HUNGARY: Our Truest Friends

The last time Hungarian puppet Premier Janos Kadar saw Moscow, back in January, he was sneaked into town. Last week, his country more firmly under his Russian-controlled thumb, Janos Kadar visited Moscow again, and this time his hosts felt they could safely pass him off as a leader of the people. At icy, flag-draped Vnukovo airport, Kadar was met by Soviet Russia’s fur-collared elite, including Bulganin,

Khrushchev, Malenkov and Voroshilov. Radio Moscow described the scene in throaty terms: “Now we see Comrade Janos Kadar emerging from the aircraft. Comrades Bulganin, Voroshilov welcome the dear visitors.”

In the land where nothing succeeds like excess, Comrade Kadar proved himself adept. Said he: “We have stepped on the soil of the Soviet Union with our hearts filled with confidence, for we have come to our most faithful, our truest friends.” Kadar thanked the Russians effusively for their bloody intervention in Hungary last autumn, in which an estimated 25,000 Hungarians lost their lives. “The whole world now knows,” Kadar said, “that every socialist state can count on the help of the Communist camp and above all of the Soviet Union.” Then Kadar and hosts drove off for “ideological and economic talks,” or, if things did not have to be phrased so diplomatically,

instructions.