The Murder of Nagy
EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL The Murder of Nagy The murder of Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, announced last week in Moscow, must go down as one of the most senseless, vengeful killings in modern history. Nagy and some...
...If their names are again forgotten in the West as Nagy's was, his fate will surely be theirs...
...Looking backward at the revolution Nagy came to lead, at the manner of his abduction and at the year-and-a-half he spent—a forgotten man—in Ivan Serov's dungeons, one must accord a high place, too, among the culprits to Yugoslavia's master of two-faced intrigue, Marshal Tito...
...the widow Julia Rajk—twice now a victim of Stalinism—and the other men, women and children who sought sanctuary with Nagy in the Yugoslav Embassy two Novembers ago and have not since been mentioned in any communiques...
...Tibor Dery, Gyula Hay and the other writers sentenced last year...
...It is pointless to speculate on the varying roles played in this crime by Khrushchev and Suslov, Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi, Kadar and Muennich...
...In killing Nagy, the Soviet leaders have killed a man who spent the better part of four decades as a hunted soldier in the ranks of Communism...
...As Sperber wrote then, the Hungarian revolutionaries ranked with the Warsaw ghetto fighters of 1943 as men who fought our battle in its purest form—and perished in "vast, cold solitude...
...whom only the violence of Rakosist and Khrushchevite repression transformed (as Bela Kovacs has testified) from a calm professor into "a flaming revolutionary...
...Now, with Hungary enjoying the stillness of the graveyard, the decision of the Soviet Communist Presidium to execute Nagy shows the type of cold-blooded vindictiveness that many thought had been buried with Stalin...
...In killing Nagy, the Communist leaders thus proclaim their intention of killing the best of their movement...
...Nagy and some three-dozen other revolutionists had been abducted by the Soviet secret police 19 months ago, when the revolutionary Workers' Councils were still battling Communist rule...
...An additionally eerie quality is furnished by the Soviet Central Committee's adoption, a few days after the announcement of Nagy's death, of major reforms tending to place agriculture on a market basis...
...Nor have recent condolences expressed in Washington substantially altered the verdict formulated here by Manes Sperber on November 26, 1956: "The West has lost the right to weep...
...If the peoples and governments of the West wish to do more than shed crocodile tears over murders they did nothing to prevent, they will now concentrate their efforts on saving the living: Zoltan Tildy, Ferenc Donath and the other political leaders who received jail terms when Nagy was condemned to death...
...All have at least acquiesced in the killing and thus bear responsibility...
...More than ever, broad, generous political initiatives are required to remove Soviet force from Eastern Europe in any way that does not harm democracy in Western Europe...
...Imre Nagy sincerely believed in neutrality and coexistence, and he was cruelly betrayed...
...whose division of the great estates in 1945 symbolized whatever hopes were aroused by the fledgling "People's Democracies...
...For it was the impoverishment of the peasants on the old Hungarian lati-fundia that made Nagy a Communist, and it was their persecution through Stalinist collectivization that ultimately made him a heretic...
...Bela Kovacs and the many other heroes who simply vanished when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest on November 4, 1956...
...And, indeed, that is how Moscow characterizes the murder: as a warning to the forces of "modern revisionism," by which is meant all those in Russia, China and Eastern Europe who hope to rescue a democratic socialism from the ideological ashes of Communism...
...Given the present temper in Moscow, Warsaw and Belgrade, who can claim we are doing anything to avert even more cruel future betrayals...
...On a broader plane, the resurgence of Stalin-type terror in Eastern Europe underlines again the tragedy of so-called "peaceful liberation" policies which neither liberate nor pacify...
...whose "New Course" in 1953 represented a sincere attempt to provide a decent life for ordinary people within the framework of the dictatorship of the "proletariat...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 26
