Unquiet Bodies

Thomas Laqueur

Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism by István Rév
Stanford, 340 pp, £19.95, January 2005, ISBN 0 8047 3644 8

I should say at the outset that I know István Rév; that I have walked with him through the cemeteries of Budapest and have seen in his company some of the graves he writes about. He is a remarkable man, the product of a culture and a time in which one either drowned or saved oneself through erudition, wit, irony and an unremitting conversation with history. I once told him that I envied the political exigency of his professional life; he replied that he envied me – this was pre 9/11 – for living in a society where one didn’t have to be on one’s guard every minute.

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[*] When I visited Hungary on the eve of the 2002 elections I was offered unsolicited advice by the desk clerk who checked me into my hotel: I had better see the museum this trip, he said, because if the socialists won they would close it immediately. I tried but the line to get in stretched around the block. The socialists and their allies did win; the museum remains open.

Vol. 28 No. 7 · 6 April 2006 » Thomas Laqueur » Unquiet Bodies (print version)
Pages 3-8 | 6110 words

Letters

From Peter Fryer

Janós Kádár can be justly accused of many things, but Thomas Laqueur’s assertion that he had Imre Nagy murdered is highly questionable (LRB, 6 April). To be sure, in reply to Western journalists Kádár always took responsibility for what happened to Nagy after he left the Yugoslav Embassy on 22 November 1956. But, as Moscow’s recently appointed satrap in Hungary, Kádár had neither the power to order Nagy’s execution nor the power to prevent it. Endre Marton, the Associated Press correspondent in Budapest during the 1956 revolution, wrote in his book The Forbidden Sky (1971): ‘All my sources, including one who was personally very close to Kádár, told me how desperate Kádár had been when Nagy was abducted and when he was executed eighteen months later.’

Peter Fryer
London N6

From Thomas Laqueur

Peter Fryer argues on the authority of the journalist Endre Marton, who in turn got the information from unnamed sources, that far from having Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian revolutionary government, murdered as I claimed, Janós Kádár, his successor, was ‘desperate … when Nagy was abducted and when he was executed eighteen months later’ (Letters, 11 May). At worst, in going along with the trial and execution of his former comrade, he was merely following the orders of his Soviet masters.

This view is archivally insupportable. But, more important, it misses the essential point that Kádár’s legitimacy and that of his regime depended on an interpretation of the 1956 revolution in which Nagy was seen as a traitor to the Hungarian people whose only possible fate was that common to traitors: death.

Kádár knew that the Soviets would not honour the safe-conduct he offered Nagy on 21 November 1956, a day before he was kidnapped from the Yugoslav Embassy, and a month later told the Party leadership that the Yugoslavs had been told as much. A year later, in December 1957, while preparing for Nagy’s trial, he justified his position to a closed meeting of the Hungarian Central Committee by saying that Tito’s all too independent government had had no right to grant Nagy asylum in the first place. Since the investigation of Nagy had ‘brought to light many new facts’, he insisted that there were further grounds for ‘denouncing’ the agreement.

Even in early December 1956 Kádár had come to see the events of the previous October not as a general crisis of the Hungarian polity but as a counter-revolution, possible only because of an alliance of native reactionaries with foreign imperialists. By the end of January 1957 Kádár had decided that Nagy should be put on trial and a dossier of his crimes going back to 1948 was compiled. In a 2 April meeting of the HSWP Provisional Executive Committee Kádár reported that he had raised the Nagy question with the Soviets and that they had endorsed dealing with what could only be regarded as ‘a mass of genuine criminal acts’ with ‘suitable severity’. He sought his comrades’ collective approval for the view that it was their duty to show the Hungarian people, as well as their enemies, that ‘a counter-revolution cannot be staged without being severely punished.’

There is no evidence that the Soviets played a direct role in bringing Nagy to trial and execution. There is evidence, however, that in late 1957 and early 1958 they sought postponements for international political reasons and that Khrushchev himself might have been happier with a death sentence followed by a reprieve. Kádár would have none of this. He told the head of the British Communist Party in March 1958 that had the Hungarians not been so sensitive to foreign Communist sensibilities ‘we would have done away with the Nagy gang a long time ago.’ He said the same thing to many others.

Nagy was hanged on 16 June 1958. Since he was unwilling to confess to his purported crimes his trial was kept secret. He refused to plead for mercy. In the absence of any evidence of Nagy’s counter-revolutionary treachery, only his death could validate the founding myth of the new regime. No wonder, as István Rév writes in the book I reviewed, that Kádár was afraid ever again to say Imre Nagy’s name lest the utterance of the necronym raise his ghost.

Thomas Laqueur
University of California, Berkeley