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Farkas, Vladimir (1925-2002) |
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The son of communist politicians, he was born in Kosice. His original name was Löwy and he was called Vladimir after Lenin. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother after his father, Mihály Farkas, was imprisoned for political reasons. In 1939, he went to live with his father, who was an official in Comintern in Moscow. He arrived in Budapest on May 8, 1945 and followed his father in taking the name Farkas. After a short period of working in the party centre, he joined the political police (ÁVO) in October 1946, working in the Operative Technical Sub-department, dealing with interrogations and censorship of mail. He dealt mainly with technical matters, but headed some enquiries and intelligence cases as well. He became head of the Intelligence Division in 1950. He was relieved of his duties at his own request in February 1955 and sent to study at the Lenin Institute in Moscow. In the spring of 1956, he was named in a party resolution as responsible for illegal acts committed by the ÁVH and recalled to Budapest. He was expelled from the Hungarian Workers' Party in August and arrested on October 5. He was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment on April 13, 1957, on eleven counts of preferring false charges and causing fatal bodily harm. However, he was freed on April 1, 1960. He then did clerical work for the Domestic Trade Hire Enterprise and the Telecommunications Industrial Research Institute (1974-5). He was an adviser to the Volán Trust (bus operators) from 1976 until his retirement in 1985. His confessions, entitled No Excuse, appeared in 1990, as a condensation of more than 100 hours of interviews. In 1990, he began to search archives in Moscow and Budapest for documents referring to his father. These and his memoirs filled 2000 pages of manuscript. |
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Farkas, Vladimír: 'Born into the labour movement'