Iron Curtain (17 page)

Much of this biographical information is impossible to corroborate, because Kiszczak apparently combed the archives for any documents relating to himself when he was interior minister, and removed or destroyed them. One or two have been found, however, including a summary of a report he sent home from London in July 1947, which had been tucked away in someone else’s file. In ungrammatical Polish, it describes how the embassy was registering and monitoring Polish members of the British armed forces who expressed a desire to return home. The contempt that Kiszczak had clearly been taught to feel for these men, many of whom had been fighting since 1939, shines through:

In the rest of the report, the now twenty-two-year-old Kiszczak disparaged the older diplomats in the embassy, the military attaché who seemed insufficiently interested in collecting counterintelligence, the colonel who was trying to demoralize him and others. In another report that survived, he was simply informing on his colleagues in a more straightforward manner. One consulate employee was constantly talking about information he had “from unknown sources” about political violence in Poland, while others were conducting heated policy arguments and threatening one another.

It was a heady job for a young man, but he left soon afterward. In an interview, he claimed that this was because he was lonely and homesick: “I couldn’t eat English sausages.” Or perhaps he had been told, accurately, that there were even better opportunities at home, and he decided to take them. In the chaos and poverty of postwar Poland the secret policemen, however modest their origins, had relative wealth and relative power. And no other state organs could arrest them if they abused it.

From the beginning, anyone with ambitions to become a secret policeman in Eastern Europe knew that the path to influence lay through Soviet connections. But it was not always easy to know which Soviet connections were the correct ones. In
Hungary, the organization that eventually became the State Security Department had not one predecessor but two, each one led by a Hungarian with his own set of Soviet friends and mentors.

One branch was created from above, in
Debrecen, along with the provisional national government, in December 1944. In theory, the provisional government was a cross-party coalition. But although the newly appointed interior minister,
Ferenc Erdei, was technically not a communist, he was secretly loyal to the party, and his first documented comments on the new security services indicate that he knew which way the wind was blowing. In a report to his colleagues on his “productive” meeting with
General F. I. Kuznetsov, the head of Soviet military intelligence in Hungary, Erdei declared on December 28 that they needn’t worry about security, because “Russian guards will help us until we can find enough trustworthy policemen with proper uniforms.”
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He worried, however, that General Kuznetsov was insufficiently interested in halting the crime and vandalism that had skyrocketed in the liberated half of the country: “We discussed far more about the political police, about which he had much general advice and many proposals.”
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One of those proposals led to the appointment of András Tömpe to lead the new service. Tömpe was a Spanish Civil War veteran with longtime links to the international communist movement and a deep conviction that he alone had the authority to become the new Hungarian chief of secret police. He immediately began to organize his new force, requesting and receiving weapons directly from the Red Army. Thus prepared, he set out from Debrecen to Budapest, arriving in the eastern part of the city on January 28, even while fighting continued in the western suburbs.

Unfortunately for Tömpe, he already had a rival. Just a few days earlier, the Budapest branch of the Hungarian communist party had also formed a political police department. Its leader was Gábor Péter, a member of the illegal Hungarian communist party since 1931 and a frequent traveler to Moscow in the years since. Throughout the 1930s, Péter had been in close contact with Béla Kun and the other veterans of the 1919 revolution in Moscow, as well as with Rákosi. His wife, Jolán Simon, would eventually become Rákosi’s private secretary.

Péter had long links to the NKVD as well. Before the war, he had specialized in underground logistics, among other things helping to make contacts between imprisoned communists and their families in both Vienna and Budapest. By his own somewhat self-aggrandizing account, Péter had long planned to lead the postwar political police and clearly assumed that he had been promised the job. He may have had some justification for thinking this. For while Tömpe apparently had the support of Soviet military intelligence officers based in Debrecen, Péter, it seems, had the support of their political masters. Certainly it was true that in the middle of January—before Tömpe’s arrival in Debrecen, and before the siege of Budapest had ended—Péter traveled to Soviet army headquarters in the eastern suburbs of Budapest to renew his acquaintances.
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In February, at a presentation he made to high-ranking Hungarian party members, he sought to give the impression that he was already very much in control of things. He spoke of his ninety-eight employees (“87 workers and 11 intellectuals”), and already claimed to have arrested many “fascists.” In the archives of the Hungarian communist party, a Russian-language version of that report is attached to the original, perhaps an indication that he expected the report to have Russian-speaking readers.
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Within weeks of the war’s end, Tömpe and Péter clashed. Tömpe suspected Péter of lacking sufficient ideological sophistication. Péter blamed Tömpe for providing him with inadequate office furnishings. Tömpe was
angry not to be invited to an event at which the press would be present.
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Each later claimed to have been the first to set up headquarters in the gloomy building at 60 Andrássy Street, the headquarters of the Hungarian fascist police in the latter part of the war, despite the fact that this decision came back to haunt the Hungarian communist party. (The fact that both fascist and communist police used the cellars in the basement as a prison created an uncomfortable impression of continuity between the Nazi and Soviet regimes.)
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Within two years, this comic-opera dispute had been resolved in Péter’s favor. After the election of November 1945, the Interior Ministry was officially placed under the control of the communist party and the fiction of a neutral secret police force was dropped. In 1946, Tömpe “retired” to diplomatic service. He spent most of the rest of his career in Latin America.
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Petty though this struggle may seem in retrospect, Péter’s successful struggle for power was an early and important defeat for Hungarian political pluralism. For one, this important debate about the nature of the new police force took place entirely within the confines of the communist party and was heavily influenced by Soviet officials in Budapest. Neither then nor later did any noncommunist politicians, even those operating legally at the time, ever have impact on the internal workings of the secret police. The nature of the victorious party—Péter and his “Budapest police”—mattered too, since the Budapest police force was in effect an extra-legal structure, controlled not by the Interior Ministry or by the government but by the communist party alone. From 1945 onward, in other words, the political police reported directly to the party leadership, flagrantly bypassing the provisional coalition government.

The special status of the secret police force was clear enough to those who worked for it. Though Péter had deputies from the Social Democratic and Smallholders’ parties, he made no pretense of taking their advice, and no one in the department was ever fooled by their presence. A lower-ranking officer later remembered the noncommunist deputies being “isolated completely”: “It became common knowledge that their rooms were wiretapped so I had to be very careful during contacts with them what I said.”
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When Vladimir
Farkas, Mihály’s son, went to work for ÁVO in 1946, he was explicitly instructed not to talk to Péter’s two noncommunist deputies: “I was not allowed to give them any information about my work, even if I received a direct order from one of them.”
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Nor did the police force listen when noncommunist politicians complained about police behavior. In August 1945 a deputy minister from the Justice
Department wrote a letter to the Interior Ministry complaining that the political police “arrest prosecutors, judges without my prior approval … The above-mentioned practice seriously damages the authority of the justice system.” ÁVO did not respond. A year later, a member of parliament made similar complaints, but by the time his letter came up for parliamentary discussion, he had fled the country. By 1946, such critiques were no longer considered safe to make at all.
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As in Poland, the Hungarian political police were accountable to no one except themselves. Also as in Poland, they grew quickly. In February 1946, Péter’s organization in Budapest employed 848 people. By 1953, the once again renamed State Protection Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or ÁVH) had 5,751 employees in its headquarters, and far more informers.
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From the beginning, Soviet advisers stationed themselves throughout the organization. “Counselor Orlov,” whom one Hungarian Interior Ministry official described as an NKVD officer “dressed as a civilian,” installed himself at 60 Andrássy Street in February 1945. Three other armed policemen—these in full NKVD uniform—were on hand to help him.
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By March, a full chain of command had been established. At the top was
General Fyodor Byelkin, officially a member of the Allied Control Council but in practice the head of the NKVD’s Eastern European intelligence command, which was based in
Baden outside Vienna. From 1947, the NKVD additionally maintained a permanent representative in Budapest—variously known as Lieutenant Kremnov or Kamenovic—whose fraternal assistance was later essential to the organization of Hungary’s political show trials. Beneath them were a host of semipermanent advisers. Even in November 1952 there were still thirty-three Soviet secret police officers plus thirteen of their family members on the official payroll of the Hungarian ÁVH. Along with relatively high salaries, they were provided with furnished apartments; travel expenses; free sports facilities, including a swimming pool, chess, dominoes, and Ping-Pong table; and domestic staff. On the weekends they went hunting. According to one former interior minister these Soviet “advisers” received daily intelligence reports and were involved in frequent meetings with their Hungarian counterparts. (Their advice was accepted, but it seems they were never convinced of the loyalty of the nation they had chosen to serve. On the night of October 29, 1956—when it seemed, briefly, as if the Hungarian Revolution might end in a Soviet withdrawal from the country—all of them, fearing the vengeance of the mob, boarded an airplane and flew back to Moscow.)
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The bosses of the Hungarian secret police kept in close touch with their Soviet mentors. Péter was in daily contact with Orlov, according to Farkas.
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But the
Russians also maintained other sources of influence in Budapest, via a small, mostly hidden but powerful community of Soviet or Sovietized Hungarians who had been born or had lived most of their lives in the USSR. One of them, János Kovács, an NVKD colonel of Hungarian origin, was Péter’s deputy from January 1945 until his death in 1948. An even more significant role was eventually played by
Rudolf Garasin, a man whose official biography seems hardly to do justice to his later influence—and whose life story illustrates that for Hungarians there were also hidden paths to secret police power.

Garasin had been born
in Hungary but wound up as a political prisoner in Russia as a teenager, following the
First World War. Radicalized by these experiences, he joined the Bolsheviks, enlisted in the Red Army, and took active part in the Russian Revolution and then the Russian Civil War. Afterward, he did not go back to Hungary—Béla Kun’s short-lived revolution had already come and gone—but settled in the Soviet Union.
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By his own account, Garasin’s subsequent career in the USSR was unremarkable. According to a memo he wrote for Hungarian party historians, he was active in the Hungarian exile community in the USSR, studied engineering, and then worked for the Soviet Ministry of Light Industry. He rejoined the Red Army as an officer during the war, but, following an injury, wound up working behind the front line. In the spring of 1944, he wrote, he was abruptly called to Moscow and taken to meet a political officer of the Red Army: “While drinking tea, an Interior Ministry lieutenant appeared with a blue cap and, without saying a word, accompanied me to a car that drove to Marx-Engels Square. There another lieutenant waited for me, showed me a door, which I entered, and left me there. There was nobody in the lobby.” Eventually, two figures emerged from the gloom and the mystery was solved: Rákosi and Mihály Farkas held their arms open to greet him.

As Garasin recounts the scene, Comrade Rákosi jovially scolded Comrade Garasin for slipping out of sight for so long (“it had taken them half a year to find me”) and then asked him for help: he wanted Garasin to select volunteers from one of the “antifascist schools” in the USSR in order to form a partisan unit that would enter Hungary along with the Red Army, just as the Kuibyshev gang had entered Poland alongside the Red Army. “Anti-fascist schools” was a euphemism: these were POW reeducation camps, where
captured Hungarian officers and soldiers were learning to become communists. Garasin did as he was told. He was introduced to the Hungarians at “
Institute 101,” the renamed headquarters of what had been the Comintern. In due course he visited the “antifascist school” at
Krasnogorsk, where he was impressed by the enthusiasm of the candidates. So eager were most to return to Hungary and fight their former German allies, he recorded, that they volunteered without hesitation. Garasin also met the “teachers” at the school, many of whom would later be leaders of the Hungarian communist government.