As Farkas says, ‘the parliamentary democratic order was condemned to collapse on the day the November election results were published.’ For a time, the Hungarians were told that they might have favourable peace terms in return for good behaviour: the eventual peace treaty, at the turn of 1946-7, went against them, as all of the lands awarded to Hungary by Hitler were returned to her neighbours. Then there was an inflation — the worst ever experienced in a European country, including Weimar Germany. By July 1946 there were 50 million million million pengo˝ in circulation, and you survived by doing deals with the Communists, who controlled things. Dealing illegally in dollars was also possible, but it gave the Communists an apparently legitimate way to try to sentence anyone who was involved, including, as things turned out, the Cardinal himself, József Mindszenty. But Hungary was not Poland. The Church did have its supporters, but there was a large Protestant element, itself divided between Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians; there was no basis here for the passive resistance that Poles could put up, or for the Christian Democracy that emerged in Italy to defeat the Communists. Indeed, strict Calvinists, hating the Catholics, supplied useful men for the Communists, including a pastor, Zoltán Tildy, who even became president for a few years. Meanwhile, the Communists infiltrated the trade unions, where there was supposed to be parity with the Social Democrats, and the trick was, as in Czechoslovakia, to identify a left-wing element. This was not altogether difficult. In the first place, there generally was, among the non-Communist left-wing elements, one that would always argue for appeasement: the Communists would behave better if collaborated with. But there was terror, and there was bribery, and there was cynicism; and in the hopeless condition of Hungary in 1945, many people (including among the intelligentsia) saw Communism as the way forward. There were vast demonstrations of ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ in Budapest, and in 1946 ‘conspiracies’ were unearthed, by which the non-Communists could be discredited (there is a heroically mistimed — 1986 — Communist book on this period, by Jakab and Balogh, which announces grandly that ‘the competent authorities of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ ‘discovered the existence of an anti-republican illegal organization’). In Hungary, there was a further factor. In 1920 she had lost many of her old and historic lands, Transylvania especially. With Hitler, some of Transylvania had been recovered; and there was a hope that, with collaboration, something could be saved from the wreckage. Not until early in 1947 were the 1920 borders reconfirmed, Romania taking back Transylvania, and Czechoslovakia or the USSR an equivalent region in the north-east.
In 1946 the non-Communist government had very limited power, given that the Communists held the Ministry of the Interior, i.e. the police, and the security services. Besides, the Red Army was in occupation, and it simply carried people off for forced labour in the USSR; meanwhile, the economy, such as it was, was now dominated by Soviet cartels, and the foreign factory owners were powerless. The government was in any case easy to divide, because some of its following remained doggedly faithful to free markets, whereas others were sympathetic to the Left; and the religious division was still so strong that, in 1947, there were vicious fights over the presence of religion in schools. With their stories of ‘conspiracy’, the Communists could arrest, torture and deport even quite prominent Peasant Party politicians, and then extract confessions from them which would incriminate the prime minister himself. The government was only really able to let people escape to the West, including, in spring 1947, the prime minister, whose little son (now a New York banker) was held hostage. At the same time, with mass demonstrations in public, and secret police threats in private, sections of the governing party could be isolated and banned (‘salami tactics’, as they were called). The Allied Control Commission, dependent upon its Soviet chairman, was powerless. In 1947 a left-wing stalwart of the Peasant Party, István Dobi, took over, a man so demoralized and given to drink that, when he headed a delegation to Moscow, Molotov simply slid the bottle contemptuously down in his direction. There was then a coup against the Social Democrat and trade union ‘Right’. An apparatus of dummy parties emerged, and in the elections of September ten parties fought, seven of them splinters, one of them so absurd as to be allowed to function openly: the ‘Christian Women’s Camp’. A Communist-dominated coalition with Social Democrats and Peasant Radicals easily won, and by March 1948 the Social Democrats had been forced into fusion with the Communists, as the ‘United Workers’ Party’. In 1949 this won ‘95.68 per cent’ of the vote, and Stalinism descended.
Its local face was that of Mátyás Rákosi, born as József Rosenfeld in Bácska, to a family of twelve children from a small trader. He had won scholarships to Hamburg and London, had been a prisoner of war in Russia (at Chita, where a Countess Kinsky had helped) and had then experienced, on and off, but more on than off, prison. He knew how to act. He had a superb voice and had charm of a sort; he was also very vain, and at his sixtieth-birthday celebrations had special shoes constructed so that he could appear taller than Anastas Mikoyan, the Party vice-chairman, who bore birthday greetings from Stalin. Thirty-three prominent writers managed to write assorted items in praise of him, at a celebration in the Opera. Rákosi was hideous, the very exemplar of the French line that at forty you are responsible for your face. For the next five years, until the death of Stalin, Rákosi ran Hungary.
As Churchill said, an ‘Iron Curtain’ had indeed descended, and though there were still Soviet sympathizers, they lost the battle for public opinion as the facts seeped through the Curtain. Greece at least had been saved from the Communist takeover because of Churchill’s bargain with Stalin in 1944. But, as ever, Churchill’s side needed American backing.
3. Marshall
When the British announced on 21 February 1947 that they could not go on in Greece, the American reaction went far further than they had expected — ‘quick and volcanic’ was the expression used. In 1945 the Americans had hardly expected to be much involved in the eastern Mediterranean, though they had oil interests in Saudi Arabia. They had not meant to be heavily involved in Europe, even. But now, in February 1947, Greece caused a sea-change. The new Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, spoke — even then, to complaints at his moderation — for the entire Truman administration when on 27 February he said, ‘It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.’ He had spent the previous year in China, where there was a civil war in progress, and had been fooled by the Communist leader, Mao Tse-tung. The behaviour of Stalin was still more provocative. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union needed peace in order to recover from the devastation of the war, and American help was on offer. Instead, after a brief interlude tyranny had been reimposed, with starvation and in places cannibalism, while millions of people were worked to death in the camps, and Stalin had told Marshall to his face that Communism in Europe would win. But by March 1947 the Americans had had enough.