1 Én Apor Péter, teljes felelősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés a szerzői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletbentartásával készült. Jelen értekezést korábban más intézményben nem nyújtottam be és azt nem utasították el. Apor Péter 2 Contents Introduction 1 Prefiguration 24 Resurrection 54 Lives 94 Funeral 121 Narration 160 1 Introduction 1 The subject of this work is the labyrinthyan history of the ways of evoking the First Hungarian Soviet Republic that subsisted precisely 133 days in the Spring and Summer of 1919. This particular historical event grew from a relatively isolated detail of the self-history of the Hungarian communist movement into the most highly praised national celebration between the years of the 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959. These ten years, however, did not mark only the rapid accumulation of historical knowledge, but rather the radical break and re-formation of communist power in Hungary that was demanded by the challenge of the October revolution in 1956. The transformation of the historical appraisal of the first Hungarian commune was inseparable from the role 1919 played in the communist re-vision of 1956. The First Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 21 March 1919. Although the leaders of the 1919 communist system were recruited from different groups, the dominant company consisted of those Hungarian communists who had been in captivity in Russia and had become acquainted with Bolshevik ideas there. Their major figures were Béla Kun and Tibor Szamuely who are still remembered as Lenin‘s close and personal colleagues. Kun occupied the position of the commissar of foreign affairs in the Hungarian Soviet government and virtually became the leader of the Hungarian proletarian state. The Bolshevik educated Hungarians founded the Communist Party of Hungary which was joined by the group of revolutionary socialists that consisted of young social democrat renegades. The government of the Hungarian Soviet regime consisted of the Hungarian communists and a group of social democrats. The left-wing social democrats supported the idea of the dictatorship, whereas the right- wing socialists did so only half-heartedly. In spite of this the two workers‘ parties were formally unified on 21 March. The proletarian state had to face inner enemies as well as outer attacks. The Hungarian Red Army was at war from April until its last days in July 1919. The Hungarian Soviet Government resigned on 31 July and after a short transitional period a counterrevolutionary regime came into existence. The general standard textbooks and historical reference works usually described how Admiral Miklós Horthy had become Regent of the country for the next 25 years. These works 2 also included an analysis of the way Hungary had gradually joined the German-Italian alliance. Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös appreciated Mussolini‘s ideas on the organization of society during the first half of the thirties. The country went into war against the USSR on the side of Germany, nevertheless the Wehrmacht occupied its territory on 19 March 1944. In October of the same year the Regent and his close followers attempted to sign an armistice, however the German army prevented the coup. Hitler appointed Ferenc Szálasi the leader of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow- Cross Party, to be Prime Minister. Szálasi, however, could not rule the country for long since the Red Army expelled the Germans by mid-April 1945. Standard interpretations called attention to the fact that after a short democratic period the communist party took over in 1948. Its First Secretary was Mátyás Rákosi, a well-known figure of the international communist movement who had been also a commissar in 1919. He returned from the Soviet Union together with other Hungarian communists in exile like Imre Nagy, later Prime Minister during the revolution in 1956. Other communists remained in the country and organized the party illegally during the war. Their leading personalities were – among others – János Kádár who became General Secretary after 1956 and László Rajk who was the most well-known victim of the purges in 1949.1 The history of 1919 became the crucial and decisive factor in transforming the anti-Stalinist insurrection in October 1956 into a genuine counter-revolution in communist terms. For communists the most shocking occurrence of 1956 was the siege of the Budapest party headquarters in Republic square where the insurgents mercilessly massacred the captured defenders. Communist interpreters found the essence of the event in this violence: for them the real purpose of the revolutionaries was to persecute 1 There is only one recent comprehensive volume on the years of 1918-1929: Konrád Salamon, Nemzeti önpusztitás 1918-1920 (Budapest, 2001). The book – in a somewhat apocalyptic manner –condemns contemporary politicians for not being able to found the democratic Hungarian republic. The history of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic appears an ephemeral episode, a futile, but bloody dictatorship that was supported incomprehensibly by leftist groups, but not the peasantry and the working class. There are numerous studies concerning these periods of modern Hungarian history. Primarily, I would call the attention to a recent book by a distinguished Hungarian historian: Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the 20th Century (Budapest, 1999). In English other readings in modern Hungarian history may be Rudolf L. Tőkés, Béla Kun and The Hungarian Soviet Republic (New York – Washington – London, 1967) György Borsányi, The Life of A Communist Revolutionary: Béla Kun (Boulder – New Jersey, 1993) György Péteri, The Effects of World War I: War Communism in Hungary (New York, 1984) Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral On Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918-1944 (Boulder, 1994) Ignác Romsics, Bethlen: A Great Conservative Statesman of Hungary, 1874-1946 (Boulder, 1995) The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression 1953-1963, ed.: György Litván (London – New York, 1996). Generally,the series of War and Society in Eastern Europe by Brooklyn College Press orientates the reader well in the history of these turbulent years. 3 and eliminate all the communists. For them the day of the siege, 30 October, stripped off the mask and showed the real face of counterrevolution: party leaders discovered that the radical right wing had directed the occurrences. Communists realized that these radicals had been present from the very beginning of the rebellion, in fact they had organized the movement and after the occupation of the party headquarters they openly called for the restoration of capitalist dictatorship and the extermination of the defenders of the communist regime.2 The conclusion that the massacre of communists had to be interpreted as a sign of counterrevolution was confirmed by the fall of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic. Officers‘ commandoes who called themselves counter- revolutionaries and aimed at the restoration of the pre-1914 social and political system, persecuted, tortured and executed communists, leftist persons and Jews. For party leaders the two events were strikingly similar. In the communist perspective the revolution in 1956 was none other than but the second edition of the white terror in 1919, and October 1956 experienced the second coming of the counterrevolutionaries of 1919. At least to the same extent as it could provide legitimacy for the communist rule, this historical construction aimed at the destruction of the party‘s adversaries: the participants and heirs of the revolution. The purpose of this particular narrative was to destroy the self-esteem and identity of the revolutionaries by proving that in reality they were not fighting for freedom, democracy, national pride or social justice, but only for the restoration of capitalist or fascist oppression and for killing communists and other decent people. Through this interpretation it was pronounced that the revolution was not the legacy of social democrats, liberals or national democrats, but exclusively that of the white terror. The practice of communist historians thereby adjusted itself to the long tradition of a peculiar historical genre: counterhistory writing. This mode of constructing histories has only one definite aim: to deprive the target group of its self-identity. The example of the ancient Egyptian author, Manetho elucidates well the practice. Manetho wrote the history of the Jewish people based upon its authentic source the Bible. Nonetheless, the author precisely inverted the statements of the Old Testament in order 2 The basic book of this representation is Ervin Hollós – Vera Lajtai, Köztársaság tér 1956 ( Budapest, 1974) A standard communist interpretation of 1956 is János Berecz, Ellenforradalom tollal es fegyverrel. 1956 (Budapest, 1969), although this book provides a somewhat different perspective and presents the revolution of 1956 as the manouever of Western imperialism. English translation is 1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary: Words and Weapons (Budapest, 1986) 4 to prove that the Jews were not an ancient people with venerable institutions, but simply a herd of lepers who copied the institutions of Egypt.3 In these regards, the communist revision of 1956 was very similar to the practice that is called historical ‗revisionism‘. These ‗revisionists‘ intend to re-interpret the history of the Nazi genocide and claim the discovery that there was no extermination at all. Their arguments are regularly based upon two ways of denial. Firstly, that the extermination would have been senseless to carry out since no one could have obtained material profit from the executions. Secondly, since there are no witnesses who experienced the gas chambers from the inside (as all of them died), evidence is doubtful. Therefore, these authors deny the fact of the genocide and the existence of gas chambers. They claim that the final solution meant only the expulsion of Jews from the east, that death happened in ‗natural‘ ways in the camps and that the genocide was only the invention of Allied propaganda. These statements are definitely capable of the deprivation of a community of its memory.