BUDAPEST-20 YEARS LATER

...And yet today, 20 years after his death, one seems to hear the name of Imre Nagy more and more often...

...If in our time a ghost haunts Europe, it is the shade of victims who have lost their lives in the name of that other ghost announced in the opening words of the Communist Manifesto...

...The murderers of Moro considered themselves enemies of the state...

...Aldo Moro was leaving his home in Rome, Imre Nagy the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest...

...Now, I would be the last to claim that he was perfection personified and that no mistakes could be charged against him...

...Whereas the world press gave front-page coverage to Aldo Moro's captivity for so long as it lasted, it all but forgot Imre Nagy a day after his abduction...

...Soviet intervention was unleashed when neutrality had guaranteed that Hungary would not join the Western bloc...

...The differences do not end here...

...Twelve years later in Prague—although the Czechs had never been allies of Hitler—the Warsaw Pact was not denounced, no pluralistic political-party system was reestablished, nobody was lynched in the streets, the country was not declared neutral—yet Soviet tanks crushed the Czech movement...

...we're on the sidelines in this game, there's nothing in it for us...

...She survived her husband by some 20 years, but it was never possible for her to visit his grave...

...At the time that meant, as it does today, that the Soviet Union must not consider the peoples' democracies as its colonies, and that the Communist party in the U.S.S.R...

...But a democratic socialist Hungary would have been an example for the other satellites...

...the one man was held captive for little more than a month, the other for almost two years...

...no one concerned himself about Nagy...

...President of the Council of Ministers for the first time, in 1953-55, he opened the prison gates to survivors of Stalin's repression...

...What I can say...

...It is true—and entirely to his credit—that he did not always share the opinions of Moscow and of the Stalinist leaders of his own party...

...Imre Nagy and his acolytes want to repeat the snare of the Trojan horse, which they have slyly modernized...

...Imre Nagy was not kidnapped alone but together with his family and his closest associates...

...However, they did not manage to extort from this man (or from any of his murdered companions) one thing—not a single word that would have been a denial of himself, his friends, or of the Hungarian revolution...

...The former are pursued by police the world over...

...Would those people seriously claim that communism or socialism had been achieved in the Soviet Union or in Hungary...

...On November 1, three days before the Soviets intervened, he, together with Janos Kadar, founded the new Communist party—the same party that is to this day in control in Hungary...

...For myself, I will add just one thing...

...And in the area of international relations, at the time of the Bandung Conference, Imre Nagy proposed a very simple idea—audacious and inspired in its simplicity: that what was called the Five Fundamental Principles—national independence, sovereignty, equality of rights, mutual respect for the rights of every nation, and noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations, should be as valid among socialist nations as between socialist and capitalist nations...

...Should it be necessary to remind ourselves that we are living not in the Stone Age or in the Middle Ages but in the late 20th century, 200 years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, 30 years after the signing of the United Nations Charter, and three years after the signing of the Helsinki Agreements...

...How could one betray something that does not exist...

...More than a decade before the wonderful Prague spring, he was the originator and the first martyr of "socialism with a human face...

...Both were taken hostage and detained in the strictest secrecy and isolation...

...But I will point out that the evil did not begin in Prague...

...Today it is known that he would have had to write not a series of letters but merely to sign a short statement in order to save his life...

...That great old prostitute History prefers the rich, the strong, the successful...

...In a period when Hungary is considered the most liberal of the Communist 89 countries...

...Whatever we might do, write, or say while fighting Stalinism in the years before the revolution, the so-called free world responded only with incredulity, irony, and doubt...

...The leaders of the totally disoriented Party and Moscow's official emissaries asked him to assume direction of the government in order to save what could be saved...

...Whether those who declare for Eurocommunism today recognize themselves in these two concepts is for them to say...

...It was also claimed that there was a new division of roles between the "hard-liners" and the "liberals," so as to gain the confidence of the people, and especially to mislead the country and the world: one Communist is no better than another, the free world opined, and even if their differences are real, let's let them devour each other...

...A neofascist Hungary would have played the role of bugbear in Central and Eastern Europe—and that the Kremlin could even have tolerated...

...THE PEOPLE WHO FAIL on life's stage are rarely perceived as having been right...

...His scornful accusers say that to denounce the Warsaw Pact was a mistake...

...My own eyes were opened late enough for me never to be tempted to lecture someone who lost his blinkers even later than I. Laszlo Rajk was blind during the Moscow purges, we were blind during the Rajk trial, and Dubcek was blind when, in 1956, the Hungarian revolution was crushed...

...It makes one wonder what the others may be like...

...Back in Hungary, in 1945 he became Minister of Agriculture and presided over the distribution of the big estates among Hungarian peasants...

...that—especially in a country that had been Hitler's last ally—to tolerate public violence was a mistake...

...And what are the mistakes charged against him and against the whole Hungarian revolution...

...In 1918, when he was a young worker, Imre Nagy had fought as a volunteer in the Red Army against White Russian forces...

...To this day, no one knows where the bodies of Imre Nagy and his comrades are...

...on the basis of the wealth of ideas in his published writings...

...Just as in Prague later—in 1956 it was not for its faults but for its virtues that the Soviets liquidated the Hungarian revolution...

...He is recalled as a precursor of the 90 Eurocommunism about which there is so much talk today...

...But I should like to know who...

...Before Prague, there had been Budapest, and before Budapest there had been Poznan, and before Poznan there had been East Berlin, and before East Berlin there had been the Gulag, and before the Gulag there had been the Moscow trials, and before the Moscow trials there had been Kronstadt...

...There are, of course, numerous differences...

...That is true, and we rejoiced for it...

...If these diverging ways of thinking, if these diverging values have won some measure of trust, that is owed to us, to us Hungarians of 1956 who laid the foundations for the authenticity and sincerity of this evolution by our struggles, our suffering, our exile—and in the case of Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter, Geza Losonczy, Josef Szilagyi, Miklos Gimes, and many other nameless comrades, at the price of their lives...

...must forgo considering other Communist parties as auxiliaries...

...The Eurocommunists recall, often and proudly, that they condemned—more exactly, they disapproved of—Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia...

...in the Hungary of that period, in the midst of a tempest and with a people in turmoil, under pressure from the Soviet occupiers and with even the Western media fulminating against him— who would have been capable of carrying out Nagy's functions without making a single mistake...

...But perhaps it is precisely the right to differ that is one of the characteristics of this movement...

...The supposition was that we were acting on the orders of our Stalinist masters...

...And that could not be tolerated...

...The revolution had already erupted, and an armed struggle was underway between Hungarian insurgents and Soviet tanks, and still Radio Free Europe was exhorting Budapest: "Hungarians, do not put your trust in Imre Nagy...

...This, in brief, is the portrait of a "traitor," of a "counterrevolutionary...

...Does it not follow logically that these Communists would sooner or later be put to death also if, happily for them, they did not live in bourgeois countries...

...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE q 91...

...The Italian was killed by the Red Brigades of Rome, the Hungarian by the Red Brigades of Moscow and Budapest...

...Do we not hear it said today that this is true of Aragon, Marchais, Berlinguer, Carrillo, not to mention Garaudy, Althusser, Ellenstein, or Daix...

...the two men, and I say this without any lapse of respect for Aldo Moro, because no one who has not endured the same ordeal as he could cast a stone at him...

...Permit me to conclude my remarks with some reflections on the matter of credibility...

...We are waiting, we are hoping passionately for the day to come when the eyes of Eurocommunists will see at least beyond Prague to Budapest...

...it was also a mistake to reestablish a pluralistic political-party system, and to proclaim Hungary's neutrality...

...Soviet intervention occurred after duly constituted workers' councils had declared that there could be no question of returning factories to their former capitalist owners...

...He did not do it...

...the killers of Imre Nagy had supreme control over the state...

...Seized together with Imre Nagy were his wife, his only daughter, his son-in-law, and his two very young grandchildren...

...The defeat of the revolution and the later martyrdom of Imre Nagy were required for the world to learn that among Communists there were—and are—patriots, decent people, and that things are not as simple as, on one side, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and, on the other side, John Foster Dulles and Senator McCarthy imagined them to be...

...Both were condemned to death in secret trials, and the world learned of their executions only after their deaths...

...but in our time, when it is Communists who exterminate Communists, they are quite rare...

...Nagy died in the spring of 1978...

...Socialism...

...He spent more than ten years as an exile in Moscow, where he was one of the people who directed antifascist propaganda programs...

...when the revolutionary committees in the villages had spoken up unequivocally in defense of the agrarian reform, ergo, against the old semifeudal order...

...Rather than discuss these actions in detail here, I would like to recall something else...

...On October 23, 1956, the day when revolution broke out in Budapest, workers, peasants, writers, artists, and youth demanded that this particular Communist should be named to head the government...

...There are differences, likewise, in the behavior of *This article—originally an address delivered June 16, 1978 in Geneva—is reprinted here, with permission, from the French journal Esprit...

...The revolution was not put down during the period of atrocities but when a renewed and strengthened government had already put an end to them...

...For the dissidents who came after us—Polish, Czech, Rumanian, East German, and Soviet—the situation has been somewhat eased because the West has come to understand their position better, and today this is an advantage also for the Eurocommunists...

...What had he betrayed...

...A more curious coincidence is that both men were kidnapped as they were coming out of a building and about to enter their cars...

...Far from fearing a counterrevolutionary or neofascist Hungary, it was an independent, democratic, and socialist Hungary that Moscow feared...

...Sad as this may be, the true misfortune is not that eyes are slow to open but that they may be incapable of looking far enough—backward...

...He was more a man of science, an agrarian expert, than a pragmatic politician...

...is that Imre Nagy was the first to assert that the kind of Communism needed is a Commumism that "does not forget the human individual...

...with the latter one cordially shakes hands and signs treaties of human rights...

...In Rome, the Red Brigades returned the corpse of Aldo Moro, and so his family was able to at least bury him...

...That is where the true and great danger lay—in a Hungary (as later, in Czechoslovakia) that would have attempted to place the superstructure of democratic rights over the infrastructure of common ownership of the means of production...

...Communism...

...When we were engaged in our struggle, credibility was our most difficult problem...

...I think I am right in remembering that the chemical formula for water is H20, but so far as I know, no such structural formula for Eurocommunism has yet been set forth, which is not surprising since its major representatives—the Italian, Spanish, and French Communist parties— agree and disagree about issues in equal parts...

...In the days when Christians were persecuted, martyrs were numerous...

...he was not killed alone but together with several of his friends...

...His behavior during the revolution is said to have been Imre Nagy's crime...

...Of course, the people who killed Imre Nagy charged that he was a traitor...

...The Pope offered himself in exchange for Moro...

...During the '20s, when extreme-right elements controlled Hungary, he was an underground Communist and was jailed several times...

...It is clear that for almost two years his jailers did not refrain from using every means of pressure, blackmail, and physical and psychological torture in order to break him...