This is the second volume of Peter Kenez's estimable history of Hungary from the end of the Second World War to the Revolution of 1956. In the previous tome, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets (2006), he provided a scholarly and experiential account of the years from 1945 to 1948, years in which the fate of his homeland seemed to hang in the balance. “Seemed to” because even if Kenez is right to say that Iosif Stalin never drafted a blueprint for the Sovietization of Hungary, there was never any real doubt concerning the vozhd΄’s ultimate goal.
That is easy to see now, but in the immediate postwar Hungarian liberals, with whom Kenez identifies, held out hope for a pluralistic Hungary, a third way between the discredited interwar government of Admiral Miklós Horthy and a communist regime imposed by Soviet Russia. It was a hope disappointed. By the middle of 1948 Hungary had been molded into a totalitarian state by the Soviet-backed Mátyás Rákosi, who had spent the war years in Moscow—as did his three tyrannical comrades: Ernő Gerő, Mihály Farkas, and József Révai. All four of them were of Jewish origin, a fact that, as Kenez observes, “mattered a great deal. From the point of view of most Hungarians, these men . . . were not Hungarians at all” (23).
Having solidified power, Rákosi and the others went quickly to work. They introduced the forced collectivization of agriculture and assigned priority to the development of heavy industry, as against agriculture and consumer goods. They turned education and culture into channels of indoctrination. To discourage any opposition, they resorted to terror that touched the lives of every citizen. Under Gábor Péter, the political police sought out enemies of the regime, most if not all of them imaginary. In December 1948, they arrested József Cardinal Mindszenty, a fierce opponent of communists—and Nazis. After being tortured and humiliated, the broken prelate confessed in open court to “crimes” against the state.
The model for the Hungarian terror was the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s. The team of dictators established a forced labor camp at Recsk, where brutally-treated prisoners quarried stone; those who failed to meet the assigned quotas were put on half (starvation) rations. In the chapter “Communists Killing One Another” (88–107), Kenez describes the fate of László Rajk, who was arrested, placed on (show) trial, and executed in 1949. A communist of longstanding, Rajk had fought in the Spanish Civil War before being briefly interned in France—he had, that is, been in the west. Unlike the ruling quartet, he spent the war in Hungary and was not Jewish. In power as Minister of the Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs, he had been guilty of many crimes, but not those for which he was charged, which included being a “Titoist.”
As the leading Soviet Bloc calumniator of Josip Broz Tito, whom Stalin expelled from the Cominform in 1948, Rákosi maintained his unchallenged rule until the Man of Steel's death on March 5, 1953; the new Soviet leaders presided over a “thaw” that cut the ground from under him. Allowed to continue as Party First Secretary, he was forced to yield the office of prime minister to Imre Nagy, who, though a Party loyalist, opposed the forced collectivization of agriculture and the frenzied pace of industrialization; even better from the Soviet point of view, he was not Jewish. The day after forming a new government, Nagy announced a “New Course” that promised to restore legality, assign priority to agriculture, free political prisoners, and close Recsk.
Without intending to do so, Nagy unleashed forces that had long been pent up, and in April 1955 a worried Nikita Khrushchev removed him from office. It soon became obvious, however, that the clock could not be turned back, especially after the Soviet leader delivered an anti-Stalinist speech in February 1956. When, on October 6, a mournful date in Hungary's abortive 1848–49 Revolution, László Rajk was reburied, thousands of people attended the ceremonies because, as Kenez points out, they no longer feared retaliation by the authorities. On October 23, the day the spontaneous Uprising began, the Party Central Committee reappointed Nagy Prime Minister, and he “reluctantly assumed the role of the leader of the nation” (247).
Not the least of this book's many strengths is Kenez's recognition that “what happened [in the pre-revolutionary period] was not predetermined by large historical trends” (262). It was the result of the contingent choices of individual Hungarians.
