Confession to Order
The Hungarian " treason " trials, with the formal accusations followed immediately by a spate of comprehensive confessions, repro- duce in every detail the patterns made familiar at Moscow. How the confessions are extracted is matter of speculation, and there it must be left. The story which the audience is asked to believe is that several of the most prominent and respected members of the Com- munist party in Hungary had been paid agents of every cause which the Communists most abhor—the Horthy regime, Marshal Tito, the American and British intelligence services—and that, having been unmasked, they are eager to confess their guilt. Who can believe that will. What is of main interest in the present trial is the evidence it produces of the total separation between Moscow-trained Com- munists and all other species of orthodoxy. The alignment is not in every case exact, but broadly speaking the trial is designed to show that the Hungarian Communist Party was composed of " Spanish " (i.e. western-orientated) and Muscovite wings, and that the former was of so weak a growth that it was open to all the plagues which haunt the Kremlin's imagination. The picture as it has been presented in Budapest is too neat, too fluent and too topical to be convincing, and though the only points at which it is directly possible to check the evidence are those at which it impinges on the Governments of Britain and America, the story as a whole bears few of the marks of probability about it. A good deal of the evidence and confessions was plainly designed to discredit Yugoslavia, with which the accused were alleged to have trafficked shamelessly.
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