The best known of the Hungarian Communists was Mátyás Rákosi, one of the leading activists in the 1920s, whom the fascists imprisoned until the Soviet Union negotiated his exchange in 1940. When he returned to Moscow, Stalin personally chose him as the leader of the tiny corps that remained of the party. Stalin’s anti-Semitism was not yet showing; five of the six top figures among the Hungarian Communists—including Rákosi—were Jewish.
The painful transition to peace began on October 5, 1944, in Moscow, when a Hungarian military delegation arrived on behalf of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who in mid-1941 had been delighted to join Hitler’s crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism.” By the autumn of 1944, however, the Red Army was at the gates of Budapest. On October 11, Hitler pushed Horthy out in favor of Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Iron Cross, whose fanatics then fought on in the capital alongside Hungarian troops and the Wehrmacht.45
Meanwhile in Moscow, Rákosi and several other émigrés joined the Hungarian delegation for meetings between December 1 and 5 with Molotov and occasionally also Stalin. They opted to create a National Independence Front, a grand coalition that included Socialists, Smallholders, Communists, and National Peasants. Most of them would receive two portfolios in the Provisional Government that took office in Debrecen on December 22. Stalin liked the program, and just as he had counseled the Romanians and Bulgarians, he told the Hungarians “to underline more strongly the defense of private property and the preservation and development of private enterprise.” He wanted “more flexible formulas” with “nothing scary” in them. That would be the first stage, as elsewhere in the east. “Once you gain strength,” he said, “you may press on” with the Communist agenda.46
On December 27 the new assembly met and “elected” a new government, giving it a gloss of legitimacy. The cabinet had only two Communists, but there were others who concealed their affiliation, most notably Ferenc Erdei, the first minister of internal affairs.47 The immediate problem was feeding the population and restoring the economy. That task was difficult because the Red Army plundered everything it could find, and in addition the USSR used specially organized squads to carry out systematic robberies of “trophies,” valuables of all kinds, and did not stop at breaking into banks and carting away the spoils before shocked onlookers. All of this added to the desperate situation of the people, who were put on thin rations.48
Fierce battles continued to rage in Budapest, and Stalin ordered more soldiers thrown into the fray. The Red Army took dreadful casualties—sometimes so foolishly that the defenders were aghast as one senseless attack after another was launched and overwhelmed. All together the Soviets sustained 80,026 killed and 240,056 wounded in the siege of Budapest and associated operations, making it one of the costliest in the war.49 When triumph came on February 13, 1945, General Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the Second Ukrainian Army Group, turned the city over to his men, who left a trail of rape, pillage, and plunder on such a scale as to defy the imagination.
Hungarian Communists complained bitterly. For example, the party in Kőbánya, a Budapest suburb, wrote Soviet authorities that the “longed-for liberation” had led instead to the town’s senseless destruction. Soldiers exhibited “an outbreak of rampant, demented hatred. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and mothers to be violated by 10 to 15 soldiers and often infected with venereal diseases. After the first group came others.” Even the obvious victims of the former regime, the Jews, were not immune to being mistreated and robbed.50
Stalin shrugged off all complaints about the Red Army, and the occupation set about performing the tasks he assigned. One of his pet projects for all of Eastern Europe was to introduce land reform, at first usually on a modest scale. Molotov told Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet head of the Allied Control Commission in Budapest, that land redistribution would “concentrate the democratic social strata, particularly the peasants.” Voroshilov called in members of the government and said such a step might win over Hungarian troops still fighting against the Red Army.
On March 17, once the Peasant’s Party and the Communists mapped out the whole process, the sweeping decrees were announced.51 Small, medium, and large landowners lost their properties. Regardless of promises, no compensation was ever paid. Lands were passed over to 642,000 families, but the confiscations did not win much support, and as in Romania, they failed to produce any more food.
That June in Moscow, Rákosi sounded optimistic in conversations with Dimitrov. The Communists already had 200,000 party members, and in his view, they would likely have been doing still better were it not for the continuing Red Army “excesses.” If these could be stopped, food supplies improved, and the Hungarian POWs returned, then the future would be bright.52 It was taking time to get all that done. Behind the scenes, Soviet occupation authorities worked at getting “reactionaries and right-wingers” out of the administration.53
Retribution in Hungary had wings of its own and took several forms. Evidently there was no lynching. The police interned around 40,000 people, and denazification commissions purged 62,000 public servants.54 A special feature was the institution of people’s courts; the first of twenty-four such judicial novelties began in January 1945. They tried and executed the major figures of the former regime in the autumn. In total, the courts handled 58,629 cases and sentenced 477 to their death, though only 189 were executed.55
In addition, Communists were in control of the secret police in Budapest, where Gábor Péter was in charge from January 1945. Alhough he had a rival in András Tőmpe, a partisan leader recently returned from the Soviet Union with ambitions of his own, they worked in tandem at Andrássy Street 60, the former headquarters of the fascist Iron Cross, and carried on the tradition of terror.
In the summer the Communists and Socialists convinced themselves that their support was growing and wanted elections to prove it. Voroshilov, a key Soviet official in Budapest, was not so sure but acquiesced. On October 7 there would be a round of municipal elections, because the Left felt it was strongest in the cities and hoped to build on successes there in the subsequent national vote. The Communists and Social Democrats ran as the United Workers’ Front and did well to get 42.7 percent of the ballots in Budapest. However, the Smallholders secured outright victory there with 50.4 percent. The Hungarian comrades said that the Soviets should have agreed to more radical social reforms. On the other hand, Voroshilov explained to Moscow that Rákosi and company had been overconfident and had not put any positive proposals to the electorate.56
From the Communists’ perspective, the results of the national elections held a month later were even worse. Instead of joining in a grand bloc, the Smallholders insisted that they all run separately. Voroshilov pressured them to issue a preelection manifesto that said there would be a coalition government, regardless of the results. The Kremlin was upset when he failed to get a Bulgarian-style joint campaign.57
The November 7 national election was the freest there would be for many decades and likely reflected public opinion. Once again the Smallholders were the winners, with 57 percent, the Social Democrats obtained 17.4 percent, the Communists trailed with a miserable 16.9 percent, and splinter parties picked up the rest.58