Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
‘THE HUNGARIAN MAFIA’ - The red octopus
FABULOUS SPY GAMES Republic found refuge here. Propaganda and secret service/financial activities accounted for the strikingly large number of the office staff. The Russian empire that plunged into civil war was trampled underfoot by a handful of members of the intelligentsia returning from emigration to force their philosophy, entirely alien to the local society, onto the country. This could hardly have been feasible without external financial support. The Bolshevik Party allowed western capital into the country by granting concessions, and permitted big consortia and banking groups to become co-owners in joint ventures founded abroad to fund its businesses and provide loans to build the Soviet system.113 The capital raised in this way was also enough to underpin the leftist movement in the West and to build the networks of communist sister parties. Stalins Soviet Union built illegal financial channels, which operated right up until the late 1980s, to fund these parties. 113 Seres 2006, p. 81-83 114 Seres 2008, p. 413 115 For more details, cf Koch 2014 The Hungarian leaders were wary of the Soviets, and, having learnt the lesson from the 133 days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, attempted to curb the spread of communist propaganda, but they were still unable to sever economic ties completely. After the Treaty of Trianon, the Hungarian government was forced to import raw materials from Russia, oil in particular: between 1921 and 1924, black gold flowed to Hungary nearly exclusively from the oil fields in Grozny.114 Triggered by the vulnerability caused by the shortage of raw materials and pushed by the industrial-financial lobby, the Hungarian government was forced to establish relationships with the communist power first economically and then also politically, but they made sure only to have as many Soviet ‘traders’ posted to Budapest as they could keep an eye on. Despite the defiantly anti-communist sentiment of the inter-war period associated with the name of Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian government was not able to eliminate the underground communist network in Hungary. The Hungarian section of Comintern played a significant role in the work of the illegal international communist movement,115 while the group referred to as 46
