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Copyright: Johanna Granville, review of Roger Gough,
A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), in
The American Historical Review
, vol. 112, no. 4, (2007): pp. 1280-1283.- p. 1280 -How is it possible that the man who swore in 1956 to fight Soviet tanks with hisbare hands and hours later agreed to serve as quisling for a post-invasion regime inHungary, a man who 8 years earlier persuaded a friend to confess to imaginedcrimes to facilitate his execution, could in 1999 be voted the greatest Hungarian of the twentieth century and third greatest Hungarian of the entire millennium? Howis it possible that a bastard child, born into poverty, with only eight years of elementary education, could become the post powerful Hungarian communist leaderfor three decades? In
A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary
,Roger Gough shows readers how. Gough, Research Director at the London-basedthink tank Policy Exchange, explains how Kádár, born János Csermanek, lived forthe first six years of his life with a foster family, because his mother, a Slovak peasant (Borbála Csermanek), could not support him. His father refused toacknowledge the crying infant on his doorstep. When Csermanek moved toBudapest, he never quite fit in, appearing awkward to city and provincial kids alike.Blacklisted from his job as a typewriter mechanic at age 14, Csermanek sufferedlong bouts of unemployment. Poverty and loneliness bred in him an inferioritycomplex and introverted personality. In 1930 or 1931 Csermanek joined theunderground communist movement, which gave him a larger cause and identity.His illiterate mother and bastardy did not trouble his egalitarian comrades (p. 12).
The author does not state this explicitly, but perhaps due to the lack of a higher,university-level education, a tendency developed in- p. 1281 -Csermanek to focus on what is currently expedient, rather than on what is morallyright. These two factors, opportunism and loyalty to a larger cause helped Kádárachieve power in the Hungarian communist system. In addition, certain accidents of history taught Kádár key lessons and catapulted him to power, namely five stints inprison (1931-1932, 1933-1935, 1937, 1944-1946, 1951-1954), the Nazi-Soviet Pact(1940), and the end of World War II. During his first experience of torture in 1931-1932, he betrayed his fellow communist prisoners, thinking he had no choice (p. 12).Afterwards he was ostracized; they didn’t trust him. From this mistake - and hiserror of dissolving the communist party in 1943 - Csermanek learned theimportance of maintaining party unity above all else. According to Gough,Csermanek’s political isolation ended when Matyás Rákosi, whom he met in 1937 inthe Csillag jail in Szeged, condoned the younger man’s “honest mistake” (p. 14). In1940, the Comintern decided to re-establish a party organization in Hungary;Csermanek was available to perform tasks in the underground again and to serve asa liaison with the legal Social Democrats. In 1945, Csermanek became one of the tensenior Politburo members elected. He adopted the Hungarian surname Kádár(“cooper”). Lacking intellectual sophistication, Kádár excelled in organization,rather than ideology, economics, or agriculture. He identified strict control over thepolice force as the party’s key task (p. 26). When instructed by Rákosi to interrogate
László Rajk, whom Kádár envied and resented for taking his job as BudapestSecretary, Kádár had no qualms (p. 35). Only later, when confronted- p. 1282 -with the “physical reality” of what his “specious justifications” entailed, did Kádárfeel guilt; he was allegedly seen vomiting after witnessing the execution (p. 46).Eighteen months later, Kádár himself was imprisoned for the fifth time. Released in1954, he still praised Rákosi, again exhibiting his loyalty to a larger cause (p. 67)
.
Inchapters 7 and 8, in which Gough provides a useful day-by-day account of the Sovietand Hungarian decision-making process in 1956, we see Kádár at the height of hisopportunism. Kádár agreed with Prime Minister Imre Nagy on the need for a fullbreak with the old Rákosi-Ger
ő
regime after he was appointed the new FirstSecretary on October 30, 1956. Chosen suddenly by the Soviet elite to head aharsher, post-invasion regime, knowing the intervention had already been launched,Kádár succumbed to a combination of fear and ambition. His belief in party unityand loyalty to the USSR prevailed. He certainly would not “opt for martyrdom” likeNagy. As Gough writes, “To view siding with the Soviet Union as a betrayal is to usea moral calculus alien to Kádár…[T]here was nothing in his thinking that madeSoviet intervention wrong
in itself
” (p. 97). As he later warned Alexander Dub
č
ek in1968, Nagy himself had not been a “counter-revolutionary,” but had been“overtaken by events” (p. 164). Although initially acting as Brezhnev’s “broker andsoft cop” in the 1968 crisis, in contrast to hardliners Ulbricht and Gomu
ł
ka, Kádárultimately joined Warsaw Pact forces in the invasion of Czechoslovakia when
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