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Hungary Sovietization
By the end of World War II, the public had little
respect for
the army because the war had been lost and the territory
that had
been reincorporated after 1938 was given back to
Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Yugoslavia. Soviet officers believed
Hungarian army
officers to be as guilty as their German counterparts and,
because of the undistinguished performance of the
Hungarian army
during the war, the Soviets had no respect for Hungary as
a
military force. The communists distrusted the former army
officers, and these officers hated the communists. After
the
Hungarian People's Republic was established in 1949, many
of
these officers were punished and often sent to the
harshest labor
camps
(see Postwar Hungary
, ch. 1).
The postwar Hungarian army developed out of divisions
put
together to fight Germany after Hungary had made peace
with the
Allies in December 1944. Under Soviet pressure, however,
the army
was quickly demobilized in 1946, and most officers were
removed
because of pro-Western or anticommunist sympathies. A new
force
was then created under an independent command controlled
by the
Hungarian Communist Party, and a new army--the Hungarian
People's
Army--officially emerged in 1948. The military clause of
the
peace treaty that Hungary signed with the Allies permitted
it to
have an army of 65,000 troops and an air force of 5,000
personnel
and ninety aircraft.
According to American expert Ivan Volgyes, Mihaly
Farkas, the
minister of defense from 1948 to 1953, served as the chief
architect of the new Hungarian People's Army. Following
Soviet
orders, Farkas, himself an avowed Stalinist, set out to
imitate
the Soviet army and to Sovietize the Hungarian army. The
HPA's
organization mirrored that of the Soviet army. Its
uniforms,
ranks and insignia, decorations, and "general privileges"
were
all based on the Soviet model, as was the "dual command
system,"
whereby the party attached political commissars to each
military
commander to ensure the political reliability and
ideological
commitment of the troops. These political officers were
assigned
by the Ministry of Defense's Main Political Administration (see Glossary)
and were given instructions by the
Administrative Department of the Secretariat of Hungarian Workers' Party
(HWP--on November 1, 1956, renamed the Hungarian Socialist
Workers' Party--HSWP). Although this dual command system was still
in effect in the late 1980s, it placed the most restrictions
on military commanders in the period between 1949 and 1955.
Soviet influence further increased when, starting in
November
1948, hundreds of Soviet military "advisers" were assigned
to the
Hungarian army at all command levels down to the
regimental one.
Although theoretically acting only as advisers, they
influenced
all important decisions. Beginning in December 1948,
thousands of
Hungarians began attending Soviet military and political
academies to gain technical expertise and political
indoctrination. Hungarian generals were sent to Soviet
general
staff schools
(see Soviet Influence
, this ch.).
The regime managed to create a communist officer corps
by
actively recruiting workers and peasants into the higher
ranks of
the military. By 1954 a little more than half of the
officers
were children of manual laborers, while about one-third
came from
peasant families. The officer corps provided upward
mobility for
the former "underclass," while providing material benefits
in a
country where standards of living were low compared with
those of
Western Europe.
Data as of September 1989
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