01.06.1947 Communists Take Over after Ousting Prime Minister 17 Ferenc Nagy
According to popular belief, in the beginning of 1945 representatives from the world’s three superpowers convened at the Yalta Conference and decided how to ...... redivide the globe. As a result of this decision, Hungary became a part of the ...... Soviet satellite zone. In spite of the fact that the third world-power, Great Britain, ...... used the few tools at its power to block the spread of communist influence in ...... Europe, the British proved incapable of realising this goal in the face of Soviet ...... might. The extent of how extremely eective the Soviet Union was at enforcing its ...... interests is best shown by the fact that it was the Soviet-friendly communists, not
...... the exiled government located in London, that came to power following the
...... liberation of Poland. While the Paris Peace Accord signed in 1947 stipulated that
...... all Red Army forces had to leave Hungary’s territory within ninety days, Austria’s
...... occupation provided an excellent reason for Soviet troops to remain. Established in 1945, the Soviet-led Allied Control Commission ACC supervised Hungary’s ...... internal as well as external aairs and consequently restricted the nation’s ...... sovereignty to a significant degree.
In spite of the fact that the United States’ foreign policy initially strove to cooperate with the Soviet Union, the relationship between the two world powers soon grew tense, resulting in the face-o of the Cold War. As of 1947, President ...... Truman attempted to follow a new course in foreign diplomacy in an attempt to ...... halt the Soviet Union’s expanding power. In 1947, the United States therefore ...... announced its initiative to promote international aid via the Marshall Plan, a ...... programme rejected by all the nations situated within the Soviet zone. After...... concluding that aid from the Marshall Plan would allow Western powers to gain ...... an economic foothold in Eastern European countries, the Soviet Union instead ...... chose to close the region o from the influx of Western capital; at the same time, ...... the Soviet Union also rushed to stabilise its regional interests by accelerating the ...... process of political transformation within the Soviet zone. Once the world powers ...... proved incapable of agreeing on the issue of Germany, the division of both ...... Germany and the European continent remained frozen in place following the Berlin Blockade 194849.
With the signing in Moscow of a treaty outlining a Hungarian-Soviet agreement of friendship in 1948, cooperation and mutual assistance, the Soviet Union ...... integrated Hungary into the Eastern bloc. Similar, bilateral agreements drawn with ...... other, Eastern European nations played a fundamental role in building a network ...... of Soviet alliances. Together with other, socialist countries, in 1949 Hungary also
HUNGARY > CHAPTER 17 > page 1 / 4 > 1947 01 June Communists Take Over after Ousting Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy
Copyright by the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw, 2016. The article can be downloaded and printed in unchanged version (indicating source of the article) - only for the educational and not-for-profit purposes...... signed the founding charter for the Council of Mutual Economic Aid, the Soviet ...... equivalent of the Marshall Plan. In response to the Western allies’ establishment
...... of NATO in 1949, Soviet satellite nations also gathered into their own military bloc,
...... thereby creating the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
During the internal battle for political power over Hungary, the Communist Party sought to decrease the influence of other parties by any means—no matter how brutal—that would serve this aim. Applying the strategy labeled as ‘salami tactics’ toward the elimination of opposition parties and various, civil groupings viewed as dissenters was made even easier by the fact that direction of both interior aairs and the police was in communist hands. Trumped-up charges were first used to discredit leaders from the Independent Smallholders’ Party—the most supported figures in Hungarian politics at the time—then to put them either in prison or force them into exile. On 25 February 1947, the Secretary-General of the Independent Smallholders’ Party, Béla Kovács, was removed to the Soviet Union, where he spent eight years in captivity. As of 2001, the day of his arrest has been commemorated in Hungary as a memorial day held to remember all those victimised under the communist dictatorship.
Since his aim of creating a civil democratic consolidation frequently caused friction with the Communist Party, fake charges and threats were also used to force the prime minister, Ferenc Nagy into resigning. While American foreign diplomacy—based on the policy of non-interference in Hungarian aairs—was unsatisfied with the extent to which Hungarian democratic parties opposed the communists, in the beginning of 1947 Mátyás Rákosi informed Chairman of the Soviet Union, Andrei Zhdanov that ‘We want to continue exposing the conspirators, including among them Ferenc Nagy’. In May 1947, while on holiday in Switzerland, Ferenc Nagy was informed that Béla Kovács had not only testified against him, but also that the Allied Control Commission ACC had handed over incriminating documents about him to the Hungarian government. Given the fact that the fate of his five-year old son (who had remained in Hungary while his father was abroad) was also being used to blackmail him, Ferenc Nagy resigned from his post on 1 June. He described the situation with the following words in a letter written to Zoltán Tildy: ‘All the warning signs indicated that my personal freedom would be at risk should I return home to Budapest. I would willingly sacrifice my own freedom if this meant I could be of even the slightest use to my country. Yet I have no choice but to strongly suspect that—given time—they would be able to have me testify against other civil leaders in Hungary’s public life the way Béla Kovács just did against me. With time everyone and anyone whom Hungarian farmers and citizens could still rely on would be incarcerated. It is with great pain that I have therefore decided to accept the advice administered me by circles in the Hungarian government and remain abroad’. In truth, the communists did not even wait for Nagy’s resignation: on 31 May, under Lajos Dinnyés’s chairmanship, a new government was declared and Zoltán Tildy, the President of the Republic, had no choice but to announce a new election.
Known in Hungary as the ‘blue ballot’ elections due to the mode of election fraud used, the 1947 parliamentary elections could have been a milestone in the process of establishing a communist, one- party system in Hungary. The communists made careful preparations before the election, primarily by drastically cutting the number of those possessing the right to vote. According to some calculations, at least five-hundred thousands fewer individuals were allowed to vote compared to the previous election. Neither members of organisations labeled as fascist, nor those deemed right-wing supporters were given voting rights. The communists also took precautions concerning the number of ballots assigned to them: according to the election laws of the time, those not wishing to vote at their registered address could vote with a ballot printed on a blue piece of paper. Using pre-printed, blue ballots and trucks hauling ‘built-in’ voters, the Communist Party was able to increase the number of its ‘supporters’. While the other parties HUNGARY > CHAPTER 17 > page 2 / 4 > 1947 01 June Communists Take Over after Ousting Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy
Copyright by the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw, 2016. The article can be downloaded and printed in unchanged version (indicating source of the article) - only for the educational and not-for-profit purposes. naturally had their suspicions regarding the sudden increase in voters, there was nothing they could do to prevent the fraud from happening.
True, the Communist Party won the ‘blue ballot’ election: this victory, however, was achieved with a total of twenty-two percent, a far smaller lead than expected. While this figure can only be estimated, at least sixty thousand blue ballots were needed to win. Even though the number of votes won by the communists matched the 1945 election results, the situation was still far dierent: the ‘salami tactics’ had succeeded in carving up the coalition’s more moderate wing into six parties. Forced to remain satisfied with a coalition government as a consequence of their slight victory, the communists had to turn to new methods.
‘The Turning Year’, as it was called by the communists, came in 1948, when the two largest workers’ parties, the Hungarian Communist Party MKP and the Social Democratic Party of Hungary SZDP, were united. Led by György Marosán, the left-wing faction first squeezed all right-wing supporters out of the Social Democratic Party, then SZDP members requested en masse to be accepted into the Communist Party. Those who did not (tens of thousands of members) were expelled from the Social Democratic Party. With the birth of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, the multi-party system came to an end. Once the country was under their control, the communists could commence with establishing a totalitarian dictatorship.
Before the Communist Party could start re-educating Hungarian society according to Marxist-Leninist ideology, the ownership of cultural institutions had to be radically altered. Schools, publishing houses and cinemas were nationalised while any vestige of pluralism was removed from the press. A variety of measures were taken to reduce the influence held by various Churches: religious holidays were either abolished or subjected to new interpretation while the licenses permitting most religious orders to practice were revoked and more than six thousand-five hundred schools operated by dierent Churches were nationalised. Due to his protest against these measures, Cardinal József Mindszenty was sentenced to death on the first degree, a judgement reduced to lifetime imprisonment a few months later. The cardinal was finally placed under house-arrest, a move influenced by pressure from the Catholic Church, international outrage and Mindszenty’s fragile health, for the Communist Party did not want to make a martyr out of such a prominent religious figure.
Nationalising the economy also occurred at a fast pace. Banks were put under state control in 1947, followed by large manufacturies in 1948. By 1949 any factory or place engaged in wholesale trade employing more than ten people also fell under state control, a measure later expanded to include smaller businesses. As a result, the quality of service provided to the population dropped dramatically. Agriculture was collectivised as farmers were forced to join socialist co-operatives that were based on the Soviet model. More well-to-do farmers were declared kulaks and a variety of economic and political methods were employed to render these farmers incapable of making a living. One such measure was to place kulaks under inexorbitant tax burdens while demanding they produce and deliver a fixed quota of goods to the state. Beginning in 1952, anti-kulak policies no longer stopped at levying fines for trumped- up transgressions, but instead aimed for the total eradication of the kulak class. As a part of this ‘programme’, kulak lands were collectivised while their farming equipment was confiscated in an attempt to force them completely out of farming. In many cases, any individual placed on the so-called ‘kulak list’ was frequently taken to work camps located on the Hungarian Plains.
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Copyright by the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw, 2016. The article can be downloaded and printed in unchanged version (indicating source of the article) - only for the educational and not-for-profit purposes. By 1948 the political wing to have wrested the most power within the Communist Party was represented by a group of émigrés (including Mátyás Rákosi, Ernő Gerő, József Révai, Mihály Farkas, Zoltán Vas as well as Imre Nagy) who had returned from exile in Moscow at the end of World War Two. At the same time, the faction comprised of members who had belonged to Hungary’s outlawed Communist Party during the inter-war period (László Rajk, János Kádár, Antal Apró, Gyula Kállai) increasingly found itself pushed into the background. Power eventually came to coalesce around Mátyás Rákosi and a narrow circle of his closer supporters, mainly Gerő, Farkas and Révai, thereby earning themselves the nickname of the ‘Quartet’ responsible for initiating the construction of a one-party, totalitarian, communist dictatorship founded on the Soviet example.
Written by: Gábor Szepesi, Literary citations, text revision and completion provided by Gábor Danyi, Translated by Maya J. Lo Bello, proofread by Maria-Philippa Wieckowski
Írta: Szepesi Gábor - Átdolgozta, kiegészítette és idézetekkel ellátta: Danyi Gábor
References: Források: A magyarok krónikája, szerk. Glatz Ferenc, Helikon, Budapest, 2006. Bihari Mihály, Magyar politika 19442004, Osiris Kiadó, Budapest, 2005. Borhi László, Magyarország a hidegháborúban. A Szovjetunió és az Egyesült Államok között, 19561956, Corvina, Budapest, 2005. Dupcsik Csaba – Repárszky Ildikó – Ujvári Pál, Befejezetlen múlt 6. A globális világ felé. 1930, Műszaki Kiadó, Budapest. Falcsik Mária – Száray Miklós, Mikor, hol, hogyan és miért történt Magyarországon?, Reader’s Digest, Budapest, 2001. Herber Attila – Martos Ida – Moss László – Tisza László, Történelem 6. 1914től 1990ig. Reáltanoda Alapítvány, Budapest, 2000. Nagy Ferenc, Küzdelem a vasfüggöny mögött, Európa – História, 1990. Száray Miklós – Kaposi József, Történelem IV., Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 2005.
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Copyright by the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw, 2016. The article can be downloaded and printed in unchanged version (indicating source of the article) - only for the educational and not-for-profit purposes.