The world had paid no great attention to the United States’ offer in January 1978 to return the Crown of St. Stephen to Budapest. The symbol of Hungarian independence and legitimacy for Hungary’s rulers for over a thousand years, the crown had been saved from the hands of the SS and smuggled to Austria at the end of the war. From Vienna it had been sent to the United States for safe custody.
There is no doubt that Hungarian feelings were deeply stirred by the return of St. Stephen’s Crown, and it is likely that outlets, other than the obvious and dangerous anti-Soviet one, for nationalist expression began to be sought at about this time.
There was one just such outlet to hand. At the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Transylvania, for centuries a province of Hungary, had been transferred to Rumania. The peace treaties at the conclusion of World War II failed to rectify this casual allocation of half a million Hungarians to the rule of a foreign power.
Now turn to Rumania. Since the war there had been a potent strain of nationalism emanating from Bucharest. Claiming descent from a Roman colony established in Dacia by the Emperor Trajan, Rumanians consider themselves linked to Western Europe by an essentially Latin language and culture.
In the nineteen seventies, coal miners in the Jiu Valley, which produces most of Rumania’s coal, had struck, demanding better conditions and improved food supplies. Ministers were jeered at and Ceausescu himself failed to gain a hearing from the miners. By promises that were immediately broken and a sweeping program of arrests, the strike was put down. But word of the strike spread throughout Rumania and in order to counteract the rumor, the government propaganda campaign chose the only issue which would unite all Rumanians. A new drive was conducted to “assimilate” the recalcitrant Hungarian minority.
The Hungarians were quick to respond. Hungary’s leading poet, Gyula Illyes, accused the Rumanians of “apartheid and ethnocide.” He in turn was accused by a Rumanian Central Committee member of having an “anti-Rumanian” obsession.
The war of words continued, but nobody considered the possibility that the Hungarians would resort to any violent strategy. In the early eighties a partial trade embargo was imposed by the Kadar government, but lifted within months, almost certainly under pressure from Brezhnev. Then a series of events occurred, and almost like cogs finding their place, started the movement of the wheel.
In Rumania, Ceausescu was faced with a new and more serious demand for better conditions by the Jiu coal miners. These men, who had been little more than retrained peasants at the time of the last strike, had now the advantage of a further eight years together and were now much closer to an industrial proletariat. Organized and formidable, they faced the government with their demands. Bucharest knew only one real strategy — to bring in the troops. And as the winter began, a significant part of the Rumanian army was concentrated on Jiu in an attempt to force the miners back to work.
In Hungary, too, the cogs had deftly fitted. Janos Kadar had retired after nearly thirty years as the head of the government. The new leadership was younger, more belligerently nationalist. They took the opportunity of Rumania’s discomfiture to demand a solution of the Transylvanian problem.
Still, in the West there was little belief that the Hungarians were in earnest. In Moscow, economic difficulties and the continuing power struggle focused all attention inward.
The Hungarians, emboldened by Moscow’s silence, took a further step. They demanded an independent principality of Transylvania, jointly administered by Hungary and Rumania.
From Bucharest came a howl of pain. But the government was in no position to do more. The Jiu strike was now spreading to the national transportation system and to the industrial suburbs of the capital itself.
Hungary, after thirty healing years of Janos Kadar’s rule, was now the most confident of the Soviet satellite leaderships in the affection of its people. But in the last months it had launched an unprecedented campaign in the press and on television against Rumanian “atrocities” in Transylvania. The new nationalist leadership had unwittingly overstepped itself. For a people whose intense feelings of nationalism had been effectively frustrated for the best part of thirty years, the situation was intolerable. They demanded action.
It was a tiger the new leaders lacked the experience to ride. They appealed to Ceausescu to come to a conference in Budapest. He refused in a violently anti-Hungarian speech. The Hungarians, in reply, moved army units toward the hitherto undefended frontier. Ceausescu spared three divisions from internal security duties to face them.
Incidents occurred daily. When fifteen Hungarian Transylvanians were sentenced to death for military espionage on behalf of Budapest, the Hungarians pushed four armored divisions across the border in a “defensive operation on behalf of Hungarian Transylvania.” Twelve hours later the two countries were at war.
That same night over Radio Free Europe and by every other means they could exploit, the Ukrainian National Army of Liberation announced its support for the Hungarians and promised that their partisan units would immediately attack across the Ukraine-Rumanian border in the direction of the Rumanian towns of Suceava and Iasi.
Even before instructions arrived from Moscow the announcement caused consternation at the Soviet Army’s Ukrainian Command Headquarters at Zitomir and KGB headquarters in Kiev. Were military and KGB units to cross into Rumania in pursuit of the Ukrainian National Liberation Army? And if they then met advancing Hungarian troops, whose side were they on?
Before dawn the Rumanian government had protested in the strongest terms since 1945 about the presence of bandit forces on their soil.
In a purely reflex action the generals of the Soviet Army ordered ten first-line divisions to the Hungarian and Rumanian border during the morning of Day One. By evening both Hungary and Rumania had protested to Moscow at what had seemed to each of them like a Soviet threat on behalf of the other.
Meanwhile the two small armies clashed in skirmishes and brigade-scale battles. Strong points were occupied and attacked. As the hours passed the fighting units became more and more inextricably intermeshed.
And still there had been no admonitory word from Moscow.
But it now became clear that Moscow’s new military problem was not to be confined to the Soviet Union’s southwest borders. News was now to arrive in Moscow which indicated that the Chinese government might be taking advantage of the situation to flex its muscles.
At Aerial Reconnaissance School A, Sverdlovsk, the three interpreting officers left the viewing theater and made their way back to the conference room.
“We all agree that it’s a positive movement?” the senior officer asked.
The others nodded.
“A force of between thirty and fifty divisions?”
“Our estimate must be based on the vehicle complement per division. To know that, we have to know whether they’re first-line of readiness or not,” one of the officers objected.
“Which is why I propose a figure of between thirty and fifty,” the senior officer said. “I don’t think we can do better on satellite information alone.”
His fellow officers assented.
The senior officer picked up his telephone and was connected to the cypher room. “Moscow T-1,” he said. “Reads: Satellite observation twenty-one hundred hours this date. Between thirty and fifty Chinese divisions on approach march Amur River border areas IV, V, VI. To arrive border twelve to eighteen hours. Message ends.”