Századok – 2013
MŰHELY - Gyarmati György: A Restaurációból konszolidációba vajúdó Kádár-rendszer egy epizódja VI/1581
1598 FIGYELŐ ni, megfogalmazni törekszünk. A tettesáldozat összetettségének vizsgálata — akár az egyéni és közösségi morál térségeiig is elkalandozva - segítene túllépni azon a történelmi determinizmust sugalló dichotóm képleten, mely szerint a hóhér csak szörnyeteg lehet, az áldozat pedig mindenkor a makulátlanság megtestesítője. A determinizmus fétiséhez képest vizsgálandó az esetlegesség-faktor a lent/fent pozíció bármelyikének elnyerhetőségében, s a kettős státusba való belecsöppenések során még inkább szerepe lehet a fatalitásnak. AN EPISODE OF THE TRANSITION OF THE KÁDÁR REGIME FROM RESTAURATION TO CONSOLIDATION by György Gyarmati (Abstract) Recently have been published the documents of that party inquiry which was carried on in 1962 by the leadership of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) against two former Stalinist party leaders, Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő. (Lehallgatott kihallgatások. Rákosi és Gero pártvizsgálatának titkos hangszalagjai, 1962 [Intercepted Hearings. The Secret Tapes of the Party Inquisition against Rákosi and Gerő.] Szerkesztette [Edited by]: Baráth Magdolna és Feitl István. Napvilág - ÁBTL, Budapest. 2013.). The published source material merits attention not only on account of the former prominence of the two persons concerned. It is also worth a closer scrutiny because it allows insight into the imbroglios of the destalinizing corrective turn made by János Kádár. With the procedure, Kádár intended to cut a double Gordian knot. He tried to blame the odium of pre-1956 terror exclusively on his predecessors in a way which would leave the pretension that „even then socialism had been constructed” unharmed. On the other hand, the inquisition was not to be allowed to pass the point where Kádár himself would be hable of being accused on the same account as Rákosi and Gerő. It was especially because of this latter consideration that the examination of responsibility could not usher in a legal accusation, and was allowed instead to end with a simple political judgement. The present study follows the unfolding of this „soft clean-up operation” in a way which involves into the reconstruction of the story the background information which was gathered at the time by the Hungarian communist secret services. The officials in the state and party bureaucracy, and the social democrats and small-holders who had already been forced out of power, reacted in private in a number of ways to the pieces of information which reached them. The secret reports show that whereas the smallholders squeezed out from the political life „barracked” for Kádár, because they cherished, totally unfounded, dreams about their own reactivation, the marginalised social democrats had no such illusions. The communist party bureaucrats of mostly middling status were rather divided between the (Khrushchevist) political habit of Kádár and the (Stalinist) stance of Rákosi. The pro-Rákosi sympathy of the latter only began to fade perceptively when it became evident that the efforts of Kádár in order to hybemate his own past, or, in other words, to scratch himself from the rewritten party history, would yield fruit. (More exactly: an important side-effect of the inquisition was the remasking of Kádár from an accomplice to a victim of Stalinism.) Thanks to the thorough political purge Kádár was able to consolidate around himself the communist new oligarchy which then proved able to monopolise the power for three decades, until the collapse of the regime, despite the fact that his patron, Khrushchev soon fell from power, and the consequent „reign” of Brezhnev is traditionally regarded by the political scientists as a period of restalinisation.
