The results showed a decisive rejection of Communism, and the Kremlin went into damage control. It denied the Smallholders’ claim to the Interior Ministry, which had jurisdiction over the police. Molotov had Voroshilov arrange for Communist László Rajk to get that post and to have two deputy prime ministers appointed. One was a Social Democrat loyal to Moscow and the other a Smallholder who was secretly a member of the Communist Party. Rajk named Communist Gábor Péter to head the secret police, so that in sum they were perfectly situated to crush opposition. These postelection manipulations mostly nullified the results. Nevertheless, the Smallholders’ leader, Zoltán Tildy, was president, and Ferenc Nagy from the same party was prime minister, with a majority in parliament and likely supported by most people in the country.59
Communists regarded the vote against them as tangled up in “wrong thinking” and “false consciousness” that they would have to undo, and starting early in the new year, they orchestrated demonstrations around the country to “cleanse” government offices. Sometimes these actions got out of hand and led to mob lynching or backfired into anti-Communist riots, as in February 1946 in the mining town of Ozd. The violence was touched off by the mysterious murder of a Communist leader who was known for being anti-Semitic. Crowds of workers demonstrated, but against the Communists and the Jews. In other towns in May and June, stories circulated about supposed Jewish religious practices, and as in Ozd, the Jews’ property was attacked. The unrest culminated in pogroms that killed two and wounded more in Karcag.
Some of the anti-Semitism was stoked by none other than Rákosi, a curious business for someone who was Jewish. Apparently he wanted to link the black marketers, a source of popular discontent, to the Jews and gain support for the cause. He went to Miskolc in July, and an enraged crowd stormed the police station and lynched a Communist police lieutenant who was Jewish—yet another sign of the anti-Semitism that still simmered barely below the surface all over Eastern Europe.60
When Rákosi met Stalin on April 1, 1946, to try to get better terms in the coming peace negotiations, he made little progress. Either as a reaction to Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech of March 5 at Fulton, Missouri, or using it as a pretext to do what he already intended, Stalin began thinking out loud that all the Communist satellites should eliminate opposition parties. No record of his meeting with the Hungarian leader has been found, and we know about it only because when Rákosi returned home, he mentioned it to a few insiders. Stalin apparently also spoke about creating some kind of organization to replace the defunct Comintern.61
In due course that summer, Communist interior minister Rajk struck a blow against a pluralist society by banning hundreds of organizations. In October the regime created a new Hungarian State Security Department, or ÁVO (Államvédelmi Osztálya), out of the already existing political police working in Budapest.62 The new organization followed the Soviet model and was led by Péter. Mere mention of his name was enough to strike fear in people’s hearts. Athough the organization changed its name slightly in December 1948 to ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság), or State Security Authority, it was common especially for English speakers to keep calling it “the Avoh.”63
It hardly bears repeating that Stalin was committed to Communist success in Hungary and the eventual establishment there of a “people’s democracy.” Given circumstances on the ground, the Communist takeover of Hungary was always a question of timing: would it happen right away, along with Bulgaria and Romania, or later on, when the situation would be more conducive to Soviet action? The latter option also carried the benefit of allaying the concerns of the Anglo-Americans, who, from Stalin’s perspective, were forever sniffing around for something to worry about.
There is evidence that well into 1946 the Soviet dictator was ruminating that, all in all, it might be advisable to have Hungary remain a bourgeois-style democracy for a while longer.64 The country as a whole had strong anti-Communist feelings, and the British and Americans were breathing down his neck; thus delaying a Communist takeover in Hungary could calm fears all round. Delay, according to this reasoning, would make the Soviets less encumbered with the Allies and more in a position to devote their energies to Bulgaria and Romania.
Such considerations explain why Stalin was not overly eager to spend much time receiving Rákosi in the Kremlin. Between 1944 and 1948, while Communists from other Eastern European countries visited dozens of times, he was there only on four occasions.65 Of course, as things in Hungary began to heat up, and as their local leader set to work, Communist prospects for that country improved.
Rákosi went about the business of eliminating the opposition in stages, using what he later famously called “salami tactics,” cutting off one slice at a time. The Communists fabricated charges against twenty-two Smallholder deputies and had them expelled from parliament. More anti-Communist conspiracies were discovered, several hundred individuals were prosecuted by the people’s court, and a few were executed. The pinnacle of the attack on the Smallholders came on February 25, 1947, when the Soviets—not the Hungarians—arrested Béla Kovács, who was general secretary of the party and a member of parliament. He was not executed but removed from the scene and neutralized. These events were mentioned in the American president’s speech before Congress on March 12, in which, as we will see in Chapter 15, he announced what came to be called the Truman Doctrine.
According to Rákosi’s memoirs, it was in May that the decisive impulse came from Moscow to create a “people’s democracy.” The Soviet representative in Budapest revealed supposedly “incriminating material” about Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy, who was outside the country at the time and decided not to return. New elections were called for August 31, and this time the Communists ran as partners in a grand bloc, which won 60.9 percent of the vote.66 Nevertheless, even with intimidation and manipulation of the results, the Communists were unable to manufacture majority support. It would take a few more twists of the screws to lock the country down and all but compel it to fall in behind the one-party dictatorship.
Stalin and his comrades also had ideas about the future of Communism in the Balkans along the Mediterranean coast. However, the geography is rugged there, as are the people, and they soon showed the limits of the Kremlin’s reach.
CHAPTER 15
Communism in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece
Far to the south and west of Moscow, indigenous Communist resistance movements struggled against the Nazi invaders. Yugoslavia and Albania did not owe their liberation to the Red Army, but such was the attraction of Stalin as leader, and so prized were the “accomplishments” he represented, that the two new regimes engaged in what can only be called “self-Stalinization.” Greece did not fit this pattern. The Communists there had long since become a force to be reckoned with; they were embroiled in bitter, continuing, and often violent feuds with oppositional political forces; and they stood out in that they managed to provoke Churchill into a serious effort to save Greece from falling into the arms of the Soviets. The Greek Communists, it has to be said, did feel a kinship with the “great man” in the Kremlin. At the same time, they had a unique identity forged in their own bloody conflict and did not yield easily to direction of the kind Stalin was offering. In the context in which they found themselves, his “go slowly and don’t worry the Allies” mandate must have seemed very much out of place.