Step Inside, Gentlemen

In the first months after the Hungarian revolt, the Communists arrested everyone they could find who had raised his hand during Budapest's Five Days of Freedom. The jails were filled with young people. But recently the pattern of arrests has shown a new trend. Obviously nettled by the United Nations report on Hungary describing the uprising as a spontaneous revolt of an entire people (TIME, July 1), the Communists are now setting out to document their own line--that the revolt was made by fascists, reactionary landowners and followers of Admiral Nicholas Horthy's pro-Nazi regime.

In the latest wave of arrests, septuagenarians lead all the rest. The Reds have seized a count who was once the head of Hungary's Boy Scouts and has been an invalid for seven years, as well as Horthy's aged Minister of Industry, and the onetime head of the Hungarian manufacturers' association. Tied to this "Horthy plot" was a group of Roman Catholic priests, also rounded up. Among them was Father Egon Albert Turcsanyi, onetime secretary to Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, who is accused of leading an armed group to steal documents from the State Church Office on the orders of Cardinal Mindszenty (now in refuge in the U.S. Legation in Budapest).

Behind the new arrests, and proud to claim credit for them, is a fast-rising Hungarian quisling named Gyorgy Marosan. A flat-nosed, husky ex-baker who once served six years in jail himself for "Titoism," Marosan has now become "the visible one" of Russia's police state in Hungary.* Recently Marosan boasted to laborers at the Csepel metal works: "I am the one who on the night of Oct. 23-24 demanded that Soviet troops should be thrown in." He went on: "Much has been said and written abroad about some arrests. Let us speak about this. Yes, we collected a few hundred persons, and yet what happened? One week later [after the dismissal of Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich in Russia], these counter-revolutionary creatures recovered their confidence. Disintegration, they thought, was starting in the Soviet Union. In order to prevent these creatures from making a new October, we asked them, 'Gentlemen, please step inside.' " Invitations went only to "good classic fascist figures," said Marosan--counts, colonels, landowners. The good classic figures could expect soon to be propped up before kangaroo courts to establish the legend of the fascist revolt.

*Radio Budapest last week explained Premier Janos Kadar's recent invisibility. He was in the Soviet Union "on vacation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.