Iron Curtain (54 page)

In the short run, the arrests of leading communists did contribute to the public paranoia that reached new levels in 1949, remained high until Stalin’s death in March 1953, and had a real impact on the public, the leadership, and the secret police. Because the accused were alleged to be foreign spies, their arrests were accompanied by a wave of especially vicious anti-American and anti-Western propaganda. In 1952, the propaganda department of the Polish communist party’s Central Committee handed out a pamphlet to party agitators containing sample speeches. One of them, using language typical for the time, proclaimed that the “American imperialists are rebuilding the neo-Nazi Wehrmacht and preparing it to invade Poland” while the Soviet Union was “helping to develop Polish technology, culture, and art.”
⁶⁷
At about the same time, East German activists were also presented with pamphlets instructing them on the proper way to explain West German politics to their East German listeners:

Both the Polish and the German
propagandists also received instructions on the conduct of the “battle against the beetle,” national campaigns to rid the Polish and German potato crops of a deluge of Colorado potato beetles that invaded Central Europe that summer—a scourge that both
Trybuna Ludu
and
Neues Deutschland
blamed squarely on the Americans: U.S. pilots, they declared, had thrown thousands of the parasites down from airplanes over East Germany, which had made their way east. Polish schoolchildren were urged to form brigades to find, catch, and kill them, and factory workers spent their weekends in the fields searching for them.
⁶⁹
The East Germans, who christened the bugs
Amikäfer
, meaning Ami (American) beetles, invited sympathetic foreign journalists from China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and Italy to witness the damage done by
Amikäfer
. Afterward, the journalists and their German colleagues signed a joint protest note: “Colorado beetles are smaller than atomic bombs, but they are also a weapon of U.S. imperialism against the peace-loving working population. We journalists who serve peace hereby condemn this new criminal method of the American warmongers.”
⁷⁰

Though that kind of language sounds ludicrous in retrospect, it had real and tragic consequences at the time. In Hungary, food shortages were widely and angrily blamed not on beetles but on kulaks, wealthy peasants who were allegedly hiding their produce in order to undermine the regime. “Enemies of the state try to prevent us from making bread for the whole nation” declared a 1950 newsreel. In that same year, an elaborate case was launched against a peasant who made a small campfire in a field to cook his lunch, knocked over the pot, and lost control of the flames. Although nobody was injured and the harvest was not harmed, the man’s field burned. A local prosecutor investigated, and was at first inclined to dismiss the case as an accident.

The prosecutor changed his mind after he was visited in the middle of the night by secret policemen who told him that this case involved a kulak, criminal arson, and a crime against the state. On the following morning, officials from the Justice Ministry also called to tell him that he had three days to finish the trial, which was being observed very closely by the highest officials. Amid a burst of national publicity the man was quickly convicted. He received a death sentence that was enacted immediately. As his daughter remembered, “When we were entering the courtroom, we could see the gallows under preparation for the afternoon.”
⁷¹
The authorities had clearly been looking for just such a case, as Rákosi’s personal correspondence from that period reveals. From 1948 onward he had been complaining about overlenient sentences for peasants convicted of crimes such as food hoarding or illegal animal slaughter. “We must take class origins into consideration in these verdicts,” he declared in a note to Ernő Gerő.
⁷²

In this period, the early training of the Eastern European secret police forces also finally began to bear fruit: they had been taught that all independent organizations were suspect by definition, that all foreign contacts most likely involved espionage—and now the evidence at the highest levels proved that those warnings had been correct. Following each arrest of a leading communist, the victim’s relatives, colleagues, employers, and employees fell under suspicion too, and many were arrested. After the arrest of Pál Justus, a social democrat who was implicated in the Rajk trial, the secret police then came, one by one, for Justus’s wife, his secretary, his friends, and then the acquaintances of his friends, of whom
György Faludy was one. “They’ll get you too comrade Faludy,” his driver told him without emotion, and a few days later they did.
⁷³
Almost everybody felt they could be accused, and almost everybody took measures to prove their innocence. At the offices of the newspaper where Faludy worked, the entire staff had gathered to hear Rajk’s sentence read aloud over the radio:

Even those who were not arrested became pariahs. Jo Langer was away from Prague on holiday when she learned of her husband’s arrest. Her companions immediately showed “shock, curiosity, sympathy, helpfulness, tearful embraces, yes. Not many words. Above all, no comments. We were six of us in the hotel room when the call came, all good friends. But at such a moment and in those times, who dared to trust five other people? Or, for that matter, the walls.” In subsequent months and years, Langer lost her job, her apartment, and most of her friends. She and her young daughter barely survived. Only a few courageous people would speak to the wife of an enemy of the state.
⁷⁵

By the early 1950s, in other words, the stage was set for the region’s secret policemen to finish the task they had begun in 1945: the elimination of any social or civic institutions still remaining, along with anyone who might still sympathize with them. Among those finally destroyed were the Hungarian Freemasons.

The Freemasons had deep roots in Eastern Europe, where they had long been linked to projects of modernization and, originally, the Enlightenment. The first Hungarian lodge was opened in 1749—Freemasonry was imported into the country simultaneously from both Poland and France—and Freemasons were an important force in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Treated with skepticism in the interwar period and banned by the Nazis, the Freemasons had lain low until 1945, when a group of them founded the first postwar lodge. The seventy-six new members were, in the words of a current member, “ordinary bourgeoisie”—doctors, lawyers, university professors, civil servants. With the blessing of the provisional city mayor, himself a Freemason, they got back their old building, a splendid structure in central Budapest.
⁷⁶
By definition they were an international organization, and they received some aid from abroad. They began organizing concerts, lectures, and charitable events.

By the end of 1950, the organization no longer existed. It had been banned, and the secret police had ransacked their building and confiscated their books and paintings.
⁷⁷
Major investigations into the activities of all the leading Freemasons were already under way. Of these, the most important
and most comprehensive was the investigation of Géza Supka, grand master of the main Budapest lodge. Supka, aged sixty-seven in 1950, had by that time enjoyed a long and admirable career. A trained archaeologist, he had been the director of the National Museum, a member of parliament, and a founder of a leading literary periodical as well as, after the war, of a short-lived centrist newspaper. He had not collaborated with the fascists, he had not compromised himself during the war. He devoted much of his life to charitable and patriotic causes.

Nevertheless, in the view of the security services, Supka represented a dangerous threat to Hungarian national security. In his thick and detailed police file, a summary of his life, written in 1950, describes him as a “representative of Anglo-Saxon interests in Hungary” and as a traitor plotting to overthrow the regime: “According to our agents’ reports, Supka had received a note in August 1949 from Count Géza Teleki in the United States, advising him to keep regular contact with political personalities on whom they can both count after the regime change. Supka establishes widespread contacts for this purpose …”
⁷⁸

During the previous year, the Hungarian secret police had detained and interrogated many of Supka’s friends and acquaintances. Many had cooperated, as his police file demonstrates. A journalist who had worked for his newspaper was threatened—or tortured—into declaring that Supka was a “man of the Americans,” that he had been recruiting “sympathizers for his movement” since 1944, that he frequently read foreign newspapers, and that after the war he had often visited the American embassy “to speak to his boss.” The journalist claimed to have visited the U.S. embassy in Supka’s company, where he had observed that Supka had suspiciously good relations with everyone there. Worse, “I have knowledge of his participation in cocktail parties with the Anglo-Saxons.” At about the same time, the secret police began opening Supka’s mail, copying letters, and placing them back in envelopes. Among the copied “evidence” against him were notices from Paris about the renewal of his magazine subscriptions.

Nevertheless, the most harrowing element of the file is a series of frequent, almost daily reports filed by someone very close to Supka. Although not named in the police file, this informer must have been a close friend or personal secretary, for his knowledge of Supka’s movements, conversations, and intimate thoughts is very precise. Supka confided many times in the informer, who then gave full reports to the authorities. The resulting report
unintentionally provides a glimpse into the life of a man who knows he is in danger, who knows he is being watched, but who still has a naïve faith in the goodwill of people who are close to him, including the informer.

As the atmosphere in Budapest grew more stultifying, Supka at first thought of emigration. “Political changes will not come soon,” he told the informer on December 20, 1949, and he wondered if he should leave the country, as some of his friends were doing, including the vice president of the national bank. He wasn’t certain, however, and he was afraid to apply for a passport, as that would draw the authorities’ attention. The informer sent this information back to Supka’s case officer, who in turn ordered him to go back “to find out the exact content of the conversation between him and this bank vice president, and at the same time to observe Supka and report as soon as he sees any preparation for immigration.”

The informer complied. He also continued to report Supka’s views on a wide range of topics. In January, Supka told him he was disappointed with American diplomacy in
China, which was too indecisive: he had expected the Americans to be more firmly
anticommunist. However, he was cheered by the appointment of General Bradley to replace Eisenhower because Bradley was a Freemason—as, he said, were Truman and MacArthur. (Supka’s case officer here made a note: “All these reports support our assumption that Supka kept in close contact with agents of imperialist powers.”)

Supka also told the informer that Hungary had two strong links to the West: the church and the Freemasons. The latter, he felt confident, could evade secret police observation. A few days later, however, the file notes that “when our agent left at a quarter to midnight, an unknown young person showed up at Supka’s apartment from the British embassy, bringing a bulletin and newspapers …” The case officer leapt upon this detail as proof of his thesis: “Supka is the most prominent representative of the imperialist powers in Hungary. On the basis of his statement, we conclude that the focus of their activity is the Freemason movement … the person coming from the
U.K. embassy proves that Supka has direct and regular links with Western powers.”

Beginning in the spring of 1950, the informer began reporting on Supka’s thoughts and movements almost every day. Supka told the informer that he was prepared to be detained at any time, and that he’d already made contact with well-connected friends who he hoped would help him if and when this happened. He told him that he knew his name had been dropped from
invitation lists, as people were becoming wary of him, and that he knew he was under observation. But now he had decided not to emigrate, due to his old age and ill-health, and he asked the informer for help in evading what he thought was inevitable arrest. He was trying to get an academic posting in the distant countryside, and perhaps the informer could help him find a suitable place.

In July, Supka and the informer discussed the Korean situation and the fact that several Freemasons had been arrested. In September, they discussed the church–state agreement and the possibility of an American war in Europe. In June 1951, Supka told the informer that police had visited his house, and confessed he was once again frightened of being deported. Among other things they also discussed the defection of Gyula Schöpflin, the former radio director, to Great Britain; the Rajk trial, about which Supka had many doubts; and Supka’s health, which was not good. Still, Supka had many visitors. His cleaning lady gave all of their names to the informer, who passed them on to the case officer.