Introduction
On 8 April 1957 Sports Illustrated published an article on the defection of Dezső Gyarmati to the United States. Gyarmati – who led Hungary to three Olympic Gold medals between 1952 and 1964 – was Hungary's best water polo player of all time, and arguably one of the best in the world in his day. In the article, the legendary athlete described the political aftermath of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary: ‘the cowards rule in the shadow of Russian tanks. Many of our friends . . . are kept in prisons and camps without the pretext of a charge or the formality of a trial. The Free World is our first line of defence, our bastion and faith, our foothold, our beachhead.’Footnote 1 Gyarmati's bold, public statement laid bare his intention to make the United States his new home. After failing to find coaching positions abroad, however, Gyarmati returned to Hungary in August 1957. As punishment for activities related to his defection, he was prohibited from domestic competition through 1959 and permanently banned from international play.Footnote 2 By July 1960, however – and with the Rome Olympic Games just around the corner – the Hungarian state reversed their decision and allowed Gyarmati to rejoin the national team.Footnote 3 Motivated by his experiences abroad, Gyarmati knew that only socialist Hungary could offer him the career and privileges he wanted. He emphasised in his biography how he urged his sport connections to soften the punishment. Fortunately, Gyarmati's actions dovetailed with the state's desire to win gold medals. From 1960 onward the former defector enjoyed a successful career and received prized material privileges in return for cooperating and helping Hungary win two additional Olympic gold medals.
This kind of cooperation characterised a larger phenomenon that formed the backbone of Cold War sport. During the cultural Cold War nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain avoided military confrontation by waging political battles in the ‘soft’ cultural spheres of music, dance, literature and, importantly, sport.Footnote 4 Eastern Bloc leaders and sport bureaucrats viewed international athletic contests as tangible representations of objective ‘competitions’ between the two sides, wherein victories appeared to symbolise the superiority of one's political system. Yet to compete and win victories in the first place, Eastern Bloc nations needed to give the appearance of adhering to the culture of the Western-dominated international sport bodies, specifically of pursuing global peace – and not socialist politics – through sport.Footnote 5 Bloc sport leaders realised that they needed to demonstrate their commitment to the sport bodies’ ideals, and therefore work with them, in order to use international sport arenas for political gain.Footnote 6 Sport diplomacy in the Cold War thus required competition and cooperation. Socialist sport leaders needed to balance competitive, politicised mandates from their superiors with the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) ideals of peaceful, sporting engagement.Footnote 7 For Hungarian sport leaders, the bloody 1956 Revolution and mass defection of hundreds of athletes, including Gyarmati, to the West threatened both pursuits. In the aftermath of both events, cooperation became a key tactic that helped the Hungarian sport community to re-establish itself, including sport leaders and athletes. The strategy thus became essential for everyone involved in Cold War sport, even athletes and states on the periphery.Footnote 8
Despite historiographic shifts, the public continues to perceive Cold War sport in Eastern Europe within an unambiguous, totalitarian framework, wherein the East German doping scheme in the 1970s–1980s symbolises the entirety of the Eastern Bloc sport experience. The framework serves contemporary audiences across the former Iron Curtain in different but crucial ways. First, it reinforces the triumphalist Cold War narrative in the West. It also enables everyone to ‘blame’ the abuses in sport on the now defunct socialist systems. Bloc athletes, many of whom remain popular and powerful figures in their countries today, are portrayed as victims alongside their Western competitors and absolved of any compliance with the past system. Support for this narrative includes Rocky IV’s fictional, Soviet boxer Ivan Drago, Disney's 2004 film Miracle and the evidence that emerged after German reunification about East Germany's doping system.Footnote 9 Many scholars initially focused on top-down approaches and topics such as sport diplomacy, administrative policies, repression, propaganda and sporting clashes. Their works demonstrated the importance of sport to the major Cold War powers, and how Eastern Bloc states used sport to exert power over athletes and audiences by shaping and utilising athletes' bodies to prove their systems' strength vis-à-vis the West, and even one another.Footnote 10 Several scholars of East German and Soviet sport and football especially have enhanced our understanding of Cold War sport by exploring moments of sporting cooperation among major nations across the Iron Curtain, and athletes’ engagement with the state as a way to influence their careers and socio-economic positions.Footnote 11 Two recent edited volumes about Cold War sport in the broader European and global contexts continue to nuance our understanding of the topic, such as by going ‘beyond boycotts’. They show how states and athletes across the world, even in non-superpower nations, found ‘a few moments of collaboration’ amid tensions and even conflicts in the international sport sphere.Footnote 12 The culmination of these works demonstrate the promise of exploring the ambiguous zones within which international organisations, states, sport leaders and athletes interacted in order to achieve their respective goals during the Cold War. This analysis contributes to the burgeoning field by focusing on the seemingly peripheral nation of Hungary to show how socialist sport leaders and many Hungarian athletes after 1956 ultimately made the conscious decision to work together to attain their own aims not only for a few moments, but for the remainder of the era. Cooperation was a tactic used by people at all levels, from leaders and organisations across enemy nations, within Blocs and, importantly, by lower-level actors such as athletes.Footnote 13
There is a considerable literature on state–society relations after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and following Stalinism in Eastern Europe, with scholars illustrating examples of the limits or contestations of dictatorship, and participatory dictatorships.Footnote 14 The growing scholarship about socialist consumption and technology also exemplifies how the Bloc's encounters with the outside world shaped domestic and international trends.Footnote 15 This analysis adds to these fields by examining how Hungarian actors and developments in 1956 met and interacted with the global sport arena before returning home to shape the domestic environment, namely by participating in the improvement of athlete–sport leader relations and contributing to state sport diplomacy goals.Footnote 16 When General Secretary János Kádár declared in 1962 that, ‘who is not against us is with us’, he professed an acceptance of apolitical citizens and an ambivalence towards those who did not openly oppose the system.Footnote 17 All Hungarians gained new insights about how to live under socialism from the trauma of the revolution, such as the necessity of cooperating with the post-1956 system.Footnote 18 Yet – due to the state's perception that culture was integral to substantiating its legitimacy – policy changes were already underfoot in the cultural sphere, most notably with the ‘3-T’ policy in 1959 with writers and artists.Footnote 19 People with international careers perhaps learned the lessons of cooperation best, especially in regard to the real limitations and opportunities afforded by the capitalist and socialist systems respectively.Footnote 20 The ‘brawn’ drain from the Hungarian Olympic team and football sphere was the single largest defection of athletes during the Cold War.Footnote 21 Many of the athlete-defectors struggled to re-establish their careers abroad.Footnote 22 The monumental events of 1956 thus sparked equally significant changes in Hungarian sport. Athletes and sport leaders changed their behaviours in ways that modified yet distinguished sport policies from before, expanded each group's opportunities and reflected the realities of post-1956 Hungary and Cold War sport. Importantly, these changes did not reload Stalinist policies, nor illustrate the limits of dictatorship.Footnote 23
In order to foreground the catastrophic damage and subsequent changes wrought by the defections on the sport community, the first section of this article contextualises Hungarian sport and athlete–sport leader relations prior to 1956. I analyse the lives of three male athletes who were punished by the state between 1951 and 1960. For reasons beyond the scope of this article, female athletes engaged far less in activities deemed punishable by the state.Footnote 24 The attempted defection and execution of Sándor Szűcs, the first case, serves as a barometer for the impact of 1956 on the sport community. The analysis then explains the mass defections and the athlete-defectors’ obstacles in the United States. The final section examines Géza Kádas and Gyarmati's experiences to show the factors that influenced sport leaders and athletes to adapt to the ramifications of 1956. By examining sources ranging from secret police files, institutional documents, newspapers, oral histories and biographies to explore the cases, my analysis is grounded in the voices of the individuals who lived and created this history. Although I lack the space to contextualise every source, it is worth noting that, like all historical evidence, these materials reflect the authors’ many lenses and ambitions. For example, the oral histories, secret police files and (auto)biographies are all problematic because their authors all sought to emphasise their agency in participating and constructing the socialist system within which they lived. The author(s) of each source therefore also highlighted the roles they played in shaping their own lives.Footnote 25 I thus triangulated all the sources to take in to account their influences and potential meanings. Despite the difficulties in determining the body or sport leader accountable for the decisions with athletes, I specify the responsible party when the sources allow. I argue that by 1960 sport leaders and many athletes learned that only by cooperating with one another in socialist Hungary could they achieve what they most desired: Olympic gold medals, successful careers and material privileges. These cases comprise only a fraction of the documents and over thirty oral histories that I collected for my on-going research about evolving Cold War cooperation between Hungarian athletes, socialist sport leaders and the IOC. Far from exceptional, within the context of 1956 the cases are demonstrative of how the events of that fateful year immediately improved athlete–sport leader relations, as well as the cooperative practices in Cold War sport and Hungarian society. Exploring the three cases in detail grounds the analysis in human stories about how athletes and sport leaders’ hopes and fears related to the upheavals of 1956 transformed their relationship into one that was cooperative and mutually beneficial.
Stalinist Hungary and Hungarian Sport, 1948–56
The years 1948 to 1953 in Hungary and the rest of the Eastern Bloc are typically characterised as the Stalinist period of rule.Footnote 26 In the late 1940s the Stalinist parties in the region believed that only by obtaining control over the economy, industries and society could they create a new, more egalitarian society that could compete economically and politically with the West. The Bloc countries therefore attempted to create planned, nationalised economies, industrialise the state, abolish private property and free trade and collectivise agriculture. State leaders oftentimes resorted to harsh methods to achieve their goals. Their actions resulted in extreme violence against the public, such as the repression and/or elimination of perceived enemies and exploitative classes.Footnote 27 The term csengőfrász, meaning bell fright, characterises this era in Hungary; it refers to the arrival of the secret police at people's doors in the middle of the night to interrogate and/or deport them to harsh labor camps.Footnote 28 The industrial drive also created an economy of material scarcity, replete with endemic shortages for clothing and basic food items that caused people to wait in time-consuming lines in the hopes of buying them.Footnote 29 The daily material conditions were only marginally better than what existed during wartime.Footnote 30
Amid the harsh repression and shortages, Hungarian sport reached its zenith. At the 1948 Summer Olympics the team earned fourth place in the total medal count. The small nation performed even better at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics Games, winning the third place of all participating nations, behind only the world's two main superpowers during the Cold War: the United States and the Soviet Union. The national football team, nicknamed the ‘Golden Team’ (Aranycsapat) and the ‘Magical Magyars’, only lost one match between 1950 and early 1956. The loss, coined the ‘Miracle at Bern’, occurred when the West Germans defeated the Hungarians at the 1954 World Cup. In Hungary, the defeat sparked the largest protests since 1948, including actions that have led scholars to call it a ‘football revolution’ and precursor to the 1956 Revolution.Footnote 31 The defeat and protests, however, impacted neither sport policy nor Hungary's sport prowess.Footnote 32 Even amid the trauma of the revolution, at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games the Hungarian team won fourth place in the medal count.
The foundation for this era came partly from the interwar period, when Hungarian athletes began dominating the global sport scene. At the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games the Hungarian team won third in the medal count, falling only to Nazi Germany and the United States. Many interwar athletes and coaches continued their work after the Hungarian Communist Party (Magyar Kommunista Párt; MKP) took over in 1948. The MKP therefore found extremely fertile ground when it began forcibly centralising sport alongside its socialist neighbors.Footnote 33 In 1951 MKP leaders like General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and Minister of Defence Mihály Farkas began governing sport directly by bringing the National Committee for Physical Education and Sport (Országos Testnevelési és Sport Bizottság; OTSB) and sport leader Gyula Hegyi under the Council of Ministers’ direct control. All sport clubs also became attached to newly state-owned industries and Ministries. For example, the Ministry of Defence gained control of the Honvéd Futball Club, while the Ministry of Interior placed the Dózsa Sport Team under its wing. They became the Army and Police teams respectively, and subsequently stacked their teams with Hungary's best players.
The MKP's centralisation of sport influenced another dynamic integral to Hungary's success: the athlete–sport leader relationship. Top sport leader Gyula Hegyi and his successors served as intermediaries between athletes and political leaders; one athlete described sport leaders as ‘sports ambassadors’ who made the sport environment more ‘digestible’ than the political one.Footnote 34 Hegyi in particular developed a carrot and stick system of rewards and punishments in order to shape athletes’ behaviour. In the early 1950s Hegyi needed to follow Stalinist policies, and thus relied heavily on punishments to police athletes’ behaviour and ensure that athletes could be promoted as models of the new Soviet Man and Woman.Footnote 35 Yet Hegyi also needed to make sure that athletes’ daily needs were met so that they could train and compete, and also be motivated to do so. He thus used his contacts with party leaders to obtain valuable rewards and privileges for athletes, such as special calorie packages and fake ‘paper’ jobs.Footnote 36 These crucial rewards gave athletes the necessary conditions to train twice daily and maintain their competitive edge.Footnote 37 Hegyi's use of connections was not unique; across the Bloc, leaders, officials and citizens ‘pulled’ their contacts to gain access to goods and services in the shortage economies.Footnote 38 Nearly every narrator provided rich details about the rewards and privileges that athletes received from Hegyi and later sport leaders.Footnote 39 Their recollections illustrate the centrality of the rewards, carrot and stick system and sport leaders to athletes’ sport success. At the same time, despite – or perhaps because of – athletes’ sport success, under Stalinism leaders resorted to extreme measures to prevent athletes from defecting to the West.
The Case of Sándor Szűcs
The story of football player Sándor Szűcs exemplifies the use of punishments to control athletes on and off the field during the Stalinist era. The biggest challenge that Hegyi and the national sport body faced before 1956 was preventing athletes from defecting to the West. The issue emerged in 1947 and reached a breaking point when three heralded football players tried to leave in 1949.Footnote 40 Athletes in other sports defected; yet football was different than other sports. The professionalisation of football worldwide – in which top players could receive lucrative contracts to play abroad – was unique to the sport. It threatened to entice members of the Magical Magyars to defect to teams in Western Europe who would pay handsomely for the world's best players.Footnote 41 By 1951, to discourage athletes from leaving, the top political leadership created specific legal proceedings that made defection under certain conditions punishable by death.Footnote 42 Szűcs became their only victim.
Szűcs played defence for Dózsa Sport Team, the Police team, and thus was a first lieutenant. He also competed on the national Golden Team. In 1951 Szűcs sought to defect to Western Europe for love and for money. He wanted to pursue a new life with his mistress, singer Erzsébet Kovács. Because their relationship ‘ran afoul of socialist morals’, the state had already threatened them with imprisonment if they did not cease relations.Footnote 43 Szűcs also thought that he could obtain a 10,000 dollar football contract in Italy.Footnote 44 The Ministry of Interior caught wind of Szűcs's plan to defect and entrapped him. On 1 March 1951 Szűcs unwittingly gave a secret agent a hefty sum of four thousand Hungarian forints to obtain the documents necessary to defect.Footnote 45 The agent also convinced Szűcs to bring his pistol with him to the Austrian-Hungarian border, so that Szűcs could ‘put away’ two-to-three men if he was caught.Footnote 46 In early March secret police officers intercepted the couple on their way to the border. Barely two months later, in a non-public trial on 19 May 1951, the Hungarian Military Tribunal sentenced Szűcs to death.Footnote 47 Several of Szűcs's teammates, including star players Ferenc Puskás and Gyula Grosics, requested help from the Minister of Defence Mihály Farkas.Footnote 48 Despite Farkas's promise to help, the intervention came too late: Szűcs had already been executed.
Szűcs's crimes and conviction were multi-layered. According to an unpublicised addendum to the penal code, military men who illegally crossed the border received life imprisonment.Footnote 49 However, aggravated cases of attempted defection, such as in the possession of weapons, were punishable by death. Szűcs's military background and the presence of his gun sealed his fate. The planting of the agent, and the agent's role in persuading the athlete to bring the gun, illustrates the significant amount of coordination between the Ministry of Interior and secret police to catch Szűcs and make an example of him. His primary sin lay in attempting to leave Hungary and take his talents to Western Europe. The gun simply provided them with the means to execute him legally. Meanwhile, due to the absence of Hegyi in the secret police materials, it appears as though Szűcs's case was beyond Hegyi's purview and in the hands of higher ranked political leaders. Considering the popularity and enormous success of the Golden Team, the efforts to entrap Szűcs underscore the desire to set him up as a lesson for his contemporaries. Szűcs's entrapment and execution is the only known incident of its kind during the socialist period within the Hungarian sport community for two reasons: it successfully deterred other football players from defecting until the revolution, and after 1956 the violence of the Szűcs case was no longer a viable option for the state and sport leaders to use to gain the willing cooperation of athletes.
Golden Team goalie Gyula Grosics explained it best, noting: ‘having decided in advance that it would be a possible deterrent to other Hungarian players, to scare off thoughts of remaining outside of the country, poor Sanyi Szűcs became the victim of Hungarian football at that time’.Footnote 50 Nothing about Szűcs's attempted defection, trial or execution appeared in the press.Footnote 51 The Ministry of Interior continued to worry about athlete defections; it submitted a list of twenty people believed to be potential ‘flight risks’ before the 1952 Olympic Games, including Gyarmati.Footnote 52 Hegyi gained approval for sixteen of the listed names to attend the Olympics, likely due to the state's sport diplomacy goals of Olympic gold medals. Yet Szűcs's execution was a successful lesson, as only a few more athletes tried to defect before 1956.Footnote 53
The 1956 Revolution and Mass Defections in the Sport Community
The fortuitous timing of the revolution – which broke out mere weeks before the 1956 Olympics began – gave athletes the space to react in a variety of ways. When the revolution began on 23 October 1956, Hungary's Olympic team members were busy training for the Melbourne Games. After famed sports broadcaster György Szepesi called for the revolutionaries to lay down their weapons, the Olympic team sprang into action by condemning Szepesi's speech. The team boldly proclaimed that, ‘we promise that at the Olympic Games we will be fighting in the sacred spirit of the martyrs of the national revolution and for the glory of the Hungarian nation’.Footnote 54 With this declaration, the Hungarian Olympic team made their allegiance to the revolution and the Hungarian nation – and not the socialist state – loud and clear. They only learned about the Soviet invasion and revolution's defeat while en route to Melbourne. Fortunately for members wishing to defect, several Americans and Hungarian-American émigrés had already started formulating a plan. Individuals from Time Inc., Sports Illustrated and the Free Europe Committee convinced the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency to coordinate efforts to bring willing Hungarian athletes to the United States. The resulting mission, Operation Griffin, enabled one-third of the Hungarian Olympic team and four Romanian Olympic athletes to defect to the United States directly after the Melbourne Olympic Games.Footnote 55
The stance of sport leader Gyula Hegyi also proved crucial for athletes wanting to defect. The revolution and Soviet invasion profoundly shaped Hegyi's perspective on the sport community's future in Hungary, and his role in it. He reportedly was despondent and drank heavily throughout the Games. His desire to receive medical treatment in Melbourne has led some to believe that he did not want to return to Hungary.Footnote 56 Hegyi was undoubtedly worried about the state's retribution measures against athletes who supported the revolution, and about being purged himself when they returned, or worse. At the same time, he came to Melbourne as the top state representative; due to the chaos back home, seven of the secret police agents initially scheduled to accompany the team to Melbourne stayed in Hungary to fend off the revolutionaries.Footnote 57 Hegyi therefore wielded more power in Melbourne than in Stalinist Hungary years before. These conditions made the Melbourne Games a unique moment for Hegyi and athletes wanting to defect. Some athletes went to Hegyi for advice about what to do, and walked away from the conversation without being forced or even pressured to return home. Fencer and defector Dániel Magay recalled in a frank tone that Hegyi ‘behaved better than I thought he would . . . some people went there [to Hegyi] and asked, “what do you think I should do?” And he said, “you have to decide”. They didn't push anybody. I was never pushed or threatened.’Footnote 58 Nick (Miklós) Martin, a water polo player and Gyarmati's teammate, specifically remembered Hegyi telling him that he would always be welcomed home.Footnote 59 Other people recalled that Hegyi offered them a shot of pálinka and a sausage as a parting gift.Footnote 60 The athletes’ remembrances illustrate their trust in the top sport representative of the socialist state in Melbourne during an incredibly stressful and uncertain time. Fellow athlete defector László Tábori described Hegyi as a ‘nice man’ who was ‘a communist on the outside, but not on the inside’.Footnote 61 These recollections demonstrate how even athletes who showed their dissatisfaction with the socialist state by defecting vividly remembered Hegyi and his actions in Melbourne in positive terms. Hegyi's response to the defecting athletes helped him to maintain his relationship with many of them, thereby keeping the door open in case they decided to return to Hungary.
The softening of Hegyi's tactics immediately after 1956 and athletes’ defections fundamentally impacted the global sport environment. In addition to the Olympic athletes who defected straight from Melbourne thanks to Operation Griffin, over 200 footballers, such as Ferenc Puskás, fled across the Iron Curtain.Footnote 62 The athletes and coaches in the ‘brawn’ drain took their talent and knowledge to the United States, Australia, Western Europe and South America, and helped athletes in other nations win precious gold medals.Footnote 63 The reverberations of Hegyi's changing stance, in addition to the 1956 Olympics and the US operation, gave athletes a once in a lifetime chance to leave and influence sport around the world.Footnote 64
For some athletes, however, the United States turned out not to be the land of opportunity that they had anticipated. About one-quarter of the thirty-eight Olympic defectors returned to Hungary within two years.Footnote 65 Some simply wanted to reunite with their families. Others struggled with the barriers they faced in obtaining competitive eligibility and grew disappointed with the lack of opportunities the United States offered to athletes. Officially, the US operations aimed to parade athletes as ‘symbols of freedom’ in propaganda aimed at the American public, and help them settle down so they could help American athletes defeat the Soviets.Footnote 66 Yet no one explained the mechanisms of US sport culture to the athletes, and only one of the thirty-eight defectors, Martin, spoke English in 1956.Footnote 67 They therefore did not understand the Western amateur ideal that US sport bodies used to govern sport. The amateur ideal held that in order for athletes to remain amateurs and compete in sanctioned events, they could not receive payment for sport-related endeavours.Footnote 68 Unlike in socialist Hungary, athletes in the United States needed to be independently wealthy, work a full-time job and/or attend university in order to be eligible to compete domestically and internationally.Footnote 69 The athlete-defectors faced an equally difficult obstacle to competing internationally for the United States: US citizenship.Footnote 70 Most of them did not obtain US citizenship until the early 1960s, about five years after defecting. The earliest Olympics that they could compete in for the United States was the 1964 Rome Games, eight long years after Melbourne. By that point most of the athletes had aged beyond their competitive peak, and in the meantime had begun another career to pay their bills. Commenting on the struggles Olympic runner and defector László Tábori, experienced, Tábori's sister said that ‘he was deeply depressed, but that should be no surprise because he had everything back home. . . . They could travel and admiring fans surrounded them. He got promised the world when he arrived here and six months later he was on his own’.Footnote 71 The difference between the athletes’ expectations and the realities they experienced in the United States proved extremely difficult for some of the defectors to bear, especially compared to their ‘special treatment’ in socialist Hungary. Athletes like Gyarmati, who returned, knew that their best prospects for sport, status and material wealth lay in socialist Hungary.
The defectors’ frustrations presented an opportunity for Hegyi and the Hungarian leadership to recoup the damages that 1956 had wrought to their sport diplomacy goals. But they needed athletes’ help. In the international sphere, sport leaders aimed to rebuild the nation's image as a leading sport superpower who – despite the violence and terror during the revolution – appeared firmly committed to the Olympic ideal of peace.Footnote 72 Hegyi had already begun this process in Melbourne, due to his position and changing stance towards athletes. Considering his inner struggles over his future role in the post-1956 state and sport community, his approach in Melbourne might have been ad hoc; regardless, his tactics appeared to set the tone for how the reconstituted state handled athletes who behaved badly in the wake of 1956, as the Stalinist era's harsh retribution against athlete-defectors or their families was no longer a top priority.Footnote 73 Hegyi's approach enabled athletes to decide on their own accord to come back to Hungary. This demonstrated to the international sport world Hungary's benevolence after all the violence.Footnote 74 Athletes who returned willingly, rather than under state pressure, would also be more motivated to contribute to sport diplomacy goals.
The state also required the help of the press to tackle the related issue of Hungary's massive demographic losses after the revolution. The nation lost far more than athletes and coaches; the flight of over 200,000 Hungarians between November 1956 and early 1957 created a significant deficit of workers and university educated young adults. The dire consequences of the mass exodus on socialist Hungary's industrial and intellectual strength rendered returning athletes’ stories a valuable propaganda tool for persuading Hungarians to stay. The state sport newspaper, NépSport, used the stories of returned athlete-defectors to exhibit the ills of life under capitalism. After water polo player Gábor Varga returned from Italy in spring 1957, NépSport reported Varga saying:
Yes, I feel good now. I'm home once more, amongst my family, between
friends, and I can train at the Sport Pool again. I've been through a lot during
the past few months . . . everywhere I felt myself a stranger, without a homeland,
an exile. I met many Hungarians, sport people, water polo players out there. . . .
Their situation is almost hopeless, their future is hopeless . . . they cannot take on
work. I heard this about the Gyarmati's too.Footnote 75
The article effectively linked the exile experiences of the athlete-defectors, such as Gyarmati, with the Hungarian refugees’ feelings of being a ‘stranger’ in ‘exile’ in the West. Conflating the situations portrayed to readers that the defectors’ trials and tribulations would be their experiences if they too left Hungary. This propaganda tactic built upon – and perhaps was influenced by – Hegyi's actions in Melbourne. The willing return of athlete-defectors helped the state achieve its sport diplomacy goals, and its propaganda efforts to prevent further demographic losses.
Punishments, Athletes and the State after 1956
The cases of Géza Kádas and Dezső Gyarmati illustrate the process by which the revolution and mass defections impacted elite sport policy, as well as the actions of sport leaders and athletes. The socialist state believed that the men's actions threatened the authority of the state or sport leadership to varying degrees and found them guilty of committing various crimes in their responses to the revolution. Since sport leaders needed athletes’ assistance to rebuild the nation's reputation domestically and abroad, they immediately altered how they treated athletes by shifting the emphasis of their carrot and stick system. Rather than force athletes into submission with heavy-handed punishments, Hegyi and others sought to persuade athletes to cooperate through more benevolent tactics. Hegyi meanwhile weathered the storm by working for the new sport body, the Hungarian Council of Physical Education and Sport (Magyar Testnevelési és Sport Tanács; MTST).
An exemplary athlete before 1956, Géza Kádas fell swiftly from grace following the revolution.Footnote 76 Kádas competed on the national swim team from 1946 to 1954, winning a silver and bronze medal at the 1948 Olympics. In December 1956 he was arrested for purportedly burning fifty copies of the state newspaper, Népszabadság, during the revolution.Footnote 77 The crime seems insignificant, considering the magnitude of revolutionary activities other Hungarians committed. Since countless people witnessed Kádas's revolutionary activities, however, the post-1956 state viewed him as a danger to the legitimacy that it struggled to rebuild. As a result, he was sentenced to death for counter-revolutionary activities like 800 of his compatriots.Footnote 78 Gyarmati's Sports Illustrated piece spread news of the swimmer's situation to the United States in April 1957. Gyarmati said that Kádas had been convicted for the ‘minor part he played in the revolution’.Footnote 79 Importantly, Hungarian sport leaders acted quickly to intervene on Kádas's behalf. On 31 May 1957 the Hungarian Swimming Federation's General Secretary, István Bárány, submitted two letters in support of Kádas. The letters detailed his swimming accomplishments, described him as példmutató (exemplary), and included how the OTSB had awarded him the revered title ‘Outstanding Athlete of the Hungarian People's Republic’.Footnote 80 Bárány's demonstration of Kádas's achievements appear as a legitimate attempt to moderate the harsh sentence.
Coincidentally, the Hungarian Swimming Federation was also preparing to host the 1958 European Aquatics Championships in Budapest. Hosting major sporting events offered the socialist countries a platform to project the validity of their political system, strength of their sport programme and their dedication to the Olympic movement.Footnote 81 Kádas's sentence did not bode well for the nation's already damaged international reputation, especially after being publicised by Gyarmati's comment in Sports Illustrated. Two months after Bárány's letters of support for Kadás, Bertil Sällfors, Honorary Secretary of the International Swimming Federation (Fédération Internationale de Natation; FINA), wrote to Bárány. Sällfors declared that:
While FINA does not usually make an attempt to meddle in political issues . . .
it is very bad that the swimmer Kádas is being sentenced to death for the events
of last November. It is possible that this may lead to some kind of boycott of
next year's European Championship. . . . I beg you to please write a recommendation
to the Ministry of Sport that he can influence this case.Footnote 82
Sällfors’s letter was highly unique. As part of their focus on peaceful, sporting cooperation that worked across political divisions, sport organisations sought to maintain a strict, non-intervention policy in domestic and international politics.Footnote 83 FINA's statement that ‘this may lead to some kind of boycott’ of the championships could be read in one of two ways: either that the International Swimming Federation threatened to boycott the event, or it feared that national federations would boycott it. In the absence of additional evidence in the Hungarian or FINA archives, Sällfors’s precise meaning is unclear. Yet his letter underscored the international body's real concerns: that Hungary's damaged reputation and Kádas's death sentence would negatively impact FINA's global image and legitimacy as an organisation that promoted friendly, sporting engagement. Sällfors’s letter also implied the risk to Hungary's reputation and sport diplomacy if the death sentence was not modified.
Sällfors’s letter achieved the desired effect: Kádas was not sentenced to death but instead to eight years in prison and was eventually released in 1961. Like other amnestied individuals, his convict status shaped the rest of his life. Rather than find work as a swimming coach, like most retired athletes, he toiled as an unskilled labourer.Footnote 84 The punishment therefore prevented him from influencing young athletes’ political and moral development. He died destitute in 1979.Footnote 85 FINA's successful intervention might suggest that Kádas enjoyed significant international support. Based on Sällfors’s explanation, though, the organisation seemed more concerned with its reputation during the Cold War than assisting the Hungarian swimmer.Footnote 86 The softening of Kádas's punishment demonstrates the importance of the international sport community's opinion to the leadership of post-1956 Hungary. His case also points to the limitations of the sport leadership's ability to help athletes who participated directly in the revolution. Kádas did not represent the level of past or future success as Gyarmati and others. Perhaps if Kádas had achieved more international victories, sport leaders could have secured him an even more lenient punishment.
Unlike Kádas, Hungary's legendary water polo player Gyarmati caused significant trouble for the sport leadership before, during and after 1956. He attempted to defect after the 1948 London Olympics. This prompted the secret police to include Gyarmati on their list of ‘flight risks’ prior to the 1952 Olympics.Footnote 87 Hegyi saved him each time, wanting to keep Gyarmati's gold-medal talent in the state. Gyarmati demonstrated his allegiance to the revolution in several ways.Footnote 88 The Hungarian Olympic team selected him as one of three people to lead their symbolic Revolutionary Committee, showing the team's enormous respect for him during the tumultuous time.Footnote 89 Gyarmati moreover refused to shake hands with the Soviet athletes after their infamous ‘Blood in the Water’ match in Melbourne, which offended the Soviet players.Footnote 90 The Australian national security service reported that Gyarmati's refusal to shake hands created a ‘difficult situation’ between the two teams. The report also explains that Gyarmati's refusal prompted the Soviet athletes to declare that the Russians would ‘fix’ the Hungarians after their return home.Footnote 91 Unaware of the Soviet athletes’ statement, Gyarmati returned to Budapest to reunite with family. When they arrived home Gyarmati wore the black Lajos Kossuth badge of the revolution, demonstrating solidarity with the revolutionaries, many of whom awaited harsh sentences.Footnote 92
1957 was a tumultuous year for the athlete. A group of Soviet soldiers beat him up, ostensibly fulfilling their athletes’ wishes back home.Footnote 93 Gyarmati reached his breaking point; he left on 1 February 1957 for Western Europe with his wife, Olympic champion swimmer Éva Székely, and young daughter, future Olympian Andrea Gyarmati.Footnote 94 One newspaper article addressed their unexpected departure by portraying his flight as one of the reasons for an on-going dispute within the Hungarian water polo community, and how it continued to impact Hungarian sport and the nation.Footnote 95 The leadership likely believed that by confronting Gyarmati's departure directly, the press could control how readers interpreted Gyarmati's actions.
When the pair failed to find coaching positions in Western Europe, they travelled to the United States in mid-March. Within a month, Sports Illustrated published the piece on Gyarmati mentioned at the outset of this article. He also declared in that article that, ‘uprooted and exiled as we are, we are free. We must cherish this freedom, not for any ulterior or personal sake, but for those who look to us for encouragement or support.’Footnote 96 Considering the anti-communist leaning to Sports Illustrated, it is no surprise that the magazine used Gyarmati's statements as propaganda for its domestic readers, and perhaps for others who might also need ‘encouragement and support’ behind the Iron Curtain. Importantly, these efforts were not dissimilar to NépSport’s intentions behind returned defector Gábor Varga's comments about the ills of the West.Footnote 97 Dick Neale of Sports Illustrated soon found Gyarmati a job as a clerk at Chase Manhattan Bank. Gyarmati, however, admitted to lasting only one day in the position.Footnote 98 Despite the athlete's earlier declarations about the free world, he realised that ‘freedom’ did not give them the same sport opportunities and lifestyle as socialist Hungary. On 7 August 1957 Gyarmati and his family left the United States in the hope of negotiating their return to Hungary.Footnote 99
The Hungarian state did not make their homecoming an easy one. Initially, the MTST, within which Hegyi worked, refused to allow them to return. After some negotiation, the post-1956 national sport body allowed the athlete couple to return with full amnesty.Footnote 100 Yet full amnesty did not preclude Gyarmati from further punishment. He experienced periods of intense interrogation by the state security forces.Footnote 101 The press publicly announced that Gyarmati's crimes included applying for asylum in a foreign country, pursuing a sport activity abroad without authorisation and allowing himself to be swayed by defected, ‘hostile’ sport leaders.Footnote 102 Moreover, ‘because of his witnessed activity at the Melbourne Olympics, it would have been necessary to apprehend him, but because of his merit up to that point, they overlooked it’.Footnote 103 The MTST's Disciplinary Committee decided to use Gyarmati's merit prior to 1956 as a justification to only punish him for crimes related specifically to the defection. Seemingly following Hegyi's actions in Melbourne, the sport body's committee left the door open for Gyarmati to eventually continue his career domestically.
Gyarmati stood apart from other athletes in terms of his cultural status. With his success and popularity came significant social capital, which evidently helped his situation with sport leaders. In his biography, the athlete described using his connections to persuade several people to pull strings for him. Gyarmati's efforts earned him permission to join the water polo team at Ferencváros Torna Club in early 1960.Footnote 104 At his urging, Gyarmati's contacts continued to work on his behalf. Less than a month before the 1960 Rome Olympics, NépSport announced on its front page how sport leaders had received permission to suspend the ban on Gyarmati's participation in international competitions. As a result of his ‘good behaviour since the ban’, he was brought onto the Olympic water polo team to compete in Rome.Footnote 105 Importantly, by consciously emphasising in his 2007 biography his role in influencing the punishment and his life, Gyarmati admitted to contemporary readers to trying to cooperate with the socialist state. Gyarmati's efforts aside, the sport leadership justified the reversal on account of the athlete's merit, status and behaviour. The MTST's sport diplomacy goals were also key to the reversal, as exemplified in the body's December 1958 statement that, ‘the most important task ahead of our sport is preparing for success at the Rome Olympics’.Footnote 106
Gyarmati's career and status continued to rise unabated.Footnote 107 The state awarded him the ‘Socialist Work’ medal for his participation in the 1960 Olympic Games.Footnote 108 He continued competing and helped the Olympic water polo team win a gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The victory brought his Olympic medal count to three golds, one silver and one bronze medal. He began coaching in 1966, eventually leading the Olympic team to a gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He appeared countless times as a sports commentator from the 1980s until his death in 2013. Even today FINA considers him one of the best players of all time.Footnote 109 By tracing his family's legacy, it could be argued that Gyarmati's willingness to cooperate under socialism helped to provide at least some of the groundwork for his family's later achievements, in terms of the sport connections and knowledge that often aid in sport success.Footnote 110 His wife Éva Székely, an Olympic champion swimmer in her own right, helped to coach their swimmer daughter, Andrea Gyarmati, to silver and bronze medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Dezső Gyarmati's daughter Eszter Gyarmati, son-in-law Zoltán Szilágyi and granddaughter Liliana Szilágyi all achieved varying degrees of success in gymnastics and swimming. Liliana Szilágyi continues to compete today and recently won sixth place in the 200-metre butterfly at the 2019 Swimming World Championships.
The differences between the treatment of Szűcs in 1951 and that of Kádas and Gyarmati demonstrate the overall impact of 1956. The Szűcs case exemplified the repressive and harsh climate of Stalinist Hungary in the early 1950s. The concerted efforts of the Ministry of Interior and secret police illustrated the state's true desire to make a lesson of Szűcs's attempted defection to his contemporaries. The events of 1956, however, put Hungary under a microscope within the international sport community. Kádas's direct participation in the 1956 Revolution identified him as someone willing to damage the state's legitimacy. After 1956 the state cared enough about its sport diplomacy goals to be influenced by external diplomatic pressure. This was a significant turnaround from the Szűcs case. Yet Kádas's experiences upon his release from prison illustrate the limits of the state's help for less successful athletes. The MTST's approach to Gyarmati underscores their belief that he offered more to their sport diplomacy goals and efforts to stabilise the post-1956 state than Kádas. Gyarmati's potential to keep contributing to Hungarian sport mattered more to sport leaders than making an example of him by punishing him more severely. After returning in 1957 Gyarmati decided to do everything in his power to resume his career after being punished, as he emphasised to readers in his biography. His conscious actions contributed enormously to the state's goals. This increasing cooperation and benevolent tactics did not only exist between Gyarmati and sport leaders. Other athletes, including, for example, Olympic fencers Lídia Dömölky Sákovics and her husband József Sákovics, returned to Hungary in late 1957 after defecting to the United States through Operation Griffin. According to Dömölky Sákovics, the sport leadership did not punish them upon their return but instead welcomed them back with open arms.Footnote 111 While József Sákovics began coaching upon his return, Dömölky Sákovics continued her fencing career and won a team gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics before becoming a coach herself; they ultimately both coached numerous Olympic fencers throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Dömölky Sákovics remains active in the contemporary Hungarian sport community and continues to live in the apartment allocated to her by the sport leadership in Budapest today. The experiences of Gyarmati and the Sákovics's underscore how athletes and sport leaders learned that cooperating with one another enabled them to achieve their respective goals in the wake of 1956.
Conclusion
Historians typically point to several moments in the 1960s that helped to improve state–society relations after the revolution. These include Kádár's 1962 statement, ‘who is not against us is with us’, the state's 1963 general amnesty for many of the imprisoned revolutionaries and the reforms of the 1968 New Economic Mechanism, which aimed to boost profits in the Hungarian economy through the creation of small businesses and increased international trade. As these developments culminated in the 1960s, the leadership and public alike significantly altered their mentalities regarding life in socialist Hungary. Members of both groups gradually reached a tacit acceptance – not an official agreement or pact, as neither were ever explicitly signed – that if people did not repeat their actions from 1956, the state would not resort to the repression of the pre-and immediate post-1956 eras.Footnote 112 Along with this gradual, unwritten acceptance, each side also adapted their ideas about how to coexist and achieve their respective goals under socialism. Ordinary Hungarians seemingly reconciled to the futility of future resistance with the more relaxed political atmosphere and increased socioeconomic opportunities available to them through the 1968 reforms and other efforts. By making the difficult choice to adapt to the post-1956 state out of concern for their own interests, Hungarian citizens played a crucial role in creating the environment known by some as ‘Kádárism’.Footnote 113 Although state–society relations continued to evolve after the 1960s – with some bumps along the way – the tacit acceptance achieved by the late 1960s characterised much of how both groups behaved in late socialism.
Importantly, the tacit acceptance between state and society was the well-developed status quo amongst athletes and sport leaders by the late 1960s. The lives examined here illustrate how this worked in practice following the events of 1956. First, Hegyi's tactics with athletes were not new or innovative after 1956; rather, his multi-faceted concerns about the reconstituted Hungarian state influenced him to modify the Stalinist era's carrot and stick system, with a shift in emphasis to fewer punishments and more help and rewards than before. The combination of the international sport world's distant yet crucial influence and the struggling domestic climate significantly influenced this shift. Importantly, after the violence of the revolution, the state and press needed the willing participation of athletes in order to rebuild the country's image as a peaceful member of the global sport community and domestic workforce. To gain their willing cooperation, the sport leadership and socialist state chose to prioritise more benevolent tactics with athletes than the harsh retribution they had meted out during the Stalinist era. Many athletes’ attitudes about living under socialism underwent a significant shift as well. Western countries like the United States ostensibly offered athletes ‘freedom’ and the hope of continuing their sport careers. Yet as athletes like Gyarmati realised, the United States would never give them what they wanted. In order to thrive in their sport careers in the Cold War and receive prized privileges, athletes needed to work within Hegyi's system in socialist Hungary.
A confluence of factors therefore arose out of 1956 that convinced sport leaders and athletes to reach an unspoken and cautious understanding with one another. Gradually and haltingly, members of both groups realised that cooperation was necessary for them to reach their respective goals. This does not mean that athletes did not get punished for bad behaviour later on. Just as athletes behaved and cooperated to varying degrees until 1989, sport leaders and the state did not always implement measures vis-à-vis athletes in uniform ways. The Gyarmati case is representative, however, of why the sport leadership and many athletes chose to work with one another on and off the field in the decades following 1956.
While recalling his experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, Olympic pentathlete and current Adidas Hungary sports marketing director Attila Császári described them as the ‘beautiful years’ of his life. ‘Sport’, he explained, ‘could protect me, sport could give me a nice target, sport could develop myself [sic]. So I have to thank, in general, to sport for almost everything.’Footnote 114 His recollections were not mere nostalgia or wistful thoughts, but were instead supported by numerous memories about his privileges, behaviours he needed to avoid and his complex relations with sport leaders in late socialism. Peeling back the many layers of his statement reflects not only on the environment of socialist Hungary, but also of Cold War sport. The conditions of the domestic and international spheres helped to facilitate the development of the ‘beautiful years’ of Hungarian sport following 1956. Finally, athletes’ cooperation should not be seen as communist collaboration, nor as a capitulation to the state's ends. Depending on their situation, athletes like Gyarmati chose to cooperate as a way to achieve the best sport life domestically and internationally. Their decision to do so was an attempt to influence their lives and assert agency within socialist rule and Cold War sport.
Acknowledgments
The research could not have been completed without the generosity of the narrators who shared their memories (some of whom have since passed), nor the help from archivists at the Hungarian national and state security archives or Dominik Petermann at the FIFA Documentation Centre. The author would also like to recognise and thank the numerous individuals who contributed inspiration, ideas and suggestions at conferences and via email throughout the piece's evolution. These people include Greg Mason, Alice Freifeld, Matt Jacobs, Emese Ivan, Toby Rider, Bob Edelman, Miklós Zeidler, Rob Nemes, Leslie Waters, Alan McDougall, Harry Blutstein, Jess Taylor, Mallory Szymanski and Bálint Fekete. The members of NASSH's Graduate Student Essay Prize provided insightful comments on an early draft of this article in 2017. The anonymous reviewers also offered excellent critiques that greatly improved the analysis, and the Contemporary European History editors provided fantastic help throughout. The archival and oral history work for the material in this piece were funded by numerous sources, including the Department of Education's Fulbright award, NASSH's Dissertation Award, The Olympic Studies Centre's PhD Research Grant, the University of Florida's Center for European Studies’ language and research fellowships. Importantly, California State University, Fullerton's Junior Intramural Grant allowed Toby Rider and me to create some of the oral histories used in this analysis for the ‘Cold War Athlete-Refugee in CA Oral History Project’ in 2017–9.
