Iron Curtain (40 page)

In normal circumstances, no democratically elected political party would have paid any attention to such menacing nonsense. But by November 1945, Father Kiss had been arrested. The memory of the Red Army’s mass arrests was still fresh. The police had already begun to eliminate the youth groups, and communist propaganda had infiltrated the radio. The Soviet advisers were angry—and Tildy gave in. The communists received the interior ministry—one of their stars, László Rajk, now became interior minister—and Rákosi became deputy prime minister. Tildy became prime minister but held the job only until February, when he was replaced by Nagy.

After that, the Smallholders’ Party began to unravel with impressive speed. Under constant pressure, its leadership made one mistake after another. In the following months the communists formed temporary coalitions with the other parties, attacking first one Smallholder politician or faction and then the next, using mass demonstrations as well as harsh language in its newspapers and on the radio. In early March, the left-wing coalition organized a media campaign and then a huge demonstration calling for the expulsion of “reactionary elements” from the Smallholders’ Party. Two days later, Nagy caved in and expelled these “reactionaries” to appease the mob. Later, another Smallholder faction, led by
Dezső Sulyok, decided to carve itself off and rename itself the
Hungarian Independence Party. Sulyok hoped to distance his colleagues from Tildy and Nagy, who had now become hate figures in the left-wing media yet were regarded as weak by their own colleagues. The arrests of Smallholder sympathizers, including the members of the former antifascist resistance and the youth leaders, accelerated throughout 1946.

In the autumn, cryptic rumors of an impending police investigation began to circulate. At first covertly, then publicly, the newspapers, politicians, and finally the Soviet authorities in Hungary accused Béla Kovács, the
party’s general secretary and a close friend of Nagy, of plotting a coup. After the Soviet ambassador described Kovács openly as a “conspirator,” Rákosi advised Nagy to sack him. But Kovács departed for a “vacation” in the country and the Hungarian police took their time about arresting him. And so the Red Army military authorities stepped in on February 26, 1947, and arrested Kovács themselves: “In his own house, they read to him the Military Commander’s order for his arrest; they searched the house, confiscated his files and took him away.”
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Kovács would remain in the Soviet Union, in prison, for eight years.

Slice by slice, the Smallholders’ Party was then whittled away with “salami tactics,” as they later became known. After Kovács disappeared, others began to go voluntarily. Leaders of the Smallholders’ Party and of the other two legal noncommunist parties slipped out of the country one by one. In May 1947, Nagy himself joined them, though it has never been clear whether or not he really meant to leave. Somewhat curiously, he chose that politically tense moment, when his party was unraveling and his colleagues were disappearing into exile, to take a vacation. Equally curiously, he took his wife, but left his young son behind. Having extracted a dubious promise from Rákosi not to enact any new nationalization legislation in his absence, Nagy drove to
Switzerland, ostensibly to examine Swiss methods of agriculture (“It was not my plan to loaf in fashionable resorts,” he explained in his memoirs).

Almost as soon as he’d left the country, Nagy received a series of phone calls from Budapest, first ordering him to return and then warning him not to. His secretary was under arrest; he was being investigated for taking part in a conspiracy; he might not reach Budapest if he tried to get there, and “it is also possible that some misfortune might happen en route,” perhaps at the border. “Don’t take the situation so lightly,” Rákosi warned, when Nagy furiously called the conspiracy accusation “a filthy concoction.” After several days of agony, Nagy finally chose exile. He wrote a letter of resignation, which he handed over in exchange for his son: “At last, holding my child in my arms, I handed the Communist emissary my letter of resignation, the document they wanted so badly, to make their
coup d’état
‘legal.’ ”
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With Nagy out of the way—and with more politicians fleeing in his wake—the elections of 1947 were a foregone conclusion. Even so, the communists weren’t taking any chances. In advance of the vote, they struck thousands of people off the electoral rolls, not only “enemies” but friends and
relatives of enemies, as well as people who had just returned from POW camps. During a campaign meeting in July, one leading activist laid out the party’s intentions plainly. Overall, he hoped to exclude some 700,000 or 800,000 voters. “Comrades,” he explained, “you should not be too law-abiding … We have to use whispering propaganda to disseminate that idea that the social democrats will merge with the communists after the elections. We must also spread the rumor that villages where the communist party wins a majority will have extra economic aid from the government.”
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Others suggested that activists should “forget” to give registration documents to certain voters. In his district, Jenő Széll made sure that the communist party had the number one place on the ballot by asking a “trustworthy lady” to choose the party’s name out of a hat during a supposedly neutral selection process (the card was folded differently). Still others organized gangs of thugs to disrupt the meetings of other parties.
Dezső Sulyok, now the leader of the
Hungarian Independence Party, remembered what happened when he tried to speak at a public meeting:

Later he complained to the interior minister, Rajk, who was not sympathetic. “As a communist,” Rajk told him, “I can tell you that if it was up to me you would be all killed.”
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Sulyok soon fled the country too.

By voting day, August 31, 1947, some 500,000 people had been eliminated from the voting rolls, about 8.5 percent of all voters. Another 300,000 never showed up, possibly because they were too intimidated. Just to be certain, the communists carried out one final fraud: they distributed tens of thousands of extra, blue-colored ballots to special voting brigades—allegedly these were voters not in their home districts because of a “vacation”—which raced from district to district casting multiple ballots. The brigades made little secret of
what they were doing. They rode in Hungarian army trucks and even Soviet vehicles, laughing and singing, dashing from village to village, apparently happy to take part in this theatrical farce.
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Inside the country there were a few protesters. One of them was Sára Karig, a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1943 and of the anti-Nazi resistance since 1944. As a friend and colleague of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Karig had helped hundreds of Hungarian Jews escape the ghetto, acquire false papers, hide their children in orphanages, and leave the country. She had also helped Hungarian
communists acquire false papers. (Her Budapest apartment, in one recollection, had been a “birth certificate factory.”) After the war she remained
politically active and in 1947, still a social democrat, she was named head of the election office of one of the central districts of Budapest. In that capacity, she set up an informal telephone line designed to keep in touch with voting stations throughout the district, the better to keep track of how many people were voting. By the end of the day, she knew there had been fraud. She reported several cases of double voting to the police. The fraudsters—all communist party members—were arrested, then almost immediately released.

On the following day Karig herself was arrested. She was picked up on the street without warning, dragged into a black Soviet limousine, and driven immediately to the Red Army’s headquarters in
Baden, near Vienna. She was kept in custody for three months, interrogated and tortured, accused of spying, and finally told that although there were no charges against her, she was being expelled from the country as an “obstacle to Hungary’s democratic process.” She eventually wound up in Vorkuta, one of the most distant Soviet Gulag camps. Back in Budapest, her friends, family, and party colleagues were given no information about her. Rákosi and Rajk denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. Even the Soviet authorities in Budapest innocently said they knew nothing—perhaps she had emigrated to the West?

Karig returned home only in 1953, after Stalin’s death.
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In the meantime, the suppression of Karig’s protest had been successful: within a year, the Hungarian government had dropped all real pretenses of parliamentary democracy. The Hungarian communist party ruled alone.

Like their counterparts across the bloc, Ulbricht and his entourage believed the left could and would win a popular vote in Germany. In September 1945,
Wilhelm Pieck wrote confidently that Germany’s workers not only “understand that Hitler [has led] to disaster” but also understood that the
Soviet Union would ensure “strong growth and prospects for G[ermany].” Therefore, they would favor politicians who were close to the Soviet Union. A few months later, Pieck also argued that elections would certainly produce victory for “a proletarian regime.”
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The German communists remained cautious in one respect. Like the Hungarian communist party and the Polish communist party, they preferred to go to the polls in coalition with the German social democrats. If they could blur the line between the soft left and the hard left, they told themselves, they would easily win over Germany’s workers. Eventually, all of the
social democratic parties in Central Europe would be forced to dissolve themselves into the communist parties. But the first “voluntary” unification of the left—the abolition of social democracy as something separate and distinct from communism—took place in eastern Germany.

It was not an easy process. Social democracy had a long and venerable history in Germany and Eastern Europe, and many social democrats were profoundly anti-Soviet and anticommunist. For their part, German communists had long despised social democrats too.
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In the early twentieth century, Lenin himself conducted a famous quarrel with Karl Kautsky, the founder of German social democracy, who had had the temerity to argue against revolution and in favor of attaining power through elections. In a famous 1918 pamphlet, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” Lenin dismissed his German colleague as a “windbag” who spoke “twaddle” and mouthed “absurdities” about the nonsense of bourgeois democracy.
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Elsewhere in Eastern Europe social democrats generally had a less radical program than communists. They advocated what we would now call the welfare state, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they wanted evolution, not revolution. Above all, however, the communists hated social democrats because they were more popular, before the war and after.

But the experience of political failure and defeat at the hands of the Nazi party had demoralized Germany’s venerable Social Democratic Party. In Weimar Germany, the left had been divided and the right had profited from that division. Now many believed that the left’s failure to unify had brought Hitler to power.
Otto Buchwitz, a longtime social democrat, in March 1946 declared his support for the unification of the social democrats and the communists.
“Reformism” had failed, he wrote. Now it was time for his party to embrace “revolutionary socialism” in partnership with the
communists.

Soviet influence played a role as well.
Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the social democrats in the eastern zone of Germany, declared in August 1945 that his party had a right to independence and would not put forward a united list of candidates with the communists. He said the same to
Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democratic leader in the western zone, in October. Two months later, in December, he made a speech to a joint social democrat–communist meeting, listing ten reasons why he opposed unification. Above all, he declared, “in our membership, a deep distrust of the communist brother party has materialized.”
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Very rapidly, he changed his tune. In February 1946, he told a British official that he was desperately worried. Personally he was under great pressure—he spoke of “being tickled by Russian bayonets”—and the party was in trouble too, its “organisation in the provinces had been completely undermined,” he explained, and there was no longer any point in resisting the merger with the communists.
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Grotewohl’s view had changed because the communist party’s tactics had changed, as had those of the Soviet military administration, in the autumn of 1945. The failure of communists to win elections in Hungary, the poor showing of the Austrian communist party (which had won only four parliamentary seats in national elections in November, despite high expectations), and the popularity of the Social Democratic Party in the western occupation zones of Germany helped to convince first the East German communists and then their Soviet minders that the time for the unification of the left had arrived. At the beginning of 1946, Red Army commanders were told to enforce the fusion of the two left-wing parties at the local level. Over the next few months, some 20,000 social democrats were “harassed, imprisoned, or even killed” if they objected.
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The Berlin city councillor
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a dedicated social democrat, wrote a diary entry wondering “who are we to stand up against the pressure of a world power? In the Eastern zone the merging process advances with steadfast relentlessness.”
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