Alongside him, were the coffins of four other leading participants of the Hungarian Revolution, and next to them, a sixth coffin – an empty one to commemorate all the victims of Soviet and communist repression during 1956. Shops and businesses were closed, and schools were given the day off. In the square, flowers and wreaths lay everywhere, Corinthian pillars were decked in black and white, Hungarian flags with the central Soviet emblem removed, and people with bowed heads, united by grief and ingrained memories.

Defeated

Imre Nagy had died exactly thirty-one years previously, on 16 June 1958, less than two years after the communists, with their Soviet masters, had quashed the uprising and re-established one-party rule.

With the uprising defeated, the communists returned, the Hungarian secret police, the AVO, re-emerged in their uniforms and, with their Soviet friends, plucked out leading insurgents for execution and scores more for deportation to Russia. They exhumed the bodies of their fallen colleagues, killed during the revolution, and reburied them with full military honours. By the end of the year, the Iron Curtain was back in place but not before over 200,000 men, women and children had escaped into Austria and the West.

Nagy (pictured) had found asylum in the Yugoslavian embassy but was kidnapped and held by the Hungarian communists for almost two years before they put him on trial that was as secret as it was pointless. On 16 June 1958, they executed him and his ‘fascist counter-revolutionary’ followers and unceremoniously dumped the bodies. Nagy was 62. (Even as late as 1988, on the thirtieth anniversary of Nagy’s death, the police used violence to break up a ceremony in honour of his memory.)

In November 1958, the communists won 99.8% in a single-party election. Everything in Hungary was back to normal.

1989

In the 1989 ceremony, people listened to the eulogies and watched the solemn laying of flowers. They listened to the speeches – words criticising the government and the continued interference of the Soviet Union, and demands for multi-party elections – echoes of 1956; words inconceivable even a few weeks earlier.

The writing was on the wall for Hungary’s communist rulers. Sure enough, on the 33rd anniversary of the start of the revolution, 23 October 1989, the People’s Republic of Hungary was replaced by the Republic of Hungary with a provisional parliamentary president in place. The road to democracy was swift – parliamentary elections were held in Hungary on 24 March 1990, the first free elections to be held in the country since the Second World War. The totalitarian government was finished – Hungary, at last, was free.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the revolution in The Hungarian Revolution, 1956, available as ebook and paperback (124 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The Youngest First Secretary

Mikhail Gorbachev was an up-and-coming star in the Communist Party and, following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, became a protégé of the new Party leader, Yuri Andropov. But on Andropov’s death in February 1984, the post of First Secretary fell, not to Gorbachev, but to the aging Konstantin Chernenko. However, Gorbachev spread his influence further so when Chernenko died after only thirteen months as leader, the post finally fell to him. Aged 54, Gorbachev was the youngest First Secretary in Soviet history, and the first to be born after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

His youth and progressive ideas alarmed the Communist hardliners and traditionalists, whose fears were confirmed when Gorbachev ushered in a reformist programme, and introduced into the political lexicon the words perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness). The Soviet’s system inept handling of the Chernobyl crisis highlighted the need for reform.

“I like Mr Gorbachev”

The international community welcomed the appointment of a man who seemed open and not ruled by cloak and dagger diplomacy and mistrust. Margaret Thatcher said of him, “I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.”

Immediately on coming to power Gorbachev was proposing a reduction in the number of nuclear arms held between the superpowers. In November 1985 Gorbachev met US president, Ronald Reagan, for the first time. Reagan, who had referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, was also impressed by the new man in the Kremlin.

In January 1986 Gorbachev made what is known as his ‘January Proposal’ by proposing a radical strategy for removing all nuclear weapons by 2000. Another meeting with Reagan in October 1986 brought this deadline forward to 1996.

Through their several meetings, Reagan and Gorbachev helped ease international tension. Despite their ideological and cultural differences, the two men build a rapport that was to have a real and lasting effect on the ending of the Cold War.

“We can’t go on living like this”

“We can’t go on living like this,” was Gorbachev’s considered summary of life in 1980s Soviet Union. The economy lagged behind that of the West, the people lived in poverty and without hope. The cost of being a superpower was crippling – the commitment to conventional and nuclear arms, the funding of communist regimes elsewhere in the world, and the costly and unpopular war in Afghanistan were all taking their toll on the economy and the everyday lives of the Soviet citizen.

Initially, Gorbachev increased spending on Afghanistan, hoping that a deeper commitment would bring about a decisive outcome and shorten the war. Although Soviet troops did benefit in the short term by penetrating deeper into the Mujahedeen heartlands, they were unable to sustain the initiative and would subsequently lose the ground they fought so hard to win.

Referring to Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound”, Gorbachev admitted defeat and in 1988 announced the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from a conflict that had become their ‘Vietnam’. A year later, in February 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan.

At home, Gorbachev toured the country, met its workers and, as no Soviet leader had done before, listened.

An “instrument of foreign policy”

On the eve of 1989, Gorbachev delivered a speech to the UN that acted as the starting pistol for the tumultuous change in Eastern Europe. He talked of nations having the right to freedom of choice: “the threat of force cannot be and should not be an instrument of foreign policy.” As a backup to his words, he promised the withdrawal of troops from the Soviet satellites.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Eastern Bloc, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (unwilling and resentful Soviet satellites since Stalin’s annexation at the start of the Second World War) all declared themselves independent. But Gorbachev, not wanting to see the break-up of the union, resisted.

In Russia, demonstrations in Moscow called for the end of one-party rule. In June 1990, Boris Yeltsin, recently elected Mayor of Moscow, was also elected president of the Russian Federation, stating that Russian legality took precedence over the Soviet Union’s. Yeltsin was determined to finish off the Communist Party, and with it the Soviet Union.

On 19 August 1991, the remaining communist hardliners within the Kremlin decided that Gorbachev was no longer the man to lead the Communist Party. Gorbachev, on holiday on the Black Sea, was declared too ill to perform his duties and placed under house arrest. The hardliners imposed emergency rule but lacked the support to succeed in their coup.

On 8 December 1991, Yeltsin, on behalf of Russia and with other former Soviet republics, formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, the CIS. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had ceased to exist. On Christmas Day the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time as Gorbachev delivered his farewell speech: “The threat of a world war is no more.”

2022 Update: Mikhail Gorbachev died aged 91 on 30 August 2022 following a ‘severe and prolonged illness’.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The two men were Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Premier, and Richard Nixon, the US Vice President. The occasion, on 24 July 1959, was the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, part of a cultural exchange between the two superpowers. Although in Moscow, this was an American exhibition, and Nixon, for the benefit of Khrushchev, was its proud host.

Communism v. Capitalism

At times polite, at times restrained, mocking, jibing, or heated, the two men debated the relative merits of communism and capitalism, from nuclear weapons to washing machines, over several hours across many venues. At one point Nixon makes his point by jabbing his finger into Khrushchev’s chest whilst the Soviet leader listens, his bottom lip jutting out in anger.

But it was the image of Nixon and Khrushchev leaning on the railing in front of the model General Electric kitchen, surrounded by interpreters and reporters that captured the moment. The Cold War in a make-believe kitchen. Following in the footsteps, looking somewhat distracted, was the future Soviet premier and Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev.

The make-believe kitchen

The kitchen was part of a showroom house which, according to Nixon, almost any worker in America could afford. “We have such things,” said Khrushchev, adding that they had much the same for the Russian worker, but better built.

Nixon boasted of the processes and appliances available to the modern American housewife, “In America, we like to make life easier for women”. Khrushchev shot back, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism”.

Khrushchev, exasperated and perhaps intimidated by the display of modernity, asked, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

At one point, Nixon says to the Soviet leader, “You do all the talking and don’t let anyone else talk.” For the full text of this terse and entertaining exchange, see this pdf on the CIA’s website.

“We will wave to you.”

In one notable exchange Khrushchev asks Nixon how long America had been in existence, “Three hundred years?” he asks, making the mistake to emphasis a point. 150 years, Nixon corrects him.

Khrushchev’s answer captured the essence of the Soviet Union’s paranoia and jealousy of the USA: “One hundred and fifty years? Well then, we will say America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite 42 years and in another seven years, we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.”

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Early Days

Born 30 June 1893 in Leipzig, Walter Ulbricht left school after only eight years and became a cabinet maker. Joining the German army in 1915, during the First World War, Walter Ulbricht served in both the Balkans and the Eastern Front but deserted towards the end of the war. Imprisoned in Belgium, he was released during the chaotic days of the German Revolution.

In 1920, he became a member of the German Communist Party, the KDP, and quickly rose through its ranks. He studied in the Soviet Union at the International Lenin School, a secretive school in Moscow that taught foreign communists how to be perfect Leninists and Marxists. In 1928, back in Germany, Ulbricht was elected into the Reichstag. It was a time of violent clashes between the communists and Nazis. Once Hitler assumed power as chancellor in January 1933, opposition parties were soon outlawed by his Enabling Act, and communists all over Germany fled or went into hiding. Ulbricht was one of them – fleeing first to France and Czechoslovakia, and then Spain during the Civil War of 1936-39 where he sided with the republicans in the International Brigades. He later received a medal for his time in Spain, angering fellow recipients, as Ulbricht never saw active service, preferring instead to hunt out Trotskyites and other unreliable elements within the KDP.

He returned to Moscow in 1937, and actively supported Stalin’s show trials and purges. Ulbricht watched as many of his superiors were purged, allowing him to rise further up the KDP ladder. It was almost as if his blandness helped him survive while his more charismatic colleagues fell. As a non-entity, no one really noticed Walter Ulbricht. He remained in Russia during the war and was let loose on German prisoners of war in order to ‘convert’ them to communism.

East German Uprising

On 30 April 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide, Ulbricht returned to Germany and within five years had manoeuvred himself into power as General Secretary, effectively head of state of the newly-formed East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (the DDR, to use its German initials).

Not unlike the power enjoyed by Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary, Ulbricht’s position was secure while Stalin was alive. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, and, sure enough, within four months, Rakosi had been removed from power. Meanwhile, Ulbricht faced his first real test as leader when, in June 1953, East German workers went on strike. But with the help of Soviet tanks, Ulbricht quashed the East German Uprising and survived.

In 1955, Ulbricht committed East Germany to the Warsaw Pact.

No one has any intention of building a wall

By the early 1960s the difference between West and East Berlin had become marked; the former enjoying prosperity and freedom that made the latter seem drab in comparison. The huge migration from East to West Berlin, and then into West Germany, was a great advertisement for capitalism and an equally poor one for communism and for Ulbricht and the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. But proposals for a wall in Berlin to stem the flow were firmly rejected by Moscow – it would only highlight their failure. Better to win the hearts of the East Berliners. But by 1961 almost 3 million, mainly young, East Germans had gone West, a whole sixth of the population, from communism to capitalism in minutes, causing severe labour shortages and an acute embarrassment for the socialist utopia. Their hearts had not been won.

On 15 June 1961, only two months before the Berlin Wall was erected, Ulbricht, at a press conference, said, ‘The builders of our capital are fully engaged in residential construction, and its labour force is deployed for that’; finishing with the now-infamous remark: ‘No one has any intention of building a wall‘. But, with now 1,700 going west every day, of course, they did. On the night of 12‒13 August  1961, a barbed-wire fence was erected. As the wire went up, many East Germans made a last-minute dash for freedom among scenes of high tension. Days later, a concrete wall completely encircled the 103-mile perimeter of West Berlin. The most potent symbol of the Cold War was in place and was to remain so for 28 years.

Retirement

The late 1960s saw a gentle improvement in relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany, and their respective leaders, Leonid Brezhnev and Willy Brandt. But Ulbricht remained firmly anti-West Germany, and the Soviet politburo deemed him out of step. On 3 May 1971, Ulbricht resigned on the grounds of ill health. He was succeeded by Erich Honecker who remained in power until October 1989, just three weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Pictured is Honecker speaking in 1958, with the attentive and beady-eyed Ulbricht behind him, watching). Ulbricht retained various honorary positions, including head of state, until his death, aged 80, on 1 August 1973.

The greatest idiot

Like any communist leader, a cult of personality was built around Walter Ulbricht. Parades and celebrations, such an intrinsic part of life under communism, would include banners and flags bearing his portrait. Every office and every home would have a framed picture of him. If they didn’t – then why not?

Wherever he went, he would be greeted with standing ovations; children would present him with bunches of flowers. Yet, for all this hyerbole, no one really liked Walter Ulbricht. Elfriede Brüning, an East German novelist, wrote that he was incapable of exchanging a pleasant word. Even Laventry Beria, Stalin’s notorious head of his secret police, described Ulbricht as the ‘greatest idiot’ that he had ever met. And Alexander Dubcek, Czechoslovakian leader during the 1968 Prague Spring, called Ulbricht, ‘a dogmatist fossilized somewhere in Stalin’s period;’ adding, ‘I found him personally repugnant.’ Ulbricht even fell out with his stepdaughter to the point of disinheriting her.

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Walter Ulbricht’s plan

East Germany’s economy was stagnating and Ulbricht (pictured), a Stalinist to the core, proposed a range of measures to pump up the economy – increase taxes, increase prices and increase production by 10% – but with no corresponding increase in wages. If the new quotas were not met, workers were told, wages would be cut by a third. The Kremlin viewed these proposals with concern, advising Ulbricht to tone down the measures and slow down the intense pace of industrialisation that the East German leader insisted was necessary. For the workers of the German Democratic Republic, this was a lose-lose scenario.

Citizens of post-war Eastern Europe did as their governments ordered, any protest was silent, whispered in dark corners. But these measures were too much; Ulbricht had gone too far.

Strike

On 16 June 1953, East Berlin construction workers downed tools. The following morning, 17 June, the strike had spread with over 40,000 demonstrators marching through the capital. Their demands at first focused on the economic – a return to the old work quotas. But then as the strike spread to other cities – Leipzig, Dresden, and some 400 cities and towns throughout East Germany, their voices gained strength and their hearts courage. They demanded increasingly more – free elections, a new government, democracy. Meetings were held; workers’ councils elected. In the East German town of Merseburg, workers stormed the police station and released prisoners from the jails.

Protestors tore down communist flags and carried banners proclaiming, ‘We want free elections; we are not slaves’, ‘Death to communism’, and ‘Long Live Eisenhower’. This was no longer a strike but an uprising.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Imre Nagy was born 7 June 1896 in the town of Kaposvár in southern Hungary. He worked as a locksmith before joining the Austrian-Hungary army during the First World War. In 1915, he was captured and spent much of the war as a prisoner of war in Russia. He escaped and having converted to communism, joined the Red Army and fought alongside the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Agriculture

In 1918, Nagy returned to Hungary as a committed communist and served the short-lived Soviet Republic established by Bela Kun in Hungary. Following its collapse in August 1919, after only five months, Nagy, as with other former members of Kun’s regime, lived underground, liable to arrest. Eventually, in 1928, he fled to Austria and from there, in 1930, to the Soviet Union, where he spent the next fourteen years studying agriculture.

Following the Second World War, Nagy returned again to Hungary serving as Minister of Agriculture in Hungary’s post-war communist government. Loyal to Stalin, Nagy led the charge of collectivization, redistributing the land of landowners to the peasants.

Prime Minister

In July 1953, four months after Stalin’s death and with the Soviet Union’s approval, Nagy was appointed prime minister, replacing the unpopular and ruthless, Mátyás Rákosi (pictured). Rákosi, ‘Stalin’s Best Hungarian Disciple’, had been responsible for a reign of terror in which some 2,000 Hungarians were executed and up to 100,000 imprisoned. Nagy tried to usher in a move away from Moscow’s influence and introduce a period of liberalism and political and economic reform. This, as far as the Kremlin was concerned, was setting a bad example to other countries within the Eastern Bloc. Nagy quickly became too popular for the Kremlin’s liking and in April 1955 Rákosi was put back in charge and the terror and oppression started anew. Seven months later, Nagy was expelled from the communist party altogether.

Hungarian Revolution

On 23 October 1956, the people of Hungary rose up against their government and its Soviet masters. The Hungarian Revolution had begun. Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow sent the tanks in to restore order while the rebels demanded the return of Imre Nagy. Khrushchev relented and Nagy was back in control, calling for calm and promising political reform, while, around him, the Soviets tanks tried to quash the uprising. On 28 October, Khrushchev withdrew the tanks, and for a few short days, the people of Hungary wondered whether they had won.

On 1 November, Nagy boldly announced his intentions: he promised to release political prisoners, including Cardinal Mindszenty (pictured), notoriously imprisoned by Rakosi’s regime; he promised to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact; that Hungary would become a neutral nation; and he promised open elections and an end to one-party rule. Two days later, he went so far as to announce members of a new coalition government, which included a number of non-communists. This was all too much for the Kremlin. If Nagy delivered on these reforms, what sort of message would it send to other members of the Eastern Bloc – its very foundation would be at risk?

On 4 November, Khrushchev sent the tanks back in; this time in far greater numbers. Nagy appealed to the West. While the US condemned the Soviet attack as a ‘monstrous crime’, it did nothing, distracted by presidential elections; while Britain and France were in the midst of their own calamity, namely the Suez Crisis. Anyway, the West was never going to risk war for the sake of Hungary.

The Hungarian Uprising was crushed. Nagy was replaced by Janos Kadar, a man loyal to Moscow, and who would remain in charge of Hungary for the next 32 years, until ill health forced his retirement in May 1988.

Secret Trial

Nagy knew he was in danger and sought refuge in the Yugoslavian Embassy in Budapest. Despite receiving a written assurance from Kadar guaranteeing him safe passage out of Hungary, on 22 November 1956, Nagy, along with others, was kidnapped by Soviet agents as he tried to leave the embassy. He was smuggled out of the country and taken to Romania.

Two years later, Nagy was secreted back into Hungary and along with his immediate colleagues, put on trial. The trial, which lasted from 9 to 15 June, was tape-recorded in its entirety – 52 hours. Charged with high treason and of attempting to overthrow the supposedly legally-recognised Hungarian government, Nagy was found guilty and sentenced to death.

On 16 June 1958, Imre Nagy was hanged; his body dumped, face down, in an unmarked grave.  He was 62.

1989

Exactly thirty-one years later, on 16 June 1989, Imre Nagy and his colleagues were rehabilitated, reinterred, and afforded a public funeral. The whole of the country observed a minute’s silence. Six coffins were placed on the steps of the Exhibition Hall in Budapest’s Heroes Square. One coffin was empty – representative of all revolutionaries that had fallen in ’56.

It was an emotional and symbolic event attended by over 100,000 people. The writing was on the wall for Hungary’s communist rulers. Sure enough, on the 33rd anniversary of the start of the revolution, 23 October 1989, the People’s Republic of Hungary was replaced by the Republic of Hungary with a provisional parliamentary president in place. The road to democracy was swift – parliamentary elections were held in Hungary on 24 March 1990, the first free elections to be held in the country since 1945. The totalitarian government was finished – Hungary, at last, was free.

Meanwhile, on 6 July 1989, the Hungarian judicial acquitted Imre Nagy of high treason. The very same day, Janos Kadar died.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the revolution in The Hungarian Revolution, 1956, available as ebook and paperback (124 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Misery and want

“The seeds of totalitarian regimes,” said US president, Harry S. Truman, a year earlier in March 1947, “are nurtured by misery and want.” In other words, communism appealed to those suffering from hardship. Remove the hardship; you remove the appeal of communism.

Known as the Truman Doctrine, the President believed that communism had to be contained, and that America could not, as it did after the First World War, turn its back on Europe – isolationism was no longer an option. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought America into the war, was proof that physical distance was no longer a guarantee of safety. In the post-war era, a stable Europe and the future of the ‘free world’ was a necessity.

The Marshall Plan

To alleviate the hardship, and to deprive communism of its foothold, the US introduced the Marshall Plan, named after its originator, George C. Marshall, a huge package of economic aid offered to all nations of Europe. Sixteen nations of Western Europe accepted the offer, which by 1951 had amounted to $13 billion. Although offered also to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, Stalin was never going to allow American / capitalist interference with the Soviet economy, and nor would he permit his satellites.

The Marshall Plan, therefore, had the effect of reaffirming Winston Churchill’s concept of the Iron Curtain (a phrase he coined during a speech in Missouri in March 1946) by forcing countries to decide whether their loyalties lay to the West or East.

The Marshall Plan also contributed to the unravelling of the fragile co-existence of East and West Berlin. Berlin, one hundred miles within the Soviet hemisphere, was split into four zones, one for each of the Allied powers, with the British, American, and French zones in West Berlin and the Soviet zone in the east. A line of communication through East Germany linked the western zones of Berlin to West Germany.

“You cannot abandon this city and this people”

In June 1948, America and Britain announced proposals for establishing a new currency, the Deutschmark, into West Berlin. This immediately caused economic chaos in the Soviet sector as people clambered to exchange their old money for the new.

The Soviets responded on 24 June by cutting off all road, rail and canal links between West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Blockade had begun. “People of this world,” said the Mayor of West Berlin, “look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.”

If Stalin’s aim was to force the Western powers out of Berlin, it backfired. The communication channels of land and water may have been closed off but not by air. And so began the Berlin Airlift.

During the eleven months (318 days) of the Berlin Airlift, American and British planes supplied West Berlin with 1.5 million tons of supplies, a plane landing every three minutes, day and night. Three years earlier, the Allies had been dropping bombs over Berlin, now, the West Berliners joked, they were dropping potatoes.

The West may have exaggerated the plight of the West Berliners for propaganda purposes but it worked and on 12 May 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes and realising the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.

East and West Germany

Within two weeks, the political division of Germany became official with, on 23 May 1949, the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ (West Germany). The formation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), had been agreed a month earlier.

On 7 October 1949, in response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.

It was now formal – Germany was divided into two, East and West, and was to remain so for forty long years.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Hungarian cardinal, Joseph Mindszenty, came to symbolise the church’s opposition to tyranny and totalitarianism.

Born Joseph Pehm on 29 March 1892 in the Hungarian village of Csehi-Mindszent (the name which, in 1941, Pehm adopted), Mindszenty was ordained a priest in 1915 at the age of 23. He spoke out against Hungary’s short-lived Soviet Republic and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned until its collapse in August 1919.

In March 1944, during the Second World War, he was consecrated as a bishop but later the same year was again imprisoned, this time by the Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross government, for protesting against Hungary’s treatment and oppression of its Jewish population.

I stand for God

Following the war, he was appointed Primate of Hungary and Archbishop of Esztergom, and in 1946 was made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII. But by now, the Hungarian communist party was looking to take over power, intimidating and silencing all opposition.

Mindszenty opposed the Hungarian communist regime of Matyas Rakosi (pictured) and was known for his vocal criticism. The cardinal toured the country, urging people to resist the government’s plan to nationalize the church’s land and property and Hungary’s 4,813 Catholic schools. In a letter published written in November 1948 and broadcast on the Voice of America radio station, the cardinal said, ‘I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. . . . Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance. I do not accuse my accusers. …I pray for those who, in the words of Our Lord, ‘know not what they do.’ I forgive them from the bottom of my heart.’

On 26 December 1948, Mindszenty was arrested. Stripped naked or dressed as a clown, Mindszenty was tortured, methods that included sleep deprivation, beatings, intense and incessant noise, and forced-fed mind-altering drugs. Finally, after over forty days and nights of continuous torture, the cardinal signed his confession.

A blot upon the nation

Mindszenty appeared at his show trial washed, shaved, and dressed up in a new suit. He was accused of over forty farcical wrongdoings, such as planning to steal the Hungarian crown jewels and, according to the prosecution, of inciting the ‘American imperialists to declare war on our country’. ‘I am guilty on principle and in detail of most of the accusations made,’ he said, but denied that he was trying to topple the government. The verdict, of course, was a foregone conclusion, and after the six-day trial, on 8 February 1949, Cardinal Mindszenty was found guilty of treason. Escaping the death sentence (the communists wanted to avoid having a dead martyr on their hands), he was sentenced to life imprisonment.  Four days later, the Pope excommunicated all those involved in the cardinal’s trial.

The verdict outraged the free world. Pius XII called the outcome a ‘serious outrage which inflicts a deep wound . . . on every upholder of the dignity and liberty of man.’ US president, Harry S Truman, said it was ‘one of the black spots on Hungary’s history and a blot upon the nation.’

The Cardinal is free

During the chaotic days of the Hungarian Revolution, 23 October to 4 November 1956, Hungary’s new leader, Imre Nagy (pictured), appointed by the Soviet politburo, sanctioned Mindszenty’s release, stating, ‘the measures depriving Cardinal Primate Joseph Mindszenty of his rights are invalid and that the Cardinal is free to exercise without restriction all his civil and ecclesiastical rights.’

Mindszenty lived under voluntary house arrest within Budapest’s US embassy and stayed there for fifteen years. When the communists, again worried lest he should die and attain national martyrdom, offered him safe passage to Austria, he refused. Finally, in 1971, on the urging of both Pope Paul VI and US president, Richard Nixon, Mindszenty left Hungary and moved briefly into the Vatican before settling in Vienna.

Cardinal Mindszenty died in Vienna on 6 May 1975, aged 83. He was buried in the city but, following the fall of communism in Hungary, was reinterred in the Hungarian town of Esztergom.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the revolution in The Hungarian Revolution, 1956, available as ebook and paperback (124 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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It was near the beginning of the Cold War: the Soviet Union had surged ahead of America in the arms race, Chairman Mao had not long come to power in China, and Americans everywhere feared the presence of ‘Reds Under the Beds’ within their own communities. In stepped Joseph McCarthy to shock the nation with a sensational announcement that confirmed their worst fears.

McCarthy exposes the Reds

It was the evening of February 9, 1950, at a Republican Women’s Club meeting in West Virginia, when 41-year-old McCarthy declared that he had in his hand a list of 205 names of State Department employees known to be members of the American Communist Party. (A month later, McCarthy had reduced the figure to fifty-seven.)

These informants, said McCarthy, were passing on information to the Soviet Union: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer.”

And so began the era of the communist witch-hunts. The eruption of the Korean War four months later with the communist North invading the democratic South Korea, merely confirmed the aggressiveness of global communism.

McCarthy’s rise

A Republican, Joseph McCarthy slandered his opponents on his way up the political pole, accusing them in turn of senility, financial irregularity, draft-dodging, and war profiteering. But when his own political career came under threat with claims that he had lied about his role during the war, McCarthy played on American’s fear of communism, and overnight became the most talked about politician in America.

Red Hollywood

Hollywood, already under suspicion, became the next target of McCarthy’s intense scrutiny. From the struggling novice to the stars, actors were interrogated. Those who confessed could wipe the slate clean by repenting and providing names of others. One screenwriter named 162 Hollywood actors, writers or directors who were communist, ex-commie, or sympathetic to the socialist cause. Many were purged, not to work again for years. Others fled abroad rather than face their turn in the McCarthy spotlight.

The studios, desperate to claw back the trust of the American people, turned out a series of propagandist films, I Married a Communist, or I Was A Communist for the FBI (which won the 1951 Oscar for Best Documentary).

Next in McCarthy’s glare came the universities, the “Reducators” of the impressionable American youth. Libraries were targeted and 30,000 anti-American titles banned from the shelves.

Joe and Ilk

Republican President candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, disliked McCarthy but needed his support to win the 1952 election. McCarthy had the gall to accuse George C. Marshall, originator of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan, of having communist leanings and being “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man.” Eisenhower planned to defend Marshall but, concerned at losing McCarthy’s support at such a vital time, failed to do so.

Once in power Eisenhower still felt reluctant to pull in the increasing excesses of McCarthyism, which by now were targeting members of Eisenhower’s administration. “Attacking him,” said one purged victim, “is regarded as a certain method of committing suicide.”

In 1953 a young New York couple, the Rosenbergs, were executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. The case intensified still further the paranoia of mid-50s America. McCarthyism was rampant.

McCarthy takes on the US Army

In 1954 McCarthy decided to take on the US Army, right up to the Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens. The army, according to McCarthy, was full of “dangerous spies”. The Republican Party tried to stop their renegade senator but too late – the subsequent investigations based on McCarthy’s allegations were televised throughout a 36-day hearing.

The nation watched aghast as McCarthy shouted, heckled and bullied his way through the hearing, with little regard for etiquette or procedure and failing to back up his wild claims with any substantial evidence.

‘McCarthywasm’

This time he had gone too far. The media, for so long in awe of McCarthy, attacked him for his “degrading travesty of the democratic process”. The Republican Party finally brought his misadventures to an end and in December 1954 stripped him of office, asking of McCarthy on live television: “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

McCarthy faded into obscurity. “McCarthyism,” said Eisenhower, “was now “McCarthywasm”.

Already an alcoholic, McCarthy drank himself into hospital and on 2 May 1957, aged only 48, died of an inflammation of the liver.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Joseph McCarthy – a brief biography first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post Joseph McCarthy – a brief biography appeared first on Rupert Colley.

‘Why stir up the past?’

Joseph Stalin had died three years earlier, on 5 March 1953. In late 1955, Nikita Khrushchev had been mulling over the idea of ‘investigating Stalin’s activities’ for some months. It was a momentous prospect – Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for the best part of three decades; he had taken the nation to victory over the fascist Germans, and his legacy was still everywhere to be seen.

Khrushchev’s colleagues were aghast at his proposal, especially the ones who had served in senior positions under Stalin, men like Kliment Voroshilov and Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. These were men with blood on their hands, who, under Stalin’s orders, had facilitated and organised the liquidation of tens or hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and women. Not surprisingly they asked, ‘Why stir up the past?’

And Khrushchev himself was far from blameless, having been the regional boss in Ukraine during the mid-1930s, a time of mass terror, liquidations and deportations. But, as Khrushchev pointed out, ‘if we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll be forced to tell the truth sometime in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches; no, then we’ll be the people under investigation.’

Khrushchev ordered a report on Stalin and his activities. The investigative team, headed by one Comrade Pospelov, spent months sifting through huge amounts of files and paperwork. Khrushchev knew what he wanted to say – that Vladimir Lenin, the first Bolshevik leader, had used terror but had employed it in a legitimate manner – against class enemies and to safeguard the progress of the October Revolution; whereas, as his successor, Joseph Stalin had misused his power, employing terror in an arbitrary and illegitimate manner. Pospelov’s report, when finally it came, provided him with the ammunition.

Our greatest friend

Khrushchev wanted to criticise Stalin’s ‘Cult of the Personality’. Lenin had become a cult but an unwilling one: ‘Wherever you look,’ said Lenin, ‘they are writing about me. I consider this un-Marxist emphasis on the individual extremely harmful.’

Stalin, on the other hand, had glorified in the adoration and indeed both expected it and received it. In 1937, one of Stalin’s sycophants referred to Stalin as ‘our great leader’, ‘our greatest friend’, ‘genius’, etc, more than fifty times in the course of just three speeches. This particular sycophant was none other than Nikita Khrushchev himself (pictured here with his boss).

But despite being aware of this, despite the deeply-held reservations of his colleagues, and despite the upset he knew it would cause, Khrushchev went ahead and delivered his speech. It took huge ‘political courage’, as Mikhail Gorbachev, whose own grandfather was arrested in 1938 and tortured, was to say exactly forty years later. It was at the end of the eleven-day Twentieth Party Congress, the first national gathering of the Soviet leadership since Stalin’s death, just past midnight on 25 February 1956. It was a closed session; there were no guests in the auditorium, no foreigners, no journalists – just the very upper echelons of the party leadership.

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech

For over four hours, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s methods, his abuse of power and criticized the regime built on ‘suspicion, fear and terror’. Khrushchev, aware of the impact his words were having, described how Stalin had chosen ‘the path of repression and physical annihilation.’ He described Stalin as a ‘very distrustful man, sickly suspicious … He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?”’

Khrushchev talked of Lenin’s ‘Testament’, in which Lenin had written of his doubts over Stalin’s capacity to lead the party; in which he called Stalin rude, impolite and capricious; and suggesting that his ‘comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.’ Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, the document had been suppressed and for most in the audience, it was the first they’d ever heard of it.

Khrushchev damned Stalin’s ‘cruel repressions’ and highlighted the catalogue of Stalin’s terror, starting with the assassination in December 1934 of Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s man in Leningrad, implying that Kirov had not been the victim of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, as always maintained, but that Stalin, fearful of Kirov’s increasing popularity, had sanctioned Kirov’s murder himself. But Khrushchev focussed on the political repressions, mentioning only in passing the mass repression of the population as a whole. And by cataloguing the terror from 1934 onwards, he ignored the mass man-made famines caused by Stalin’s policies of collectivisation, and the liquidation of the kulaks, the better-off peasants.

He condemned Stalin’s conduct during the war, calling Stalin a coward who ‘not once… visited the front during the whole war.’ He refused to take seriously warnings, even from Winston Churchill, that Hitler was planning an invasion of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the shock was such that days after the Nazi invasion, Stalin suffered something akin to a breakdown.

Deathly hush

Khrushchev described the ‘deathly hush’ that followed his speech as his pale-faced audience absorbed the heretical attack on the man who had ruled over them for so long. Many cried. Some of those present reputedly suffered heart attacks in the weeks that followed; some committed suicide. ‘De-Stalinization’ had started.

The text of Khrushchev’s secret speech, although secret and not officially made public in the Soviet Union until 1988, soon spread across Russia and abroad, causing shock that the great man’s name should be so besmirched but also relief that, through Khrushchev’s secret speech, the tyranny that had overshadowed the Soviet Union for so long was now something of the past.

But the speech caused riots in Georgia, Stalin’s country of birth, where they still viewed him as a hero: ‘Glory to the great Stalin,’ they chanted.

East Germany

The first signs of post-Stalin unrest came before Khrushchev’s secret speech, with the brief and unsuccessful East German Uprising in June 1953, just three months after Stalin’s death.

Poland

But following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the expectation of greater freedom from centralised, Kremlin rule intensified. In June 1956 in Poland, in a repeat of the East German Uprising of 1953, the workers revolted demanding economic reform. The Polish government, in a conciliatory gesture to their people, replaced their hardline leader with the popular and reformist Wladyslaw Gomulka. The Poles had taken Khrushchev at his word and were following a ‘different road to socialism’. But Khrushchev was not impressed. Furious, he flew unannounced to Warsaw for a showdown with the Poles. Gomulka held his ground but promised that Poland would remain loyal to Moscow. Satisfied with this, Khrushchev withdrew.

Hungary

But it was the Hungarian Uprising in October 1956 that truly tested the extent of the Soviet Union’s resolve. Following the relative success in Poland, students and workers took to the streets, tearing down a huge statue of Stalin and demanding greater freedom, the right to worship, and protesting against the excesses of the AVO, the Hungarian secret police. Khrushchev ordered in Soviet troops but replaced the unpopular Hungarian leader with the reformist Imre Nagy. With Nagy in place, Khrushchev withdrew his troops to the Hungarian border.

But within days, Khrushchev ordered the tanks back in. This time, with brutal efficiency, Nagy was removed and the uprising was crushed.

Khrushchev may have denounced Stalin as a tyrant, but when need be, he could be equally as ruthless.

The Dead Stalin

In 1924, Lenin’s corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum where people would queue for hours to pay their respects to the founder of the Soviet state. (He is still there today although the queues are considerably shorter). In 1953, Lenin was joined by Stalin, and the two ‘great men’ lay side by side. But in 1961, Khrushchev decided that Lenin’s sanctuary had to be freed from Stalin’s contamination: ‘The further retention in the mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honourable Soviet people and other activities… make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.’

In the dark hours of 31 October 1961, the dead dictator was removed from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. There was no solemnity, no ceremony, no speeches, just a few workmen doing a matter-of-fact task – by moonlight. The not-so Great Man was reburied behind the Kremlin Wall. A few weeks later, a granite stone marked the grave with the inscription, ‘J. V. STALIN 1879-1953′.

For the full text of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, all 23,000 words of it, click here.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech – a summary first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech – a summary appeared first on Rupert Colley.