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Czechoslovakia. Efficient, unimaginative President Antonin Novotny, 55, recalls Lenin's famous wisecrack about Molotov—"the best file clerk in the country." One of the two satellite leaders who are simultaneously head of state and Communist Party boss (the other: East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, who became head of state last week), Novotny is a chronic tubercular of morose disposition. Trained as a locksmith, he joined the Communist Party at 17, spent much of World War II in Nazi Germany's Mauthausen concentration camp. Under his heavy hand, Czechs have benefited less than any other satellite people from international Communism's post-Stalinist "liberalization." Even in 1956, when destalinization was at its height, Novotny stubbornly refused to rehabilitate the memory of former Czech Communist Leader Rudolf Slansky, whose 1952 execution was largely Novotny's work. Though he admitted that the charges of Titoism and "Jewish cosmopolitanism" which had been used to destroy Slansky were ''false and fabricated." Novotny ingeniously argued that Slansky deserved hanging anyway for torturing political prisoners.
Hungary. Janos Kadar (pronounced Kah-dahr), 48, is a brusque, ill-educated peasant's son who specializes in betrayals. A member of Hungary's Communist resistance during World War II, Kadar escaped death at Nazi hands only because the wife of his close friend Lazlo Rajk refused to disclose his whereabouts even under Nazi torture. In 1949 Rajk was jailed for Titoism. Kadar, then head of Red Hungary's sadistic secret police, talked his old friend into making a false confession by promising to save his life. Then he personally signed the order for Rajk's execution. A few years later, Kadar himself was charged with Titoism and thrown into one of his own prisons—where his former subordinates softened him up by pulling out his fingernails. Released by Hungary's then Premier Imre Nagy, Kadar showed his gratitude by joining Nagy's government at the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian revolution—and, after ten days, deserting to the Russians. When the Russians rewarded him by installing him as Premier, Kadar swore to grant an amnesty to all who had fought in the revolution. Predictably, he kept his vows by ordering a wave of summary executions capped in 1958 by that of Imre Nagy, to whom Kadar had personally promised immunity. Kadar still runs Hungary for the Russians, though he resigned the premiership almost two years ago, is now officially only First Party Secretary. Khrushchev's apparent purpose in bringing this model Communist careerist to New York: to win for Kadar the aura of legitimacy which the Hungarian people refuse to grant him.