THE THIRD EXECUTION
OF THE HUNGARIAN COMMUNE
By P RICHARDS
It was no accident that, after the victory of the October Revolution, the first European country where the Commune triumphed was Hungary. The soviets which were set up at Budapest scarcely a year after the Russian Revolution were not only an echo thereof but also the heralds of a great revolutionary wave in Europe. The credit for this belonged above all to the Hungarian working class, which had already trained itself earlier in powerful strike movements and by playing the leading role in the great popular uprisings for Hungary's national freedom, in the struggle against the magnates and capitalists. The Hungarian proletariat's enormous determination to be free was already shown almost 40 years ago in the victory of the proletarian revolution in Hungary. This success was to be attributed, to a considerable degree, to the wonderful cadres of the Hungarian Socialist (later Communist) Party. Lenin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party spoke of their merits with great admiration. When the Hungarian revolution was crushed by the intervention of the armies of neighboring countries (especially Rumania and Czechoslovakia), the Soviet Union opened its doors to the revolutionary refugees who succeeded in escaping from the savage White terror. During the '20s, there could be seen in Moscow and other cities of the Soviet Union many Hungarian political refugees who, together with the Russian proletariat, were wholly sacrificing themselves to consolidate socialist power and participate in the beginnings of socialist construction. They were exceptionally active and held important posts, including in the Red Army. The building of a true and fine socialism in the Soviet Union - that was the ideal that spurred them on and meant for them not only the continuation of their previous revolutionary activity in Hungary but also a serious preparation for a renewed struggle for socialism in their own country: A Hungarian revolutionary, a Hungarian communist, would have been unable to conceive that in the Soviet Union — which was for him the very substance of workers' solidarity and genuine comradeship — anything bad could happen to him as a political refugee. Yet it turned out otherwise. Already in the first stages of the inner-party struggle, which began in the '20s, the elementary laws of hospitality and of the right of asylum were rudely violated. The clique led by Stalin, stimulated by egoism and the desire for power, found that among the Hungarian political émigrés (as well as, incidentally, among the Poles and Italians especially) there were too many Trotskyists, and, later, supporters of the Leningrad Opposition. Petty chicanery and reprisals against the Hungarians in the Soviet Union began already in the '20s: these proletarians of "the old school" wanted worker's democracy, they wanted freedom of thought, especially in the party, they protested against the steady lowering of the working-class masses' living standards on the one hand, and against corruption and arbitrariness on the other. Stalin's attempts to stimulate a Great-Russian chauvinist tone and to push the Soviet Union's foreign policy toward imperialist channels roused indignation among the Hungarian communists, and especially among the best of them. Already at the beginning of the '30s a large number of active Hungarian political émigrés had found themselves removed from their posts and sent to distant regions; secret arrests and sentences by the G P U, which already existed, began; neither the comrades in question nor the closest relatives of those who were arrested knew why and to what punishments they were sentenced, or even of what they In the mid-'30s, when the reprisals against the Bolshevik Old Guard took on a mass character, the persécution of political émigrés, especially the Poles and Hungarians, became general. Since the veterans of the Öctober Revolution themselves were being sacrificed to a regime that was becoming more and more cruel, why should consideration be paid to the survivors of the Hungarian Commune? What was really the most tragic aspect of this matter was that at this period the fascist regimes in Europe, especially Hitler, were reaching the full development of their repressive activity: the European proletariat and, so to speak, the best and best-formed of its representatives, could not believe that Stalin was using precisely this moment to make a bloody liquidation of the victims of reaction and fascism who were within the frontiers of the Soviet Union. And a highly developed blockade of the frontiers aimed at not allowing a word about these crimes to be known abroad, completed the disorientation of the masses throughout the world. When, in 1937-1938, the police measures to guarantee what in today's official documents is called the Stalin personality cult, but which was in fact his autocracy, reached its highest pitch, the series of persecutions of the political émigrés was topped by two crimes of
42 particular enormity: one was the dissolution of the Polish Communist Party and the execution of its leaders; the second, the arrest and physical liquidation of the Hungarian communists, with, at their head, the president of the first soviet government there, Bela Kun. All this took place on Stalin's personal orders, and was carried out — long before Beria appeared in Moscow — by N Jezov, a quite insignificant person who eftectively executed the orders given by Stalin in the name of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the US S R. In the press there appeared only reports full of insults and calumnies. About Bela Kun it was said that "his hands were stained with workers' blood." He himself tried till the last moment, at the seat of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, of which he was a member right up to the moment of his arrest, to appeal to Stalin, for that was the only — and, as events. proved, the vain — hope of the man literally hunted for months by all the running-dogs of the regime. It was only in his prison cell, when he was sick and helpless, in filth and stink, amid an everchanging public of prisoners, awaiting his last minute, that Bela Kun expressed the opinion that if he had fallen into the hands of Horthy or Goemboes, they would surely also have killed him, but less cruelly than Stalin did. Today it is established by the Soviet judicial authorities, solemnly stated by party authorities, and officially published in the Soviet press, that, in the of the Polish party, of many thousands of political émigrés, of Bela Kun and other leaders of the first Hungarian Commune, it was a question of provocation, of banditism, of (White, counter-revolutionary) terror, carried out, not by them, but against them by Stalin and his henchmen! It took more than twenty years for the truth about the crime committed against Bela Kun and the Hungarian communists of the "first" generation to come to the light of day. But in the meantime, Stalin had continued his work of destruction against the Hungarian communists: he sent Laszlo Rajk and - with him, before him, and after him - many other Hungarian communists, to the gallows. Whatever may have been the role of Rakosi and his group in these trials and shameful executions, they were - as has been established — like Jezov formerly, only momentary tools in carrying out Stalin's orders. The authorities of the state and the party, the official press of the Soviet Union and of the "people's democracies," have in the meantime stated that here again it was a question of counter-revolutionary provocations. That was the second execution of the Hungarian Commune. It is only logical, and shows the inexorability of historic laws, that more than five years after Stalin's death there took place for the third time the execution of the Hungarian Commune in the person of Imre Nagy and his comrades. As the memory of Stalin has not been stigmatized by the publication of the truth about his wretched crimes, and the people around him — his henchmen, pupils, and police -remain at their posts just as before, they are continuing the same practices in similar conditions. And only a genuine rebirth of the workers' movement throughout the world can put a stop to their work.