Once the Soviet tanks had put it in power, the “Kadar government,” trying to win some mass support, declared that the gains of the revolution would be protected and the government would make it its task to defend these threatened gains.
But having come to power only by force of Soviet arms, and not finding any support among the masses, it has been led to institute a regime reminiscent of the Rakosi government; it has even been forced to defend the Rakosi regime, claiming that criticism of it has been exaggerated. As time passed, it has stopped calling the October-November events a “revolution” and begun to call them a “counterrevolution.” As the British Communist journalist Peter Fryer put it so well in his pamphlet on his expulsion from the British Communist Party: “If this was a counterrevolution it was the first counterrevolution whose first act was to put arms in the hands of the proletariat.”
Kadar and his supporters around the world talk about “counterrevolution,” about fascists, about returned Hungarian emigrés, foreign arms, etc. For two months now, “order” (Stalinist style) has ruled in Budapest. The government has made many arrests and conducted many court martials. To this day it has not produced a single emigrant, a single foreign weapon. All the same, in such a struggle as took place, it would be surprising for nothing to be found if there had really been a significant number of repatriated emigrés in the country and if the uprising had been prepared well in advance in a foreign country. The government is silent on this point because the weapons it found are those of the Hungarian army, and because its arrests are mainly of workers and intellectuals who never emigrated and who express the aspirations of the entire people to get rid of the Rakosi-Geroë regime.
The judges are now being reprimanded for being too lenient. The attorney general, Geza Szenasi, a former AVO, said: “A humane attitude is no longer appropriate; the fascists must be shown that it won’t do to oppose the Karhatolom.” That is the new name of the AVO, which carries out dragnets in the suburbs of Budapest.
Kadar had promised in the first few days that the infamies and horrors of the Rakosi regime were over. But the first major trial that took place was of a group of students who had published a newspaper, Truth, during the revolution. What was the accusation against the medical student Ilona Toth? Injecting oil with a hypodermic needle and pumping air into the heart of a Communist whom she took to be an AVO! This is a rehashing of the “Doctors’ Plot” and the “Assassins in White,” “confessions” being a central factor.
Does Kadar plan to give Nagy and Maleter a “Rajk-type” trial? This is not excluded; but will they be the kind of defendants that are needed? That is doubtful right now!
If this is no longer the Stalinist Rakosi regime, its methods are more or less the same; for example, the technique of the amalgam. Using this method the leadership of the new party permanently expelled at one blow Imre Nagy and Losonzcy, on one hand, and Rakosi and Geroë on the other. The amalgam has its limits, however, in that Nagy and Losonzcy are under arrest, while Rakosi is living peacefully in the USSR.
Kadar denounces the “counterrevolution.” But whom does he repress?
Among the prisoners are long-time communist writers such as Guyla Hay, Zoltan Zelk, and Tibor Tardos. On December 29, despite the governmental terror, the Hungarian Writers Association expressed the sentiments of the working masses:
“We must declare with a heavy heart that the Soviet government made a historic error when it drowned the revolution in blood. We predict that the time will come when this great power will regret its mistake. We warn everyone against the misconception that the Hungarian revolution would have destroyed the conquests of socialism if Soviet arms had not intervened. We know that this is not true.”
Such a declaration, however moderate its tone—it could be called too moderate, in fact—could not go unpunished. On January 17, the Writers Association was dissolved.
Where else does Kadar see “fascists”? In the working class.
The workers’ councils which supposed they might turn their attention to politics—fascist. The workers who did not want to belong to his party (supposedly it had about 150,000 members, but they were mostly government functionaries required to join in order to keep their jobs) —fascists.
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The government manipulates the extremely difficult situation to the disadvantage of the workers. January production was about 50 percent that of the previous October. The government refuses to carry out its promise of a 10 percent raise in salaries. Unemployment has been used to put pressure on the working class.
And now Kadar establishes a “workers’ militia,” responsible for suppressing rebellions in the factories and preventing strikes! The factories are where Kadar’s “fascists” are. The militia is designed not to defend the factories against someone who wants to turn them over to the capitalists—for there is no significant force of that kind—but to combat those who in October and November demanded workers’ democracy and created councils (soviets) to put it into effect.
Of course, Kadar imitates Rakosi even in details. Russian is now a required course again in school. Any occasion is suitable again for glorifying the USSR.
This “climate of terror’—as Marosan, the Minister of State, shamelessly calls it—may allow Kadar to appear for a time as the head of a government which calls itself a government of the workers. But it will not give this regime a long life. The Hungarian revolution is not dead; it cannot die.
It lives in the clandestine movements in Budapest itself, which are making a real analysis of the events in preparation for future struggles. The Hungarian revolution was a precursor of the great mass uprisings against the bureaucratic regime which will raise workers’ democracy to a previously unattained level. The period separating it from this great mass uprising will be short. Certainly Kadar’s bureaucratic counterrevolution will become even more fierce in the days ahead. But it will save neither the Kadars nor their masters in the Kremlin. Both will pay for their counterrevolutionary crimes.
Throughout the world, the labor movement, revolutionary intellectuals, and all progressive elements must raise their voices to demand an end to the bureaucratic terror, in order to tear the Hungarian revolutionaries out of the clutches of their executioners, and to aid the Hungarian workers who displayed so much heroism and self-sacrifice in the service of the socialist cause.
A glimpse of the tendencies that exist in Hungary is provided by a duplicated document signed “Hungaricus,” circulating in Budapest, excerpts of which have been published by the journalist Fetjo in France-Observateur. According to this document, “the anti-Rakosi opposition inside the Hungarian Workers Party began to disintegrate with the fall of Rakosi” and “after the crushing of the national insurrection by force, it could be said that the opposition fell apart completely.”
There appears to exist a tendency which aims solely at military resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, which the document’s author says shows “total incomprehension of the actual situation and impotent rage.”
Another tendency wishes to “flirt with Kadar’s Workers Socialist Party.” According to the document, leaving aside opportunists and cowards, it is possible to find “many comrades who believe or at least would like to believe that inside the Workers Socialist Party they would be able to resume the struggle against Stalinism. But isn’t the principal lesson to be drawn from the history of the last few years that such struggles inside the party, respecting the party’s statutes, fail?”
Rigorously criticizing the errors of the Communist opposition, it continues, “History has shown the opposition to have been correct. But the same time it has judged it severely for failing to organize an independent force. While the party leadership was ceaselessly condemning antiparty factions in a whole series of resolutions, what did the opposition do? It discussed. It discussed whether or not it should organize itself into a faction. It did nothing to reach the people and in particular to establish a base in the working class. It did nothing to approach the bourgeois-democratic parties. In fact, even on the eve of the revolution, the Communist opposition limited itself to drawing up petitions and issuing gloomy prophecies—courageous but ineffective.” The document warns against believing Kadar’s statements portraying himself as an enemy of Rakosi and Geroë: “In any case, it would be difficult after the revolution to pursue the policy abandoned by Geroë. Kadar must know this. Thus—as has
often happened in history—it is possible that despite the defeat of the revolution, some of its essential demands may be realized. We should fight to see that this happens. But we must fight knowing that this path is strewn with the dead of our revolution. It is no more than a provincial road in an empire, a road that ties us inseparably to Moscow. The Hungarian people do not want that; and we can be sure that as soon as they begin to move, the hundred thousand members of Kadar’s party will abandon him even more quickly than the 900,000 members of Rakosi’s party deserted Geroë last October. . .”
It denounces those who flinch or who desert the workers’ side: “It is a pretty poor outcome to arrive in the port of Eisenhower and Eden after serving on Rakosi’s ship so zealously and for so many years.” “The Marxist critique of capitalism remains valid, as does the Leninist critique of imperialism; the Egyptian expedition furnishes stunning new proof.
The document sets itself the task of political clarification:
“The socialist partisans of Hungarian freedom should set themselves apart from whatever falsely goes by the name of socialism in Hungary today. They should be independent. Only by establishing their independence can. they join with the popular movement and cooperate with the democratic and bourgeois elements who do not plan a restoration but seek a genuine renewal.”
“The theory of Hungarian socialism must be created, based on a revision of all ideas which have up to now been considered final, based on confronting the reality of our times. Only after clarifying our ideas and our aims can we go on to the second stage, that of organization.”
After such a momentous experience, the first result of defeat will necessarily be disintegration and ideological divisions. But the Hungarian revolution—in only a few days—provided important lessons for the international proletariat; and Hungarian revolutionaries, with the aid of the international revolutionary Marxist vanguard, will not fail to surmount this initial period and to strengthen their ties with a political cohesion forged from the lessons of the struggle.