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PARTISAN REVIEW
communist purge in his new postwar empire. For his successor, Khrushchev,
Hungary served as the first colony to start a "de-Stalinization": The Rajk
trial had to be reversed. Beria's execution was in reality a bullet in the dead
Stalin's head; in 1955, with the firing of his Hungarian counterpart, Gabor
Peter, Khrushchev prepared the downfall of Matyas Rakosi and through him
the old Stalinist guard in Eastern Europe.
We, the survivors of the purge, became once again the " objects of
history." The show trial was reeled backwards, and we were found innocent.
The rehabilitation of those who remained alive, as well as those who
had died , was as much a lie as had been our arrest. "A regrettable error,
Comrades, the personality cult, Beria and Gabor Peter were responsible,
not the system."
Istvan Lehota, promoted from chief guard and torturer in the cata–
combs in Andrassy Street to his new position as prison director, waited to
shake my hand when , on September 1, 1954 , he opened the prison gate to
let me go free.
* *
*
The dream of the "Realm of Freedom" which we had cherished in
Switzerland, had a short life in Hungary; four years after the liberation it
fell victim to the Rajk trial. This was an historic turn of events for many
reasons. It marked the start of the ruthless repression of any independent,
critical stirrings in the Communist Party , of any hope that the failed , first
Socialist model, the USSR, might not be the only possible one.
At the same time , however, the trials planted into the seven years of
the Rakosi era which followed them the seeds of its own destruction; the
rehabilitation, actual and posthumous, in 1955, of the victims of the trials
initiated the process of fermentation which culminated in the uprising of
October, 19)6 . On October 6, seventeen days before the outbreak of the
revolution, three hundred thousand people gathered at a mass meeting at
the gravesides of Rajk, Szonyi and their murdered friends , defying the Party
and the political police and made a solemn vow to end all distortions, deceits
and lies. What began as the funerals of Rakosi's victims ended as the funerals
of their henchmen.
The October revolution of 1956 was still another dream that could not
come true . Not only because of the Russian tanks that crushed it, but also
because of the Rajk affair. The show trial and its aftermath of terror became
the "childhood trauma" of a whole generation , of all the dreamers about
a sane, just society, even of the surviving former purge victims trapped in
Hungary.
It
broke their back. Its memory buried their hopes , it "repoliti–
cized" them into the docile bureaucrats who today administer the country.
