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they permit the ruthless exercise of power - the inOiction of suffering and
deathJrom a distance,
that can also be enjoyable. Andrei Gromyko recalled
that Mikhail Kaganovich (a close associate of Stalin) wrote '''Hooray!' on
the margin of the NKVD lists of names of those sentenced to death as
'enemies of the people.'" On the other hand physical force can be justi–
fied as a necessi ty. Rakosi said in connection wi th the beating, the
defendants in the Rajk case: "Beating is a necessary method of the AVH
and it needs to be used." Gyula Princz, one of the officers actually admin–
istering the beatings, said: '''We beat them as long as they refused to
confess.' They were beaten because 'even during the investigation they
continued their hostile activi ties', that is, they denied the charges. Some
had to eat salt, others had to lick the toilet bowl or had water dripped on
their head ." Farkas instructed Princz to beat Rajk until he admitted being
an agent of the imperialist powers. Gabor Peter, head of the AVH
demanded that the interrogators show "unwavering hatred" to "the ene–
mies of the Party," that is, the accused in the Rajk case.
Eyewitness accounts of Soviet Party purge (or criticism and self-crit–
icism) meetings (where a certain amount of spontaneous audience
participation was encouraged), the Cultural Revolution in China, and the
Cambodian criticism-self-criticism sessions, among others suggest that
these regimes were often also successful in tapping into aggression and
scapegoating impulses among people not professionally involved with
political violence and coercion. Actively responding
to
such inclinations
and impulses, following official encouragement, is distinct from being
obedient to authority. At the same time we must remember that most of
the political violence under communist systems (as under Nazism) was
quite unspontaneous; it would be difficult to argue that the specialists of
the KGB (and similar organizations in other communist states) were "car–
ried away" either by their own impulses or spontaneous group
encouragement. This still leaves us with the possibility, indeed probabili–
ty, that many of those most intimately involved with ordering and
inOicting violence found it a congenial rather than a painful exercise of
duty.
JOSE DONOSO
1924-1996
