SOME DIED SLOWLY

András Tömpe and the Long War within Communism*

A tall dignified man in his late fifties, whose English moustache only accentuated his military bearing, András Tömpe brought two guns to work one day at Vörösmarty Square. He wanted to be sure. The disciplinary verdict was due to be read at a meeting, but, asking for the forbearance of those who had gathered, Tömpe returned to his tenth floor office. Back there and alone, András took out one of the guns and shot himself in the head. It was a most careful suicide.

Understandably, it is hard for many to feel sympathy for the Communists whose rule extended over much of Europe in the twentieth century. In their ascent and ascendancy, they first brutalized and then sought to annihilate myriad groups and peoples who contradicted their claims and aims. The shadow of this persecution looms still in the communal and personal lives of the persecuted, and will do for many decades to come. Yet nothing better epitomizes the rise and reign of European communism—its character and the course it took—than the cruel war that the continent’s Communists persistently waged against one another. It was a war which defied all forms of defence, repeatedly destroying the best and brightest of the believers, and ultimately ripping the movement to shreds. The life of András Tömpe, which ended with such strange decorum that Wednesday afternoon, serves as one of many testaments to this internecine struggle and its toll.

Such disillusionment was far from the minds of those who gathered in Budapest a quarter of a century earlier for the inaugural assembly of the Hungarian Volunteers’ Association of the International Brigades in Spain (Spanyolországi Nemzetközi Brigádok Magyar Önkénteseinek Szövetsége). In the wake of the recent Soviet victory and the destruction of the fascist states of Germany and Italy, those who had fought Franco’s forces in Spain could now look back not on a lost cause, but on the first skirmish in a larger war that had turned their way. Among the Hungarians at those July 1945 festivities, basking in the glow of celebrated heroism, were András Tömpe, Ernő Gerő, and László Rajk.

The glow, at least for these men, would not linger. But even though it would have been difficult for Rajk and many others to predict that their Spanish service would soon be used against them by their comrades, the Spanish Civil War was not short of clues to the rocky path that awaited Hungarian Communists under Soviet oversight and communist dominance. We are accustomed to regarding the Iberian war as foreshadowing the opposing sides and military methods that would soon emerge at such cost on the world’s stage. But it was just as much a portent for what the export of an internally consolidated Soviet power would mean for the foreign Communists who either adhered to or resisted it.

COMMUNISM IN SPAIN

Unlike Tömpe and Rajk, Gerő—who left Hungary following the 1919 collapse of Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and joined the Comintern’s executive committee in 1931—had been in Spain for years before the Civil War. His presence reflected Soviet involvement in the guidance of Spanish communism, through both the NKVD and the Comintern, which Moscow used to control the international movement. The Partido Comunista de España (PCE) was the Comintern’s party in Spain, and Gerő, who became fluent in Catalan (and known as ‘Pedro’ there), spent the first two years of the war leading the PCE’s Catalan affiliate, the PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya), from behind the scenes. But despite the opportunities it provided, the civil war itself was a path that the Soviets and their acolytes had wished to avoid, contradicting as it did the newly embraced ‘popular front’ strategy.

While some on the revolutionary left, including the PCE’s rivals, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), sought to turn the gathering chaos and radicalization of 1936 Spain into immediate revolution, the PCE had been trying to play a longer game. ‘Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy’, Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov had told the Comintern’s Seventh Congress in August 1935, enumerating the idea of temporary cooperation between Communists and other left-wing and anti-fascist parties. ‘The attacking army was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the Trojan Horse, it penetrated to the very heart of the enemy camp. We, revolutionary workers, should not be shy of using the same tactics.’ It was in this spirit that the PCE and others on the left joined forces with the advocates of liberal and parliamentary democracy in the fateful Spanish election of February 1936. Indeed, it had been the Communists’ idea to call that electoral coalition, after their own concept, the Popular Front (Frente Popular).

Following the Popular Front’s narrow 1.1 per cent (151,000 vote) margin of victory over the National Front, it soon became clear that both the parliamentary republic (in existence since 1931) and the coalition now ruling it were reliant for survival on those who had no interest in either, except as a stage through which a revolutionary transformation could be prepared and enabled. ‘The Republican left had burned all bridges with the centre and right, and could remain in power [only] by ceding more and more power to the worker parties’, Stanley Payne explains in The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. The new left-wing government set about releasing those who had been jailed for their role in the October 1934 revolutionary insurrection and restoring them to their former employment, while some of those who had taken part in legally prosecuting the revolutionaries were themselves imprisoned. Far from the paeans to democracy that would soon be used to beautify the ‘Republican’ cause, the leading left-wing forces in the Popular Front government made it clear that a zero sum game had begun in which nothing that opposed it would be allowed to retain power in Spain. What followed was a spiral of repression, violence, and illegal seizures.

As Diego Martínez Barrio, founder and leader of the Unión Republicana (Republican Union) party, and briefly prime minister, put it later, ‘certain Socialists, and all the Communists, suffered from the mirage of what had taken place during the Russian Revolution of 1917, and handed to us Republicans the sad role of Kerensky’. Aleksandr Kerensky was the moderate Socialist who, following the fall of the Tsar in February 1917, led the provisional Russian government between July and the Bolshevik Revolution in October. ‘According to them, our mission was reduced to smoothing their road to power.’ This was no paranoia. ‘We must follow the path of completing the democratic-bourgeois revolution’, the PCE’s paper Mundo Obrero proclaimed just after the Popular Front victory, ‘until it takes us to the point where the proletariat and the peasantry assume responsibility for making the Spanish people as happy and free as the Soviet people through the victorious completion of socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat’. A few days later, PCE luminary Dolores Ibárruri insisted that Spain was in ‘a revolutionary situation that cannot be delayed by legal obstacles, of which we have already had too many’ since the Republic had been proclaimed in 1931. ‘The people impose their own legality, and on the sixteenth of February [the recent election day] asked for the execution of their murderers.’ ¹Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 84–89.

The fire and logic of such rhetoric overtook the popular front strategy to which the PCE was still committed. Ultimately, and unlike the otherwise somewhat similar situation in post-war Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviets (here through the Comintern) ‘lacked power to control the left as a whole or, for that matter’, as Payne summarizes, ‘to force conservative forces to sit while the left carried out its programme’. In the early hours of 13 July, soon after the murder of a socialist police lieutenant, the prominent opposition MP and leader of the Renovación Española (Spanish Renovation) party, José Calvo Sotelo, was extra-legally detained by the police and then killed. Even in a deteriorating civil climate, it was a shocking, watershed moment. Within a week, military leaders who had already been planning to seize Spain back from the left launched the pronunciamiento that turned the simmering contest for supremacy into war.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES

Armed conflict rapidly radicalized the situation, as it usually does, and in many areas that remained in ‘Republican’ hands after the initial assault of the nationalist forces, the communist revolution that had been both feared and foreseen indeed took place. But even as this was happening, the Comintern, under orders from the Soviet leadership, was directing its numerous constituent parties, groups, and front organizations to whitewash the cause as a simple anti-fascist struggle for parliamentary democracy. The skill and success of this campaign—which was thoroughly contradicted by both the status quo ante bellum and wartime reality—is manifested by the way these misleading pieties are still routinely parroted in the conventional Western view of the conflict. In parallel with this campaign, the Comintern directed communist parties across Europe and the world to begin recruiting volunteers for an international fighting force it would assemble and lead in Spain.

This momentous development found a 22-year-old András Tömpe completing his mechanical engineering studies at the Deutsche Technische Hochschule, a German-language college in the Czech city of Brno. Even by the time Tömpe had, five years earlier, left the Fáy András Gimnázium ²At that time, the secondary school, on Mester Street, was called the Magyar Királyi Fáy András
Reálgimnázium; it is now known as Fáy András Közlekedésgépészeti Műszaki Szakgimnázium. in the Budapest district of Ferencváros, he was already a committed Communist and, under the pseudonym of Péter Barna, part of the Hungarian Young Communist Association (KIMSZ). ³His parents are Benő Tömpe and Jolán Sugár. Benő, according to András’s nephew István, in
István Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, (The Betrayal of the Elites) (Noran Libro Kiadó, 2015), was born
Benő Fried, but changed his surname to that of his mother, Mária Tömpe. Studying abroad due to the numerus clausus law of 1920 that restricted Jews’ registration in Hungarian universities to a proportional equivalent of the overall Jewish population, András enjoyed the greater freedom afforded to Communists in Czechoslovakia and joined the Communist Party (KSČ) there. After his older brother István came through Brno on his way to fight in the new Spanish conflict, András, upon graduation, soon followed.

András was among thousands of young men arriving at the International Brigades’ headquarters in Albacete, and for many idealists, it was a first and bitter taste of living under actual communist rule. ‘Nobody I know who went to Spain during the Civil War who was not a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist came back with his illusions intact’, reflected the English poet W. H. Auden, who had his own sojourn in war-torn Spain. Ruling the roost over the International Brigades was André Marty, French Communist and Comintern executive committee member, who became known as the Butcher of Albacete for his ferocity, not toward fascists, but against his own side. Marty’s ‘penchant for dealing with all problems by simply having the offenders shot’, historian R. Dan Richardson comments, ‘became a scandal even among many Communists’. ⁴R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 175.

While all armies rely on a level of discipline and punishment beyond civilian norms, the International Brigades existed in de facto autonomy from the rest of the ‘Republican’ Army, meaning not only that those set aside for arbitrary punishment had no recourse outside of the Brigades, but also that even routine matters of military discipline were regarded as rooted in dangerous political heresy, increasing the recourse to imprisonment and execution. There were three main ways in which Comintern and Soviet influence was exerted and felt in these matters. Firstly, there was the NKVD, headed in Spain by Alexander Orlov, which had its agents amongst the brigades. Then there was the Brigades’ own political police, the SIM (distinct from the like-named organization for the rest of the Army); and lastly, the political commissariat of the Brigades, which placed within each battalion a political commissar, whose authority could and would overrule the military commanders. Within the International Brigades, ‘the search for political dissidence, its unmasking and punishment’, insists Richardson ‘became one of the primary concerns of the Brigade commissariat’. ⁵Richardson, Comintern Army, 119, 123, 159, 161–62.

It was here that László Rajk cut his teeth as the political commissar of the Rákosi Battalion, a primarily Hungarian formation within the Brigades, also containing András Tömpe, ⁶Unusually for a foreign fighter on the ‘Republican’ side in Spain, András’s brother István did not
fight within the International Brigades. (István Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 95–97). and named in honour of Mátyás Rákosi, another veteran of Béla Kun’s short-lived Soviet Republic in Hungary, who was at this time merely a prominent communist prisoner, incarcerated in Hungary since 1925. ⁷Generally speaking, there were five main International Brigades: the XI, XII, XIII, XIV, and XV.
For most of its existence, the Rákosi Battalion was within the XIII Brigade, but it was also later in
the 150th Brigade. Rajk soon discovered that enforcing the official communist line left one no less vulnerable to accusation and intrigue. And Rajk’s subsequent troubles in Spain, as the historian Jenő Györkei claims, had Gerő’s fingerprints over it. After Gerő wrote to his university friend László Haas, who was a commander at the Brigades headquarters, reprimanding him for not exposing enemies within the Hungarian volunteers, Haas brought accusations against Rajk, including of tolerating Trotskyism within the Rákosi Battalion, from which Rajk had to defend himself in the summer of 1938. ⁸Magdolna Baráth, ‘“Pedro”: Gerő Ernő Spanyolországban’ (Ernő Gerő in Spain), in Magdolna
Baráth, Gerő Ernő politikai pályája 1944–1956 (The Political Carreer of Ernő Gerő 1944–1956),
PhD thesis (Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, 2001). 419–421; Karl Benziger, Imre Nagy, Martyr
of the Nation (Lanham: Lexington, 2008), n. 54.

While the Brigades enforced political compliance within these Comintern-controlled forces, in an atmosphere of deepening mutual mistrust, the proxies and representatives of Soviet communist power in Spain took the chance to brutally repress all the external voices of the revolutionary left that did not toe Moscow’s line. These other Communists are often still labelled Trotskyites (or Trotskyists) today, which perpetuates the Soviet propaganda that transformed all non-Comintern Communists (or those who merely fell out of favour with Stalin) alike into members of an ideologically uniform and organized, quasi-fascist fifth column. ‘In February [1937] the enemy was Franco—that’s why I went to Spain’, recalled an officer in the Lincoln Battalion; ‘by June it was Trotsky—that’s what I never understood’. ⁹Cecil Eby, Comrades and Commissars (University Park: Penn State Press, 2007), 169. The most extraordinary stage of this Spanish inter-communist bloodletting—famous thanks to the testimony of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia—occurred under Ernő Gerő’s purview in Barcelona.

The semi-autonomous region of Catalonia had, since the outbreak of war, been effectively controlled by a coalition of revolutionary parties, including the PCE/PSUC’s rivals, POUM, and the anarcho-syndicalist union, CNT. These were radical Communists and related-revolutionaries who, with no interest in the strategies and geo-politics of the Comintern, were hostile toward the Popular Front and its Army. Thus, in May 1937, Gerő and the PSUC engineered a provocation which led to days of street-fighting between left-wing factions in Barcelona, culminating, under pressure from the PCE, in the re-exertion of central power in Catalonia by a new Republican government that swiftly gave the PCE and their Soviet sponsors what they wanted. Although the PCE had few portfolios, the new alignment crucially gave them control over the police. And with the new government quickly outlawing POUM, the PSUC occupied its premises in Barcelona, turning it into a jail for their vanquished foes. The coup de grâce came when POUM’s leader, Andrés Nin, on the basis of forgeries of communication between him and Franco’s forces, was arrested. NKVD agents took charge of Nin, but failed to quickly extract either a forced confession or a compromising mistake—such work is done over months—and settled for his hasty murder. ¹⁰Radosh, Habeck, and Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
170–210.

As Stalin’s Great Terror raged in the Soviet Union, with thousands of party and military leaders either imprisoned or executed, the assassinations of Catalonia demonstrated that, though the Soviets and their Spanish allies were certainly intent on winning the war, they were not interested in a victory that did not see Moscow-aligned Communists emerge pre-eminent. As would soon be clear, they would get neither. But despite the disbandment of the International Brigades in the autumn of 1938, András Tömpe remained in Spain to fight on, reuniting with his brother István, who had been with Spanish battalions throughout. The end of their war came in early 1939, when András was injured in the doomed fight to defend Barcelona from the Nationalist Army. After narrowly avoiding the amputation of his wounded arm, András, along with István, joined the hundreds of thousands streaming, beaten and bedraggled, into France.

They did not find a warm welcome there. On the verge of a world war that would close in viscously on the people of Europe, refugees and veterans from Spain were detained as undesirables in French internment camps. In the Pyrenees, the Le Vernet camp near Pamiers held a veritable politburo of Hungarian Communists, including the Tömpe brothers, László Rajk, Sándor and Imre Sebes, Ferenc Münnich, photographer Dezső Révai (brother of József), and even, after his arrest in Paris, Arthur Koestler. ‘A few years ago we had been called the martyrs of Fascist barbarism, pioneers in the fight for civilization’, wrote Koestler, a former Comintern propagandist, in the memoir of his time at Le Vernet. ‘Now we had become the scum of the earth.’ But while Koestler secured his release after four months at Le Vernet, many others remained there for years.

Release for the remaining Hungarians finally came in the wake of Nazi Germany’s fateful invasion of the Soviet Union. With Germany’s increased need of military production, prisoners at Le Vernet, now within Vichy France, were offered liberation and a return home in exchange for a period of labour in Germany. The Tömpe brothers, as well as Rajk, took their chance, with András working for the plane manufacturer Junkers at its Dessau plant. Having served his time there, following more than a decade abroad, Tömpe eventually found his way to Hungary; but neither safety nor respite awaited him there. After being again arrested and released, Tömpe was conscripted into a forced labour battalion (munkaszolgálat) and sent to Ukraine, where he managed to abscond across the front line to the Soviet side. ¹¹Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 104–105. András was probably once more living under a pseudonym at
this time, and, if so, would have been enlisted into the munkaszolgálat (labour service) as a political
dissident, not as a Jew.Before the war ended he fought in Slovakia with the partisan group of Sándor Nógrádi. Finally, in December 1944, András arrived in Debrecen with the new Soviet-backed provisional Hungarian government.

NO LOYALTIES WILL SUFFICE

The extraordinary flux that Hungarians had experienced since the demise of the kingdom and the dismemberment of the state after the First World War also shaped the strange course of the immediate post-Second World War period, often in unexpected ways. Trianon had, of course, pulled the rug out from under the feet of millions of Hungarians who suddenly found themselves foreigners needing to leave their homes in order to stay in their country. Much of the post-war elite had been born in Hungarian territory that was no longer legally Hungary, including Rajk (Transylvania), Rákosi (Banat), and Kádár (Fiume). Back in the 1920s, Budapest had been inundated with these refugees, who were simultaneously native and foreign in a land whose dismemberment had made it into a more ethnically defined state; a development that was also evident in the new names that many adopted to fit the times (Rosenfeld became Rákosi, Czermanik became Kádár). But, as we have seen, for Hungarian Communists an additional element was added to the general disorientation. With their political affiliation under legal duress in the inter-war years, they hid behind false identities in Hungary, or bounced around Europe in search of a viable vehicle for their commitments, or, frequently, both. Therefore, when their moment seemingly arrived with Soviet hegemony in 1945, there were few prominent Communists, including those like Tömpe who were born in Budapest, who did not have a complex, secretive, and convoluted past that would not only psychologically pull them in different directions in the coming years, but leave them vulnerable to accusations that would force a new interpretation on their lives. The men who had reinvented themselves amidst the historical and epistemological chaos of post-1918 Europe had no defence against further enforced reinvention. ¹²István Rév has written persuasively on this topic in a number of places, including the source below.

It is fitting that Hungarians call a show trial—which Stalin insisted that communist parties of the satellite states adopt in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of internal purges—a koncepciós per (conceptual trial). The public and staged process in court is the tip of the iceberg, while the heart and substance of it is the prior painstaking creation and elaboration of a defining concept within which the events of the accused’s life are rewritten, enmeshing him in a new character and identity, with circumstantial connections, false testimony, and, ultimately, forced confessions providing the ‘corroboration’. And in the context of both the deepening Cold War and Stalin’s recent extravagant excommunication of communist Yugoslavia, not only previous underground activity, but also experience in the West and involvement in international communism became biographical details with which loyal Communists were retroactively turned, within the koncepciós perek, into persistent enemies. This was how service at the Comintern’s beck and call in the International Brigades went from a badge of honour to a potentially fatal liability.

This did not, of course, create a guaranteed list of victims for Rákosi, as the MDP (Hungarian Working People’s Party) decisively seized all reins of Hungarian power in 1949. The list of suspect categories contained too many, the Tömpe brothers no doubt included. And while minister of the interior between 1946 and 1948, László Rajk had played a central role in the slow repression of the Communist Party’s rivals. But, just as had occurred in the Rákosi Battalion, the tables were turned on him by those more secure, thanks to their Muscovite connections. As he was bundled into an State Protection Authority (ÁVH) car outside his home on 30 May 1949, Rajk lost all control of his own history. ‘When the accused entered into dialogue with his accusers about his illegal past’, István Rév reflects, ‘he became a lost person; there was no escape anymore from the perverted logic of the interrogation […]. He who entered once into the world of the dark, could be suspected of having remained there; his life on the surface serving only as the cover of his real, illegal activities.’ ¹³Rév, ‘Reconstruction Reconsidered: An Examination of Police Philology: The Case of László Rajk’,
Psikhologicheskie Issledovaniya, 3/5 (2009), http://psystudy.ru/index.php/eng/2009n3-5e/165-rev5e.html.

Rajk’s first arrest for illegal Communist activity in 1931 was, in the story set out at his trial (beginning on 16 September 1949), the moment he was turned by the Horthy-era police into a spy and an agent provocateur for the forces of anti-communism. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, according to Rajk’s coerced testimony, he was sent to Spain by the Hungarian Police ‘with the double assignment, on the one hand to find out the names of those in the Rákosi Battalion […], and on the other hand through political disruption to bring about a reduction of the military efficiency of the Rákosi Battalion’. In the following account rendered before the court, the real accusation that László Haas brought against Rajk switched into a false denunciation by Rajk of Haas, but strangely resulting in the exposure of Rajk’s own ‘Trotskyist propaganda’ during the resulting investigation, so that ‘the whole thing backfired’. At this point, the trial’s narrative becomes a little sloppy, with Rajk adding that he deserted the Rákosi Battalion in February 1939, thereby preceding the other brigadiers to France. ¹⁴László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court (Budapest 1949), 38–39. But the Brigades had been disbanded for many months by then, and virtually every member of the International Brigades had either already left Spain or was hurriedly leaving. 

The scene of Rajk’s supposed machinations then moves in the trial to Le Vernet, where Rajk ‘admits’ to having continued his collaboration with Yugoslav ‘Trotskyists’, as well as the French intelligence services, culminating in him receiving a special offer from the Germans, now at the Hungarian Police’s request, to be allowed to return to Hungary via the Third Reich. There would have been quite a few listeners (the trial was broadcast live on the radio) squirming as they listened to this part (including András’ brother, István Tömpe), well aware that the German offer was one widely given and accepted at the camp, and by no means incriminating evidence of fascist collusion. But before Rajk’s courtroom tale left Le Vernet, there was another character with whom to connect him. Noel Field, the American diplomat who was in fact a long-time spy for the Soviets within first the US State Department and then the League of Nations, had been seeking asylum in Prague in May 1949 when he was detained and handed over to the ÁVH, which—along with its Soviet advisers—concocted a new biography for him as an agent of American intelligence, using his connections and travels to link many aspects of the grand anti-communist plot that Rajk was accused of leading. Of all the cruelties between Communists during the Rajk case, and there were many, the treatment of Field is particularly striking. Fearing that his long service for the communist cause would endanger him back home, in the aftermath of the Alger Hiss trial, Field had sought refuge among comrades, but instead found torture, incrimination, and public humiliation at their hands.

Even in the context of a meticulously rehearsed and regurgitated story, there are points in the trial at which the poise and clarity falters; the fact that inventions are being inserted within real events can be glimpsed through odd interactions. Testimony of a meeting between Rajk and Field could help the story because, in it, both Field and Allen Dulles served as key plotters, along with Rajk and the others on trial beside him. And Field really had visited Le Vernet as part of his League of Nations remit to assist in the repatriation of International Brigade veterans. During the first day of testimony, Rajk asserted that Field, ‘who was as far as I know, the head of the American intelligence agency in Central and Eastern Europe’, had said he was on orders from Washington DC to get Rajk home to Hungary in order to infiltrate the party leadership. ¹⁵László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court, 46–47. It was an absurdly anachronistic fabrication, not least as it projected the United States’ intelligence structure and capability in Europe a few years back in time.

But further questions to Rajk about Field came on the trial’s second day, during the questioning of Tibor Szőnyi, who was supposed to have had closer dealings with Field and Dulles. And it took a while for Rajk to again find his feet and role, despite what he had recited the day before regarding Field. Leadingly asked by the judge if he knew Field as he was shown his picture, Rajk answered, probably accurately, ‘I do not know him. I do not remember whether I ever spoke to him’, before clarifying that he did remember that Field came to Le Vernet. This was not good enough, and the judge pressed for more—‘But they definitely told you then that it was Field?’ So Rajk responded, ‘It was Field’. With this definitive answer, the judge said, ‘So you saw him once but because it was so long ago you cannot be sure you remember his face’, nudging Rajk toward further certainty. Rajk takes the lead and alters what he has said just seconds before: ‘When I spoke to him they told me afterwards that it was Field, and I did not pay attention then’ (italics added). It is odd and flimsy testimony, but, in the context of the koncepciós per, sufficient. In his long closing statement, Dr Gyula Alapi, the public prosecutor, concluded, ‘It was proved to be true that [Rajk] had already in the French internment camp established contact [with American intelligence] through Noel H. Field, one of the heads in Switzerland of the OSS’. ¹⁶László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court, 159–60; 257.

TÖMPE, GÁBOR PÉTER, AND THE ROAD TO THE RAJK TRIAL

András Tömpe was far away during the period when so many of the experiences he had shared were being spun into a web of deceit that ended in Rajk’s execution. Since 1947, he had been in South America, serving as an intelligence agent along with his second wife, Elvira Weiss. That he had ended up there was, in fact, intimately linked with the emergence of the Hungarian communist regime as a killer of its own, and he would, when he later returned to Hungary, be deeply involved with the consequent reckoning. Back in December 1944, as we have noted, he arrived in Debrecen with the Soviet forces and a provisional, nominally multi-party, government. Once there, he was appointed to head the political police department of the Ministry of Interior by its minister, Ferenc Erdei—a covert Communist despite representing the Nemzeti Parasztpárt (National Peasant Party)—following the advice of General Fyodor Kuznetzov, head of Soviet military intelligence (GRU). But the GRU had a long-standing rivalry with its civilian equivalent, the NKVD (or as it was later and more famously known, the KGB). Therefore, it was both predictable and highly significant that in Budapest, with the gruelling Soviet siege of the capital grinding to an end, another Hungarian Communist, Gábor Péter, who had long connections with the NKVD, was being handed a similar brief by the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP). ¹⁷Mária Palasik, ‘Üstökön ragadni a reakciót’ (Grab the Reaction by the Mane), http://beszelo.
c3.hu/99/11/10pala.htm; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
(New York: Doubleday, 2012).

It is well known that control of the Ministry of Interior was a stepping stone that post-war Eastern and Central European communist parties utilized, within coalitions, on the way to taking over. But the importance of the Ministry of Interior as part of the government was temporary, since the party’s control was both of paramount importance and ultimately incompatible with the neutrality of government organs. As soon as party control of the Ministry of Interior helped achieve and consolidate party control of the entire state, the Ministry and those within it were important only to the degree they could function as reliable instruments of the unmediated power of the party and its ruling clique. It was for this reason that in Hungary, as well as in other communist states, the political police (often unhelpfully referred to in English as the ‘secret police’) first rose, along with the Ministry of Interior of which it was nominally a constituent part, and then exceeded it, becoming the single most powerful arm of the new party-state. On the level of personal intra-regime politics, this played out through the dynamic that those with strong Soviet links—particularly Rákosi, Gerő, Mihály Farkas, and Gábor Péter—could outmanoeuvre those whose prominence had been established in any other way (military service, partisan heroism, wartime resistance, etc.). This whole process took nearly five years in Hungary, but began to unfold in the power struggle that emerged with Péter and Tömpe’s parallel appointments.

With overlapping and competing authority, the two Communists struggled both to assert fragile police power over a devastated country and to ensure communist predominance within the police, while simultaneously fending off each other. Both complained about their rival, with Tömpe speaking to his superiors about ‘Comrade Péter’s petty personal behaviour’. In May 1945, Tömpe was formally appointed head of the Political Department of the National Police Headquarters (Magyar Államrendőrség Vidéki Főkapitányság Politikai Rendészeti Osztálya), establishing a nominally territorial division of responsibility, as Péter led the Political Department of the Budapest Police Headquarters (Magyar Államrendőrség Budapesti Főkapitányság Politikai Rendészeti Osztálya). But in the summer and autumn of 1946 it was Rajk himself, after taking over at the Ministry of Interior from Imre Nagy in March, who finally settled the matter by extending the authority of Péter’s organization over the whole country, renaming it the State Protection Department of the Hungarian Police (ÁVO: Magyar Államrendőrség Államvédelmi Osztálya). Having served its role as the iron fist of the party, Péter’s political police force received its final elevation in September 1948, a month after Rajk had been demoted to the Foreign Ministry and Kádár had taken his place. Given control of even wider police and security powers in September 1948, the ÁVO was renamed the State Protection Authority (ÁVH: Államvédelmi Hatóság), indicating that this was no mere department, but an authority in its own right. It was in this enlarged and largely untouchable form that the ÁVH would, under the tutelage of Belkin and its Soviet counterparts, and the direction of Rákosi, turn its attention from external enemies to an internal purge. ¹⁸Rolf Müller, ‘A Magyar Államrendőrség Államvédelmi Osztályának szervezettörténete (1946.
október–1948. szeptember)’ (Organizational History of the State Defence Department of the
Hungarian State Police (October 1946–September 1948)), http://www.betekinto.hu/en/2013_3_
muller.

THE VORTEX OF PURGE AND REHABILITATION

Tömpe could count himself fortunate to have been defeated relatively early by Péter, losing his prominence before Péter was in a position to eliminate his rivals. But the mercurial power of Péter and the ÁVH did not even survive until the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the tentative and halting de-Stalinization that soon followed under the premiership of Imre Nagy. Péter’s arrest in January 1953 had begun as part of Rákosi’s attempt to engineer a Hungarian counterpart to Stalin’s extraordinary and antisemitic ‘doctors’ plot’.  Zionism was becoming a new central allegation with which to label opponents and around which to concoct tales of plots, and had recently been a significant element in the Czechoslovak equivalent of the Rajk trial, which resulted in the December 1952 execution of former KSČ General Secretary, Rudolf Slánský. ¹⁹Hungarian Jews were particularly vulnerable, despite the fact that the three most prominent
leaders of the Hungarian Party were Jewish: Rákosi, Gerő, and Mihály Farkas. But when Stalin died and the accused doctors were released in the Soviet Union, Péter remained in prison to serve a different purpose: he would become the sole culprit of Hungarian Stalinization’s worst excesses, and a way for Rákosi to distance himself from them.

Naturally, this was not a sleight of hand that Soviet leaders were themselves fooled by. ‘It is not right that Comrade Rákosi gives direction regarding who must be arrested; he says who should be beaten’, Beria, the long-time head of the Soviet political police, had extraordinarily proclaimed in the June 1953 dressing-down of Rákosi in Moscow that would lead to Nagy’s appointment as prime minister. ‘A person that’s beaten will give the kind of confession that the interrogating agents want […] it will never be possible to know the truth this way.’ ²⁰Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, János M. Rainer, eds, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in
Documents (Budapest: CEU Press, 2002), 16. Knowing the truth, as Beria well understood, had not been the object of this torture, but the Soviet leaders’ private reprimand of Rákosi (who retained the leadership of the party) demonstrated the shift in winds that accompanied Stalin’s demise. It was a shift that would soon lead to Beria’s own arrest and execution, bundled from the scene as part of Khrushchev’s seizure of power, and, back in Hungary, to a slow review of the most prominent trials and cases involving Communists. Péter ‘admitted’ his responsibility for the koncepciós perek before Rákosi and the MDP Central Committee, but did not share Beria’s fate, merely being sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1953 for ‘abuse of power and crimes against the people’. But this was not a show trial—the party was tentatively feeling its way towards a manner and method of de-Stalinization that would allow it to simultaneously condemn some of its crimes and retain its authority. Unsurprisingly, this involved numerous incremental steps, involving secrets, half-truths, new lies, and shifting stories. And it was mostly suspended in 1955, when another shift in Moscow allowed Nagy to be deposed. But then Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Soviet 20th Congress in February 1956 (in which he exposed and attacked Stalin’s ‘mistakes’) and its ripples across communist Europe finally ended Rákosi’s ability to evade his own responsibility.

We know how the disintegration of all remaining regime credibility that summer, and the dramatic reburial of Rajk as a hero on 6 October, paved the way for the revolution. But the effectiveness of a barely begun process of de-Stalinization in bringing about a revolutionary situation, leading to Soviet intervention, meant that a proper reckoning with even the intra-party atrocities of the 1949–1953 period was stillborn. Even though Kádár positioned his post-1956 settlement by simultaneously distancing the regime from the so-called Rákosi–Gerő clique (of which Kádár had been both a loyalist and a victim) and Imre Nagy (of whose revolutionary government he had been an intricate part), it was the threat represented by the latter on which the party-state focused its attention during the years of consolidation that followed 4 November 1956. And it was to this once-more battle-scarred Hungary that Tömpe again returned after another decade abroad in 1959.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Having unquestionably repressed the more radical voices of the revolution, and generally muffled the events of 1956 under a pall of silence, Kádár could turn his attention to the left side of his so-called two-front struggle. There was still genuine political peril and opposition on the hard-left for Kádár, and further distancing his regime from pre-1956 outrages promised both domestic and diplomatic advantages. It was timely and welcome, therefore, when Khrushchev returned in October 1961 to the theme of de-Stalinization, this time openly, at the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Startlingly describing specific instances in which leading Communists were defamed and murdered under Stalin, Khrushchev concluded that ‘it is our duty to make a thorough, all-round examination of cases of this sort that are due to abuse of power […] to do all in our power to establish the truth now, because the longer the time that passes since those events, the more difficult it will be to re-establish the truth’. With this line—and Khrushchev’s use of the issue to condemn internal rivals such as Molotov and Malenkov—Kádár had justification and motivation as well opportunity to resume Hungary’s own unfinished business.

Nevertheless, with vivid memories of the uncontrollable consequences that followed the previous de-Stalinization effort, Kádár proceeded cautiously when he returned from Moscow, suggesting to the Politburo on 14 November 1961 a strictly limited and internal process under a committee led by Interior Minister Béla Biszku (Antal Apró and Sándor Nógrádi were the other two members). ‘We must establish how many people were done away with, how many proceedings were brought, how many lives it cost.’ Presenting this proposal to the Central Committee three days later, Kádár expanded on the necessity of an ‘ideological struggle against the other remnants of the personality cult […] such as arrogance, insolence, conservatism in thinking, fear of anything new, one-sided thinking and hunger for power’. ²¹Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006),
134–35. Within days, Kádár was declaring the memorable phrase that would define his next twenty-five years, ‘aki nincs ellenünk, az velünk van’ (‘who is not against us is with us’). On 22 December, privately and more significantly, he visited the Ministry of Interior, a place he had avoided since his tenure as its head had been followed by his humiliating arrest.

Since András Tömpe’s return from South America, he had been working at the Ministry of Interior, firstly within the Intelligence Department and then, in March of 1961, moving to its Political Investigations Department (Politikai Nyomozó Főosztály). The dismemberment of the ÁVH had been one of the previous acts of de-Stalinization, carried out by Nagy in the midst of the revolution, which had remained undisturbed since. Once again fully absorbed within the authority of the Ministry of Interior, the political police for which Tömpe now worked was still a vital part of the regime, but no longer an autonomous weapon unaccountably in the hands of two or three party leaders. Yet many of those deeply involved within the ÁVH between 1949 and 1953 remained in the Ministry, aided by an especially half-hearted review of former ÁVH personnel immediately following the revolution. Exceedingly selective though Kádár’s new focus had to be, especially considering his own implication in the Rajk case, if there was to be a fuller reckoning with intra-party atrocities, the Ministry of Interior could no longer avoid scrutiny. Speaking for two hours before the party Committee of the Ministry of Interior, Kádár demonstrated that dealing with past excesses was inextricably connected with entering a new stage in which the repression for which the political police had been utilized before and after 1956 could no longer be the focus of a regime that now needed to encourage the non-ideological acquiescence of its people in order to endure. For Kádár, partially punishing former misdeeds was necessary, not so much as a grand gesture, but in order to undermine those within the party who were unwilling to move on from repression as the regime’s central activity. ²²Tibor Huszár, ‘Hogy valakinek itt legyen képe pofátlankodni’ (‘So that someone here has a face
to make fun of’), http://epa.oszk.hu/01300/01326/00034/12Huszar.html).

But how much meaningful reform was possible within a department charged with the internal affairs of a one-party state? Tömpe, who had preceded Kádár’s discourse with an introductory speech, was already at the end of his tether, marginalized within the bureaucratic organization. Writing to Kádár a few weeks after his visit, Tömpe told the leader that he wished to retire, while adding pointed critiques of Kádár’s address. Far from persuading him to put Tömpe out to pasture, the critical letter convinced Kádár that he needed to bring Tömpe further into the process at this critical juncture. By the end of January 1962, the Politburo had made Tömpe head of the important Administrative Department of the Central Committee (MSZMP KB Adminisztratív Osztály), which gave him coordinating oversight over the work of the Ministry of Interior along with the other prominent organs of state. ²³Huszár, ‘Hogy valakinek itt legyen képe pofátlankodni’.

In the end, the initial process that culminated in August 1962 with the Biszku committee’s report and the subsequent Central Committee resolution was a classic communist half-measure: revelations and concessions designed to end discussion. On the one hand, as the regime plainly and publicly repeated the already well-known admission that the koncepciós perek under Rákosi had been fabrications, all those involved were barred from working in the Ministry of Interior and the judicial system. The process of removing those identified was already under way before August, with 76 people eventually sacked from the Ministry of Interior and a further 19 from the judiciary. Those incriminated but no longer in high-level positions were excommunicated from the MSZMP (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party), including Rákosi and Gerő in Moscow, and Gyula Alapi. The highest profile current casualty was Politburo member and former head of the Central Committee’s Disciplinary Committee (KEB) Károly Kiss. As an admission of widespread communist malfeasance in the Stalinist era, this was relatively far-reaching, even extending to the war waged against Social Democrats. ²⁴Baráth, ‘A Belügyminisztérium “megtisztítása” a volt ÁVH-soktól, 1956–1962’ (The ‘Cleansing’
of the Ministry of the Interior of Former ÁVH Members, 1956–1962), in Évkönyv VII (Budapest:
1956-os Intézet, 1999); Árpád Tyekvicska, Írások a forradalomról (Balassagyarmat, 2006), 401–404.

And yet the emptiness of the repercussions for the implicated points to the short-term political purpose of the whole endeavour. Those who were recognized to have played crucial roles in the basest cruelty against their erstwhile comrades were often merely moved to alternative positions. Unmolested by prosecution or recriminations, some of those excluded from the Ministry of Interior had glittering careers still ahead of them. For example, Sándor Rajnai—who was also heavily involved in the capital prosecution and trial of Imre Nagy that would not be officially regretted for another quarter of a century—spent four years in the Foreign Ministry following his removal from the Ministry of Interior in 1962, after which he actually returned to work a further decade at Interior, before a long stint as the Hungarian ambassador to the Soviet Union. Even in the context of an inquiry that did not look beyond either ‘labour movement’ (munkásmozgalom) victims or the end of Rákosi’s reign, this was a whitewash. With the end of the inquiry and the resulting mild censures, these cases were regarded as closed.

This was not the conclusion that András Tömpe had anticipated, and, two days before the Politburo was due to discuss the Biszku report on 3 August, he sent Kádár a letter distancing himself from its conclusions. In particular, Tömpe complained about the report’s thesis that ‘theoretical deviation’ was the principal cause of the abuses that took place in the Stalinist period. This was backwards reasoning, Tömpe insisted, because the leaders had been motivated by personal power; they had not made a mere ideological error, but had consciously adapted the theory to fit their selfish purposes. ²⁵Tibor Huszár, Kádár 2. (Kossuth Kiadó, 2010). It is hard not to wonder if Tömpe had his old rival Péter partly in mind—we know that Péter was worried that Tömpe might use his new position to settle scores. But Péter need not have worried; the old ÁVH chief had been free since January 1959 and would live out a long life in peace as a librarian. Meanwhile, relatives like the widow of Miklós Szűcs were receiving belated compensation; her husband and his brother Ernő, who had been Péter’s deputy until his arrest, both died in 1951 while undergoing torture at the ÁVH. Five thousand forints was supposed to draw a line under the episode. Unable to abide this mixture of paltry measures and premature silence, Tömpe soon left his new position. András Tömpe, according to his nephew and author István, ‘did not want to erase the past’.

HOPE EXTINGUISHED

As it turned out, the past kept returning to haunt the communist regimes of Europe, even as they tried to placate its ghosts. While the MSZMP Politburo was handing out censures to its own unpunished perpetrators, in Prague the KSČ Presidium—with Khrushchev’s 22nd Congress declarations likewise ringing in its ears—was establishing its own commission of inquiry (the Kolder Commission) into previous intra-party abuses. The Czechoslovak party had persisted with Stalinist methods beyond Stalin’s death, and had been slower to either review or rehabilitate than the Hungarian or, for that matter, Soviet party. But the Kolder Commission’s brief and findings went far further than previous token gestures, including the 1957 report of Rudolf Barák, the now imprisoned former interior minister. Sitting on the Kolder Commission was a young Slovak leader named Alexander Dubček, for whom it was an eye-opening experience. ‘Many revelations about the methods of the repression were truly shocking’, Dubček would later recall. ‘I do not think I was the same person at the end of the commission’s work.’ The Kolder report was presented to party leaders in April 1963, resulting, amongst much else, in the reform-minded Dubček replacing the implicated Karol Bacílek on the Presidium. And while the public was only cursorily informed of the conclusions four months later and even party cells were only privy to about 10 per cent of the voluminous findings, the report was an unmistakable turning point. ‘The partial exposure of the brutalities of the not-so-distant Stalinist past’, reflect Kevin McDermott and Klára Pinerová, ‘played a crucial role in galvanizing the search among party liberalisers and intellectuals for a more humane form of socialism.’ ²⁶Alexander Dubček, Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček, trans. Jiři Hochman
(Kodansha: New York 1993), 84–87; Kevin McDermott and Klára Pinerová, ‘The Rehabilitation
Process in Czechoslovakia: Party and Popular Responses’, in Matthew Stibbe and McDermott,
De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims after 1953 (Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2015), 114–115. By the time that the rising tide of reform swept Antonín Novotný from atop the KSČ in January 1968, replaced by Dubček, András Tömpe was eagerly following developments from East Berlin.

Recalled from a civilian position in the publishing industry, Tömpe had been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to the GDR in September 1967. Of course, András had carried out his university studies in German, and his fluency in the language had also aided his career in foreign intelligence. But it was Tömpe’s Czech connections that came to the fore at this moment. He had been a KSČ member before he had even been in the Hungarian party, and, three decades later, the reforms occurring within the KSČ reminded Tömpe of the flourishing Czech democratic culture he had enjoyed in Brno. It had not seemed incompatible with his communist convictions back then, and the broad consensus that Dubček enjoyed as he spearheaded democratic change under communist auspices seemed an overdue, and much needed, affirmation of that conviction.

‘Czechoslovakia was on the way to becoming the first of the socialist countries to reach a stage of democracy that would have made the socialist system attractive even to workers in the developed capitalist countries’, Tömpe later wrote to the MSZMP Central Committee in August 1968, after Hungary had taken part in the invasion that smothered the Prague Spring. ‘The Czechoslovak Communist Party not only did not weaken the position of socialism but rather they strengthened it to an unprecedented degree.’ There was no doubt in Tömpe’s mind that what the Czechoslovaks had attempted was the path the left had to take. ‘We can speak of socialism only when the broad working masses have a say in matters of the party, of the state, and in economic affairs’, he insisted. ‘Without the continued development of democracy, a mobilization of society cannot be achieved that will allow economic development.’ The relaxation of censorship and information control in Czechoslovakia had been a constant source of criticism from the other Warsaw Pact countries throughout the spring and summer, but Tömpe argued that ‘an indispensable pre-condition for socialist development is comprehensive information and guarantees of the possibility to obtain this information’. The KSČ had recognized these necessities, he added, ‘when it freed itself from the chains of dogmatic leadership’. ²⁷Peter Weidhaas, Life before Letters (New York: Locus, 2010), 177–180.

It must have been excruciating for Tömpe to be an enthusiastic supporter of the Prague Spring while an emissary to the communist government most implacably opposed to it. ‘The reaction of the East German leadership to events in Czechoslovakia […] was unfriendly in the extreme.’ Tömpe rightly emphasized that ‘as early as February they claimed that counter-revolution was under way in Czechoslovakia, which would have to be suppressed by military intervention’. These were assessments and conclusions that far exceeded the analysis of Brezhnev at this time. And it placed Tömpe in a particularly awkward spot, as he was also representing the government, and above all the leader, Kádár, who showed genuine and consistent sympathy with the Czechoslovak reforms throughout the months of escalation in the Warsaw Pact position. ²⁸For an analysis of Kádár’s position during the Prague Spring, see David A. J. Reynolds, Revising
History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counterrevolution in 1956 and 1968 (London: Anthem, 2020). Even at the Warsaw summit of 14–15 July between the leaders of the Soviet Union, Poland, the GDR, Bulgaria, and Hungary, Kádár was still attempting to soften the assessment of developments and give Dubček space to deal with matters, prompting a stinging rebuke from the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht. ‘I am amazed by the analysis that Comrade Kádár gave [he] said that we are dealing with revisionist forces there. I can’t agree with that. The question is about counter-revolutionary forces’, Ulbricht argued.  ‘I don’t know, Comrade Kádár, why you can’t grasp all this’, he added threateningly. ‘Don’t you realize that the next blow from imperialism will take place in Hungary?’ ²⁹‘Document No. 52: Transcript of the Warsaw Meeting, 14–15 July 1968 (Excerpts)’, in Jaromír
Navrátil, ed., The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 218.

But, ultimately, Kádár did not dissent when it was clear that a Warsaw Pact invasion would take place, and contributed Hungarian troops to the Soviet-led forces. It was this development that prompted an anguished Tömpe’s letter of resignation on 24 August. He had witnessed much betrayal between Communists in his time, but this may have been the bitterest yet, as a self-styled fraternal intervention snuffed out the life of a communist regime he wholeheartedly supported. ‘I assume that there are those even in the Central Committee of the [MSZMP] who also claim that there was no other choice, and that what occurred was the lesser evil’, Tömpe reflected sadly. ‘We would have been mightily tested’, he conceded, if Hungary had refused to take part in the invasion, ‘the greater evil however is that very participation, which in the long run will have very serious consequences’.

TO REFUSE INDIGNITY

This time Tömpe would not be allowed to withdraw quietly from prominence. Taking up the leadership of the Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers Association (MKKE), he soon found himself subject to unwarranted criticism. Although it had always been within the appropriate channels, Tömpe had been outspoken in his criticism of his own party and regime, and there were those who believed that it was now his turn to receive a rebuke. In October 1970, Tömpe had dismissed one of his deputies, Dr Jenő Kiss. He had handled it carefully and consensually, but soon afterwards Kiss denounced Tömpe before the MSZMP’s Executive Committee (VB) for Budapest’s Fifth District on the basis that Tömpe should have received higher authorization before firing a party secretary. It was an unfounded accusation, since Kiss was, by the time of his removal, no longer a party secretary. But the party’s city-wide Executive Committee ruled that Tömpe should be officially admonished. ³⁰György Moldova, Aki átlépte az árnyékát (Who Crossed His Own Shadow) (Budapest: Urbis,
2001), 221–25; MSZMP Budapesti Végrehajtó Bizottságának ülései (Sessions of the Budapest
Executive Committee of MSZMP) (HU BFL – XXXV.1.a.4.) 1971: 1971-09-10 360. öe. – 1971_
VB 360/3.

Try as he might, Tömpe could not gain redress through regular party channels of appeal, and he steadfastly refused the offers he received from friends in high places, including György Aczél, to intercede on his behalf. He wished to be cleared according to due process, or not at all. After more than forty years as a Communist, since his teenage days in the Budapest district of Ferencváros—from Brno to Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Berlin, and back again to Budapest—this was by no means the harshest setback to his ideals. And yet, somehow, it was the final straw. ‘Greater or lesser indignity’, his nephew reflected many years later, ‘was the bitter bread of the age. You had to eat it to survive. András did not want this.’ He would not play these games anymore. ³¹Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 224–225. It was on 15 December 1971 that he was to publicly receive his rebuke. And he chose to defend his dignity by taking his life moments before the verdict against him could be announced.

Four months later, he was back on the agenda of the Budapest Executive Committee. On the basis of a report from the party’s Central Control Committee (KEB), it was admitted that errors had been made in the ‘András Tömpe case’. But the Executive Committee did not need to feel guilty ‘because their intentions were honest’ and there was ‘no need’ to assign personal responsibility for what had happened to Tömpe. Lessons, it was stated, would be learned. And with that there was only one thing left for the minutes to declare: ‘The András Tömpe case is considered closed.’ ³²‘Budapesti Párt-Végrehajtóbizottság 1972. április 7-i üléséről’ (On the Session of the Party’s
Budapest Executive Committee), MSZMP Budapesti Végrehajtó Bizottságának ülései (HU BFL –
XXXV.1.a.4.).

• 1
  Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale
  University Press, 2004), 84–89.
• 2
  At that time, the secondary school, on Mester Street, was called the Magyar Királyi Fáy András
  Reálgimnázium; it is now known as Fáy András Közlekedésgépészeti Műszaki Szakgimnázium.
• 3
  His parents are Benő Tömpe and Jolán Sugár. Benő, according to András’s nephew István, in
  István Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, (The Betrayal of the Elites) (Noran Libro Kiadó, 2015), was born
  Benő Fried, but changed his surname to that of his mother, Mária Tömpe.
• 4
  R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 175.
• 5
  Richardson, Comintern Army, 119, 123, 159, 161–62.
• 6
  Unusually for a foreign fighter on the ‘Republican’ side in Spain, András’s brother István did not
  fight within the International Brigades. (István Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 95–97).
• 7
  Generally speaking, there were five main International Brigades: the XI, XII, XIII, XIV, and XV.
  For most of its existence, the Rákosi Battalion was within the XIII Brigade, but it was also later in
  the 150th Brigade.
• 8
  Magdolna Baráth, ‘“Pedro”: Gerő Ernő Spanyolországban’ (Ernő Gerő in Spain), in Magdolna
  Baráth, Gerő Ernő politikai pályája 1944–1956 (The Political Carreer of Ernő Gerő 1944–1956),
  PhD thesis (Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, 2001). 419–421; Karl Benziger, Imre Nagy, Martyr
  of the Nation (Lanham: Lexington, 2008), n. 54.
• 9
  Cecil Eby, Comrades and Commissars (University Park: Penn State Press, 2007), 169.
• 10
  Radosh, Habeck, and Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
  170–210.
• 11
  Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 104–105. András was probably once more living under a pseudonym at
  this time, and, if so, would have been enlisted into the munkaszolgálat (labour service) as a political
  dissident, not as a Jew.
• 12
  István Rév has written persuasively on this topic in a number of places, including the source below.
• 13
  Rév, ‘Reconstruction Reconsidered: An Examination of Police Philology: The Case of László Rajk’,
  Psikhologicheskie Issledovaniya, 3/5 (2009), http://psystudy.ru/index.php/eng/2009n3-5e/165-rev5e.html.
• 14
  László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court (Budapest 1949), 38–39.
• 15
  László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court, 46–47.
• 16
  László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court, 159–60; 257.
• 17
  Mária Palasik, ‘Üstökön ragadni a reakciót’ (Grab the Reaction by the Mane), http://beszelo.
  c3.hu/99/11/10pala.htm; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
  (New York: Doubleday, 2012).
• 18
  Rolf Müller, ‘A Magyar Államrendőrség Államvédelmi Osztályának szervezettörténete (1946.
  október–1948. szeptember)’ (Organizational History of the State Defence Department of the
  Hungarian State Police (October 1946–September 1948)), http://www.betekinto.hu/en/2013_3_
  muller.
• 19
  Hungarian Jews were particularly vulnerable, despite the fact that the three most prominent
  leaders of the Hungarian Party were Jewish: Rákosi, Gerő, and Mihály Farkas.
• 20
  Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, János M. Rainer, eds, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in
  Documents (Budapest: CEU Press, 2002), 16.
• 21
  Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006),
  134–35.
• 22
  Tibor Huszár, ‘Hogy valakinek itt legyen képe pofátlankodni’ (‘So that someone here has a face
  to make fun of’), http://epa.oszk.hu/01300/01326/00034/12Huszar.html).
• 23
  Huszár, ‘Hogy valakinek itt legyen képe pofátlankodni’.
• 24
  Baráth, ‘A Belügyminisztérium “megtisztítása” a volt ÁVH-soktól, 1956–1962’ (The ‘Cleansing’
  of the Ministry of the Interior of Former ÁVH Members, 1956–1962), in Évkönyv VII (Budapest:
  1956-os Intézet, 1999); Árpád Tyekvicska, Írások a forradalomról (Balassagyarmat, 2006), 401–404.
• 25
  Tibor Huszár, Kádár 2. (Kossuth Kiadó, 2010).
• 26
  Alexander Dubček, Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček, trans. Jiři Hochman
  (Kodansha: New York 1993), 84–87; Kevin McDermott and Klára Pinerová, ‘The Rehabilitation
  Process in Czechoslovakia: Party and Popular Responses’, in Matthew Stibbe and McDermott,
  De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims after 1953 (Palgrave Macmillan:
  Basingstoke, 2015), 114–115.
• 27
  Peter Weidhaas, Life before Letters (New York: Locus, 2010), 177–180.
• 28
  For an analysis of Kádár’s position during the Prague Spring, see David A. J. Reynolds, Revising
  History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counterrevolution in 1956 and 1968 (London: Anthem, 2020).
• 29
  ‘Document No. 52: Transcript of the Warsaw Meeting, 14–15 July 1968 (Excerpts)’, in Jaromír
  Navrátil, ed., The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 218.
• 30
  György Moldova, Aki átlépte az árnyékát (Who Crossed His Own Shadow) (Budapest: Urbis,
  2001), 221–25; MSZMP Budapesti Végrehajtó Bizottságának ülései (Sessions of the Budapest
  Executive Committee of MSZMP) (HU BFL – XXXV.1.a.4.) 1971: 1971-09-10 360. öe. – 1971_
  VB 360/3.
• 31
  Tömpe, Az elitek árulása, 224–225.
• 32
  ‘Budapesti Párt-Végrehajtóbizottság 1972. április 7-i üléséről’ (On the Session of the Party’s
  Budapest Executive Committee), MSZMP Budapesti Végrehajtó Bizottságának ülései (HU BFL –
  XXXV.1.a.4.).