Party Chief Led Nation to Prosperity : Kadar: The Villain Who Won Hungary’s Respect

When Janos Kadar came to power in the fall of 1956, the burned-out hulks of Soviet tanks still smoldered in the streets of Budapest in the aftermath of an anti-Communist uprising in which thousands of Hungarians died and more than 200,000 fled to the West.

Only days before, Kadar had fled in the opposite direction, to eastern Hungary, where, with the help of Moscow’s youthful ambassador to Budapest, Yuri V. Andropov, he formed a new government under Soviet sponsorship. Its first act was to invite a Soviet invasion of Hungary to crush the dissidents under the banner of “fraternal assistance.”

Kadar may have had no choice if he wanted to keep his new job. But this invitation to a slaughter nevertheless earned him worldwide contempt as the betrayer of his country’s brief grasp for freedom.

Nearly 30 years later, the man once reviled as a Soviet quisling has undergone a remarkable transformation as he has led Hungary to a level of prosperity unmatched in the rest of Eastern Europe, let alone in the Soviet Union. In a part of the world where a popular Communist leader is almost a contradiction in terms, Janos Kadar, who will be 73 on May 26, has won the respect of most Hungarians.

Kadar, in fact, is probably the only leader of a Soviet Bloc country who could win a free election.

“He’s extremely popular,” a Western European diplomat said, reflecting a view that is widely shared among foreign diplomats in Budapest, though it may overstate matters. “In an election, Kadar would probably win 90% of the vote.”

A baldish man of medium height with melancholy eyes and a gravelly baritone voice, Kadar comes closer to the Western image of a politician than any other East Bloc leader. He has the gently didactic manner of a retired schoolteacher, tempered with a touch of humor. At a Communist Party congress in March in Budapest, normally an event of the greatest solemnity, Kadar spiced his rambling remarks with quips and anecdotes that brought laughter from the 1,016 delegates.

A Modest Life Style

Kadar’s modest life style is less aloof and ostentatious than that of some other East Bloc leaders. He and his wife, Maria, live in a comfortable but ordinary neighborhood in the Buda Hills overlooking the Danube River. Hungarian sources say that his chief entertainment, to the constant dismay of his security detail, is his weekly Friday afternoon stroll from his office to a nearby movie theater.

He has also gone further than most national leaders, East or West, to avoid the Orwellian cult of personality that some of his allies still favor. Not only is Kadar’s picture not displayed on walls and billboards, there are none in government offices. (Lenin’s portrait takes his place in offices.)

Diplomatic observers tend to regard Kadar as an encouraging model for the rest of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, both for his adroit piloting of liberal economic reforms past the shoals of Marxist ideology and for his personal style of leadership, which has given Hungary the most relaxed political atmosphere in Eastern Europe.

Among the seven Warsaw Pact countries, Hungarians enjoy the freest travel to the West and the lowest level of ideological intrusion in their lives. The police keep a close watch on a tiny dissident community, but none of its members are currently in jail.

Hungarians Ambivalent

Many Hungarians, however, hold complex and sometimes ambivalent feelings toward the one-time streetcar conductor, blue-collar revolutionary and chess enthusiast who has led their country for the last 29 years.

On the one hand, they give Kadar full credit for the reforms that have introduced wage and profit incentives in industry and allowed small-scale private enterprise to flourish. As Kadar begins what may be his last years in office, many worry that his departure will bring a resurgence of orthodox Marxist conservatives, and that if they gain the upper hand over liberal reformers, Hungary’s bloom of prosperity may wither.

“Kadar is very good for us,” a 23-year-old clerk in a private clothing shop in Budapest said in a recent conversation that reflected this concern. “I hope he lives to be 100.”

Pain of 1956 Repressed

On the other hand, the pain of the 1956 uprising, by far the bloodiest in postwar Eastern Europe, is repressed but not forgotten. Anti-Communist and anti-Soviet feelings still flow broad and deep in Hungary, as they do elsewhere in the region. To many Hungarians, Kadar is the “least worst” leader of a social system that is not of their choosing. If Kadarism has taken root, communism has not.

“Is he popular? I don’t know. It’s not the right word,” Laszlo, an electrical engineer from Budapest who was born in 1956, said in a conversation that began with a chance encounter at the great Citadel in the Buda Hills above the Danube.

“There are just a few lines in our history books that tell us almost nothing about what happened in ’56. But the old people remember very well. They say Kadar is responsible for thousands of deaths. He was the one who asked the Russians to come in.”

And yet this engineer, who, like hundreds of thousands of Hungarians feeds his country’s prosperity by moonlighting at a second industrial job, credits Kadar with keeping his promise to raise the standard of living: “We have our economic problems, too. But life here is the best there is behind the Iron Curtain.”

Trials and Executions

Similarly, a Budapest intellectual who is a party member noted that many questions remain about Kadar’s role in the political trials and executions of the Stalinist era (when he briefly served as interior minister before he was also arrested and tortured) and during repressions that followed the 1956 uprising.

“Yet, among many of the people old enough to remember these things, there is a kind of amnesia,” he said, explaining that it is a compulsion to forget the past and emphasize Hungary’s good fortune to have become the upscale neighborhood of Eastern Europe.

“There is the impression that the uprising was all over very quickly, and that was that,” he said. “Nowadays, people say, ‘Look around you. See what we have. Look how things are in Poland or Czechoslovakia or Romania.’ ”

From the vantage point of Warsaw, Moscow or Bucharest, Hungary looks very good indeed. Budapest, with 2 million people, is not Paris, Rome or London, but in many ways it seems a brighter, more sprightly city these days than Vienna, 160 miles up the Danube.

Austrians Come to Shop

Growing numbers of Austrians, in fact, are coming to Budapest to shop for food and clothes at low prices. Along with three Parisian-style nightclubs and two Pierre Cardin shops, a fashionable Italian boutique recently opened its doors in Budapest. Aerobic dance studios and home computer stores are currently in vogue.

Among the attractions of Vaci Utca, the city’s most attractive shopping street, are a cheerful kitchen boutique, an imposing antique store, shops selling Hungarian-made clothing on a par with moderately priced West European fashions, even a sporting goods store selling top-quality Western tennis racquets and boards for wind surfing.

While meat is still rationed in Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, the meat stores of Budapest are piled high with whole smoked hams and strings of sausage in a dozen varieties.

Housing in Short Supply

Hungary’s economic picture is far from unblemished. As in most of the East Bloc, housing is in such short supply that young married couples often live with one set of parents. The waiting list to buy a new car through a state outlet is six years long, and getting a telephone installed can take 10 years.

Moreover, rising prices have made two jobs a growing necessity for many families. The growth of living standards has stagnated over the past three years and for many, especially pensioners, purchasing power has actually declined. According to official figures, as many as 2 million Hungarians, a fifth of the population, live below the official poverty line.

Yet as Hungarians are quick to point out, things could be worse. A teacher, for example, who recently visited relatives in Romania was shocked at the poverty he found.

“They were begging for chewing gum and cigarettes, and they wanted to buy our clothes,” he said with dismay.

“On a Friday, the main shopping day, the food stores were closed. They had nothing to sell. It was so sad I almost cried,” he added. “When I got back to Hungary I knelt down and kissed the border.”

An Unlikely Leader

As the son of a semi-literate peasant family, Kadar was an unlikely candidate for the national leader who would heal a wounded nation and inspire such expressions of gratitude.

In 1918, Kadar’s mother--he never knew his father--brought him to Budapest at the age of 6 to learn a trade. He managed to get a high school education and in time became an excellent chess and soccer player. It was through his soccer team that the teen-age Kadar gravitated to underground Communist circles.

In and out of prison before World War II for his political activities, Kadar rose quickly to national prominence after the war in a new regime led by Matyas Rakosi, Josef Stalin’s hand-picked vicar, who brought a reign of terror as brutal as the Soviet dictator’s.

According to Western analysts, Kadar served as head of the Hungarian police and security apparatus at the height of religious and political persecutions in Hungary from 1948 to 1950, only to be arrested himself in 1951 and jailed for three years on charges of sympathizing with Yugoslavia’s independent Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, who had refused to accept Moscow’s domination.

Support from Tito

“Titoism” ceased to be a crime after Stalin’s death in 1953. At the height of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, it was, ironically, Tito who urged the new Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, to trust in Kadar as the man to reconcile Hungary.

He proved a more moderate and pragmatic Communist than his record might have suggested. After a period of harsh repression that broke the back of the anti-Communist resistance, Kadar proceeded to make good on Tito’s assurances with a new, conciliatory policy under the slogan, “He who is not against us is with us.”

Planning for economic reforms began in 1957, but the reforms were not set in motion until 1968, when the political climate seemed ripe. Agriculture was the testing ground: Given broad freedom to manage themselves, Hungary’s farmers responded with unprecedented bounty. A conservative backlash stalled the reforms for several years in the 1970s, but a new phase began in industry and the consumer sector in 1980-82, with a careful unleashing of market forces and a relaxation of central planning.

Over the years, one Western diplomat in Budapest explained, “Kadar introduced a kind of unwritten social contract. The state in effect says you can pretty well run your life as you see fit, even criticize social policy in practice, though not on its principles. We just ask you not to engage in any independent political activity. In return, the state says, we promise you an ever-increasing standard of living.”

A Bargain Is Kept

Both sides, this diplomat added--the state and the people--”have kept their parts of the bargain.”

Hungarians credit Kadar’s success largely to his persuasive personality. Diplomats add that Hungary’s small size (the population of Ohio in the land area of Kentucky) has made it a tolerable and even convenient test tube for economic reforms that Moscow might have quashed if they had been tried first among 37 million Poles on the Soviet Union’s western border.

Kadar has also managed his relations with Moscow shrewdly, taking care to satisfy the two most inflexible demands the Kremlin imposes on its nominal allies: that the Communist Party retain a full monopoly of power and follow Moscow’s lead on major foreign policy issues.

While nudging his reforms ahead, Kadar also has cultivated a balance of reformists and orthodox Marxists among the members of his Politburo, avoiding factional purges that might have suggested Hungary was veering off in the radical direction that Czechoslovakia took in 1968, which Moscow cut short by leading an invasion of Warsaw Pact forces.

Quiet Ties With West

Although it faithfully echoes Soviet views on such issues as European missiles, Hungary has quietly maintained good relations with the United States and almost every other Western country, on the principle that Eastern Europe’s small nations can serve as a bridge between the superpowers while, incidentally, expanding their trade with the West.

Hungarians also consider modesty an important political virtue. Anxious to avoid rousing the envy of their more orthodox neighbors, or suspicions in Moscow of ideological heresy, officials bridle when Westerners praise their success too lavishly.

They still fume at a speech Vice President George Bush gave in 1983 after visiting Budapest, in which he praised Hungary as an “open and successful country” in contrast with Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany.

“That was a lesson in how not to conduct relations with us,” one official commented in a recent conversation.

Kadar has also maintained good personal relations with successive Soviet leaders.

“He was friendly with Khrushchev and (Leonid I.) Brezhnev. Andropov was good for Hungary, because he understood the country,” a Hungarian journalist noted. “(Konstantin U.) Chernenko didn’t matter. (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev? Who is he, really? We think he’ll be good for Hungary, but no one really knows him yet.”

Retirement Considered

Kadar has considered retiring several times, first in 1972, but each time he has been persuaded to stay on to ensure the stability of the balance of power at the top that has kept the reforms moving.

He appears in relatively good health, and officials say that he is not likely to step down anytime soon. With Gorbachev, an unknown quantity in the Kremlin, Kadar’s prestige, it is thought, will amplify Hungary’s otherwise small voice at a crucial juncture.

Yet Hungarians know that that he can’t last forever, and they worry about who, and what, will come next.

Kadar himself appears to be moving people into position for an eventual succession, the shape of which remains unclear.

“He’s a shrewd old man and a good chess player,” a party member said. “Right now he’s moving people around like men on a chessboard. This is a delicate period, and no one knows what it means.”

Some Leading Candidates

Two men of differing views are considered the leading candidates as successor: Politburo members Ferenc Havasi, 56, a firm advocate of economic liberalization, and Karoly Grosz, 55, the hard-line party boss of Budapest, who has signaled ideological misgivings about the reforms.

A third Politburo member, Karoly Nemeth, was named in March to the new post of Kadar’s deputy. Some Hungarian observers believe that Nemeth, who led a retrenchment of the reforms in the 1970s but now appears to be Kadar’s ally, will be the successor, while others contend he will be no more than a transitional figure to the real successor.

For many Hungarians, who feel their conspicuous success is at best a fragile flower in the harsh soil of Soviet-style socialism, the eventual end of the Kadar era, which began in such bitterness, is a now a gloomy prospect.

“Ours is a fragile prosperity,” a liberal party member says. “We could wake up one morning with a new man in charge, and it would all be over. In our system, everything depends on one man.”