Daughters of the KGB (33 page)

In the Soviet tradition that saw heads of the NKVD, such as Yezhov, and of the KGB, such as Beria, executed when they ‘knew too much’ about Stalin, Gábor also was arrested in 1952 and accused of forming ‘an Anglo-Zionist conspiracy’ with László Raik and Rudolf Slánský to assassinate Stalin. At the time he was heading an organisation of 5,751 full-time officers and thousands of informers – the thirty-three highest-paid full-timers being embedded MVD officers.
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Surprisingly, after confessing, Gábor was not executed but sentenced to life imprisonment in 1954 and released in 1959, to start a new career as a librarian! Did anyone dare to bring back an overdue book with such a man behind the counter?

Stalin’s death in 1953 sent waves throughout the USSR and its satellites. In Hungary Rákosi’s authority waned and he was replaced as prime minster by Imre Nagy, but kept in the government. In a palace revolution, Rákosi managed to regain control, but was then forced to resign after Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ at the twentieth congress of the USSR Party on 25 February 1956 denouncing the crimes of his predecessor, Josef Stalin, with the exception of those in which he had participated. When the process of destalinisation led to protests by Polish workers in Poznan at the end of June, suppressed by Soviet armed intervention, news of this stimulated unrest in Hungary, which the government could not control, so Anastas Mikoyan deposed Mátyás Rákosi on 18 July under the pretence that he was ill and urgently needed ‘treatment in Moscow’. Before leaving, Rákosi managed to hand the position of party leader to Erno Gero, who had also spent two decades in the USSR after the bloody Béla Kun Soviet uprising of 1919, and was doubly unpopular for his recent participation in the collectivisation and industrialisation programmes.

Gero’s previous international ‘claim to fame’ was from the Spanish Civil War, when he was one of the commissars accused of the murder of Andrés Nin and other leaders of the POUM faction in the International Brigades. Even now, he refused to make concessions to the demonstrators and repeatedly requested Moscow to keep Rákosi in the USSR to avoid his return upsetting the delicate political balance in Hungary. Gero’s short reign, lasting only three months, was characterised by increasing unrest, not only from intellectuals and workers’ representatives, but also his own colleagues at the head of the party, who considered him headstrong and deaf to criticism or advice.

On 23 October 1956 peaceful demonstrations and demands for reform were met by Gero ordering the police to fire on the demonstrators. Like the obedient puppet he was, he also called on Soviet Ambassador Andropov for help. He advised Khrushchev to send in tanks and Soviet troops moved into the city early on 24 October, to find themselves attacked by students. Reports of the crisis in Hungary caused the Soviet politburo to despatch the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Anastas Mikoyan, to Budapest with Mikhail Suslov on 24 October, tasked with assessing the situation. The AVH being unable to control the violence in the streets, Mikoyan and Suslov travelled to meetings in an armoured personnel carrier. They were informed by Gero that, unsurprisingly, the presence of Soviet troops was viewed unfavourably by the population. Equally unpopular was his own dictatorial broadcast speech taking the nation to task. The Soviets then retired Gero after a reign of only three months, with the Hungarian Central Committee appointing the relatively liberal János Kádár as party leader and Imre Nagy – who had been deposed as prime minister on Moscow’s orders in early 1955 for the crime of being ‘too Hungarian’ – appointed prime minister because he was considered the only leader capable of handling the rebellion.

Instead of obeying the government’s orders, some Hungarian military units mutinied and distributed light weapons to the demonstrators. Prudent party officials lay low. Officers of the AVH secret police who were careless enough to be caught by their erstwhile victims were gunned down in the streets. In the provinces, local councils sprang up, with peasants reoccupying their confiscated fields and political prisoners freed from prisons and labour camps. Anxious to avoid civil war, Nagy pleaded with the demonstrators to go quietly home and let the party sort things out, but it was too late for that.

Unrest continued to grow. On 29 October the embedded Soviet ‘advisers’ with the AVH wisely assembled their families and followed Mikoyan and Suslov back to the USSR. That they were right to do so was obvious when daylight came and AVH men were found gunned down in the streets, beaten to death and hanged from street lamps. The new government was powerless to calm the unrest. Anarchy ran wild, with red stars hacked off the facades of state and party buildings. Some 8,000 political prisoners were released, among them Cardinal József Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary jailed for life in 1949 for resisting the Communist takeover. Cheering crowds escorted him back to the primate’s palace in Budapest. Students took over the national radio network.

The Budapest chief of police and Nagy’s Minister of Defence Pál Maléter declared for the demonstrators, many of whom had served as conscripts and knew how to handle rifles and anti-tank weapons and make Molotov cocktails – which eventually cost 200 Soviet tanks over four days of conflict. Whether from prudence or sympathy with the Hungarians, some tank crews parked up, opened the hatches and did nothing, but on 25 October when AVH snipers started shooting at them, the tankers replied with machine gun fire and cannon shells in a confrontation that killed around 200 people in and around the parliament building.
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The disorder was nationwide, with agricultural workers plundering the collective farms and all factories closed by strikes.

John Sadovy, a 31-year-old photographer born in Czechoslovakia who was working for
Life
magazine at the time, compiled the most graphic photoreportage of the Budapest fighting. On 30 October, after the undamaged tanks had been withdrawn from the city, forty-seven AVH officers took positions on the roof of the Central Committee building and fired on the crowds, killing scores of people. Forced to emerge and surrender, they were grabbed by the demonstrators. So densely packed was the crowd that Sadovy had to get very close to the action, using a wide-angle lens on one of his two Leica 35mm cameras to photograph what happened before, during and after their executions. His verbal account included this passage:

The first to emerge from the building was an officer, alone. The next thing I knew, he was flat on the ground. It didn’t dawn on me this man was shot. Six young [secret] policemen came out. Their shoulder tabs were torn off. Quick argument: ‘Give us a chance,’ they said. Suddenly one began to slouch forward. They must have been close to his ribs when they fired. They all went down like corn that had been cut. Another came out, running. He saw his friends dead, turned, headed into the crowd. The revolutionaries dragged him out. I could see the impact of bullets on clothes. They were shooting so close, the man’s body acted as a silencer.
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The intensity of the terror under which Hungarians had been living with the AVH was evident from the vicious punishment handed out by ordinary people. At least one officer was strung up from a tree, doused in petrol and burned to death; others were beaten to death with bricks and sticks, to be left lying in the streets. And not only employees of the AVH were set upon. Sadovy’s photographs record informers, including women, being attacked in the streets and begging for their lives. At the same time, tens of thousands of political prisoners were being liberated by the rioters, among them prisoners who had been in jail since the end of the war, twelve years before. The most important liberated prisoner, Cardinal Mindszenty broadcast an appeal on national radio for reconciliation, but nobody was listening.

After forming a coalition government of socialist parties to negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet occupation troops, on 1 November Imre Nagy announced Hungary’s secession from the Warsaw Pact, which it had only joined the previous year, and requested the UN to recognise his country’s neutral status, hoping this would lead to protection by the Western powers, but timing was against him. France and Britain were embroiled in armed intervention in Egypt to punish the government of President Nasser for nationalising the Suez Canal and Eisenhower was furious that his European allies dared to take such action without his approval. Seeking to legitimise its own armed intervention in Hungary, Moscow canvassed support from neighbouring Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Knowing what had happened to people who went to Moscow ‘for consultations’, President Tito refused to leave his holiday island in the Adriatic, obliging Khrushchev and Malenkov to make a nightmare journey to obtain his approval, partly in a light aircraft in bad weather and a small boat in storm-tossed seas.

Nagy had received reassurances from Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov that the USSR would not interfere but, with Britain and France involved in the Suez crisis, Khrushchev judged that the US would not risk a global confrontation over Hungary. On 1 November he ordered Soviet occupation troops to take all measures to ‘restore order’. A quarter-million Hungarians grabbed the chance to cross the temporarily unguarded western frontiers and ‘voted with their feet’, abandoning their homes and taking only what they could carry before the Soviets upped their military presence.

On 4 November the five Soviet divisions already stationed in Hungary were reinforced by twelve more Warsaw Pact divisions, and the fate of the Hungarian uprising was a foregone conclusion with Budapest surrounded by 2,500 armoured vehicles plus artillery and multi-barrelled rocket launchers. Eleven years after its ‘liberation’ by the Red Army, some parts of Budapest were again a battlefield; in others, life seemed normal and even telephones still worked. A BBC Hungarian Service translator calling an aunt in Budapest for an update heard the trams running as usual in the background – followed by bursts of heavy machine gun fire not very far away.

When all was lost, Nagy advised Mindszenty to seek asylum in the US embassy. A Marine corporal and a master sergeant were standing behind the grille at the entrance to the embassy with the Air Attaché, when the cardinal and an English-speaking monsignor arrived and asked to enter the building. The corporal asked the attaché, ‘What should I do, sir?’ but received no reply. He then asked the master sergeant, who replied, ‘Do your duty.’ The corporal opened the grille; his act was justified a few minutes later when a telex arrived from Washington instructing the embassy to extend every courtesy, should the cardinal request asylum. Mindszenty was to stay isolated in the safety of the embassy for fifteen years. His ‘brother in Christ’ Canterbury’s Reverend Dean Hewlett Johnson condemned Britain for the Suez invasion, but said that ‘politically, the situation is different in Hungary [where] the action of the Soviet Union was to prevent [a return to] fascism’.
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Nagy was not so lucky. He took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, which was swiftly surrounded by Soviet tanks. Minister of Defence Pál Maléter was invited to negotiate with the Soviet command, but was instead taken prisoner. In the early morning of the same day, János Kádár broadcast a speech proclaiming a new pro-Soviet government with himself as prime minister. Retracting Nagy’s secession from the Warsaw Pact, he did, however, promise that once the ‘counter-revolution’ was suppressed and order restored, he would negotiate the withdrawal of the Soviet army of occupation. Some credibility was given to this and his promises of reforms because it was known that he had been imprisoned by the AVH and tortured under the Stalinist regime of Máyás Rákosi. Yet armed confrontations between Hungarians and the Soviet troops continued.

Among the few Hungarian politicians who did well out of the 1956 uprising was János Kádár, who was transported with a skeleton administration to his office in Soviet armoured vehicles while Soviet tanks continued to shell nearby buildings from which sniper fire was coming. To acquire a semblance of democratic reform, Kádár promised free elections, the withdrawal of the Soviet troops and a general amnesty.

Courage and rifles are no match for tanks. Soviet losses totalled 1,250 wounded and more than 650 dead, against 17,500 wounded and 2,500 dead on the Hungarian side by the time the fighting ended in January 1957. The workers used the only other weapon they possessed and proclaimed a general strike. It was several months before daily life reverted to normal. Meantime, Nagy had been tricked out of the Yugoslav embassy by an offer of safe conduct signed by Kádár, but was forcibly abducted to Romania. He, Maléter and their associates endured an ignominious two-year captivity that ended with him being returned to Budapest for a trial in camera, his years of loyal service to Moscow as an agent of the NKVD availing nothing.
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Nagy, Maléter and the other VIP prisoners were hanged in a prison there on 16 June 1958. Lesser activists were deported to the Soviet Union, never to return.

In the ‘free’ election following the rebellion, the official result was a 99.6 per cent vote for the Communist-dominated Patriotic People’s front. Then the shark showed his teeth: one by one all the slight concessions of the previous three years of destalinisation were cancelled: agriculture was recollectivised and many former AVH employees reappeared, working for the Interior Ministry in a new repression that began early in 1957. By 1960 they and their KGB ‘advisers’ had brought the country to its knees again and, with the loss of all those who had fled abroad, the economy was in dire straits. In a search for incentives, Kádár’s regime introduced an amnesty for political prisoners, lifted the press censorship and allowed foreign travel that gradually saw a million Hungarians visiting the West in a single year.

It is impossible to over-estimate the importance for all the satellite states of the Hungarian government’s decision in May 1989 to dismantle the barbed wire, watch-towers and minefields along Hungary’s western border with Austria. On 16 June the Hungarian people showed what it felt about the forty-five years of Soviet domination by reinterring, after a televised state funeral, the remains of Imre Nagy and Maléter, the three other men hanged on 16 June 1958 and a sixth coffin symbolising all the other deaths.