Hoxha’s only rival to total power was a faction inside the Communist Party led by Koçi Xoxe, a man with notably pro-Yugoslav tendencies. Stalin had not yet made up his mind about what should happen to Albania and had not invited them to the founding meeting of the Cominform in September. Xoxe was making headway inside the Albanian party and was on the verge of displacing Hoxha, until June 1948, when Moscow broke with Yugoslavia and the situation changed. It went without saying that Hoxha would side with Stalin, so that the faction around Xoxe was in danger of being purged. Indeed, after the Albanian leader returned from a visit to the Kremlin in March–April 1949, Xoxe was arrested, tried in secret, and executed in June. The purge continued into 1950–51, and anyone remotely suspected of pro-Yugoslav sympathies—a considerable number, it turned out—was ousted.
The Albanians took every possible step to follow the Stalinist model, including the widespread use of terror, so much so that the tiny country became notorious for its repressive practices. Between 1945 and 1956, in a country with a population of around 2 million, some 80,000 political arrests were made.16
When Hoxha last visited the Kremlin in April 1951, Stalin was pleased. “You have done well,” he said. Caution was still very much advised because the enemy “will even try to worm his way into the Party, indeed into its Central Committee, but his attempts are uncovered and defeated through high vigilance and a resolute stand.” Hoxha knew what to do—he had already purged the party and eliminated the basic freedoms. He remained a Stalinist long after Stalin was gone, and in fact he eventually fought with Nikita Khrushchev until the new Soviet leader in frustration broke diplomatic relations with Albania in 1961.17
Hungary was a bigger and tougher nut to crack, and it was far more difficult to impose Communism there. Party boss Mátyás Rákosi wanted to take on the churches, particularly Catholic cardinal József Mindszenty, who angered the regime by being both passionately anti-Communist and a firm believer in denominational education. By January 10, 1948, Rákosi announced a veritable all-out attack. “We must not allow the impossible situation to continue,” he said, “in which the majority of the enemies of the people hide behind the cassocks of priests, in particular of the Catholic Church.” Nevertheless, the regime proceeded cautiously until June, when it nationalized the schools. There was a backlash, and popular protest was even greater than when the state collectivized the land. The arrest of Mindszenty in December was inevitable, as was his show trial, after which he was incarcerated until freed during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. He became a worldwide symbol of what was wrong with Communism and went into exile.18
The church struggle in Hungary reveals once again that the Stalinization of these years had native roots. Moscow never issued any orders to battle the churches, so that the Hungarian events suggest that in the center-versus-periphery debate over the creation of the Stalinist system, this case has to be credited to the periphery. Of course it was also true that the signals from Moscow about eliminating freedom were impossible not to hear.
The Hungarian Communists were no less determined to show solidarity with the Kremlin’s desires for a purge of the party ranks, and they soon narrowed their focus to Minister of the Interior László Rajk. No doubt from the Kremlin’s perspective, it helped Rákosi to pillory the Jewish Rajk, the latter a faithful Communist since the 1930s who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and later in the resistance and did not seek exile in Moscow during the war. Rajk was arrested in May 1949 and finally charged after Rákosi returned from talks with Stalin, who personally went over the indictments.19 That Rákosi, who was also Jewish, managed to stay in the good graces suggests that Stalin’s anti-Semitism was not race-based as such but more political and tactical.
Rajk and several other mostly midlevel officials were put on trial in September. The object was to link them to Tito and the Western “imperialists.” They were accused of treason, tarnished as Trotskyites and “nationalists,” and said to be working for American intelligence. It did not matter that Rajk had done nothing of the kind. Although Mátyás Rákosi was ruthless, he thought the court’s seven death sentences were harsh and proposed to Stalin that along with Rajk, perhaps it would suffice to execute only two more. The Boss magnanimously agreed.20 Hundreds of other “Rajkists” were arrested and, in groups of up to a dozen, tried in secret. Others were consigned to the camps without even a semblance of a trial.21 Stalinization then steamed full speed ahead, with his name attached to public places and streets and his birthday turned into a national holiday. One of the propagandists said, “We have to keep alive and strengthen” love and loyalty “towards our teacher, Comrade Stalin.” Anyone wavering “a tenth of a millimeter” from supporting him and the USSR would cease being a true Communist.22
The terror drastically affected the small country with a population of around 10 million. Between 1945 and 1950 alone, 59,429 persons had to face trials before people’s courts, and in the same period somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 were interned without trials. For the period 1948 to 1953, some 1.3 million people were hauled before various tribunals. Of those, a staggering 695,623 were found guilty and received punishments ranging from losing their job to paying with their lives. When a Hungarian delegation was called to the Kremlin in June 1953 and met with Soviet leaders, they were reproached by none other than Secret Police boss Beria for going overboard. He wanted to know how it was possible for such a small country to subject so many to legal proceedings in the last two or three years. He said there was a “virtual wave of oppression” that had turned “honest people into traitors.”23
For sixteen-year-old George Konrád, the year 1949 in Hungary marked the end of “the brief period of normal civil life that followed the Germans’ collapse.” Looking back, he said facetiously that after Rajk and his associates were tried and executed, “the only people not yet arrested were the ones whose trials the authorities had lacked time to arrange. They were scheduled for the following year.”24 And yet other Hungarian Jews like the young János Kornai were completely blind to these harsh realities, shielded—or so he recalled—by his blind faith in Marxism-Leninism and the conviction that the Communist Party “embodied true ideas, pure morals, and service to humanity.” At the time it never crossed his mind that “the admiration and respect” he felt for Stalin and Rákosi might be called a “cult of personality.”25
Charles Gati, who was also there, is right to remind us that the numbers tell only part of the terror. Two points stood out for him: “More than anything else the totalitarian era in Hungarian history was marked by an immense gap between popular hatred of the Communist regime and professed solidarity with it and between conditions of anxiety and the officially proclaimed euphoria about the new world order.”26
The Russian documents show Rákosi’s persistence in trying to get Soviet leaders to trigger proceedings even beyond his own borders and against Communists all over Eastern Europe. He returned repeatedly to the theme of “enemies” who had entrenched themselves in the leadership of various countries, and he was disconcerted when foreign comrades did not follow up on his leads.27 Eventually he provided the Kremlin with a list of 526 “persons of interest” that had emerged from the investigations in Hungary, and he kept on informing Soviet authorities in many more communications.28