a safe house for several days or maybe weeks, ‘until the clouds disperse.’

   ‘What clouds?’

 

  The comrades exchanged glances. Swearing me to secrecy, they said that Rakosi was getting ready to strike. He had called the Central Committee to ratify a list of four hundred opponents to be arrested. The first name on the list was Imre Nagy, followed by a whole series of writers, intellectuals, and senior civil servants. Included were some. Such as Janos Kadar and Julia Rajk, who had only recently escaped the AVO’s dungeons.
   I suspected a hoax. People knew I was sympathetic to Nagy; was someone trying to trap me into an act of disloyalty to the current regime? Nevertheless, very discretely, I took the necessary steps. A former underground fighter, now a doctor, was running a nursing home in a forested area up north. An isolated house could be made available. My friend asked few questions. He readily agreed to my request that he accommodate a small group of undercover agents that I would send in advance. Meanwhile, Imre Mezo, a member of the Budapest party committee, warned the Kremlin of what Rakosi was planning.

   The Central Committee of the Hungarian party was summoned to meet on Julyn17. Rakosi, a pile of documents in his hand, began to explain why he proposed to arrest four hundred opponents of his regime. At that moment, the door opened and Comrade Mikoyan of the Soviet Politburo entered in the company of his bodyguards and his interpreter.

   Silence. Some members of the audience stood up.

    ‘Continue,’ said Mikoyan. ‘Make your report, Comrade Rakosi.’

   Rakosi proceeded to denounce ‘the open opposition against the party and the popular democracy organized by Imre Nagy.’ He spoke of the Petofi Circle. The interpreter translated. Mikoyan raised his hand.

   “Excuse me, Comrade Rakosi, you say the Petofi Circle [which had been suspended two weeks earlier] is made up of enemies of the people and counter-revolutionaries. But from what we’ve heard the cry ‘Long live the party’ was heard at every meeting. If counter-revolutionaries love that song, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

   Large drops of sweat rolled down Rakosi’s face.

   ‘Nevertheless, Comrade Mikoyan, what I am saying is true.’

   He asked that the meeting be adjourned and left, accompanied by the Soviets.

   Several minutes later, Mikoyan gave him a message from Khrushchev: ‘In view of the measures being planned by Comrade Rakosi, he advised him to resign from all his positions in the Hungarian party and leave the country’

   In a state of shock, Rakosi picked up the red telephone that connected him to the Kremlin.

   ‘Comrade Khrushchev. I have difficulty believing my ears .  .  .’

   ‘It would be in your interest to believe them.’

   The next day, Rakosi left for Moscow, taking all his belongings with him. For the newspapers, he left a communique saying that his departure was necessitated by high blood pressure. For the country, he left a replacement who was hardly any better than he was: Erno Gero, his longtime right arm, the former political commissar of the Soviet secret police in Spain and the champion of bizarre industrial plans that in ten years had ruined the Hungarian people.
  After the dictator had slunk out of the country, the opposition within the party obtained the full rehabilitation of the most notable of Rakosi’s victims, principally Laszlo Rajk. After long and difficult research, his remains were found, miraculously intact, in a wood alongside the national highway from Budapest to Lake Balaton.  The quicklime that was supposed to have destroyed the body has preserved it instead. Th burial was scheduled for October 6, 1956.  the party opposition and Rajk’s widow insisted on a solemn public ceremony.  Attendance would be large.

This was dangerous. The general public didn’t care that much about settling accounts within the party, but poor management of the economy and shortages of goods had pushed them to the end of their tether. This was the first time the criminal incompetence of the regime was to be exposed publicly and it was feared that Rajk’s funeral would degenerate into a riot. As police chief of Budapest and as a Communist, I wanted to ensure that the ceremony unfolded without incident. The leaders of the opposition assured me of their co-operation. There would be no inflammatory language, nothing that might arouse the passions of the crowd.

   The morning of the ceremony. the first secretary of the Budapest party organization, a notorious Stalinist, phoned me in a panic.

   ‘Kopacsi, what’s to become of us?’

   He was in a pitiful state, his voice trembling.

   ‘What are you afraid of, Comrade?’

   ‘A riot.’

   ‘It’s going to be okay, Comrade. You have nothing to fear.’

   On the phone, I heard a sigh of relief. ‘May God hear you, Kopacsi.’

   This time God heard me. A throng of two hundred thousand people paraded in front of the funeral chapel, but there was no riot. The guard of honor changed every five minutes. I took part myself as a representative of the Partisans’ Union.

   When it was the turn of the members of Rakosi’s Politburo, a fierce wind started to howl. Everyone noticed the phenomena. A supernatural production for a Shakespearean drama full of spilled blood and treachery.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_K%C3%A1d%C3%A1r