HUNGARY: Asylum’s End

One of the minor mysteries, in all the disorder of Hungary’s last days of freedom, was the killing of Milenko Milovnov, a Yugoslav embassy secretary, as he stood “looking out the window” of the Yugoslav embassy on Stalin Square. Last week the mystery was cleared up: he was shot, all right, but not while staring out a window.

On Nov. 4, the last of Hungary’s five days of freedom, Premier Imre Nagy knew that he had gone too far in giving in to the Hungarian rebels, in proclaiming Hungarian neutrality and denouncing the Warsaw Pact. He had to flee for his life. Being a Communist, and knowing that Communist vengeance extends to families, he gathered up ten other Hungarian political leaders and their families, including Julia Rajk, whose husband Laszlo Rajk had been executed as a Titoist in 1949. They all arrived at the back door of the Yugoslav embassy just in time. As Embassy Secretary Milovnov let them in,a Russian armored car screeched to a halt, and out popped a soldier who sprayed the doorway with his Tommy gun. Nagy & Co. got inside the door safely, but Milovnov crumpled to the ground, dead.

Inside the Camp. For 19 days, while the battle of Budapest raged about them, Nagy’s party found asylum with the Yugoslavs. In these 19 days, while the Russians cruelly repressed but could not crush the Hungarian rebellion, another battle was going on throughout the Communist world: a frantic attempt to fasten the guilt for the Hungarian revolt. Tito got caught in the crossfire. Pravda accused him of being an accomplice of the “counterrevolutionary” Nagy, and hinted that Tito’s talk of “many roads to’ socialism” underlay all the trouble. Tito, in turn, indignantly blamed Hungary on Moscow’s failure to purge all the old “Stalinists.” But he was also careful to disown Nagy, and to justify the use of Soviet tanks, thus supporting Moscow where it counted: in its crushing of the rebellion.

Last week Pravda answered Tito—in surprisingly moderate terms for an issue so grave: “The attempt at dividing the Communist Parties into Stalinist and non-Stalinist . . . can only cause harm to the Communist movement.” This was a quarrel inside the Communist camp: Tito was not being expelled, nor was he asking to leave.

Inside the Bus. In such a quarrel, the compromised Imre Nagy was an embarrassing guest for the Yugoslavs. Tito sent Yugoslav Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Dobrivoje Vidic to Budapest to arrange for the safe-conduct of Nagy and his party to their homes in Budapest. Vidic obtained written guarantees from the Kadar government—but not from the Russians. That evening a bus arrived at the bullet-scarred Yugoslav embassy, and the 44 Hungarians (including 16 women and 17 children) climbed in, accompanied by two Yugoslav diplomats. As they were about to move off, two Soviet military cars drove up, and a Soviet officer ordered the bus driver to proceed to Soviet military headquarters. The Soviet commander told the protesting Yugoslav diplomats that he knew nothing about the safe-conduct agreement: “I got orders and have to carry them out.”

At midnight Radio Belgrade announced to the world that the Nagy party had not reached their homes. Under Secretary Vidic protested angrily to the Kadar government: “If the agreement [to return the Nagy group to their homes ] is not implemented, the Yugoslav government will consider it a flagrant violation, not only of the existing friendly relations between the two countries, but also of the generally recognized norms of international law.”

Despite the Yugoslav protest, the Hungarians spent that night at Soviet headquarters, and next morning Nagy was taken to see Premier Kadar. Nothing is known of what took place during the interview, but Kadar may have urged Nagy to join him in a coalition government, and been refused. The next that was heard of Nagy was a cryptic announcement over Radio Budapest that Nagy had expressed a wish to live in a people’s democracy, and that he and his companions had “departed to the territory of the Rumanian People’s Republic.”

Outside the Country. In the complicated game of rival intrigues and rival ambitions in the Communist world, it may be some time before anyone knows for sure whether Tito offered up Nagy to the Russians as his way of playing the game, and was mad not so much at Nagy’s arrest as at the tactless way the Russians grabbed Nagy before he was even out of Yugoslav hands. Nor could it be known whether Nagy was in fact in Rumania or, like thousands of other Hungarians, on his way to Siberia. But the Russians may yet have need of Imre Nagy’s services to pacify the Hungarians. Day after his capture, the General Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest demanded that Nagy be brought back and installed as head of the government, asked that a three-member delegation be allowed to visit Nagy—”wherever he is.”