Hungary: Suffering Stalinists

Since Russian tanks crushed the Budapest uprising in 1956. Communist Boss Janos Kadar, 50. has ruled Hungary with judicious use of carrot and club. He ruthlessly exterminated the revolt leaders but tried to woo the Hungarian people with consumer goods and such self-deprecating slogans as “He who is not against me is with me.” To get the faltering economy moving. Kadar replaced many of the inefficient Red managers with non-Communist Hungarian technicians, arguing that “political reliability and professional competence are two different things.”

Kadar’s efforts to rally the country behind him have not been a stunning success, but at least the people are quiet. Said a veteran of the Budapest revolt: “You agree to work for the Reds so you can live, so your wife can eat and your children can get an education. You try not to think about it too much.” But if the people were tamely cooperative, the local Communist functionaries grew bitter at their downgrading and longed for the old days of bulletheaded Matyas Rakosi and Erno Gero, who as party leaders in 1956 had invited the Russians to put down the rebels.

Last week Kadar felt himself strong enough to move against the Red dissenters. In a plenary session, the Central Committee of the party voted to expel 25 top Communists—including Stalinists Rakosi and Gero—for factionalism, and for crimes they had committed in the Stalin era (when Kadar himself was jailed and tortured by Red police, who castrated him and tore off his fingernails). It was the most sweeping move toward destalinization undertaken by any satellite country since Nikita Khrushchev put on the heat in his campaign against Stalin’s image; Khrushchev quickly indicated his approval by promising to make a personal appearance beside Kadar at the Hungarian party congress in November.