The Murder of Imre Nagy

[p004] The Murder of imre Nagy A sordid and shameful affair-—Steadfast to the end—A new stage opens—Where are the prophets of ‘liberalization’?—Imperialism’s crocodile tears— ‘Violation of socialist legality’?—Neither ‘full’ nor ‘evidence’—The Marxist answer—A_ reju- venated Marxist movement. HE world Labour movement is horrified by the brutal murder of Imre Nagy, Pal Maléter, Miklos Gimes and J6zsef Szilagyi. There is not one re- deeming aspect of this sordid and shameful affair. First Nagy is tricked into Russian custody by means of a specious promise of safe conduct, and Maléter arrested while he is negotiating with the Soviet Command. For months public opinion is lulled by Kadar and his spokes- men into supposing that Nagy’s life is not in danger. Then come trial, sentence and execution, secret and sudden, so that the news hits like a physical blow. The crime is accomplished and the criminals are washing the blood off their hands before anyone has been given the opportunity to protest or appeal for clemency. Nor is this all. No one of sensitive imagination can contem- plate without profound emotion and distress the fate of Géza Losonczy, whose health had already been shattered in Rakosi’s foul prisons, and who is referred to in these laconic terms: ‘Penal proceedings against Géza Losonczy were stopped by the Chief Attorney because in the meanwhile, as a result of illness, the accused had died.’ This statement was issued by the ‘Ministry of Justice’. Nor yet is this all. Nagy and his companions are killed, but Rakosi and his friends go scot-free, guzzling in some Black Sea villa while the suffering and sorrow they brought to Hungary goes on without respite. Not a hair of Farkas’s head is touched—Farkas the loathsome torturer who castrated his victims and urinated in their faces. But Nagy the communist is killed; Maléter, the heroic-leader of a desperate guerilla, who proudly wore to the end his red five-pointed star, who answered by clapping his hand to his pistol holster when Basil Davidson asked him what his attitude would be if there were any attempt to restore capitalism—Maléter is killed; Gimes, who loved the truth above all else, whose pen dripped acid when he wrote about the torturers and hangmen who had disgraced the name of communism— Gimes is killed. None of these men was great in him- self. But they were buoyed up and swept forward on the tide of great events; and they did not sully the Hungarian Revolution by temporizing with their tor- mentors, or by confessing to crimes they had not com- mitted. They were steadfast to the end. They will not soon be forgotten. O opens a new, grim and bloody stage of the Stalinist dictatorship. Where now are the prophets who talked glibly about the ‘liberalization’ of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that ‘irreversible process’ born in the dry-as-dust brains of pedants who substitute ready- made schemes and formulas for the living, contradictory movement of history? Speak up, all you who hailed the famous ‘Thaw’ as the beginning of some golden post-Stalinist age. Speak up, you who poured out articles about the ‘historical necessity’ of the purges, ‘but now, you see, all will be different’. Speak uv, you who waved last September’s issue of LABOUR REVIEW on public platforms and quoted, with ineffable scorn at our ‘dogmatism’ and ‘rigidity’, these sentences: It would be idle to suppose that the degenerate excres- cence which is the bureaucracy can be removed without a surgical operation. Those who write in terms of a self-liberalization of the bureaucracy, of the possibility of this caste or part of it beginning to act in the interests of the Russian workers, coming to terms with them, fulfilling their demands, are not merely the victims of illusions; they are guilty of vulgar and superficial think- ing and of a crude revision of the Marxist conception of bureaucracy. It is not enough to protest. We must also understand. F course our protest and our analysis have nothing QO in common with the hypocritical comments of Dulles, Eisenhower and the British Foreign Office. It ill becomes those who five years ago framed and mur- dered Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to shed crocodile tears over the deaths of four Hungarian communists. It ill becomes those who butcher Cypriots and Kikuyus to speak about [mre Nagy. The true feelings of imperialism 65

[p005] LABOUR REVIEW are expressed in the letter in The Times of June 20, from someone who found it impossible to regret the death of a communist. In private the British and Ameri- can imperialists believe the only good communist is a dead one. Like Stalin and Khrushchev they are by way cf being experts on this question; they too have killed very many. HAT of the members of the British Communist — Party? Are they inured to the need for instant acceptance of every Kremlin deed and word as a great new contribution to Marxism-Leninism? Or are they wondering how long it will be before the murder of Nagy turns out to have been a ‘violation of socialist legality’? It was eight years before Rajk was rehabilita- ted and his bones reburied, at a ceremony attended by 200,000 people. Will 1964 see the rehabilitation and reinterment of Nagy—and the comment by R. Palme Dutt that his murder was just one more spot on the Soviet sun? We can be sure, at all events, that there is great consternation among the ordinary members of the Communist Party, and perhaps also at the top. This is indicated by the Daily Worker editorial of June 19: There is regret and great concern in the working-class movement at the executions in Hungary. People who are in every way sympathetic to socialism and to the Hungarian People’s Republic regret that the Supreme Court felt it necessary to impose death sentences. We share these feelings. Precisely what this means it is hard to say. What is the Daily Worker regretting? That the four were killed—or that the Supreme Court ‘felt it necessary’ to kill them? Does the ‘evidence’—the ‘full court evidence’— presented to readers the previous day not convince the Daily Worker’s editors? There is no reason at all why it should. For not only does it turn out not to be evidence at all, but simply the ‘Ministry of Justice’ communiqué —but there are interesting omissions which make it rather less than ‘full’, and which show what is going on in the minds of the British Stalinist leaders. The version given in Pravda of June 17 contains the following, omitted by the Daily Worker: Imre Nagy and his associates also proceeded to make an agreement with the Hungarian bourgeois-fascist émigcés who were in the service of the imperialists. Evidence of this is provided by the declaration of the president of the so-called ‘National Committee’, Béla Varga, on October 28, 1956, that ‘members of the Committee are maintaining constant contact with the leaders of the Hungarian revolt’. What ‘evidence’! A second omission: One of the members of the conspiratorial group, Laszlo Kardos, was in contact with a former member of the May-June-July 1958 British mission in Budapest, Cope, with whose help anti-State political writings by Imre Nagy were smuggled abroad. Some capital crime! And a third omission: The Imre Nagy group, which had earlier come out under the pirate flag of ‘national communism’, fled from responsibility into the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. Clearly it is better not to remind readers of this, or they might remember that safe conduct. The whoie communiqué bristles with absurdities and contradic- tions. We had always been asked, for instance: ‘Where did they get the guns?’ True, no one had been able to produce a single Western gun, but the idea was that the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were armed by the West. Now we read in the communiqué that ‘Kopacsi had over 20,000 guns distributed among the insurgents from police stores’. Liars should have good memories. HE aim of this new wave of Stalinist terror, and of T the campaign against Yugoslavia, is clear. It is to strike fear into the hearts of ‘revisionists’ every- where within the Soviet orbit—but particularly to warn those who, especially inside the Soviet Union, are find- ing their way, painfully, gropingly, but with all the inevitability of a natural process, to Marxism. The Stalinist world no less than the imperialist world is in crisis. The bureaucracy has stated plainly that it will not tolerate any Marxist opposition to its domination. It will murder any socialist or workers’ leader who stands in its way, even if this means once again dragging the banner of communism through a sea of mud and blood. Marxists can give only one answer to the Kremlin’s declaration of war. We can no longer tolerate the perverting and derailment of movements, the des- truction of people, the miseducation of workers, the slandering of individuals, the dishonouring of socialism, that Stalinist methods entail. Openly, honestly, as be- fits Marxists and revolutionaries, we want a confronta- tion of ideas before the workers. We accuse the Stalinist leaders of abandoning Marxism, abandoning the class struggle, abandoning socialist principles. We want to destroy Stalinism lock, stock and barrel; we want to build a powerful and rejuvenated Marxist movement in Britain, that will bring clarity, vision, understanding and drive to the gathering forces of working-class militancy. For rank-and-file members of the Communist Party for whom the murder of Nagy is the final straw there need be no season in the political wilderness. There is a place for them among fellow-Marxists, building a movement that will cleanse the Stalinist dross and tarnish from the good name of communism. The Khrushchev speech at the Twentieth Congress is still topical ... and the full text of the speech, together with Lenin’s Testament and other documents suppressed for 34 years, and a Marxist commentary on the revelations, are available from New Park Publications Ltd, 266 Lavender Hill, London, S.W.11. Price 1s.6d. post free. PTT UT TTT TTT ETT TTT TTT TTT TTT irri yy) 66