Verhovayak Lapja, 1955 (38. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1955 / Verhovay Journal
fage io____________________________________ Verhovay Journal____________________________January 19,1933 TENSIONS WITHIN THE SOVIET CAPTIVE COUNTRIES HUNGARY Prepared at the Request of the Committee on Foreign Relations By the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress Presented by ALEXANDER WILEY Wisconsin, Chairman, Committee *of Foreign Relations (In Serial Form Here) FOREWORD This study of Tensions Within Hungary completes the series of documents published by the Foreign Relations Committee on tensions within the Soviet captive countries. Earlier studies have dealt with Bulgaria, Rumania, the Soviet Zone of Germany, Czechoslovakia. Poland, and Albania. In Hungary, the pattern of Communist control has been the same as in the other Eastern European captives — and so has the pattern of Communist difficulties. These difficulties would be great, even with a friendly population, if for no other reason than the sheer magnitude of the administrative task of supervising every facet of national life. But when the Communists are faced with popular resistance, and in some cases open hostility, as they are in Hungary and elsewhere, the difficulties are compounded many times over. Nowhere in Eastern Europe do the Communists appear in imminent danger of losing control of the situation, but behind the monolithic facade of the Iron Curtain there are accumulating bitter hatreds and tensions. The free world can draw hope and encouragement from, the inspiring resistance of the captive peoples. This series of studies provides ample.evidence that the Sgviet Union is having trouble digesting its conquests. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the whole Communist structure is on the verge of collapse. The Red Army and the secret police present formidable barriers to popular revolt. This series of studies was undertaken by the Library of Congress at the request of the Foreign Relations Committee which felt that objective analysis of the situation in Eastern Europe would be helpful to the Senate and to 'the public generally. Dr. Sergius Yakobson, senior specialist in Russian affairs of the Legislative Reference Service, has exercised general direction of the series. The study of Hungary was made by Dr. Bela T. Kardos, of the Slavic and East European Division, Library of Congress, with the assistance of Joseph G. Whelan, of the Legislative Reference Service, on whom falls the reponsibility for content. To Messrs. Yakobson, Kardos, and Whelan, as well as to others who prepared the earlier studies, I express my deep appreciation for a difficult and, at times, a tedious task. The staff of the Foreign Relations Committee has taken care of the necessary editing and seen the various manuscripts through the press. ALEXANDER WILEY. TENSIONS WITHIN THE SOVIET CAPTIVE COUNTRIES HUNGARY I. BACKGROUND When the Red army moved into Hungary on October 6, 1944, grim memories of the short-lived. Bolshevik rule at the end of World War I were firmly embedded in the minds of the Hungarian people. In 1919, Moscow-trained propagandists drawn largely from the ranks of Hungarian prisoners of war who had been subjected to Communist indoctrination in Soviet captivity, returned to Hungary and seized control of the Government in Budapest. Their reign of terror lasted only from March 21 to July 31, 1919, but it was marked by uncounted atrocities, starvation, and misery, and it was long enough to make Hungarians abhor communism in the years to come. The Communist Party was outlawed in 1920 and remained for years a negligible underground group fraught with dissent and intrigue Ironically, Béla Kun. the “leader” of the erstwhile Hungarian-Soviet Republic, was tried and executed in the Soviet Union in 1937, as a member of the Trotskyist opposition. Firmly resolved to make renewed efforts at the propitious moment toward bringing Hungary under the Kremlin’s domination, Soviet Communists continued to train reserves of profess ional revolutionaries such as Mátyás Rákosi, Zoltán Vas, Ernő Ge'rő, Mihály Farkas, and, more recently, some Hungarian prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union during World War II as well as a few Hungarian civilians who had crossed the lines to the Soviet Union in the course of the war. Rákosi and Vas, originally dispatched to Hungary in 1924 with the assignment of organizing the Communist Party there, were arrested soon after their arrival and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Released from prison in 1940 in connection with an exchange agreement with the Soviet Union, Rákosi and Vas headed the team of Moscowtrained Communists who, by then Soviet citizens, made their reappearance in Hungary in the footsteps of the Red army in 1944. The Communist penetration of Hungary, in the closingstages' of World War II and thereafter was aimed at a country which, for amillenium, had been an integral part of European civilization and a stronghold of Western Christianity. This ' country could take pride in an impressive record of stubborn defense of its national independence against any threats, no matter where they originated. The liberal reform era, which began in Hungary in the early 19th century and reached a climax in Kossuth’s revolution in 1848—49, had paved the way for the development of parliamentary institutions and of the western concepts of the inalienable rights of the individual. The great Hungarian patriots, Kossuth and Petőfi, have been revered by the Hungarian people ever since as symbols and protagonists of the struggle against absolutism and national enslavement. Few Hungarian citizens are likely to forget the lawlessness, humiliation, and indignities to which they have been subjected under the Red army’s occupation regime since 1944. Nine years after the close of World War II tens of thousands of prisoners of war are reported still to be detained in the Soviet Union, and their families in Hungary await their return in anxiety and desperation. Large numbers of Hungarian citizens, both men and women, have been spirited away to Soviet penal camps where many of them have perished, and the Soviet Union serves as a reservoir for the overflow of prisoners for whom there is no space in Hungary’s RESENTMENT AGAINST CURRENT REGIME HUMILIATION OF RUSSIAN OCCUPATION Against such a background it is obvious that the frontal attack launched by communism -on all values traditionally cherished in Hungary was bound to generate widespread resentment. An American journalist who spent 40 months in Communist Hungary as a correspondent of the London Times and the Reuter’s News Agency identified as important springs of this popular resentment, the contempt for Communists, hatred for the Soviet Union, the sense of insecurity, the fear of arrest or denunciation, and the deterioration of economic conditions. Accoi’ding to the armistice agreement with the Soviet Union, Hungary was obligated to deliver reparations amounting to the 1938 equivalent of $200 million. The ruthless implementation of this agreement seriously damaged the Hungarian economy. Prices of capital equipment and goods to be delivered to the Soviet Union were fixed at low levels, and severe penalties were imposed for delayed delivery. The systematic impoverishment of the Hungarian economy has conratification of the peace treaty. A marked inflation of the Hungarian currency resulting from excessive occupation levies, together with Hungary’s enforced isolation horn the world’s raw material and capital markets, greatly contributed to economic disruption and lowered standards of living. Further instruments for draining Hungary’s economic resources were the so-called Soviet-Hungarian joint stock companies which were under Soviet control and management and enjoyed the privileges of tax and tariff exemption. The domestic Communist leadership has also had its share in the progressive deterioration of the country’s economic conditions. Only recently the head of Budapest’s Communist Party issued the stern warning that the Government could not renege on its promises of an improved standard of living and that any return to the Communist policy practiced until the summer of 1953 “would have called forth grave economic and even graver political conse-
