hungarian studies - EPA - Országos Széchényi Könyvtár

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LÁSZLÓ BORHI
of the purges. It turned out that it was not Rákosi who was responsible, but Péter
and his associates. In the summer of 1956 Péter took vengeance on Rákosi, helping
to destroy him by revealing his former master's true role in the show trails of
1949.
The function of terror in a Stalinist society was to enforce compliance, to destroy
pre-existing values, to break down preconceptions, to make it easier for the
new revolutionary values to take root, and to facilitate the politicization of society.
Stalinism was an ideology of perfection. Hence, by definition there could be
no problems that could not be solved. Should a solution fail, failure could not be
attributed to the ideology, only to antagonists. Consequently, there was no place
for error, there were no accidents or honest mistakes. 45 In the implementation of
terror against real and imagined "hostile elements," Hungary followed the Soviet
model closely, not only because Moscow demanded it, but also because the country's
rulers believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rákosi agreed with Lenin's
definition, "Rule founded on violence unconstrained by law". 46 Even one
decade after his fall, Rákosi still believed that Stalin's definition of the kulaks
remained valid. In 1955 almost seventy thousand people worked for the Ministry
of the Interior. Most of them belonged to the border guards, or wore the uniform
of one of the police organizations. 47 Their enemies were numerous. According to
contemporary Soviet figures the cases of 362,000 people were taken to court in
1951, and additional administrative, meaning police, proceedings involved another
half million. 48 Even so, in 1953 Zoltán Bíró, the deputy head of the Central
Committee's Agitation and Propaganda Division, estimated that there were still
around 500,000 hostile elements 49 in a country of less than ten million. Beria
believed that 1,500,000 people had been subjected to legal proceedings prior to
1953. 50 Up to the end of the first quarter of 1953 alone the courts tried 650,000
people and sentenced 387,000; the police meted out punishment in 850,000 cases. 51
As a comparison, in Poland there were six million names on the list of "criminal
and suspicious elements" in 1954, that is one third of the adult population. In 1950
thirty-five thousand political prisoners were held in Polish jails. 52 Of course the
massive hunt for "enemies" did not cease after 1953. A note prepared by József
Révai sheds light on the list of those the system regarded as enemies: Zionist and
Hungarian bourgeois nationalists, the remnants of capitalists, kulaks and cosmopolitans.
"It is impossible not to talk about the bourgeois remnants of ideology
beside the remnants of the capitalist classes, which nourish the hostile forces. In
Hungary these remnants are much larger and more dangerous than in the Soviet
Union, because in Hungary there was hardly any struggle against them and the
majority of our intelligentsia is bourgeois". 53 The chief targets were the former
"ruling classes" and the kulaks. Rákosi borrowed Stalin's interpretation of the
kulaks and considered them the most implacable enemies of Socialist construction.
According to this view, the kulaks along with the former "ruling classes"