Antifascism, the 1956 Revolution and the politics of communist autobiographies in Hungary 1944 – 2000

Abstract

Using oral history, this contribution explores the reshaping of individuals' public and private autobiographies in response to different political environments. In particular, it analyses the testimony of those who were communists in Hungary between 1945 and 1956, examining how their experiences of fascism, party membership, the 1956 Revolution and the collapse of communism led them in each case to refashion their life stories. Moreover, it considers how their biographies played varying functions at different points in their lives: to express identification with communism, to articulate resistance and to communicate ambition before 1956; to protect themselves from the state after 1956; and to rehabilitate themselves morally in a society which stigmatised them after 1989.

I didn't use this word ‘liberation’ (felszabadulás), because in 1956 my life really changed. Everybody's lives went through a great change, but mine especially. … I wasn't disgusted with myself that I had called the arrival of the Red Army in 1945 a liberation, but [after 1956] I didn't use it anymore.

Notes

¹All respondents were promised anonymity; hence all names used are pseudonyms. Quotations in this article are taken from the following interviews: Ernö: interviews with author, April and May 2000; Mátyás: interview with author, April 2000; Márton: interview with author, May 2000; Csaba: interview with author, April 2000; Jenő: interview with author, May 2000; Ágota: interview with author, May 2000; Miklós: interview with author, December 1999; Alajos: interviews with author, November 1998 and February 1999; Benedek: interview with author, September 1998; Judit: interview with author, April 2000; Imre: interview with author, April 2000; Károly: interview with author, May 2000; Kálmán: interview with author, May 2000; János: interview with author, May 2000; Zsolt: interview with author, July 2000.

²An exclusive suburb of Budapest.

³This occurred on 21 January 1945.

⁴This refers to fears on the left, which were exaggerated by the communists for political advantage, that the right were planning to undermine the fragile post-war democracy with an ‘anti-republican conspiracy’. It was used by the communists as a pretext to arrest the first secretary of the Smallholders' party, Béla Kovács, in February 1947.

⁵This was an echo of communist propaganda in early 1947, when they accused the Smallholders' party of helping to organise an ‘anti-republican conspiracy’ to undermine post-war democracy and impose a ‘reactionary’ social order.

⁶An ‘eternal flame’ was constructed by Hungarian nationalists in 1926 to the memory of Lajós Batthyány, who was executed as prime minister of Hungary during the war for independence against Austria in 1848 – 1849.

⁷A poet and journalist who joined the Communist party in 1930. He was soon expelled, committed suicide in 1937, but his work was later appropriated by the communist state.

⁸On the social memory of the revolution, most research has been done on younger generations' responses to the uprising; on the children of those executed and caught up in the reprisals (Kőrösi & Molnár 2003) and on ‘third-generation’ post-communist teenagers (Szalai & Gábor 1997, pp. 26 – 50).

⁹Thanks to Mark Pittaway for providing me with these figures.

¹⁰On 30 October 1956, an armed assault on the party's headquarters on Köztársaság Square led to lynchings and the deaths of 24 people who were guarding the building. After 1956, the state presented the dead as communists martyred at the hands of fascists and this story became one of the main propaganda tools used to establish the idea of 1956 as a counter-revolution (Rév 2005, p. 215).

¹¹From this point many members of the intelligentsia and old middle classes (from whom this sample of party members is taken) began to recover the social position they had lost in the early communist period (Rainer 2005, pp. 66 – 67; Valuch 2001, p. 99; Gáti & Horváth 1992).

¹²Some scholars of memory have explored social complicity in the process of official silencing (Passerini 2003, pp. 242 – 244; Young 2002).

¹³For explorations of the collective silencing of 1956 see György (2000), Gyáni (2001), Ripp (2002), and Kőrösi and Molnár (2003, p. 2).

¹⁴Silencing of the past was not a feature of all respondents' testimony; however, nearly all interviewees took care to protect their social position from the intrusion of past political actions.

¹⁵This practice of referring to the suppression of the ‘counter-revolution’ indirectly also explains the absence of a memorial to the ‘Soviet heroes’ of 1956 in the Kádár period. Commemorations of the suppression of ‘counter-revolution’ were held every 4 November at the World War Two monument that celebrated liberation from Fascism. This compromise allowed ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be associated with Nazis, but ensured that the actual role of the Soviets in 1956 could be glossed over (Rév 2005, p. 194).

¹⁶This does not mean that all had morally pure life stories; rather that they believed their experiences could acceptably be turned into such a story.

¹⁷Different post-communist conservative leaders have utilised different aspects of the recent past. József Antall, the head of the first post-communist conservative government from 1990, could not—unlike other figures such as Wałęsa and Dubček—present himself as a resistance hero. His father had played a significant role in the Horthy regime (Rainer 2005), however, and it was to the sense of continuity between anti-communism of both the Horthy regime and post-communist Hungary that he appealed. Viktor Orbán, leader of the conservative Fidesz party and prime minister between 1998 and 2002, referred much more to the conservative legacy of 1956; this was in part because he had established his political credentials demanding that the Soviet army leave the country at Imre Nagy's reburial in 1989; hence his political reputation had been built on the back of the memory of 1956 (Gyáni 2006).

¹⁸Horthy's regency saw the enactment of anti-Semitic legislation (from the early 1920s), the imposition of the Nuremberg Laws in Hungary, the creation of Jewish forced labour battalions, massacres of Jews following the annexation of Transylvania in 1941, and eventually the deportation of Jews to concentration camps after the occupation of Hungary by the German army; however, Hungary under Horthy also remained one of the safest countries in Europe for Jews fleeing deportation until March 1944. Rather than allude to a mixed legacy, conservatives tended to stress the latter point alone.

²⁰His interpretation is clearly moulded by the Black Book of communism's focus on counting the number of victims in order to judge communism. This is the figure the Black Book gives for deaths attributable to communist rule in the Soviet Union, and includes not only state-sanctioned killings, but also deaths in the Gulag, through famine and those indirectly caused. It is interesting that he referred to a figure for deaths outside Hungary to make his point; despite lasting for approximately eight months (and communism just over four decades), fascist rule in Hungary led to a far greater loss of human life (including over 500,000 Hungarian Jews) than the communist regime did.

¹⁹See, for example, Kuromiya, who argued that,‘Courtois’[one of the writers of the Black Book] attempt to present communism as a greater evil than Nazism by playing a numbers game is a pity because it threatens to dilute the horror of the actual killings’ (Kuromiya 2001, p. 195).

²² Az Államvédelmi Hatóság (literally, the State Protection Authority) existed from 1950 to 1956.

²¹This interpretation is also present at the conservative ‘House of Terror’ museum in Budapest; the linking space between the exhibitions on the fascist and communist periods is called ‘Changing Clothes’. The room contains cloakroom lockers; two mannequins back to back, one dressed in the uniform of an Arrow Cross member and one in the garb of a communist, which spin around; and Rákosi's statement, ‘Sometime unfortunately we admit fascists into our party’ printed in large text on the wall. Party members, it is suggested, can merely slip on a new uniform and turn from fascists into communists.

²³Ex-party members did admit to manipulating their antifascist biographies for personal gain, but only after 1956 when they no longer supported the party, led depoliticised lives, and had stopped being concerned about questions of integrity when instrumentalising their political pasts.

²⁴This is the approach used in the House of Terror museum. Imre Nagy features most prominently in the room on communist justice (as an illustration of the absence of it in his 1958 trial), but is not present in the exhibition room that deals with the uprising itself. Indeed, the museum sites 1956 and its aftermath not within the main two floors of the museum which provide a narrative of Hungarian history from 1944 to c. 1958, but in a dark basement room between the reconstructed prison cells of the secret police and the ‘Hall of Tears’ (which commemorates the victims of communism). This placement suggests that 1956 is not being remembered for its specific political aims but has become historically decontextualised to operate merely as a symbol for the communist victimisation of the nation. Such an approach makes it easier to write Imre Nagy's politics, and the reform socialist tradition, out of the historical narrative.

²⁵It is striking that even though the left has mobilised Imre Nagy, the other significant leftist contribution to the revolution—the Workers' Councils—have become unfashionable with the decline in leftist working-class culture and are now seldom mentioned.

²⁶According to Orbán, ‘October 23rd bequeathed to us the inheritance of national independence, freedom and bourgeois democracy; November 4th however gave us the traditions of treason, terror and dictatorship’ (Litván 2002, p. 261).

²⁷In his radio address of 3 November 1956, Cardinal Mindszenty, following his release from prison, refuted the idea that 1956 was a revolution, preferring to characterise it as a ‘fight for freedom’ to re-establish the historical traditions which had been broken by the arrival of the Red Army in 1945. This conservative platform rejected not just communism, but also the progressive, democratic system which had emerged between 1945 and 1948.

²⁸It was striking that respondents from a variety of political traditions reproduced, in the post-communist period, aspects of the Kádár-era conception of 1956 as a counter-revolution intent on restoring a bourgeois ‘reactionary’ state to Hungary. Conservative respondents used it positively to suggest that the revolution was intent on re-establishing a bourgeois Hungary, and that reformed socialists played only a minor role. Reformed socialists (such as Károly above) used the threat of the right-wing restoration in the revolution to suggest that the right had sabotaged the reform process by inviting the Stalinists to suppress the revolution. Supporters of the Kádár system still produce counter-revolutionary rhetoric in post-communist testimony.