"Imre Nagy aka 'Volodya' - A Dent in the Martyr's Halo?" by Johanna Granville

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When Nikita Khrushchev dropped the other shoe with his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, not only did he expose Sta... (More) When Nikita Khrushchev dropped the other shoe with his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, not only did he expose Stalin’s crimes, he also created a public image of himself as a patron of “different paths to socialism” that would later prove hard to uphold. All over Eastern Europe, the “little Stalins”—Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary, Antonín Novotný in Czechoslovakia, Bolesław Bierut in Poland, and their like—watched fearfully, wondering how far de-Stalinization would go. Meanwhile, their opponents, who had criticized Stalinist policies, suddenly rose in popularity and stature.
The Hungarian leader Imre Nagy was one such critic. Having served briefly as Hungary’s prime minister (July 1953-March 1955), Nagy had become famous for his censure of the pace of collectivization, his expertise in agrarian reform, and advocacy of greater production of consumer goods. In Western history texts, Nagy has become a genuine hero and tragic figure. As former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov wrote bitterly, Nagy acquired in death a “martyr’s halo.” A professor of agricultural economy and long-time member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Nagy, we know, was something of a “bookworm,” an idealist mixed up with ruthless politicians of Mátyás Rákosi’s ilk. And yet, certain puzzles in the history of Nagy’s career have remained. For one thing, Mátyás Rákosi, who was the most powerful man in postwar Hungary, detested
him. Given Rákosi’s hatred of Nagy, why was it not Nagy - rather than László Rajk - who was branded the first Hungarian “Titoist agent” in Stalin’s sanguinary witch-hunt that swept Eastern Europe from 1949 to 1952, and cost the lives of Traicho Kostov (Bulgaria), Rudolf Slansky and Vladimir Clementis (Czechoslovakia), and the freedom of Władysław Gomułka (Poland)? Apparently, someone was protecting him “at the center” (in Moscow). The translated Russian archival documents printed below reveal that Imre Nagy, codename “Volodya,” enlisted with the Soviet secret police on September 4, 1930. According to the secret police report of March 10, 1938 translated below, Nagy was again recruited three years later, on January 17, 1933, by the OGPU's successor, the NKVD. Of Nagy's numerous submissions to the Soviet secret police denouncing his émigré colleagues, at least the handwritten ones should be seen as authentic. The story of how these archival documents - three of which are translated below - initially emerged in late 1988 from the KGB archives has more to do with Soviet and Hungarian party politics amidst the revolutionary upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s than with scholarly investigation. Since these materials were selected specifically to discredit Nagy and undermine political trends in Hungary in 1989, scholars should certainly be cautious in evaluating them.
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