Black Book
The Truth about the Nagy Affair. Preface by Albert Camus. (Seeker and Warburg, 35s.) FOR many, the first days of November, 1956, are a dreamlike memory, not only because of the coincidence of the Suez and Hungarian crises, but because neither seemed to belong to the main stream of history at all. Now seen in retrospect, Suez had no decisive effect on Britain's interna- tional relations except perhaps for the worse (and for the wrong reasons, some would say) with France. Similarly, the Hungarian tragedy did not notably affect the major Soviet trend of today, that is, away from Stalinism and towards rap- prochement with the US. It is almost tempting, therefore, to think of Nagy and his colleagues as the last such victims, European at least, of the unquiet era between the end of the Pax Britan- nica in 1914 and the beginning of the new American-Russian peace in 1959.
Tempting, but only on a broad sweep, for at close range the situation hardly looks so tidy. Under Khrushchev's shelter, Kadar's secret courts are still grinding out their political sentences of execution and imprisonment, regardless of United Nations protests. This is why the publication in English of a volume like The Truth about the Nagy Affair is still as timely as ever. Produced for the Congress for Cultural Freedom to document the judicial murder of Nagy, Maleter and their fellows and to counter the Kadar Government's White Book of fabricated charges, this volume, unlike others we have seen, is a trenchant piece of documentation. Compiled, fortunately, by real writers and firmly edited down to essentials, the volume provides a brief chronology of the drama, the facts about Nagy and the other actors, a simple dissection of the Communist indictment and a summary of international reactions. The case against the Soviet leaders and Kadar is thus allowed to build itself up fact by fact, yet through this very understatement its nature is made clearer. To me, two points especially seem emphasised.
The first is that Janos Kadar stands out as psychological traitor on a historic' scale. On the radio, on October 31, he expressed his 'complete agreement with his friend Imre Nagy.' On Novem- ber 1 he spoke of 'the glorious uprising of the people against the Rakosi regime.' The next day
he decamped to the Soviet side where the Russians at once placed him at the head of a puppet govern- ment calling for their armed intervention. Less than a day later, the Soviet police chief Serov entered a Russian HQ, where Hungarian delegates led by the national hero, General Maleter, were negotiating about Russian withdrawal, and to the surprise of the Russian general placed them under arrest--after which the Russian tanks closed in on Budapest. On November 11, on Budapest radio, Kadar invited Nagy to leave the shelter of the Yugoslav Embassy 'to make negotiation and agreement possible.' As late as the 21st he officially assured the Yugoslays that his government had no intention to punish Nagy and his group. The next day, as Nagy left his asylum, he was forcibly taken to Soviet police headquarters, to disappear until his execution. Even if Kadar was at moments deceived by his masters (which cannot be entirely ruled out), the record reveals the man.
A second point brought out by the documents is the significant difference between the Nagy- Maleter case and other Soviet trials. Not only because its events took place in the open, before the eyes of the Hungarian people and international opinion, or because no confessions were obtained so that the trials were held secretly. The main distinction is that the charges, however grotesquely distorted, referred to real actions by Nagy and his group, to a genuine, documented political conflict. Nagy was probably no great man, but he has been described as 'a Hungarian first and a Communist second' and by sentiment he was certainly humani- tarian. From 1953 to 1955 as President of the Council and after that in opposition, he fought hard in Communist ranks against Rakosi's legacy of Stalinist economic exploitation and gangsterish rule. The charge of conspiracy against him is, of course, absurd. His waverings during the initial rising show how far he was only a confused Corn- munist reformer. And this is the decisive point. Seen in historic context, Nagy and his fellows were both heroes and martyrs of the intellectual revul- sion which swept Eastern Europe after the death of Stalin, and this wave of feeling is not yet spent.
T. R. FYVEL
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