The Atlantic and Its Enemies (7 page)

Hungary went the same way, in September 1947, with a unified Workers’ Party in 1948. Hungary in 1945 had reached the end of the line. Budapest had had its moment of glory, around 1900, and, with Glasgow and Sydney, was among the greatest of the Victorian cities. But Hungary had consistently chosen the wrong side, had lost territory all around, and had fought the war to the bitter end: the siege in February smashed the great bridges between Buda and Pest, the Royal Castle on the Buda side was a ruin, and from the top floor of one of the grandest mansion flat buildings in Pest there stuck the fuselage of a bomber. Crammed into the ghetto area, there survived still about 250,000 Jews, whose lives had been spared because there were considerable limits to the anti-semitism of Hungary; but there was bitterness and privation all around. The Soviet authorities had promoted a sort of last-moment National Front and anti-Nazi coalition, and then set about recruiting Communists in a country that did not, by nature, produce very many. However, land reform was a serious cause in a country still dominated by great (and quite efficient) estates; there was at least a peasant radical movement, and, given the large and sometimes foreign-owned factories in Pest, there was at least the beginning of a labour movement.

To begin with, Stalin had not quite known how to handle Hungary, and allowed a free election in November 1945 - calculating no doubt at first, as with East Germany, that the triumph of the Red Army would cause Communism to become popular. But there was an overwhelming vote for the Peasant Party. It formed a government, but the Soviet occupiers gave control of the police and the Security Service (AVO) to Communists. Most of these were Jewish, their leader, Mátyás Rákosi, soured and made crafty by long experience of pre-war prison. Others had survived in Moscow (where Stalin had had several of their associates murdered) by treachery and guile.

Two young men in the new apparatus, Vladimir Farkas and Tibor Szamuely, had had characteristic Hungarian lives. As a young adept in AVO, Vladimir Farkas, born in 1925 in that selfsame region of what had been north-eastern Hungary that produced Robert Maxwell, distinguished himself as a zealot: the headquarters, on one of the main boulevards of Pest, had its complement of torture instruments, and there was a whole office to listen in on telephone conversations or to open letters. When he was born, his father, a Communist (and later on head of AVO), was in prison, and when he came out the family disintegrated. Father left for Moscow and worked for the Comintern, remarrying with a German woman and living in the celebrated Hotel Lux with the other Comintern families. Mother did not get on with grandmother, tried to kill herself by jumping into the river Hernad with her child, and then left for France, where eventually she joined the Communist resistance. She and Vladimir briefly met again only in 1945. He grew up in a sometimes flooded cellar with his grandmother, who took in washing; as a child he took meals to German Communists in the prison. The old woman, hitherto Orthodox Jewish, decided that there was no God after all, and when the Hungarians reoccupied the place sent the boy off to join his father in Moscow, having baked a favourite cake called
Linzer Karikak
which had raspberry jam inside and nuts outside. She was to die in 1945 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery, but her son, by this time head of the Hungarian Communist security system, would not have a proper tombstone put up. The boy, now fourteen, went on a Hungarian Jewish network to Prague, Warsaw and Moscow in 1939. His first (and characteristic) experience of the USSR occurred when the customs officials split open his apple to find out if anything had been concealed in it. Then he stayed, ignored, with his father and stepmother in the sinister Lux. In October 1941 the Germans arrived outside Moscow, and the Comintern people were evacuated to Samara, then called Kuybyshev. The lift wheezed up and down from the fifth floor, where the Farkas family lived in a set next to the Gottwalds from Czechoslovakia. Father and stepmother piled in with suitcases, leaving no place for the boy, and father pressed the button. Boy ran down the stairs and arrived at the lobby just as father’s bus pulled out. He did get himself to the train after an odyssey through trudging refugees, and travelled for a week, fed from sardine tins by a Hungarian Communist woman, Erzsébet Andics, who, looking like Madeleine Albright, urged her charms on all and sundry. Then that Comintern political school, all pseudonyms, water, relentless Marx and no sex. Vladimir went to Hungary late in 1944 with a view to organizing the Communist takeover. With him went another Moscow product, Tibor Szamuely. Szamuely was the nephew of the man who had set up the Hungarian equivalent of the Cheka, the secret police of revolutionary Russia. They were called the ‘Lenin Boys’. They had fled in 1919, and ended up via Vienna in Moscow. Young Tibor was sent to Bertrand Russell’s progressive school, and was therefore bilingual in English (of which he was a superb writer). Back in the USSR, such people went to camps, and he did as well, but war liberated him and he too arrived in Budapest with instructions concerning the takeover. Both men ended up on the other side. Tibor Szamuely kept his cards hidden and arranged an appointment in the end as ambassador to Ghana (of which he remarked that the anthem should be ‘aux arbres citoyens’) and defected to London with all of his belongings. Vladimir Farkas was imprisoned in 1953 for his misdeeds and was let out in 1961, returning to his grand apartment on the Orsó utca in Buda to see his little daughter and his wife, who slammed the door in his face.

As Farkas says, ‘the parliamentary democratic order was condemned to collapse on the day the November election results were published.’ For a time, the Hungarians were told that they might have favourable peace terms in return for good behaviour: the eventual peace treaty, at the turn of 1946-7, went against them, as all of the lands awarded to Hungary by Hitler were returned to her neighbours. Then there was an inflation - the worst ever experienced in a European country, including Weimar Germany. By July 1946 there were 50 million million million
pengo˝
in circulation, and you survived by doing deals with the Communists, who controlled things. Dealing illegally in dollars was also possible, but it gave the Communists an apparently legitimate way to try to sentence anyone who was involved, including, as things turned out, the Cardinal himself, József Mindszenty. But Hungary was not Poland. The Church did have its supporters, but there was a large Protestant element, itself divided between Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians; there was no basis here for the passive resistance that Poles could put up, or for the Christian Democracy that emerged in Italy to defeat the Communists. Indeed, strict Calvinists, hating the Catholics, supplied useful men for the Communists, including a pastor, Zoltán Tildy, who even became president for a few years. Meanwhile, the Communists infiltrated the trade unions, where there was supposed to be parity with the Social Democrats, and the trick was, as in Czechoslovakia, to identify a left-wing element. This was not altogether difficult. In the first place, there generally was, among the non-Communist left-wing elements, one that would always argue for appeasement: the Communists would behave better if collaborated with. But there was terror, and there was bribery, and there was cynicism; and in the hopeless condition of Hungary in 1945, many people (including among the intelligentsia) saw Communism as the way forward. There were vast demonstrations of ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ in Budapest, and in 1946 ‘conspiracies’ were unearthed, by which the non-Communists could be discredited (there is a heroically mistimed - 1986 - Communist book on this period, by Jakab and Balogh, which announces grandly that ‘the competent authorities of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ ‘discovered the existence of an anti-republican illegal organization’). In Hungary, there was a further factor. In 1920 she had lost many of her old and historic lands, Transylvania especially. With Hitler, some of Transylvania had been recovered; and there was a hope that, with collaboration, something could be saved from the wreckage. Not until early in 1947 were the 1920 borders reconfirmed, Romania taking back Transylvania, and Czechoslovakia or the USSR an equivalent region in the north-east.

In 1946 the non-Communist government had very limited power, given that the Communists held the Ministry of the Interior,
i.e.
the police, and the security services. Besides, the Red Army was in occupation, and it simply carried people off for forced labour in the USSR; meanwhile, the economy, such as it was, was now dominated by Soviet cartels, and the foreign factory owners were powerless. The government was in any case easy to divide, because some of its following remained doggedly faithful to free markets, whereas others were sympathetic to the Left; and the religious division was still so strong that, in 1947, there were vicious fights over the presence of religion in schools. With their stories of ‘conspiracy’, the Communists could arrest, torture and deport even quite prominent Peasant Party politicians, and then extract confessions from them which would incriminate the prime minister himself. The government was only really able to let people escape to the West, including, in spring 1947, the prime minister, whose little son (now a New York banker) was held hostage. At the same time, with mass demonstrations in public, and secret police threats in private, sections of the governing party could be isolated and banned (‘salami tactics’, as they were called). The Allied Control Commission, dependent upon its Soviet chairman, was powerless. In 1947 a left-wing stalwart of the Peasant Party, István Dobi, took over, a man so demoralized and given to drink that, when he headed a delegation to Moscow, Molotov simply slid the bottle contemptuously down in his direction. There was then a coup against the Social Democrat and trade union ‘Right’. An apparatus of dummy parties emerged, and in the elections of September ten parties fought, seven of them splinters, one of them so absurd as to be allowed to function openly: the ‘Christian Women’s Camp’. A Communist-dominated coalition with Social Democrats and Peasant Radicals easily won, and by March 1948 the Social Democrats had been forced into fusion with the Communists, as the ‘United Workers’ Party’. In 1949 this won ‘95.68 per cent’ of the vote, and Stalinism descended.

Its local face was that of Mátyás Rákosi, born as József Rosenfeld in Bácska, to a family of twelve children from a small trader. He had won scholarships to Hamburg and London, had been a prisoner of war in Russia (at Chita, where a Countess Kinsky had helped) and had then experienced, on and off, but more on than off, prison. He knew how to act. He had a superb voice and had charm of a sort; he was also very vain, and at his sixtieth-birthday celebrations had special shoes constructed so that he could appear taller than Anastas Mikoyan, the Party vice-chairman, who bore birthday greetings from Stalin. Thirty-three prominent writers managed to write assorted items in praise of him, at a celebration in the Opera. Rákosi was hideous, the very exemplar of the French line that at forty you are responsible for your face. For the next five years, until the death of Stalin, Rákosi ran Hungary.

As Churchill said, an ‘Iron Curtain’ had indeed descended, and though there were still Soviet sympathizers, they lost the battle for public opinion as the facts seeped through the Curtain. Greece at least had been saved from the Communist takeover because of Churchill’s bargain with Stalin in 1944. But, as ever, Churchill’s side needed American backing.

3

Marshall

When the British announced on 21 February 1947 that they could not go on in Greece, the American reaction went far further than they had expected - ‘quick and volcanic’ was the expression used. In 1945 the Americans had hardly expected to be much involved in the eastern Mediterranean, though they had oil interests in Saudi Arabia. They had not meant to be heavily involved in Europe, even. But now, in February 1947, Greece caused a sea-change. The new Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, spoke - even then, to complaints at his moderation - for the entire Truman administration when on 27 February he said, ‘It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.’ He had spent the previous year in China, where there was a civil war in progress, and had been fooled by the Communist leader, Mao Tsetung. The behaviour of Stalin was still more provocative. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union needed peace in order to recover from the devastation of the war, and American help was on offer. Instead, after a brief interlude tyranny had been reimposed, with starvation and in places cannibalism, while millions of people were worked to death in the camps, and Stalin had told Marshall to his face that Communism in Europe would win. But by March 1947 the Americans had had enough.

Marshall himself was an old military man, straight, austere, not given to panic, but also unwilling to tolerate untruths. Now he spoke for almost the entire American establishment. Dean Acheson, also a man of much integrity, told the Congress leaders that a Soviet penetration of the Near East ‘might open three continents to Soviet penetration’. The need now was to convince a largely apathetic public of the danger, and on 12 March, at a joint session of Congress, Truman made what was referred to as the ‘All-Out speech’: ‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.’ Large majorities gave Truman what he wanted: $300m for Greece, $100m for Turkey. There followed a deliberate American strategy to contain Communism by using the economic weapon.

As Marshall returned from the exhausting and fruitless Moscow conference, without even an Austrian, let alone a German, deal, he could see that the Greek problem was just a small version of a much larger one. Western Europe desperately needed help, and the British themselves were unable to go on shouldering the burden as before. The three western zones in Germany were producing hardly one third of their pre-war level and yet they had been the source of one fifth of Europe’s entire industrial output, including the heavy machinery for which Germany had been so famous. On the official market an egg in Hamburg cost a day’s wage. The former President Hoover had been sent in 1946 to study the food question, on which, with Belgium in the First World War and Russia after it, he was a considerable expert. Early in 1947 he reported that the whole problem was insoluble unless Germany were once more part of a wider European economy.