Since not even all Communist leaders are alike, the Kremlin tries to put their differences to work. The result is something like an old-fashioned cuckoo clock with a smiling face emerging to indicate sunshine and a dour face to indicate storm. The idea used to work like clockwork, too: dour or smiling, the face was still Communist. But the leaders whom the Kremlin now has to call on are men.who have suffered for their deviations, Marxists with the mark of Communist prisons on them, and ideas of their own. The men called back to power in Hungary last week were so-called "liberal" Communists. But it was they who, when the occasion demanded, had to preside over the use of Soviet tanks to murder unarmed Hungarians. Their case histories:
PREMIER IMRE NAGY
(rhymes with Hodge)
Born: 1896, at Kaposvar in southwest Hungary, son of a Calvinist peasant farmer (though Hungary is 66% Roman Catholic, the Calvinists are an important (21%) minority.) Early Days: after commercial school, became a locksmith's apprentice, then a mechanic. When World War I broke out, big, burly (200 lbs.) Imre was drafted into Austro-Hungarian army, wounded on Italian front, later captured by Russians, who sent him to Siberia. When the Czarist regime cracked he joined the Bolsheviks, was captured while fighting White Guards, escaped. Carried revolution to Hungary as minor lieutenant of famed Hungarian Communist Bela Kun, who ruled Hungary for 133 days in 1919. When the revolution failed, Bela Kun fled to Russia (where he was executed by Stalin in 1938). Nagy escaped to Paris. Returning soon after to Hungary, he was imprisoned by Admiral Horthy's regency (in power 1920-44)! On his release he went to Russia, took Soviet citizenship, studied agronomy at Moscow University, was sent to Siberia to direct a collective farm.
World War II: called into Stalin's Hungarian propaganda section, edited Uj Hang (New Voice) in Moscow, and broad cast from Budapest-beamed Radio Kossuth (named after National Hero Louis Kossuth, who led Hungary's 1848 struggle for independence which a Russian army helped crush). Returned to Hungary in the baggage train of the onsweeping Red army in 1944, along with Gero, Rakosi and other Moscow-trained Communists, to take over liberated Hungary.
The Takeover: Nagy played a role in the formation (December 1944) of provisional government at Debrecen, a coalition of Communists, Social Democrats and Smallholders.. Free election one year later gave democratic elements smashing victory (Smallholders, 2,688,161 votes; Social Democrats, 821,566; Communists, 800,257), but Soviet influence and soldiers on the ground put key ministries into Communist hands. As Minister of Agriculture (nicknamed "the Kulak" because of his sleek, well-fed look), Nagy undertook land seizures and enforced collectivization. As Minister for Internal Affairs (police), he acted as cover for the Soviet terror which led in 1947 to the arrest of Smallholders Secretary Bela Kovacs, and forced the resignation of Premier Ferenc Nagy (no kin), the leader of the Smallholders.