Farkas, Vladimír: 'Born into the labour movement'

I was born in Kassa¹ in the Czechoslovak Republic on 12 August 1925. Although my birth certificate was lost, the information in my elementary school certificate shows that my original name was Vladimir Lőwy. They called me Vladimir after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as I was born into a Hungarian communist family. At the time, my father² was serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence in the local prison because he'd been secretary of the Young Workers' Association. My father's mother, Janka Lőwy, was the only grandparent I knew. She broke with the Jewish religion for good about the time I was born. She said there couldn't be any God if her son was in prison for defending the interests of the poor and the working people. So the Jewish religion wasn't to play any role in my life, despite being brought up by my grandmother until I was fourteen.

	Mihály Farkas and his family (the boy is Vladimir Farkas)

	Vladimir Farkas's grandmother on his father's side

In Kassa, we lived until I was ten in a room less than 140 square feet in area, in the basement of a tenement block. It was like a coal cellar. It had a front door that doubled as a window, and you had to go down a few steps as you came in. When it rained, the water would pour down those steps into our apartment. There was a door at the back of the room leading to a laundry room and a toilet. My father's sister also lived there, along with my mother and grandmother.

I was born into the labour movement.

My first memories are of house searches, which were quite frequent at our place when I was three or four years old. On one such occasion, this police officer wanted to shake hands with me, but I refused, saying I wasn't going to shake hands with any enemy of the working class. About the same time, I met my father and got to know the prison for the first time, when my mother took me along to visit. It was normal in Czechoslovakia even for a communist on a long sentence to be allowed to meet his family regularly. My parents got divorced while my father was in jail. I haven't any other childhood memories of my mother, because I only met her again in the autumn of 1945 in Budapest, when she came back from France, where she'd been living as an emigré. She didn't have a trade or profession and she was working as a seamstress at the time. Sándor Lőwy, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Workers' Communist Association who was killed while being force-fed in jail, was her brother. In 1929, when I was four years old, my mother went to Hungary illegally on a party mission, but she was caught and expelled from the country. Her brother died in the same year. My mother then reached France by way of Vienna. Once in France, she became the member of the French Communist Party and took part in the resistance movement, using false papers under the pseudonym of Mrs. Simon (Anna) Kara. I was taken care of by my grandmother after she left. I grew up without a father or a mother, because my father, when he was released from jail in 1930, was sent to work in various European countries by the Young Workers' Communist International.³ In effect, I lost all contact with him until we met up again in Moscow in 1939.

My grandmother enjoyed a great deal of respect and authority, and no leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party came to Kassa without seeing her. Even Klement Gottwald came to visit her, simple and uneducated as she was.

I was always in contact with the police and the prison when I was a child. When some immigrant Bulgarian and German communists were jailed in Kassa, my grandmother was charged by Red Aid with cooking for them and it was my task to take their dinner into the prison after school.

I went to a school where we were taught in Slovak, but we only spoke Hungarian at home. My grandmother sent me to a Slovak school because she thought I wouldn't succeed in life otherwise.

My childhood is inseparably associated with Zoltán Schönherz. He was a link between my father and us. I knew him from my very early age; I last met him as he set out on his fateful journey from Moscow to Hungary. He told me a lot of nice things about the Soviet Union. Although he was working in Prague, I think, he often came back to Kassa, as his wife lived there. The picture I had of the Soviet Union was all pieced together from what I heard from Zoli Schönherz at the Workers' Home in Kassa, because he'd already been to the Soviet Union by then. The Soviet Union seemed almost like heaven on earth to me. What's especially tragic about this is that it happened in the latter half of the 1930s. That was when we learned those wonderful Soviet songs–the chorus of one goes something like: 'There's no other land on earth where man can breathe freer.' That was the period when we heard Stalin quoted as saying, 'We can live a happier, easier, gladder life now.' I loved Zoli like a father; he'd also bring us some financial support from my real father, although it wasn't enough to keep us and my grandmother had to work as a washerwoman. We also sent him a letter or a photo occasionally, but I can't remember us ever getting a reply.

In 1937, my father sent us a gift of a miniature copy of the sculpture by Vera Muhina that stood in front of the Soviet pavilion at the World Exposition in Paris. It was an inkpot and I was very proud of it. My father only took one positive step to help me in his whole life and I wish he hadn't done that either: he arranged in 1939 for me to move to Moscow. I'm going to spell out something horrible now. I don't want to explain away or qualify my responsibility for what I'm going to talk about later in this interview, but I've come to wish now that I'd died in Auschwitz in 1944, as a Jewish kid. I'm saying that honestly. Not that I consider what happened to me after I arrived in Moscow as an act of fate: I've never forgiven myself for anything in thirty years.

[...]

Zoli Schönherz arrived in Kassa illegally in the spring of 1939 and said he had a party assignment to do–get me to Moscow. I was against it, mainly because I didn't want to leave my grandmother by herself, but Zoli said I couldn't continue my studies here at the secondary school for long anyway, because someone was soon going to realize who my father was. I didn't have a future, he said, and it was no use applying for a passport, because I'd never get one. The party instructions were that Grandma should not risk crossing the border illegally.⁴ This was extremely hard for me to accept; but I knew anyway that she wouldn't be able to do it. I had to go alone. I was dressed up as a boy out on a hike and managed to slip over the border into Czechoslovakia. I was met on the other side by György Káldor (Krämer), who took me to Prague and handed me over to one of my father's old friends and comrades, Ervin Polak. Polak got me a Nansen passport⁵ and an entry visa to the Soviet Union. In the end, I was only allowed to travel through Poland guarded by two Polish gendarmes for the whole journey from the Czechoslovak-Polish to the Polish-Soviet border.

At the Soviet border, the train was boarded by a pair of huge soldiers, each wearing a fur coat and a cap with a red star on it. It made me say to myself that this was a quite different world indeed – such was the contrast between the Polish and Soviet border guards, in clothing and appearance. I remembered everything I'd heard about the Soviet Union. I started to cry because I thought I'd come to the land of paradise.

I arrived at Negoreloyevo, the Soviet border station, with the surname Wolf, because that was my father's name in the international labour movement. My original surname of Lőwy was lost for good in Prague. It was February 1939 and I was thirteen-and-a-half years old.

	Vladimir Farkas's mother

	The teenager Vladimir Farkas

All the way to Moscow I was worried that I wouldn't recognize my father when I arrived in the morning, as I'd only seen photos of him before. But I was relieved because I was met by Wiliam Siroky at the Belorus Station, who said my father had heart problems and wasn't allowed to leave his sickbed. Then we arrived at the famous or infamous Hotel Lux. Even the first time I entered it left me with a strange feeling, for even Siroky had to show his ID and I was given an entry card.

My father had two small hotel rooms. As far as I remember, there wasn't anything like falling into one another's arms and embracing. There was his second wife, a German comrade who's still alive, my half-sister Renata, who was three-and-a-half years old, and a peasant woman called Natasha from Ryazany, who lived in and ran the household for them, plus Sándor Nógrádi, a boyhood friend of my father's, although he wasn't living there. I was surprised how small the two rooms were. They were no wider than our cellar in Kassa and there was only a washbasin on the wall in the outer room. We had to use the common toilet, bathroom and kitchen down the corridor. In the inner room stood my father's writing desk, two beds and a few bookcases. There were three beds in the outer room, where I was to live with my half-sister and Natasha. There were one or two apartments on each floor. On our floor, the apartments were occupied by Wilhelm Pick and the Gottwalds. I was a little stunned by the conditions, because when I'd been asked on the train about my father, and I'd told them he was Mikhail Wolf, they'd known he was one of the leaders of the Young Workers' Communist International. All along I'd cherished the idea that he was an important and well-known person. I hadn't expected anything special, but when I landed up in those two rooms, it felt as if I'd been given a blow on the head. I found myself in worse conditions than I'd been in the last four years in Kassa, when my aunt had got married and we'd all moved out of the cellar into a proper, ordinary two-room apartment. I didn't understand. This was the first of many things I didn't understand.

After I arrived, I was sent to School 635, just an ordinary school. I wasn't sent to an elite school, like many other children of leading functionaries were. They didn't take much notice of me; I wasn't even shown around the city and the circumstances weren't explained to me either. No wonder I kept saying in the first few months how much nicer Kassa was than Moscow. I walked aimlessly in the streets, seeing huge, oversized sculptures everywhere. I couldn't understand why people were standing in lines outside the shops. When I asked them, they said they wanted to buy bread, shoes or sugar. I even saw men in rags and sandals in the streets in the winter of 1939. What I was seeing contradicted my cherished picture of the Soviet Union before. I felt desperate and lost. Of course, I missed my grandmother most, for I never received the kind of love and family and home in Moscow that I'd enjoyed in Kassa. I wanted to be back there. My longing took the form of refusing to wear valinki and ushanka; throughout the winter of 1939–40, when the temperature sometimes fell below 40o C, but I still wore my clothes from home–ordinary shoes and a beret. This early period was very difficult for me; I couldn't find anything to hold onto.

* * *

Rákosi, arriving in Moscow, became aware of the horrible loss that had befallen the Hungarian emigrés. He set about trying to find out what had happened to the people who'd disappeared. A look at a lexicon of the labour movement will show that only a tiny proportion of Hungarian communists perished in the prisons of Horthy, Hitler and Szálasi compared with the number that died in Stalin's Soviet Union. Other parties also suffered losses, but the Hungarian Communist Party was second only to the Polish Communist Party in its number of purge victims. That was one reason why Rákosi proposed that Hungarian communists who were the members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party should transfer to the Hungarian party.

* * *

My father and I weren't Soviet citizens. I had a temporary residence permit which had to be extended every three months at some office. The permit to stay for another three months would be stamped in my visa in a neat and orderly manner. My father twice sent me to Artek, the famous elite pioneer camp in the Crimea, in '39 and '41, when I was 14 and 16. It was like paradise on earth, but by then, I couldn't think of it as one, for I already knew that this wasn't the real Soviet Union.

We were provided with daily necessities at the Hotel Lux, but we lived very modestly. I remember clearly that we had to go and buy things in the ordinary shops every day. I'm sure we weren't fully provided for, because when I needed a pair of shoes, I had to go down to the shop at two in the morning to stand in a line of hundreds of people waiting, and my turn didn't come until about noon. In other words, we didn't have any other way of getting a pair of shoes than other people in Moscow.

Natasha, the illiterate Russian peasant woman, was the person closest to me in Moscow. I loved her most, and I believe she loved me more than anyone else in the family except my little sister Renata. She was a grandmother substitute for me. She'd say things like, 'Oh, dear, Volodya, if you'd come a year earlier, you'd have seen goodness knows what.' Of course, I'd only heard people speak of the Soviet Union in superlatives before. 'The chorny vagon came each night,' she'd say. As I didn't know what a chorny vagon was, Natasha explained, 'You know, it's a closed black van for taking people away. We never knew who they would take. We only learnt in the morning in the kitchen, when someone or other didn't turn up again.' I asked her what that was all about and she replied, 'They were taken away by the NKVD,'⁶ and when I asked her what these people had done, she'd say, 'How on earth should I know? I'm only a simple peasant woman.' But nobody but her ever told me anything about these things in the early period. What I found was exasperating and I longed to go home.

* * *

We were staying at the resort of the Young Workers' Communist International in Mamontovka when the radio suddenly fell silent, and then the best known announcer, Levitan, read out the news that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union. Then Molotov spoke. We all thought that it was a horrible thing to have happened, but we reckoned Hitler would be beaten to pulp within a few weeks.

Most of my senior schoolmates volunteered to go to the front and most of them perished. I wasn't a Soviet citizen and I couldn't have joined up because of my age in any case. But I understood that this wasn't a time for study, and so I volunteered for auxiliary defence work–digging trenches to stop tanks between Smolensk and Vyazma. I was utterly shocked by the news of the German victories in the war. Of course, I didn't know what had been happening to the commanders of the Soviet Army before. But then I wasn't even sixteen. I got back to Moscow, and we were evacuated on 16 October. The Comintern general staff was moved to Ufa. I went to work at a factory there instead of continuing my studies, but for me, the most important event was meeting my future wife, Vera Berei, and fell in love with her straight away.

Soon after, they set up the Comintern political school at Kushnarenkovo. The school had highly qualified teachers; most of them Bulgarian, but Erzsébet Andics taught there too. The Hungarian party decided to send me there to study and I was told of the decision by Rákosi himself. There I met the same sort of enthusiastic communist community that I'd known at the Workers' Home in Kassa, but what I liked most about it was being with Vera again. My name was changed to Vladimir Volvo for conspiratorial reasons. I didn't find any contradictions in what I was studying at the age of 16 or 17 and I found theoretical clarification of the problems I'd had earlier about the Soviet Union.

This school was supposed to train reinforcements for the communist parties of occupied Europe. When Comintern was dissolved in 1943, the school was also closed as well, but many of its students later played very important roles in various national communist movements. As far as I know, each group dealt with the history of its own party, except us Hungarians. Our group was led by Dezső Names. I know now that it would have been almost impossible in view of what had happened to the Hungarian communists in the Soviet Union, but at the time, all I found strange was that we weren't learning the history of our own party. Then the school was closed and we were sent away, Vera and me, too. I was still under 18. I finished secondary school in a year. By then we were living in the Hotel Lux in Moscow again.

At the beginning of 1944, Rákosi gave me a party assignment again. I was sent to Mamontovka for a crash course as a radio operator, before they threw me across the border into Hungary to do illegal work there. Although I was hopeless at technical things, I managed to learn Morse and how to make a transmitter out of a radio set. In the end, we were all given Mayak portable radio transmitter-receivers and we learnt how to work them, but we were never sent into action.

On 8 May 1945, I boarded a US-made Soviet military transport plane taking some Soviet generals and several Hungarian immigrants to Budapest. I had to bring my Mayak radio, too. But I wasn't told what I'd have to do.

I was still under 20 years old. If I'd known even five per cent of what had been happening in the Soviet Union, it would have given a different direction to my attitude and thinking, indeed to my whole life. Not that I'd ever have stopped respecting and admiring the peoples of the Soviet Union.

All I knew about Hungary was what I'd heard in Moscow. We were Hitler's last allies. I came home believing there was going to be an anti-fascist coalition with participation by the communist party, too.

My only baggage was the portable Mayak. My father wanted me to go to university, but he didn't have a clear idea of what I should study. I didn't want to do that, mainly because I wanted to move out of their home and get married. Going to university would have meant staying with them. I didn't feel like studying anyway. I wanted to go out and do something to help the country recover as soon as possible.

A group was set up to provide radio communications between party headquarters and the main local committees, and I was put in the group. We worked in an attic room at party headquarters at Akadémia utca 17.

The job didn't take up much of my time, so I had a chance to get acquainted with Hungarian literature and history. I read Móricz, Mikszáth, Gyula Illyés, history books. I sat in our cage and read all the time. The only contacts I had were with the secretariats attached to Rákosi and Farkas, because our whole operation was top secret.

	Farkas, Mihály

	Vladimir Farkas in August 1945

I was beginning to feel my work wasn't required and I thought I'd give it up. Relations between Hungary and Czechoslovakia were very bad at the time and I thought I might be able to help, as someone at home in the Felvidék.⁷ So I applied to work at the Foreign Ministry, but despite being the son of Mihály Farkas and speaking fluent Slovak and Russian, I was turned down after failing the English examination. However, I didn't turn to my father for help and accepted the decision.

My father had nothing to do with the fact that I ended up with the political police.⁸ I first had a call from Tibor Szőnyi, head of the cadre department of the party, in October 1946, then from Endre Szebenyi, under-secretary for interior affairs, who told me that they needed men with my qualifications. I was enthusiastic about the offer. I was placed in a sub-division headed by József Száberszky with a rank of second lieutenant, dealing with technical matters, such as phone tapping, censorship of mail, and counterfeiting of identity cards.

	Vladimir Farkas in his study in Andrássy street No. 60

I worked for the state-security service for nearly ten years, but I never experienced anything that made it seem like a government authority. No matter what it was called, the organization was a special force at the service of the inner leadership circle of the party, above all at the service of Mátyás Rákosi within the government and later within the party—or more precisely, over the party.

I never heard the word 'legal' used in our ranks, but I certainly heard the term 'revolutionary ruthlessness and implacability' and I approved of it myself. This was one of the fundamental principles of state security work. The sub-division had nothing to do with direct, open political oppression. It couldn't, by virtue of its function and duties. Tasks would be assigned by the head of one of the investigating bodies, for instance by the head of a sub-division.

I have to admit with shame that I, as a faithful communist or Stalinist, saw everything as quite natural.

* * *

From 1946, when I started working there, to 1949, ÁVO (State Security Office) went through a learning period, in which it discovered it had the one single duty of carrying out the orders of the party. I didn't find mainly primitive or lumpen elements and careerists in ÁVO at all. There were quite a few honest and highly intelligent men there. Many had chosen freely to serve in ÁVO because they were convinced of the merits of what it was doing. Of course, there were careerists as well, drifting with the tide, and there were some sadists too, but they weren't characteristic of the people at ÁVO headquarters in 1946–7. One of Stalinism's greatest sins was to produce blind tools for creating and maintaining an anti-socialist, and therefore anti-national and anti-popular regime, not only at ÁVO and not even just in Central Europe, under the banner of the noblest ideals of humanity, using a mechanism of manipulation unprecedented in the history of mankind.

In 1948, I was put in charge of the sub-division, subordinate directly to Ernő Szűcs, first deputy to Gábor Péter in the chain of command.

Didn't you want to be promoted to something more important than providing technical support?

I saw there were investigations of great importance going on and I did indeed want to get closer to doing real tasks of political investigation. I was interested in such matters, I could say I was excited by them, but I didn't know much about them. I became intimate, even friends with Gábor Péter in 1948.

Gábor Péter had the idea at the beginning of the Rajk investigation that it was time to engage me in the actual work of investigation, as well as technical matters. I was told me to interrogate Sándor Cseresnyés about László Rajk. I hadn't interrogated anyone before, so I had no idea how it went. I asked how I was supposed to go about it. I put the question in the presence of Gábor Péter and Ernő Szűcs, as well as a lawyer and a medical doctor, and I was told to begin the interrogation by hitting the person in the face. I'd never hit anyone before. I felt terribly awkward. I told myself if I didn't hit Sándor Cseresnyés, I'd only have proved to myself I wasn't fit for the job. If I had to hit him, then I'd hit him. And as far as I remember, I did hit him in the face, but Cseresnyés, as a witness in my trial in 1957, denied that I'd ever hit him. He said he'd been beaten before and after that interrogation, but he'd never been hit by Vladimir Farkas. Still, I remember slapping him in the face. I should mention here that I can't remember a single case in my work from 1946 to 1955 when legal concerns about the case in question were raised. More serious still is the fact that I never, even once, encountered any internal or external control.

When Noel H. Field was arrested in Prague, and smuggled to Hungary, he was held in custody in the same villa on Svábhegy as Rajk was, when he was arrested a little later. I was responsible for setting up the technology to tap and record the interrogation and to make it possible to follow from the adjacent rooms. Rajk and Field were horribly beaten in there, but both of them stood up firmly to their treatment. In the room where the interrogations were recorded, there were two members of the Political Committee,⁹ as well as the ÁVO leaders. I thought it was quite credible at the time, with the Cold War in full swing and the ostensible menace of Titoism looming large, that the enemy should find their way into the top party leadership, as they had done already in the 1930s in Moscow. Others were also beaten up horribly in that villa. Those beaten there at that time lived to the end of their lives, or even live today, as much-decorated veterans of the communist movement.

	House in Eötvös street where László Rajk, Tibor Szőnyi, Noel Field and others were secretly interrogated by State Security Office (ÁVH)

	House in Virányos street where preparations of the Rajk trial were made

I was shocked by these instances of torture and couldn't find any explanation for them, as the horrors of Nazism were still so recent. If I asked about this, I was told that the enemy, whether discovered and still denying it or resistant and defiant, had to be broken by any means, and the use of physical force in such cases was comparable to combined artillery and air bombardment in a war.

It's to my shame, but I accepted everything uncritically when I was 23 or 24; although I did have increasing doubts I wasn't able to synthesize them. I didn't get as far as saying that this wasn't what the building of socialism should be about. I'm not talking about the enthusiastic and generous work of millions of true believers that went into rebuilding the country or about abolishing historical injustice in the hope of a more humanistic future.

The most terrible thing for me is my failure to realize at that time how this system of power had nothing in common with the socialist ideas that I'd absorbed in my childhood and that I thought I'd understood theoretically at school in Kushnarenkovo.

* * *

I could have quit ÁVO at any time without the fear of reprisals. But I have to ask whether it was just at ÁVO that crimes against the people were being committed. Law and order weren't characteristic in other areas of Hungarian society either. How many thousands experienced tragedy caused by the Central Supervisory Committee of the Hungarian Workers' Party? How many people died due to the system of compulsory produce deliveries from farmers or through internment? I only want to suggest that whoever's saying these days that they only realized what had been going on in the country when they learned the truth about Rajk, Marosán or Kádár are simply trying to excuse themselves. It's a lie! Such people are either deceiving themselves or as blind and bigoted as I was.

By this time I know what should have been done. We should have overthrown the rule of Rákosi and his comrades by force.

By 1953, I'd already seen many things that I found questionable and didn't agree with, but I didn't quit, I didn't leave the corps. Was that cowardice on my part? I'm not saying I stayed in my job out of fear. Since 1968, I've thought that the mass movement inside and outside the party, which I consider a democratic and national movement too, took up arms against Stalinism in 1956, not socialism. And it was justified to take up arms against Stalinism! Nothing could have happened in this country to promote a freer, better and more human life for the Hungarian people had it not been for October '56.

* * *

I believed the charges against Rajk were well founded and justified, although I was disturbed by his last words. People say no one in his right mind could have believed the case against Rajk and hundreds of people at ÁVO knew he'd been framed. I know there really were many who didn't believe the charges at the time, but they were all on the other side of the barricade or forced to be there, and they had a quite different way of thinking, as men in their right minds should. Still, the only ones at ÁVO able to hold any opinion were those on the case, and there were very few of them.

	The Rajk trial: László Rajk confessing

	The Rajk trial: Tibor Szőnyi confessing

* * *

Before I talk about the ÁVH,¹⁰ which came into being on 1 January 1950, let me say a few words about the 'avant-gardism' that was ostensibly gaining ground in ÁVO. This, according to the party leaders, meant that some leaders of ÁVO were crediting the organization's successes to themselves instead to Comrade Rákosi and his wisdom and prudence towards them. So the party leadership discharged several senior ÁVO officers, ones who were by no means opposed to the role and practices of ÁVO, and appointed new high-ranking officers transferred from the party apparatus. Some of these new men had already been involved in the Rajk case, but their arrival didn't bring any moral revival at ÁVO. The ÁVH was established under an order of the Council of Ministers dated 1 January 1950 (which was a breach of the law, incidentally). That order was far less important than a decision by the party Secretariat in February 1950 that the one law and order for the ÁVH was the law and the order of the party. The ÁVH simply had to carry out the instructions of Rákosi and the Central Leadership.

* * *

In 1950 came a mass show of force against right-wing Social Democrats. They were to make up most of the inmates of Recsk,¹¹ but why were they declared right wing? It's clear today that it was because they were unwilling to accept either Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution or Stalin's socialism. In other words, they refused to ally with the communists.

Now Árpád Szakasits, György Marosán, Imre Vajda, István Ries, Pál Schiffer and many others were arrested, as Zoltán Horváth and Sándor Szalai had been earlier. It's hard to claim that this action against left-wing Social Democrats was instigated by Moscow, because former left-wing Social Democrat leaders were left in their posts in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the GDR. It was a peculiarly Hungarian matter, even if Rákosi couldn't have done it without Moscow's consent, of course. Although the trials of the Social Democratic leaders didn't bring any executions, the campaign had lasting effects on the international labour movement. In the background was an always tense relationship between communists and social democrats in Hungary. It gained poignancy from the fact that there'd been a strong, legal Social Democratic Party until 1944–the only legal social democratic party in the whole of occupied Europe–whereas the illegal Communist Party had been very small.

The case of the Social Democrats wasn't comparable with that of Rajk. Rákosi was now in sole charge, without any other Political Committee members participating. There were Soviet advisers too, but they really were just advisers. They didn't behave like Belkin and his comrades. The operative head was Ernő Szűcs. By the time Rajk's case came up, there had emerged a practice of setting up an operative ad hoc group of leading ÁVO officers to carry our the most important tasks of investigation. I took part in such investigations five times between 1946 and 1955, spending altogether 14–16 months on such activities. For a while, I was the interrogator of Árpád Szakasits. Ernő Szűcs would start the interrogations and then hand the case over to me. I would have been given the questions in advance and Szakasits had to answer them. I had to apply the usual strategy of making him write his autobiography for the party, but this time it had to be the true one.

Szakasits's was only under house arrest for a few weeks, because Rákosi went back on his word by having him taken into investigation custody by the ÁVH, along with his wife. They were put in the Gyorskocsi utca prison, if I remember right. But as long as I was on the case, he wasn't treated so severely as others were. After a time, Ernő Szűcs and I together headed the team dealing with the case of all the leading Social Democrats. This meant that the investigators dealing with Vajda, Riesz, Marosán, Schiffer and others were under my command, but the relationship was mostly formal, as the investigators I was working with were Szűcs's closest associates. Some of them even looked down on me professionally and politically and would only communicate with Szűcs himself.

* * *

Gábor Péter never gave written instructions and Rákosi would only write instructions on little slips of paper very rarely. Gábor Péter then showed these only to the people concerned, never handing them to anybody else. So I can't prove what I've just said, but I said all these things to the respective party, prosecution and judicial authorities between 1954 and 1957, and no one ever called it in question.

	Péter, Gábor

	Szakasits, Árpád

Schiffer was beaten mercilessly, because Rákosi had this obsession that Schiffer was Szakasits's evil spirit and he was especially annoyed that Schiffer hadn't confessed to any of the charges. I was among several other people present when Gábor Péter called Schiffer into his office and told him, using the familiar, insulting form of address: 'I'm authorized by Comrade Rákosi himself to have you beaten up, if need be.'

I only found out by chance that István Riesz's interrogator was using methods quite unparalleled in the cruelty in the ÁVH since 1946. As long as I was involved in his case, we received no instructions to use physical force in his interrogation.

I believed it when Árpád Szakasits was exposed as a spy. There were some documents, and he confessed to the charges made by Rákosi. Why shouldn't I believe them? Of course, I didn't believe that all of those people were British spies and former agents of Horthy's, but I believed the first stage of Szakasits's case, as I received evidence ready made.

Then I ceased to be involved in the case of the Social Democrats, as I had to go to Moscow with Gábor Péter and then I became head of the intelligence division that was formed according to a Soviet initiative. The interrogations were continuing and they hadn't even started to write the indictment. I have to note here that I never met a judge, a lay assessor or a prosecutor personally in connection with any charges, fabricated or otherwise.

I was relieved when I got my new post. The experiences I'd had with the case of former left-wing Social Democrat leaders were more than enough to convince me that I should keep out from such matters. I'm sorry to say I'd failed morally–I'd lost moral ground, above all as a result of the power and influence that came with such a position and such responsibilities. The Soviet advisers assigned to set up the intelligence division and train us for intelligence work arrived under the command of Colonel Filatov. Meanwhile another case was started at the ÁVH, this time against Ernő Szűcs, who was no longer Gábor Péter's first deputy, as he'd been demoted to the post of head of military intelligence. As far as I know, he took over the case of the generals and other senior officers from Janikovszki, as leader of military counter-intelligence.

About the same time, I was summoned by Gábor Péter and when I arrived in his office, I found Chief Counsellor Colonel Yevdokimenko of the MGB and Ernő Szűcs's Russian wife there, who'd worked under me as an engineer in the sub-division providing technical assistance for operational activities. Gábor Péter asked me to interpret for him. Then Jevdokimenko told Szűcs's wife 'Your husband is an enemy!' It came to me as a bolt from the blue.

Péter finally decided that Márton Károlyi should remain in operative control of the investigation, but I should take over as head of the investigation, in addition to organizing the intelligence division, as Yevdokimenko was insisting that I do so.

More or less the same people were involved in this case as in Rajk's or the case of the Social Democrats. However, I never met anyone who'd say anything other than this: 'OK, we believe a lot of things about Ernő and we had objections as well to much of what he was doing, but one thing is sure: he couldn't have been a British agent.'

Everyone agreed that the charge against Szűcs couldn't be true. If Szűcs had been a British spy, he must have deceived and misled the ÁVH and the party in all the previous cases as well.

Márton Károlyi interrogated Ernő Szűcs, and perhaps his brother Miklós Szűcs too. We agreed with Károlyi that he'd raise some of our doubts about some of the previous cases where Szűcs had played an active role. Szűcs told Károlyi that he thought he'd been wrong on several issues and felt responsible for them. Károlyi asked him to write about these issues, as we'd agreed. That's how one of Ernő Szűcs's self-critical pieces came about, in which he took responsibility for certain 'excesses', if I remember rightly. For example, he thought he'd been responsible for presenting Marosán as a police informer and he also accepted responsibility in the case of the generals. That piece of writing by Ernő Szűcs went through Gábor Péter's hands to Rákosi, along with the usual morning report, without any previous discussion or permission from Gábor Péter. The interrogation was carried out by Károlyi, and so Károlyi got the document and gave it to me. I gave it to Gábor Péter, who gave it to Rákosi. That piece of writing caused a virtual bomb to explode that afternoon. Late in the afternoon, after normal working ours, Gábor Péter called me and Károlyi in and told us Rákosi was fuming with rage. He held Gábor Péter to account, for who'd authorized us to deal with issues that the party had already settled. Then Gábor Péter said something like this: 'Comrade Rákosi ordered that if need be, they should be beaten for days until all their bones were broken, to make them confess to being British spies.' We told Péter we knew Szűcs well and he wasn't the kind of man to be broken by torture or beating. Péter replied that he thought the same, but it didn't matter, because Rákosi's order had to be carried out. I asked him what our role in it was to be and he replied: 'Take this message to Ernő Szűcs and Miklós Szűcs; I'll do the rest.'

I hadn't met the Szűcs brothers since their arrest. The interrogations were being carried out by Márton Károlyi, and he told me what was happening. I'd never even met Miklós Szűcs. But anyway, I called Ernő Szűcs out of the cells and conveyed Rákosi's message to him, as communicated by Gábor Péter. To this, Szűcs replied: 'I won't confess to any charge for something I haven't done. It looks as if it was a pity I listened to you and wrote down what I did.'

Gábor Péter selected the men to be put in charge of beating up the two Szűcs brothers. I'm sure the leader of them was Gyula Prinz and I'm also sure that one of them was Gábor Péter's assistant József Kovács, who'd been very brave as an illegal communist. There were more of them, but I can't remember other names. They were experts in beating people up, but to my knowledge, they'd never beaten anyone to death before. Károlyi and I were sitting in our room paralysed and helpless, when after an hour, we were told that the two Szűcs brothers weren't feeling well and needed a doctor. We were also surprised to learn that István Bálint, the chief doctor to the ÁVH, and his deputy Andor Kőrösi were still in the building. Bálint examined the two men. Károlyi was present too when he came back and said, 'I've examined them and given them an injection. Nothing serious. You can carry on beating them up in an hour.' But the beating couldn't carry on, because less than an hour later, the thugs reported there was a real problem. I called Bálint and his deputy again. They confirmed that both of them were dead. Bálint reported that the cause of death was third-degree burning over the whole body. We immediately informed Gábor Péter and Yevdokimenko about what had happened. Yevdokimento said nothing and never asked about the Szűcs case again. Gábor Péter simply told us to come to his office next morning. Next morning, Dr Bálint stated that both of them had suffered from serious heart disease. That was why they'd died as a result of being beaten up. I couldn't understand that turn of the event. I couldn't understand either how they could have died in the hands of the professional torturers of the ÁVH.

That was the only occasion during my ten years in the ÁVH that I told my wife what had happened when I got home. But before I did so, I went into the bathroom and cried. It wasn't Ernő Szűcs I was crying about. All of a sudden I realized what I'd become involved in and also that I should have done something to prevent it. But how could I have prevented it? What was my role in the death of these two men? I asked myself those questions but I couldn't find any answer that would satisfy me. In the end, I began to feel I wasn't responsible for what had happened to the Szűcs brothers after all. Because there was always something else going on behind my back and behind Károlyi's back–off stage.

I didn't manage to find an explanation for the death of the Szűcs brothers until I was already in prison myself. Looking back on that period of Stalin's rule of horror, I came to the conclusion that in the end there always came the turn of the leaders of the repressive forces as well. The sequence of names told a tragic tale. Rajk was executed after collaborating with the Soviet state security wholeheartedly. Sándor Zöld was pushed into killing himself. Ernő Szűcs, their confidant, was killed. János Kádár, having been minister of interior affairs, took his turn in jail too. István Ries was murdered, and finally, Gábor Péter and Gyula Décsi ended up in prison, as well. But of course, the same thing had been going on in the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century!

* * *

After 1953, when they began reconsidering the cases of communists who'd been murdered or imprisoned, I suggested several times that the case of the Szűcs brothers should be taken up as well, but this was always rejected. I've been convinced ever since that the Szűcs brothers were murdered deliberately; they were arrested solely in order that they could be wiped out. I also asked for the case of the Social Democrats to be reopened, but that was also rejected by everyone, saying that the Social Democrats weren't going to be rehabilitated. With the Szűcs brothers, I also recommended exhuming their bodies, to exclude any suspicion of poisoning, but they wouldn't do it.

Ernő Szűcs had become extremely dangerous. He'd been involved in the backstage secrets of the fabricated charges and he could have exposed Rákosi, Gábor Péter and even the Soviets, if he'd ever started to speak. He'd have dragged everybody else down with him. Actually, it's immaterial whether it was Rákosi who gave the order to murder them in agreement with Yevdokimenko, or Yevdokimenko who initiated the business. They were both out to protect themselves.

I already had serious doubts about the case of the Social Democrats and I never believed anything of the Szűcs case. At the same time, I think it's important to note here that I didn't do what I did on somebody else's orders. And I didn't do it because I was afraid. When it was the turn of Kádár and Gyula Kállai to be arrested, a separate group of investigators was again set up and a special party committee appointed, headed by my father, Mihály Farkas. It consisted of two members of the Political Committee: Károly Kiss, chairman of the Central Supervisory Committee, and István Kovács, head of the cadre department of the Central Leadership. I became the political head of the case on the ÁVH side, while the operative work was coordinated by Márton Károlyi. I never wanted to accept the job. My father played a fatal role in getting me to accept it in the end. But I certainly should have refused, as a grown man of 25. I'd never have thought that my father would involve me in such a dirty case.

The participation of István Kovács and Károly Kiss seemed an additional recommendation, as they were old comrades of Kádár's. When I received the job, I was exceptionally cautious and asked for Kádár's interrogator to be someone not involved in any of the earlier investigations. I suggested a full-time party worker from the ÁVH party committee, but he was lucky enough to be transferred very soon after.

The reason for the arrest of Kádár and Kállai was the suicide and murder of the Zöld family, as the troika¹² assumed that they might take refuge at one of the Western embassies or commit suicide too. At the beginning of the case, there were no charges against Kádár or Kállai; it looked as if their arrest was just preventive.

This case was initiated by the Hungarian party leadership, but, apparently, with Moscow's approval as regards Kádár. There were Soviet advisers involved in this case, too, but they behaved as genuine advisers.

As far as I know, the charges were the work of Rákosi's mind, but Mihály Farkas, the members of the committee, and Gábor Péter also contributed to them. Rákosi was very impatient throughout the whole case.

Gábor Péter called me one day. Mihály Farkas was there, too. He said Rákosi was very disappointed and demanded that Kádár should be exposed as a former police informer that very day and I was appointed to do the job. I protested, saying I had no evidence whatsoever, but Mihály Farkas retorted that Comrade Rákosi's message was to finish the case, for it was clear that Kádár's case led on from Rajk's.

I only interrogated Kádár once; I never met him in the role of an investigator either before or after. The interrogation took place in a room with hidden microphones. It was being followed in another room by Mihály Farkas, Gábor Péter and Márton Károlyi, and also being recorded. No written record was made of the interrogation, but the court admitted extracts from the transcript at my trial in 1957. Actually, they didn't incriminate me. Mihály Farkas helped me with the advice that I should start the interrogation with the question of the dissolution of the party, but I didn't have any documents to prove it.

I told Kádár that I was there on Rákosi's orders and I only wanted to talk about one thing: why he'd dissolved the party in 1943. Kádár protested and said if the case went on like this, he'd feel forced to say things that weren't true. I told him not to make up things that were untrue, because what he was saying wasn't being said to me, but to Comrade Rákosi. At this point, Kádár confessed to having been a police informer. When I came out, Gábor Péter asked me whether I thought what Kádár had said was true or not, but I shrugged my shoulders. Mihály Farkas, however, was highly satisfied with the investigation. The sound recording was typed up at night and the transcript sent to Rákosi in the morning. Next day, Mihály Károlyi reported that Kádár had withdrawn the confession he'd given to me. We sent a written report of this to Rákosi via Gábor Péter. Then Gábor Péter asked for a room in Gyorskocsi utca that wasn't tapped and talked to Kádár there. After that talk, Kádár confessed once again to what he'd confessed to me but withdrawn in the presence of Márton Károlyi.

When Gábor Péter and I were in jail together, I asked him what he'd said to Kádár, but he refused to answer.

* * *

As there was no evidence to support the charges and I was no longer willing to go along with the investigation methods, I told Márton Károlyi I refused to do it any longer. His answer was tragic–as I see it now. He said it was easy for me because I could go back to the intelligence division, but he had to stay in the investigation division. Eventually I managed to get Filatov to help me return from the investigation division to the intelligence division–months before the charges were preferred.

In 1951–2, we were gathering cadres, i.e. recruiting the staff for the intelligence division, and I often had to turn to Gábor Péter for approval in various cases. I experienced two things. One was that he never took responsibility for any difficult decision; he always passed the matter on to Rákosi. But if he still had to take a position in a complex matter, he showed evidence of poor intellectual qualities–apart from an exceptional memory. I hadn't been able to observe him in such situations before, although he was closer to me than my own father until 1952, when our relationship deteriorated. Gábor Péter played an active part in that turn of events. I didn't know why at the time, but I do now. Péter's relationship with people changed according to Rákosi's, and this effected his relationship to their families as well. What lay behind the deterioration in my relationship with Péter was the deterioration in the relationship between my father and Rákosi.

Gábor Péter's case started in the first days of January 1953. At the beginning of January, I went into Gábor Péter's room and found László Piros there sitting at Péter's desk. He told me in a friendly way how naive I'd been; I'd been deceived, because Gábor Péter had turned out to be an American spy. He sent me over to Rákosi, who attacked me without any explanation: 'I always said we shouldn't have appointed such a young, inexperienced, naive man as head of the intelligence division. Do you know what's happened? We've discovered a spy ring. And do you know what the biggest problem is? You believed that your men deployed in Western countries were working for you, but they were Gábor Péter's links to the American intelligence service.' He listed four people, three of whom had been arrested, and instructed me to write a written report on them for Piros.

I wrote the report, but I didn't write a word that could have served as the basis for suspicion or an indictment.

Soon after, Béla Végh appeared at the ÁVH, to become operative head of Gábor Péter's case, together with István Dékán and László Piros. Then Mihály Farkas was replaced by Ernő Gerő, who'd arrived from Moscow in the second half of January. Later I learned that Gábor Péter and his gang had been 'exposed' by the MGB–just as the Szűcs brothers had. After a little time, Dékán entrusted me with evaluating and analysing some of the evidence. I worked in the analysis group for two months and learned many things. I heard that Rákosi thought the case was much more dangerous and ramified than Rajk's.

* * *

The Zionists' trial of the doctors had already ended in Moscow and Slansky's trial in Prague had also had Zionist overtones. If Stalin hadn't died, all the Jewish members of the party leadership would have been involved in this case–except Rákosi and Gerő.

The most active in the case were the cadres in the party who'd formerly been deployed at the ÁVH to 'break down the avant-gardism that had become dominant in the organization.' Béla Végh personally interrogated Gábor Péter and he called me to go in with him once. There is a story about this interrogation. Gábor Péter told me when we were in the Gyorskocsi utca prison after '56, 'There's only one thing I bear you a grudge for, Vladi, and it's for slapping me in the face.' There's another smack in the face that Gábor Péter claimed I'd delivered, but I never slapped him on the face, as opposed to the other episode, where the person I was supposed to have hit denied it, whereas I admitted it. But Péter insisted on his version: I'd smacked him and he forgave me for it nonetheless.

Péter was a broken man. As he told me later, he and the other colleagues had been treated horribly. Piros was busy on the interrogations with the party cadre mentioned already, who'd sometimes turn up with a truncheon in his hand.

It was over this case that József Száberszky killed himself, because he was summoned by István Kovács, who asked him on Rákosi's behalf why he'd recommended Gábor Péter for the party when he was a police informer. I heard this from István Kovács himself. Száberszky was an experienced man, who knew what happened to people who were asked questions like that. He went back to the Ministry of Finance, took the pistol he was officially entitled to carry and put a bullet through his own mouth.

It was horrible that several other leaders of the ÁVH were also arrested. I was quite sure that Gábor Péter wasn't a spy and the charges against the others were forged as well. I was confused about everything by that time. For instance, I thought it was preposterous to claim that people in my division had links with the CIA! Even if I had reservations about their personal qualities, I'd have staked my life on their reliability and I wrote that down as well.

Gábor Péter was arrested in Rákosi's apartment, just as Szakasits had been, in the presence of Mihály Farkas. He was put in shackles by Colonel Boda, commander of Rákosi's guard, and held captive for days in the cellar of Rákosi's villa, along with his wife.

I never had anything to do with the whole case and it's never been brought up against me. I haven't even been asked about it.

I only learnt in June 1953 that this was meant to be a Zionists' trial. Stalin's death brought a change in the lives of those who'd been arrested, but it also brought a change in the whole case, because some state security officers arrived from Moscow who spoke fluent Hungarian. They talked to everybody who was under arrest, but they found it very difficult to make Péter, Décsi and Tímár believe it wasn't just another trick when they tried to get them to withdraw their confessions. Péter and the others thought it was just a new trick. It was a few days before they grasped that the situation had really changed and started to hope for an early release.

The situation changed again after the Hungarian leaders had been summoned to Moscow, where Beria was the most ardent critic of Rákosi's policies. Everybody was trying to shun responsibility after the decision of June 1953. After a series of consultations with Moscow, Voroshilov is thought to have had the idea of shifting all the blame on Gábor Péter, who was in jail anyway. That was how the concept of Gábor Péter and his gang was born. Most of those under arrest had been released by the autumn of 1953, but those involved in the investigations were kept back. Tímár, Décsi, Prinz, Károlyi, Tibor Vajda and Dr. Bálint weren't released – and the list is probably not complete. And of course Gábor Péter wasn't released either.

György Nonn, the chief public prosecutor, testified about this case in Parliament in 1956 and he had deceived the whole nation. For these men had not been arrested and condemned for breaching the law at all. Gábor Péter had been charged at most with voting to dissolve the party when he was a member of the Central Leadership in 1943, and that was regarded as a criminal act against the people. Rákosi was sly and cunning again; because it was implied in the charge and the sentence that Kádár couldn't be rehabilitated either. This means that the ÁVH members weren't convicted over the forged cases and fabricated charges. Only in 1957, by which time Szénási was chief public prosecutor, was there a proposal to reopen the case, which led to the heads of the ÁVH being convicted of breaking the law–but only in the forged cases and the interrogations of members of the labour movement

* * *

Mihály Farkas agreed with the policy of the New Course associated with Imre Nagy, but he obviously couldn't champion the idea of quashing the show trials based on fabricated evidence. At the same time, his strongest motive was loyalty to the Soviet Union. That may explain why he lined up sincerely behind Imre Nagy, because Imre Nagy had been appointed by Moscow.

Once Rákosi managed to regain his position, Mihály Farkas, the orthodox Muscovite, betrayed Imre Nagy and found himself in a vacuum. Now both sides could rightly consider him a traitor. Already when he lined up with Imre Nagy, Rákosi and his supporters were plotting a policy of throwing Mihály Farkas as a bone to the dogs, who were greedy for revenge. There's evidence for this in the way István Dékán, even at the end of 1954 when Mihály Farkas was still a secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Political Committee, visited Gábor Péter in prison and told him, 'You won't be shackled by Mihály Farkas another time.” Gábor Péter replied, 'I wasn't shackled by Mihály Farkas, but by Colonel Boda, the commander of Rákosi's bodyguard.' That was when the interrogators started to ask questions about the role of Mihály Farkas, i.e. his criminal acts in these cases; but only his acts, as if he alone had committed all the crimes. It was strictly forbidden to mention any other name–least of all Rákosi's.

	Farkas, Mihály

	Vladimir Farkas as a major

The mechanism was set to motion; all kinds of material were produced, in which Rákosi's name never turned up in connection with the breaches of the law in the earlier cases, and only Mihály Farkas's name was repeated time and again. This investigation was led by Piros and Dékán, but the Chief Prosecutor's Office was also involved. The script for the policy of throwing bones to the dogs grew longer. It wasn't difficult for the heads of the Interior Ministry to persuade the jailed Márton Károlyi and Gyula Prinz to demand the arrest of Mihály Farkas and his ring. They also started to 'hear' me. I have to say that in the meantime I'd told Gerő I wanted to quit the ÁVH. Gerő replied curtly that I could only quit if the party decided that I could or should. Then the ÁVH was made formally part of the Interior Ministry. The intelligence division became just a department, headed at first by Gyula Gazdag, who'd made a career out of the case of Gábor Péter, and then by István Hárs, while I stayed as first deputy head of the department until February 1955, when I was dismissed from the ÁVH.

* * *

I started thinking, Oh, my God, what was I involved in? How could all these things have happened? The victims of the fabricated trials began to come out of the prison in 1954, among them some whose case I'd been involved in. I thought I had a moral duty to see the men who'd been vilified and who'd suffered in jail. But it couldn't be done. I'd have done it, but I was prevented by the fact that a smear campaign had been started against me, and became stronger and stronger until it reached the point of being a veritable pogrom. The only way I could have defended myself from the slander would have been to call everyone and tell them what was true and what wasn't, but that would have been impossible for several reasons. I was called as a witness only in the retrial of the one case of Pál Justus.

I was still free when the political leadership decided on the idea of making scapegoats of Mihály Farkas and Vladimir Farkas. The Chief Prosecutor's Office led by György Nonn began to produce records that all pointed in one direction and led to my prosecution in 1957.

The beginning of the process known as the policy of finding a scapegoat and throwing him as a bone to the vengeful dogs goes back to László Piros. The next stage was disciplinary proceedings against me in the Partisans' Association. In principle, an investigation of that kind should have been carried out on all the members of the Association who'd been involved in the cases fabricated by the ÁVH, but it never happened. I was the only one whose case was investigated! By then, it was clear to me that no one was interested in finding out the truth. In the cases against communists alone, 700 people became victims. How was that all going to be foisted on me? In the end, I was expelled from the Partisans' Association in an unacceptable way, based on a number of false charges. That was an important and humiliating part of the whole process, because they didn't dare attack Rákosi directly, and so they sought to drag my father deeper and deeper into the case through me. I'm not saying that in defence of my father, who was the man after Rákosi most to blame for the cases against Rajk, Kádár and the generals. I consider him responsible for the executions, the prison terms, and the horrible political and moral damage.

My mother-in-law, Erzsébet Andics, went to see Rákosi in the spring of 1956 and told him the public weren't demanding the head of Vladimir Farkas, but Rákosi's primarily. Rákosi replied in a cynical, self-confident manner that he'd make sure they were satisfied with the head of this dead lion's cub.

Don't forget that Gerő, up to 23 October 1956, was heading the three-member committee reinvestigating the fabricated cases, and Rákosi was one of the members until 18 July 1956. In March 1956, the Central Leadership, having established Rákosi's responsibility over the fabricated cases, delegated a committee to investigate the case of Mihály Farkas. But only one of them, Antal Apró, was in any position to serve on any such committee, as the rest of them had all been involved in breaches of the law to some extent.

I'd have considered it fair to conduct a procedure like the one initiated by Dubček and his leadership in 1968. In other words, reinvestigating all political cases regardless of who'd been involved. But this committee had been set up with the deliberate idea of making a case against Mihály Farkas, not of dealing with all the fabricated charges, knowing that it would only cover some of the breaches of the law.

There was no change in the procedure after Rákosi's removal in July 1956, because the man who replaced him as first secretary was Gerő! The matter could only go as far as expelling Mihály Farkas from the party. But even before that, selected leaders of the ÁVH had already been expelled. I was to have been one of them, but I insisted that Rákosi, Gerő, Kádár and others should give evidence in my case. That meant they couldn't serve my head up on a charger at the meeting of the Central Leadership in July, even though the Central Supervisory Committee had interrogated me for several hours. In the end, I was expelled too, in August, without the evidence of the witnesses I had requested being heard. But it was characteristic of the whole case that Károly Kiss apologized to me, saying the party couldn't reach any other decision at that time. They admitted that I'd never had hostile intentions when I'd done what I did, and he even asked me not to succumb to a persecution complex.

When the Political Committee ordered my arrest, somebody asked Károly Kiss what the legal grounds were. His reply was an example of continuity, for he said that the ÁVH had always been able to find a reason to arrest somebody and it would find one now, as well. The Károly Kiss who said this was the same man who'd told me to continue working honestly and I'd be readmitted to the party soon.

I quit the ÁVH in February 1955 at my own request. My highest position between October 1946 and February 1955 had been head of division with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Between 1950 and 1952, I'd been a member of the Board of the ÁVH, and I was also a member of the ÁVH party committee for several years. When I quit the ÁVH, they tried for the second time to send me out of the country. They summoned me to party headquarters, where I was told it had been decided I was going to Vietnam as chargé d'affaires. However, a few days later, they suggested I continue my studies at the Lenin Institute on full pay. But someone at the meeting of the Central Leadership in March 1956 said it was unacceptable for me to study on government pay, while one of my subordinates, Márton Károlyi, was serving a 12-year sentence in jail. So I was expelled from there, too, and went to work as an operative in the Telephone Factory.

* * *

I wasn't prepared for my arrest, but I wasn't surprised. I was taken to Markó utca, where I was received by Pál Bakos, a former ÁVH officer then serving as head of the department for special cases at the Chief Prosecutor's Office. He told me, 'Vladi, we have nothing to do with your arrest. It's the decision of the party. We know you don't deserve this.' The names of those arrested with me appeared in the papers on 11 October. They were all released after 4 November except Ervin Faludi and me. They were granted pardons by the Presidential Council. The prosecutors said Faludi had to be kept in prison only because there had to be someone else to prosecute with me at my trial. No other ÁVH officers were arrested after 4 November 1956. It was part of the devilish script that I was arrested one day before the reburial of Rajk, so that newspaper readers would link me with the case. Not even a suspicion of my involvement in any of the death sentences was raised during the investigation, which was carried out in an atmosphere like a pogrom. But most of those who'd committed serious breaches of the law were living free and continuing to work in important posts.

The investigation of my case was led by Dr István Kovács, deputy to the chief military prosecutor. He was very strict at first, but then said there were no capital charges and they didn't have evidence that I'd initiated anything in breach of existing law. He also said I hadn't had the right to refuse to carry out orders from the head of the ÁVH, who had the rank of lieutenant general. I could only have made a remark on his orders. I told Dr. Kovács that I'd never defend myself that way. He was fair and he also said there could be some issues in the charges that had already lost relevance; such as threatening or cursing someone. I was interrogated each day and still tried to behave as a member of the party. I always thought about what I could say and what not, in terms of the interests of the party and the Soviet Union. So I made a request to talk to someone from the party leadership. György Non came to talk to me; this was tragic, as the two persons who'd played a decisive role in the slander campaign against me were László Piros and György Nonn. By 23 October, only 45–50 pages of confessions had been recorded, which was almost nothing for a case of this kind.

* * *

I knew my father had also been arrested, although it had been said when he was expelled from the party (by a party decision) that his case was considered closed for good. He too was given the chance to go to the Soviet Union with his family–like Rákosi. But he refused, saying here was where he did what he did and he'd take full responsibility for it. I thought that was an honest attitude. Of course, he couldn't know yet that he was to be blamed for everything the political leaders of Rákosi's regime had done. After 4 November, Lt. Col. Dr. Kovács came into my cell and told me that history had swept away the Rákosi regime, and having studied my case, he was no longer accepting the role of prosecutor at my trial. He also said he'd made a written proposal that I should be given a pardon by the Presidential Council due to procedural errors. Despite that, my case was continued. The policy of making a scapegoat of me had been started by Rákosi, but it continued after 4 November, too. One of the turning points was an article in the 18 December issue of Népszabadság which I only read in January. The title was 'No more autocracy', and it appeared as an editorial, but I know it was written by László Szabó. In principle, I absolutely agreed with the message, but there was a paragraph in it that read like this: 'They organized the division of special cases (at ÁVO) and Vladimir Farkas was appointed its head. The first large-scale criminal action of this division was the preparation for the Rajk trial, during which hundreds of innocent people were put in jail.' I have hardly ever read a meaner and more evil lie. I only want to illustrate that the atmosphere around me hadn't changed at all. I consider the article to mark the birth of a policy that's protected the anonymity of the ÁVH ever since, and as the origin of the fact that my name is still used as a synonym for the ÁVH. The truth of the matter is that there was no division of special cases at ÁVO at all and I wasn't in charge of the Rajk case. I sent a written response to the article, but I had no chance of a correction. Instead, it became clear to me that the Chief Prosecutor's Office and Supreme Court shared the same concept.

* * *

Szénási, the chief public prosecutor, visited me in prison in January 1957. And what happened on that occasion is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of law in Hungary since 1945. I can't discuss the crux of the matter here, but he told me things like this: If the Russian comrades had accepted us, the Hungarian authorities wouldn't have arrested us. That (the fact that I was still in prison) was still Rákosi's business. They didn't know what to do with me. The only reason I was still in prison was that my father was Mihály Farkas. I remarked that this was still the same old policy of throwing a bone at the dogs. Szénási agreed I could say that, because there were at least another 40–50 persons on the ÁVH staff alone who might have been arrested on the same basis. 'But then,' he asked, 'who would there be to fight the counter-revolutionaries?' He also said, 'Since we [the party leadership] don't regard you as our enemy, but still call you guilty, you'll be convicted symbolically by the court, and when the agitation's died down, we'll enable you to move to another people's republic, where you can live with your family in peace.'

The Military College of the Supreme Court was aware of what Szénási had told me, and they also thought the trial should be held to calm down the public outcry, but the seriousness of the sentence would have no practical consequences and we'd soon be released from jail anyway. The real character and purpose of the proceedings is also shown by the way the investigation suspended after 4 November was never continued. All I could get them to do was to let me dictate another sixty pages to a typist, in the absence of my interrogator.

Ferenc Münnich sent for the draft of the charges–was there any difference between his and Rákosi's intervention?–and insisted that the Szűcs case should also be included. To me, his motive was clear. He wanted to charge me with complicity in manslaughter. The prosecutor mumbled something and apologized that he wasn't responsible for this. When I received the charges, I made only one comment, as the whole case was preposterous: there was no motive for the criminal acts that I was being charged with. The prosecutor said in reply that I was right, but he'd find a motive before the trial, which he indeed did. The motive was careerism.

Captain Kelemen of the prosecution also told me that the only reason he was still involved in my case was that he knew what Szénási had told me. Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to reconcile it with his principles. By then, Ervin Faludi was the only one of those originally arrested who was still in custody with me. Our case was being treated separately from Mihály Farkas's. There was the trial of Mihály Farkas alone, and there was the trial of Vladimir Farkas and Ervin Faludi. And later came the trials of Gábor Péter, Gyula Décsi, and Márton Károlyi.

My trial was heard in camera and I'd decided I wouldn't say a word, but I couldn't keep silent. They didn't let me say too much in any case, for my style didn't fit in their ideas. The judge of the military court was Major Sömjén, with Lajos Czinege and Tibor Csonka as the assessors, the latter being an official at the ministry. They were both lieutenant colonels. During the trial, Csonka ordered me to stop talking about various other matters and start talking about how I'd tortured Comrade Kádár! But of course, he was warned by Sömjén and Czinege to stop that, because none of it was true. That was how well the court had prepared for the trial!

Here's another example. Gyula Prinz was a prosecution witness. He said Vladimir Farkas's headquarters were on the corner of Csengery utca and truckloads of dead bodies were carried away from there each night. But the building was the headquarters of overseas intelligence. I had to laugh out loud, but even the court was embarrassed because Prinz, apparently, hadn't been prepared for this. They couldn't do anything but send him out of the courtroom. If it had been a serious trial, this evidence would have been clarified. Apparently, it was such a nonsense they didn't even consider it.

As far as I know, only evidence heard in court can be considered in a criminal trial. I was charged with complicity in framing charges against 11 persons. In addition, there was the case of the Szűcs brothers, as I've mentioned.

János Kádár never gave evidence in my case; he didn't turn up as a witness and his written evidence wasn't read at the trial. I know of a confession by György Marosán dated September 1956 and recorded by György Non and his men, but it didn't contain anything to incriminate me. The only evidence against me came from my old colleague at the ÁVH and concerned the Marosán case. Szendi used this forged evidence to pay for his release and I was convicted on that basis.

As I say, 700 communists were rehabilitated. Who'd fabricated all those charges? Where were the old colleagues of mine responsible for them, when I was being sentenced in court? Twenty-seven innocent communists had been executed. Who were their interrogators? Who'd got them to give false evidence? Who'd assembled the cases against them and orchestrated their trials? There were 11 names mentioned at my trial. I had nothing to do with the rest of the trials or charges. And I haven't said a word about the non-communist victims of fabricated charges between 1945 and 1956. How many of them were there? What about the ones interned or detained? There'd been tens of thousands of them, but nobody's ever been called to account.

* * *

In the end, I was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, which meant serving only six years. The prosecutor said this was a response to the lenient sentence on Mihály Farkas. When Mihály Farkas's case was retried in April 1957, he was sentenced to 16 years, which in effect meant eight years, after proceedings lasting barely half a day, because they said his share was one third of the responsibility of the ruling troika. Think of that. Eight years for a member of the trio that had abused and usurped power. Seven years for Gábor Péter, head of the ÁVH. Six years for Vladimir Farkas. It's worth thinking about who was manipulating who? The ones who devised these sentences, or me? Am I trying to manipulate readers? Those three sentences themselves would deserve close examination and analysis.

* * *

As I see things now, I believe legal proceedings could have been taken against me on the grounds of criminal acts against the people. But then the actual meaning of responsibility would have been different and I'd have accepted my share of it, as I would even today. But there wouldn't have been just two people on trial. The list would have begun with Rákosi and there would have been many more names before mine. I'd consider a retrial of the case legally justified. I'm convinced that there must be an investigation into the acts against the law and violations of the law committed after 1945. Maybe it's a task for historians, sociologists, psychologists, and legal experts, of course. But you'll have to hurry, because there are fewer and fewer witnesses alive and the written records and documents, which may contain only a fraction of the truth, are busy disappearing for some curious reason. It would be best for Parliament to appoint an independent committee of investigation to examine the full scale of the legal violations and bring the case to a conclusion by passing sentence on behalf of history – naming all the people responsible, regardless of personal sensibilities. The truth about this past historical age can no longer be kept secret on the grounds of any public interest. For my part, I'm doing all I can to make it happen. That's why I've written thousands of pages of memoirs.

* * *

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, I finally came to the conclusion that it had been a horrible tragedy for me to have joined this movement and remained loyal to it even as an adult. Today I can sum up the situation in the so-called socialist countries and their history in the last 43 years by saying the first sign of the reform policy associated with Gorbachev that attempts to end Stalinism conclusively was Imre Nagy's New Course in 1953, but Dubček's period was the first genuine attempt and chance for renewal. For he wanted a truly human, democratic socialist system and enjoyed the support of the majority of his people in it.

* * *

I was released from jail in 1960. I was pardoned individually. Gábor Péter had been released much earlier; there were no other ex-members of the ÁVH in jail by then. My father and I were the last to be released.

I never applied for individual pardon, any more than I'd ever asked for an acquittal in my case. If I'd asked for acquittal, I'd have been implying that the sentence was lawful, which I've never done.

After my release, I was called into the Budapest police headquarters, where I was met by the head of the Interior Ministry department of investigations. He was very friendly with me. 'Let's wait a bit, Vladi,' he said, 'until things have calmed down a bit and then I'll help you find a job.' I worked as a wages clerk at first. I wasn't even allowed to finish the history course I'd started at ELTE¹³ way back in 1953, so that I could find a job as a librarian or something. My situation was made worse still on the day I came out of prison, when my wife told me she didn't want to live with me any more. I'd lost my last support. Soon I had nowhere to stay. My father and my mother were alive, but my aunt was the only one who'd let me stay with her. Her son offered to move out of the maid's room that he'd being using and I could move in. I met my second wife at work. That marriage broke up in the mid-1970s and I had to start all over again. Later on, I worked as a statistician, and then as a factory economist. I worked at an engineering research institute for a short time, but it didn't suit me, so I went to work for Volán in 1976 and retired from there.

I got married for the third time when I was fifty, and once more I started from scratch. Today all I have is this 380 sq. ft flat in a concrete block in Budafok–a working-class district of Budapest–where we're sitting right now. I've had a happy marriage for the last 11 years.

I've been waiting for an opportunity to talk since 1968. It's my duty and responsibility to tell people what I know and only I know. It's a matter of honour for myself, my children and my grandchildren. I feel obliged to do it for the country and the nation and for the Hungarian and international labour movement. Some say certain people weren't allowing me to tell the public. I'd have talked sooner if I could, despite the fact that I knew I'd have to face questions that weren't very pleasant for me–that were cruel and painful to face.

I was forced in the early 1980s to take three libel actions against newspapers that wouldn't stop libelling me unscrupulously before the public. But I realized there was no use in libel actions against newspapers in my case. Now, in the spirit of openness and publicity that's been proclaimed, I'd gladly publish the documents of these three cases without comment.

My name's become synonymous with the ÁVH in the public mind, because it was in the interests of various individuals and groups to conspire against me. And hidden behind that image, the leaders responsible for the death sentences and acts that were incomparably more serious than mine, have been living happily in peace for thirty years. Many of those who died were buried ceremoniously as veterans of the labour movement. Those who are alive have retired from high positions with all kinds of decorations and awards. For these people, the policy of making a scapegoat of Vladimir Farkas and throwing him to the dogs like a bone has been an official policy that's paid them well. Hearing about talks on their experiences before various audiences and about their memoirs, I told friends the time wasn't far off for these old colleagues from the ÁVH and others to start a club of ex-ÁVH officers and officials of the Justice, Interior and Defence ministries within a great umbrella association of anti-Rákosi or anti-Stalin veterans. They've all become resistance fighters by now; they never took part in anything, did they? I alone was responsible for everything, wasn't I? If they hadn't find a way to implicate my name in a case, the ÁVH would have remained anonymous to this day. Does anybody know who was responsible for the execution of 27 communists? No. No one even knows who the heads of the ÁVH were. Today, when there's more talk about the ÁVH, it doesn't even occur to people to start examining what really happened or who were responsible for it personally.

However, we have no present and we have no future unless we know and learn the history of our recent past. Since the national tragedy and the purifying revolution of 1956, which had historic importance, I've believed there's no excuse for the dirty and often bloody events and actions of the recent past, which have been kept secret, but which will have an effect on the future as well.

1 Kosice, Slovakia

2 Mihály Farkas

3 The youth wing of the Communist International (Comintern), established in March 1919 which was the tool through which the Soviet Union maintained control over the international communist movement. Comintern was disbanded on Stalin's orders in May 1943.

4 Kassa was in the part of Southern Slovakia reannexed to Hungary on 2 November 1938 under the first Vienna Award, imposed on Czechoslovakia by the Axis powers. Meanwhile official Hungarian anti-Semitism was mounting; anti-Jewish laws were passed in May 1938 and May 1939.

5 Nansen passports were identity cards first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees in 1922 and eventually honoured by governments in 52 countries. They were devised by Fridtjof Nansen, the League's high commissioner for prisoners of war.

6 The Soviet security service set up in 1918 and given control over all internal and state security in 1934. After various alterations in name, function and structure in the 1940s, its state-security functions were taken over by the KGB on 13 March 1954, shortly after the fall, secret trial and execution of Lavrenty Beria, who had been in supreme command of security since 1938.

7 The Hungarian term for the area that became Slovakia.

8 State Security Office

9 The main policy-making body of the ruling communist party, analogous to the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

10 State Security Office. The changes at the time brought the structure of the Hungarian security services closer to the Soviet structure (MGB/MVD) introduced in 1946.

11 The biggest internment camp.

12 Mátyás Rákosi, Ernő Gerő and Mihály Farkas

13 The Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest

Interviewer: Gyula Kozák. Date: 1988.
Editor: Gyula Kozák.
Translator: Elemér Boreczky.