Blackmail, bribery and bullying

You can always tease Hungarians if you say that they have more Nobel Prize-winners than the Japanese, and that that really remarkable statistic is the abnormally high percentage of non-Jews among them, namely 17½. In 1900 Jews made up about 25 per cent of the Budapest population, and once abroad they hit the world with great force, whether in Hollywood or in nuclear physics (the memoirs of Arthur Koestler are a testimony to their drive and adaptability, as well as to their sense of humour).

There is a black story involved, just the same: their role in the Communist takeover between 1945 and 1948. Anne Applebaum does not evade this question, nasty as it is: the four leading figures were Jews, chief among them, Mátyás Rákosi. Their children sometimes became dissidents, and in the later Seventies this led to an extraordinary business. The then (Jewish) cultural boss, Tamás Aczél, sought to discredit them, and allowed David Irving of all people into the archives to study the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the Revolution of 1956. The resulting book, Uprising, said divisive things, but what on earth was Irving doing in the Communist Party archives in the first place?

Bad feelings were stirred up, and Neal Ascherson, in his review of the book, understood what it was really about far better than I did. It is a measure of the explosive nature of the question, given that, historically, the Hungarian Jews were better integrated than any others east of the upper Danube, and perhaps even of the Channel.

When the Russians established themselves in Central (or ‘Eastern’, if you prefer)Europe, they came upon a crashed world. It is very well described in Applebaum’s opening chapters, where she sets the scene for her account of the Communist takeover. Here is a landscape of smashed cities, Warsaw worse than any other, but much of Budapest in ruins; mass rape and, in thousands of cases, kidnappings to Siberia; epidemics from poisoned wells; low-level civil wars, as men hiding out in forests ambushed the security forces or were ambushed by them; vicious village battles between Ukrainian nationalists and Poles; deportations of millions and millions.