The Aftermath

• Reprisals and restoration of the political system
• Showdown with the revolutionaries

Reprisals and restoration of the political system

The extraordinary legal powers introduced on December 12 opened a new period in the restoration of the Bolshevik system. Having vacillated for a month, the Kádárite authorities were resolved on drastic measures that would effectively restore dictatorial socialism, although their spokesmen continued to dissociate them from the methods of the Rákosi period. The individuals and groups considered most dangerous were dealt with, after which policy concentrated on crushing and intimidating society, regaining control of the public administration, and building up a national party organization <one-party system>.

The reprisals that continued until the great 1963 amnesty functioned as a means of obtaining power and of retaining it, right up until the change of political system in 1989–90, by acting as a deterrent to opposition. The first stage in this long, ruthless period of mass repression lasted from early December 1956 until the spring of 1957. This can be called the phase of unrestricted, unbounded reprisals. The retaliation was still not targeted at defined groups. The regime attacked all parts of Hungarian society indiscriminately. Furthermore, the apparatus conducting the reprisals fail to observe even the paltry, self-imposed legal constraints, as will be seen later.

The main legal disguise adopted in this phase of the reprisals was summary justice, but these trials did not offer the accused even the minimal opportunities of defending themselves they obtained later. People arrived in court without charges having been brought, or with only a few lines of accusation before them. In many cases, it was only in court that prisoners met their defence lawyer for the first time, who was not familiar enough with the documents, the accused or the accusations to mount a credible defence. In any case, the proceedings were not directed at establishing what acts the accused had committed and under what circumstances. With the commonest charge—concealment of arms—the prosecution would content itself with establishing that weapons had been concealed and pass sentence on that basis. The sentences were certainly severe. No mitigating circumstances of any kind led to a sentence of any less than ten years’ imprisonment.

The summary-justice proceedings were intended to punish and intimidate the whole of society, not just those who had been active in the armed revolution. The authorities wanted to put fear into society because they themselves were afraid, of the weapons that were still at large and of those who might use them. Only in about half the trials was there any mention that the accused had taken part in the revolution in some form (as an armed rebel, a national guard, and so on), and the courts made little effort to proof such statements. Sentences were passed equally on factory guards who had hidden weapons, demobilized army officers who had failed to hand in their service pistols, those buying rifles for poaching purposes, armed robbers, and communist Greek settlers in Hungary.

The other important form of reprisal in this early phase was internment. The decree permitted the confinement for public-security reasons of anyone whose person or conduct the authorities considered might disturb the order or peace of society. The decree, allowing for six months’ internment which could be extended by two further six-month periods, served several purposes. It was a substitute for remanding prisoners in custody, because the special forces arrested so many people in December 1956 that the only partly restored prosecution service was unable to cope. It was a help with the trials as well. Potential witnesses in them could be interned, which put pressure on them to testify in the way required. Later, it helped to take pressure off the overworked courts, as a form of punishment for acts that the authorities did not think merited a prison sentence, allegedly committed by persons they thought it was worth vilifying personally, for their past or for their social allegiance.

The firing incidents at this time functioned as reprisals in a similar way. The bullets fired on crowds did not draw distinctions, just as the summary courts <summary justice> did not confine their sentences to active participants in the revolution. The firing incidents, of course, were among the forms of reprisal that were illegal, even according to the distorted legal system of the time. There were other illegal acts in which members of the special forces would surround a workers’ or students’ hostel or a village and brutally beat up all who fell into their hands, almost indiscriminately. Physical maltreatment was an almost inevitable accompaniment of arrest in this period. Only in the autumn of 1957 did it become more likely that a detainee might escape it. Several of those arrested died of injuries received in prison. However, a distinction has to be drawn from cases where the special forces intentionally murdered a prisoner seen to be an enemy. (On December 9, 1956, two arrested leaders of the national guard at the Salgótarján steelworks were tortured and killed and their bodies dumped into the River Ipoly.)

The beginning of the reprisals caused a renewed flight of refugees. Large numbers of people had left the country after the November 4 invasion. In December, the situation began to look still more hopeless for those who had played a part in the revolution and for the country, which led to a second, bigger flight. Most of the refugees fled to Austria, while the rest reached the West through Yugoslavia, although there were some who tried to reach West Germany <East and West Germany> by way of Czechoslovakia. Altogether, about 180,000 people left the country permanently, which further weakened the resistance at home.

As the mass reprisals got underway, the central power of the Kádár regime <Kádár government> steadily expanded and stabilized itself, bringing first Budapest and then the provinces under its close control. In December and January, the remaining centres of the revolution were wound up, such as the Writers’ Union and the Journalists’ Association. The central workers’ council in Csepel preferred to dissolve itself rather than lend any legitimacy to the regime. On January 5, a government statement broke with the subtler analysis of the HSWP Provisional Central Committee resolution of December 4, making a crude attack on the government of the ‘traitor’ Imre Nagy, which presaged the future calling to account. It became apparent that the Kádár government was not going to keep the political promises it had made in November. It gave up the idea of forming a paper coalition, after some initial attempts had failed, and the political parties that had revived during the revolution withered away. Purges began in the central offices of the state and in the judiciary. On January 12 came the introduction of accelerated criminal proceedings, which relied, ironically, on legislation passed during the period of right-wing reprisals that followed the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. The purpose was to convict swiftly and severely those who had taken part in ‘counter-revolutionary. However, the method did not live up to expectations, either in severity or speed, so that it was replaced in the spring by a new type of penal institution, the people’s courts. In February, the Workers’ Militia was formed as the armed wing of the party, charged primarily with armed action and intimidation against the internal opposition.

Party committees were formed in towns and then rural districts, to take back local power from the workers’ councils and national councils, which were intimidated and shorn of their leaders. The last true representatives of the people were squeezed out of local government in March. As the communist party extended its power again, it gradually shed the supporters of reform, which necessarily strengthened the admirers of Rákosi and his methods. National and local press campaigns were started against the revolution and its leaders.

The pre-1956 political system was almost totally restored in the early months of 1957. The communist state party <one-party system> directed the country again and the Soviet system was restored throughout the country. Leaders who had been elected during the revolutionary period were removed and in most cases arrested. A similar fate awaited the functionaries who had joined the mass movements of October and November. Disciplinary proceedings at work places began in the spring of 1957, under the euphemistic label of rationalization. The managers removed were ones who had supported the collective demands and gained personal prestige among those they directed, or simply among their colleagues. Time was even found to purge local party organizations. The people removed or disciplined were the ones who had wavered or accepted one or two of the people’s demands in October, rather than the ones who had forsaken their posts, so long as the latter were prepared to give the new leadership their unconditional support.

The recapture of political power, nationally and locally, coincided with the process of reimposing party control over all aspects of life. An end was put to the trade union <SZOT> efforts to gain some independence. All the organizations that did not fit into the reimposed structure (such as the workers’ councils) were stifled or confined to a semblance of activity. Kisz, the Communist Youth League, was re-established under party auspices as the sole institution of the youth movement. Other youth organizations were wound up or so restricted that they withered away. A new system was fabricated for imposing party control and supervision on the churches; ten or twenty clergy were arrested as a way of breaking church resistance. The party monopoly over the press was fully restored.

The political investigation department set up within the police force may not have been the successor of the ÁVH, but it certainly inherited many of its personnel and functions. (At the same time, the special forces lost significance and were wound up soon afterwards.) The new institution’s first test came at the beginning of March. It made masses of arrests and handing of suspects to the prosecution service, which by March was also initiating 1956-related prosecutions on a mass scale, although it failed to keep up with the police activity.

Early in 1957, the party leadership sent Gyula Kállai to Snagov in Romania, to learn what position was taken by Imre Nagy and his associates, who were in involuntary exile there. Kállai was to discover to what extent they were united, and whether there were any chances of weaning any of them away from Nagy and gaining their support for the Kádár government. He returned with little to show for his visit. The vast majority of the exiles were staunchly behind Nagy and the Hungarian revolution. None of them would turn against the revolution openly or help the new regime to gain legitimacy. After hearing Kállai’s report, the inner leadership of the HSWP decided as early as February that Nagy and his associated would have to be tried.

Meanwhile the government was accompanying the terror it had unleashed with some gestures to the public. Specialist committees were set up to consider economic reforms. Pay rises and price cuts were announced. Rail-travel concessions withdrawn four years earlier were restored. Measures such as these could not match the revolution’s demands, but paltry as they were, they could be seen as advances in a country worn out by resistance.

The advances made at home by the Kádár government were not paralleled by any success abroad. Public opinion in the non-socialist world displayed their disgust at the Soviet intervention and the Hungary’s puppet government by demonstratively accepting and welcoming Hungarian refugees. The UN General Assembly set up a special committee on January 10, 1957 to discuss the Hungarian question. The UN secretary-general indicated that he wanted to visit Budapest and gather first-hand information on the situation. The Hungarian Revolutionary Council was set up at a general meeting in Strasbourg at the beginning of January. There, the 1956 emigré community formally elected as its leaders Anna Kéthly, Béla Király and József Kõvágó.

Moscow was less worried about the propaganda measures of the West. (There was more concern about the worsening relations with Yugoslavia.) The illegitimately formed Kádár government, on the other hand, found the constant threat increasingly unpleasant. It found it had less diplomatic room for manoeuvre than it had expected when it was formed, since it received little or no support from the reformers in the socialist camp. Even after it had crushed the opposition at home, it remained dependent on other socialist states, because of its financial promises, which were designed to compensate for the cancelled political reforms. Help from the ‘fraternal countries’ was required to stave off economic crisis. This help came at a price: there was interference in Hungarian internal affairs and insistence that revolutionaries be called strictly to account (something to which the Kádár regime was inclined in any case).

The search for drastic solutions and the external pressures both tended to push the HSWP leadership to the left. The number and influence of the party members inclined towards reforms decreased, while the orthodox camp steadily grew. Rehabilitation of the ÁVH began. The pro-Rákosi wing of the party revived with the return of József Révai from the Soviet Union, while the veterans of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 created a distinct group. At the beginning of 1957, only about 10 per cent of the HSWP had not been members of the pre-revolution HWP. In other words, the membership of the new party had soon come to resemble the membership of the old. During the first few months of the year, this resemblance spread to the structure and mode of operation of the party. Leadership was usurped not only by the party, but by a small group within the party (János Kádár, György Marosán and Ferenc Münnich), as it had been by the Troika of Rákosi, Gerõ and Révai in the early 1950s. They took the important decisions without consulting the ostensibly responsible party bodies, such as the Central Committee, whose resolutions they reinterpreted at will. Meanwhile the party became a state party <one-party system> again, taking the government decisions instead of the government, controlling the national press, and so on.

However, the position of the country’s rulers was still not secure, despite the terror they unleashed and all the power they usurped. Doing away with the institutions of the opposition simply drove the rearguard actions of the revolution underground. The ideological legitimacy and revolutionary credentials of the Kádár government were attacked, under the pseudonym Hungaricus, by Sándor Fekete, formerly on the staff of the central party daily Szabad Nép, in a study that essentially called for a return to Imre Nagy’s policies. There continued to be broad public support for intellectual opposition of that kind.

Some groups at home and in exile refused to accept that the revolution had been crushed and planned to resume the armed struggle on March 15 (the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution). Some brought out weapons they had hidden in November and December, others distributed leaflets calling for a new uprising. The authorities exaggerated the importance of this campaign (known as MUK from its Hungarian initials). Despite the fact that any notion of resuming armed resistance was unrealistic, it provided them with an excuse for expanding the machinery of oppression, imposing further restrictions, and making mass arrests in early March. Furthermore, the triumph over the exaggerated peril raised the prestige of the Interior Ministry and its influence in the party and of the Hungarian party leadership in the Kremlin.

The latter was especially important to Kádár and his associates, who travelled to Moscow on March 21. The Hungarian leaders took with them a number of requests, and the only recompense they could offer consisted of progress with the consolidation, total acceptance of the Soviet line (especially in foreign policy), and successes in eliminating ‘counter-revolution’. Khrushchev and the CPSU leaders duly expressed their appreciation of these successes at the talks, endorsing the steps that the Kádár leadership had taken. This provided a basis for requesting that Moscow confirm its support for the policy described as centrist, accept the HSWP resolution excluding from Hungarian political life the Rákosi group of exiles in Moscow, and endorse the plan to try Imre Nagy. There was no disagreement on any of these issues. Khrushchev even did Kádár the favour of having Rákosi moved from the capital to Krasnodar. He wholeheartedly agreed that Imre Nagy/a> and his associates should be prosecuted and given heavy sentences, but drew Kádár’s attention to the need for careful timing that considered foreign-policy requirements.

The most important thing for the Kádár group, along with stabilizing their power and gaining Moscow’s approval, was Soviet financial assistance. That was the only solution to a menacing economic situation and to satisfying the financial demands of the discontented public. This had to be a period in which the emphasis was on continuity, not change, so that it was vital to avert insolvency by orthodox economic means and not have to introduce reforms whose outcome would be uncertain.

Showdown with the revolutionaries

The reorganization of the penal and judiciary systems, the triumph of the MUK campaign and the success of the Moscow talks gave a strong impetus to the reprisals. These were being targeted not at the whole of society, but at certain groups and types of activity. Once the Kremlin had given its approval, successive politician-members of the Snagov group of exiles were arrested and investigated. In April, the Supreme Court established the Council of the People’s Court. This was followed in the summer by five other people’s courts, in Budapest and Gyõr-Sopron, Baranya, Csongrád, Pest and Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén counties. These formed the judicial institution eventually capable of conducting the huge numbers of political trials and handing out the severe sentences required by the regime. The people’s-court legislation placed the defence at a disadvantage to the prosecution. The presiding judge could declare the proceedings complete before the defence had made its case, reaching a verdict simply on the prosecution evidence and testimony. If the sentence did not suit the authorities, there was unlimited scope to increase its severity on appeal, even if the prosecutor had accepted it in the first instance. The chief prosecutor, if he saw fit, could assign to the case the Council of the People’s Court of the Supreme Court, against whose verdicts there was no appeal.

For this long, second phase of the reprisals, the party defined which groups and activities it wanted to punish most severely. The guidelines of penal policy, published for internal use on December 10, 1956, show the vengefulness of the party leadership and their desire for absolute security in power. They wanted to settle with the armed rebels, the group, which had turned against the regime with the most determination. On the principle of an eye for an eye, they also wanted to be even with anyone who had taken part in the mob justice and street lynching of the revolutionary period. Most of the death sentences were passed and carried out on freedom fighters, and those who avoided the noose seldom received a sentence of less than ten years’ imprisonment. Apart from those already mentioned, the rebels executed included István Angyal, László Iván Kovács, János (‘Uncle’) Szabó, János Bárány and Miklós Gyöngyösi.

Those who had proved they could lead some group or community, such as a work place or a village, or the whole country, could also be targeted and heavily sentenced. The party leadership was intent on monopolizing power, so that anyone with leadership qualities who acted independently, without party support was not tolerated. Imre Nagy, Árpád Brusznyai of Veszprém and Gábor Földes of Gyõr were executed, for example.

Another targeted category was the leading intellectual and artistic figures, especially the writers who had supported or helped to prepare for the revolution, although none of these was executed. Among those who sentenced to long terms of imprisonment were the novelist Tibor Déry and the poet István Eörsi.

Finally, like all systems basing their rule on an ideology (or purporting to do so), the Kádár regime would tolerate no heretics. The party opposition of the pre-1956 period and the left-wing intellectuals who joined them were subjected to reprisals. Among those who received prison sentences were Sándor Fekete, László Kardos and György Litván.

The acts that the accused had committed were not the only factor determining their sentences, of course. The proceedings had to prove, or ought to have proved, one of the crimes outlined in the December party resolution—that the accused was a class enemy , or one of those who had prepared for or led the counter-revolution.

Even some thorough cooking and falsifying of the figures and statistics failed to reveal that more than five per cent of those sentenced were ‘Horthyites’ or class enemies . The vast majority of those sentenced to death or imprisonment were manual workers, peasants, clerical employees or students. This made it necessary to invent further pejorative categories. Those who had changed jobs several times or grown up in state institutions were branded as Lumpenproletariat. On the other hand, a communist or labour-movement past or a working-class background was an aggravating circumstance for those placed in the category of ‘deliberate traitors to their class’.

Apart from the ‘class’ dimension, the courts were concerned with ensuring a complete spread across society in their work, horizontally and vertically. After the early period of reprisals had ended in the spring of 1957, most of the trials were held in camera. Only rarely would a sentence be reported in the press. The authorities hoped that secrecy would help the machinery of retaliation to run more smoothly, blunt protest at home and abroad, and prevent the day-to-day work of consolidation from being disturbed. On the other hand, the process was supposed to intimidate the whole of society. Each community and section of society had to have its trials and sentences, each village and trade had to yield up its scapegoat. The concurrent application of so many criteria ultimately meant that the reprisals became an irrational and unpredictable process.

The only constraint on the number of sentences was the capacity of the courts and the prisons to handle them. Even in this early period, the Kádár regime was concerned to distance itself at least from the methods of the Rákosi period. The procedures followed in the reprisals after 1956 bore an underlying resemblance to the show trials of the Rákosi period. Both served political purposes. Both involved crude executive interference in the workings of the judiciary. Both forced the courts, shorn of their independence, into subservience to the authorities. However, there were also distinctions between the procedures in the two periods and these were later to gain importance. The show trials of the Rákosi period were built entirely on trumped-up charges. The trials of the early Kádár period concerned acts that had been committed, but were considered in isolation from their original context and placed in another dimension. In other words, they were criminalized by being viewed through the prism of politicized judiciary. In this way, participants in a struggle for freedom could be condemned as murderers and Prime Minister Imre Nagy executed as the leader of a conspiracy.

There was also the important difference that the accused were legally defended, albeit to a limited extent. In the ‘classic’ show trials, defence lawyers were more concerned to defend the ‘socialist’ social system than their clients. Here, according to how bold they were and what scope was open to them, lawyers tried to get their clients acquitted. There were many restrictions on the right of defence. Apart from those mentioned earlier, there was an approved list compiled by the justice minister, which excluded many lawyers from participating in political trials. There were restricted opportunities for defence lawyers to study the documents on the case. Not least, the trials coincided with a process of reorganizing the lawyers’ chambers (associations), which meant there was a threat of losing their livelihood hanging over those who were too eager in their clients’ defence.

The most important trial in the period was the trial of Imre Nagy and his accomplices.

The accused in the Imre Nagy trial, as sentence is passed on June 15, 1958

There were several reasons why the Kádár group needed to try and execute the man who had been prime minister during the revolution. These explain why it was still thought necessary to do so eighteen months after the event, in the summer of 1958. First, Nagy’s execution was required to authenticate the explanation that had been fabricated for the 1956 revolution—an attack by the class enemy on proletarian power that the party failed to fend off because of treachery from within. Secondly, the living figure of the legitimate prime minister was a constant reminder of the illegitimate origins of the Kádár government. The authorities were intent on making sure that this was forgotten as soon as possible. Finally, some communist leaders were dissatisfied with the scale of the reprisals, so that harsh sentences would be evidence of the leadership’s resolve. The Nagy trial could even be seen as an effort by Kádárite policy, which saw itself as centrist, to cut off the road to the right, while Rákosi’s exile in Krasnodar intimated the fate that might be ahead for those to the left of the regime.

Of course the regime’s dissociation from those to its right and left was by no means equal. On one side, there were almost 230 death sentences and several thousand terms of imprisonment meted out. On the other side, there were just a handful of short prison sentences (for Gábor Péter and Mihály Farkas, for instance), during which privileges were granted over the ’56-ers and ordinary prisoners. Meanwhile exiles like Gerõ and Rákosi remained as party members until 1962, although they were prevented from playing a political role. There are several factors to explain this difference of treatment. For one thing, the reforming policy was the more dangerous to the Kádár group. The revolution of 1956 had shown that it enjoyed mass support and could run the country without outside assistance, whereas the Rákosi regime could only defend itself from the people with Soviet support. The Kádárite ‘centre’ was also skewed to the left by the increasingly violent and drastic process of consolidation, which emphasized its character of a restoration. It was also important that Kádár, for a long time, was not strong enough to wave a struggle on two fronts. He needed to conciliate one side if he was to stabilize his power, and of course he chose the side that was less dangerous and more akin to his regime. For though he saw himself as a centrist between the two extremes, he was certainly closer to the left. Imre Nagy, in October 1956, had been able to transcend his earlier convictions. He was prepared to follow the policy chosen by society, rather than the path he himself thought best and would have chosen. Kádár, on the other hand, ruled throughout in an undemocratic fashion, although there is no denying that he was much more concerned than Rákosi with the views and attitudes of society, so that he was able to break with his more extreme dictatorial methods by 1962–3. Nagy had worked towards a separation of state and party that gave scope for political pluralism and social self-organization. Kádár restored the state party <one-party system>, stifled all other political manifestations, and made the party’s influence and power total again. Finally, the Kádár system proved to be as incapable of durable reform and change as the Rákosi regime had been. Nagy’s policy had been marked by an open approach and support for corrective measures. The lesson that Kádár drew from 1956 was that reforms lead to an explosion. Although he was obliged to make innovations from time to time (for instance in 1968, with the New Economic Mechanism), he was extremely cautious and built into such reforms brakes that would more or less bring them to a standstill after a while.

After the discussions in Moscow in March 1957, Kádár and his associates continued to broaden and institutionalize the reprisals, and to continue the set of policies they had begun early in the year, which was intended by this time to consolidate, rather than just stabilize their power. In May, about ten per cent of the members of Parliament were deprived of their seats, a few for left-wing, but most for right-wing inclinations. This also meant they could be prosecuted. At the same time, the parliamentary term was extended for two years, which would postpone the general election to a time when no surprises need be expected.

In the same month, an agreement was signed with Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the stationing of Soviet troops in Hungary. This legalized the presence of the troops (or turned it from a temporary into a permanent presence), but also placed legal constraints on their movements within the country.

Stronger measures were taken to appease wage-earners, who made up the vast majority of the population. Instead of pursuing economic growth, the economic plan was designed to promote equilibrium, coupled with a steady, secure rise in the standard of living.

The dual policy of the authorities (deterrence and appeasement) began to have results. Social solidarity, which had been one of the main characteristics of the resistance and the months of rearguard action, began to break down in the late spring of 1957. The assistance given to the detainees and their families remained on an occasional, personal level, and never developed into a broad, national assistance movement. Society, having become atomized again, proved incapable of unified action for several decades, except in the ways and frameworks dictated by the authorities. After the Moscow talks, the mass demonstration organized for May 1 in Budapest’s Hõsök tere (Heroes’ Square) seemed to confirm that Kádár’s policy of consolidation was succeeding. March 15 having passed without incident, the already traditional mass demonstration for May Day showed that the apparatus of power had been successfully reorganized, since it had averted the danger in March and ensured a celebration without incident in May, worthy of the festival of labour. The developments showed that society had given up the fight and was bowing to the party’s will, and this provided some leverage for combating the UN campaign. The request to visit the country from the Committee of Five and the secretary-general was turned down on the grounds of interference in the country’s internal affairs.

The success on May 1 also assisted the preparations for a party meeting designed to end the temporary nature of the HSWP organization. It was a meeting, rather than a congress <party congress> because the delegates were designated by the county party committees, not elected by the local branches (except in Budapest, which was under closer control), to forestall unexpected developments. Another sign that the leadership was still uncertain of itself was that the public would be excluded. (Only when it proved unexpectedly successful were the minutes published.) A broad ideological campaign was launched to precede the meeting, during which the topmost members of the leadership gave lectures. These centred on condemnation of the ‘counter-revolution’, which further increased the strength and influence of the left wing in the party. This was one reason behind the exclusion of two politicians from the Provisional Central Committee of the HSWP, just before the national meeting. Back in November, the two concerned, József Köböl and Antal Gyenes, had been the ones most concerned for a negotiated agreement or compromise with the Nagy group, even suggesting they might be allowed to form a party of their own.

At the party meeting in June, the leadership was confronted by the fact that most of the membership was more left-wing than they were. József Révai arrived with a distinct, Stalinist platform. The vast majority of the delegates favoured changing the name of the HSWP to the Hungarian Communist Party, and there were even some left-wing attacks on the leadership. However, the meeting had been well prepared and was kept under strict control, so that it confirmed Kádár’s team in office. This gave the leadership a complete victory, helped by the fact that Khrushchev had managed to forestall a Stalinist coup in Moscow only a few days before. The left wing in Budapest was lulled by promises that the remnants of the ‘counter-revolution’ would be systematically eliminated and punished. The meeting endorsed the Kádárite policy so far and outlined the tasks for the future accordingly.

One of the tasks emphasized after the party meeting, along with the detailed work of consolidating power, was to speed up and complete the regulation of the reprisals, not least because that had been the basis on which party unity had been achieved. Despite the agreement in principle, only in the second half of the main period of reprisals, at the end of 1957 and the beginning of 1958, were the party’s guidelines on penal policy prepared, followed by a joint directive from the bodies responsible for executing it. Much of the delay came because it proved impossible to base sentencing practice on a politically conceived assessment: the political criteria could not be applied. cadres with long service in the labour movement. This required requisite numbers of such cadres to be present on local (Budapest district and county) party committees, in the trade-union apparatus, in ministries and the main authorities, and so on. However, even in this period, at a time when he had the greatest need of support, Kádár was also making sure that only people who would give his policy unquestioned support were placed in key positions of power. Left-wingers failed to win places in the top central organizations of the party or the Budapest party committee, which meant that they could be removed fairly simply from the front ranks of the party, once the job for which they were needed had been done.

The period of mass reprisals had not finished before a new campaign began. The party leadership set about completing the collectivization of agriculture. This would show that the Kádár leadership could make advances in creating a socialist society, not just restore order in the country. Moreover the political situation was especially promising for this long-postponed task, because the general intimidation meant that less resistance than usual could be expected from the rural population. There would be less need to convince it was useless to resist, so that relatively little force would be required to bring about a ‘socialist’ reorganization of Hungarian agriculture. In this respect, the protraction of the reprisals was a problem, since it tied down in the judicial system many of the cadres who could otherwise be mobilized. Although the collectivization campaign got underway at the end of 1958, it was only at the end of the suitable period, in February 1959, that the party resolution came, calling for large numbers of cadres to be transferred to the task. This meant that its effects were only felt in the autumn, at the end of the agricultural year.

It was not fortuitous that the first major amnesty coincided with the beginning of collectivization. Some prisoners had been released in 1957. These were mainly people who had been detained through an administrative mistake, although they did not fit the political criteria, or those who were willing to cooperate with the authorities. However, the 1959 amnesty was the first relatively large-scale release of prisoners. (It was designed also to improve the public mood ahead of a visit to Hungary by Khrushchev.) Thereafter, there were smaller amnesties every year around April 4, the day the country’s liberation from Nazi Germany was commemorated. The most notable of these was the 1960 amnesty, when the people released under a personal (rather than a general) pardon included Tibor Déry and Ferenc Donáth, and on the other side (as a token of centrism) Mihály Farkas. Within days of the 1960 amnesty, other prisoners in Vác National Prison had begun a hunger strike, protesting against the limited, exclusive nature of the releases.

The early 1960s formed a transition, in which one period was concluded while the foundations were laid for another. The final proceedings against ’56-ers, while the forced collectivization of the peasantry was also a form of collective punishment of the peasantry. Only after the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in October 1961, had opened a second wave of de-Stalinization in Eastern Europe, did Hungary abolish the special legal institutions of the reprisals, such as internment and the people’s courts. Now that they had fulfilled their purpose, the 1919 group and the Rákosi-ites could be removed. A further re-examination of the pre-1953 show trials, made in 1962, ended with many former ÁVH officers being dismissed from the political investigation departments of the police. A party resolution was issued stating that those who had played a part in the illegalities of the early 1950s could not remain in the law-enforcement or judicial organizations, or the HSWP Central Control Committee, the party’s internal-policing organization. At the same time, investigation of the illegalities was declared to be concluded. Among those expelled from the party were Mátyás Rákosi, Ernõ Gerõ and István Kovács. In the autumn of 1962, Kádár dismissed György Marosán, who had hitherto played a prominent part in the top leadership. Thereafter, not only the primacy, but the unique position of Kádár in the Hungarian political leadership was unquestioned, almost until the eve of the change of system. Since the collectivization of agriculture had been completed, the 7th Congress of the HSWP was able to claim that Hungary had laid the foundations of socialism.

Secret talks had begun between Hungary and the United States in 1960. As a result, the Hungarian question was not put before the UN General Assembly in the autumn of 1962. In a related development, Hungary proclaimed the great 1963 amnesty in the following spring, under which the vast majority of ’56-ers were released from prison, although their reintegration into society remained a problem right up until the change of system. They were kept under police surveillance and it was difficult for them to find jobs, so that they were always aware that they were not equal citizens of Hungarian society.

That Hungarian society, despite the bloody suppression of the revolution, clearly began to live under different, better conditions in the early 1960s—better than before the revolution and better than in the other countries of the socialist camp. All the ways in which Hungary differed from the other socialist countries followed to a large extent from the revolution. Both the authorities and society as a whole avoided awakening memories of the revolution, but it remained in the collective unconscious. After the party meeting of June 1957, Kádár had expressed the view that the vast majority of Hungarians were interest primarily in a secure improvement in their own livelihood, not in national politics. The aim, throughout the period to which he gave his name, was to ensure people relative and increasing prosperity. The period of ‘socialist’ large-scale investment projects was over. Those directing the economy concentrated on ensuring equilibrium and a modest, secure increase in living standards. The private sector expanded. There were no more Szabad Nép half-hours before work, devoted to reading the party daily. There were fewer organized mass demonstrations of support for the regime, and those that remained were concentrated on occasions like May Day, which became ‘secularized’ and popularized. It was no longer fear that sent people to parades in Hõsök tere or mass picnics in the woods of Hûvösvölgy. They went for the May Day frolics and the cheap beer. People no longer needed to reiterate their agreement with the regime and its ideology. It was enough if they did not oppose it. The wry watchword of 1961 was, ‘Those who are not against us are with us.’ This helped to make society indifferent and depoliticized. There was profound relief that the collective terror, the total dependence and the hopeless poverty were over. Society turned against the unpredictable and perilous world of politics, while shedding its illusions that socialism could be reformed or that the Western democracies would send assistance. People retreated into the private sector, where limited, but realistic prospects opened up for those with ambitions. They had not made peace with Kádár, the HSWP or the authorities, but they had become reconciled to them.