HUNGARY: As for My Mistakes

The Central Committee of Hungary’s Communist Party was treated to one of Communism’s most affecting ceremonies last week: at the bidding of his comrades, bulletheaded, gold-toothed Matyas Rakosi, 64, Hungary’s ironhanded Red boss for eleven years, hoisted himself onto a podium and proceeded to abase himself.

“In the last two years,” Rakosi began lamely, “comrades have often noted that I have no longer been so frequently as before at enterprises among the masses. They were right. But they did not know that the reason was the worsening of my health. My state of health began to affect the quality and quantity of my work, which in such an important post can only do the party harm.” Having made his excuses, Rakosi got to his crimes.

The Target. “As for my mistakes in the sphere of the personality cult and of violations of Socialist legality,” said Rakosi, “after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and Comrade Khrushchev’s report, I realized that the gravity and influence of these mistakes were greater than I believed and the damage inflicted upon our party as a result of these mistakes much more serious than I thought earlier. These mistakes complicated the work of our party [and] gave the enemy quite a wide target for attack.

“In correcting these mistakes I ought to have gone farther. I … bear a serious responsibility for all this.”

For Matyas Rakosi, the public humiliation was an added twist: the Central Committee had already extracted his resignation, put him on the podium just to see him squirm. After his groveling little speech, Rakosi walked out of the hall, his 37 years of service to the Hungarian party rewarded by dismissal. A slavish follower of the Kremlin’s twisting line, Rakosi had used his famous “salami tactics”—cutting up the opposition slice by slice—to become the undisputed ruler of Hungary, earn the title “Little Stalin.” When events outdated this title, Rakosi expediently tried to bend to the time, admitted mistakes, promised changes, apologized to Tito. But tough old cutthroat that he was, Matyas Rakosi could not really put his heart into the softer new policy, and Tito was the first in line to demand his hairless scalp. Soviet Traveling Salesman Anastas Mikoyan smugly watched last week as the once-proud Rakosi bowed his head.

The Successor. Rakosi’s successor, 56-year-old Deputy Premier Erno Gero, is a longtime Communist planner whose career—and devotion to Stalin—closely parallels Rakosi’s. The only discernible difference is that Gero has earned a smaller portion of Tito’s enmity. His appointment indicates no easing of conditions in Hungary. Lean, tuberculous Erno Gero wasted no pity on his old boss. Rakosi’s failure to adjust to the new line, he told the Central Committee, had hampered the development of collective leadership in Hungary. The committee then adopted an ironic resolution noting “the historic and imperishable merits of Comrade Rakosi, merits which cannot, however, make us forget the mistakes he committed.”