TWO COMMUNIST FACES

Since not even all Communist leaders are alike, the Kremlin tries to put their differences to work. The result is something like an old-fashioned cuckoo clock with a smiling face emerging to indicate sunshine and a dour face to indicate storm. The idea used to work like clockwork, too: dour or smiling, the face was still Communist. But the leaders whom the Kremlin now has to call on are men.who have suffered for their deviations, Marxists with the mark of Communist prisons on them, and ideas of their own. The men called back to power in Hungary last week were so-called "liberal" Communists. But it was they who, when the occasion demanded, had to preside over the use of Soviet tanks to murder unarmed Hungarians. Their case histories:

PREMIER IMRE NAGY

(rhymes with Hodge)

Born: 1896, at Kaposvar in southwest Hungary, son of a Calvinist peasant farmer (though Hungary is 66% Roman Catholic, the Calvinists are an important (21%) minority.) Early Days: after commercial school, became a locksmith's apprentice, then a mechanic. When World War I broke out, big, burly (200 lbs.) Imre was drafted into Austro-Hungarian army, wounded on Italian front, later captured by Russians, who sent him to Siberia. When the Czarist regime cracked he joined the Bolsheviks, was captured while fighting White Guards, escaped. Carried revolution to Hungary as minor lieutenant of famed Hungarian Communist Bela Kun, who ruled Hungary for 133 days in 1919. When the revolution failed, Bela Kun fled to Russia (where he was executed by Stalin in 1938). Nagy escaped to Paris. Returning soon after to Hungary, he was imprisoned by Admiral Horthy's regency (in power 1920-44)! On his release he went to Russia, took Soviet citizenship, studied agronomy at Moscow University, was sent to Siberia to direct a collective farm.

World War II: called into Stalin's Hungarian propaganda section, edited Uj Hang (New Voice) in Moscow, and broad cast from Budapest-beamed Radio Kossuth (named after National Hero Louis Kossuth, who led Hungary's 1848 struggle for independence which a Russian army helped crush). Returned to Hungary in the baggage train of the onsweeping Red army in 1944, along with Gero, Rakosi and other Moscow-trained Communists, to take over liberated Hungary.

The Takeover: Nagy played a role in the formation (December 1944) of provisional government at Debrecen, a coalition of Communists, Social Democrats and Smallholders.. Free election one year later gave democratic elements smashing victory (Smallholders, 2,688,161 votes; Social Democrats, 821,566; Communists, 800,257), but Soviet influence and soldiers on the ground put key ministries into Communist hands. As Minister of Agriculture (nicknamed "the Kulak" because of his sleek, well-fed look), Nagy undertook land seizures and enforced collectivization. As Minister for Internal Affairs (police), he acted as cover for the Soviet terror which led in 1947 to the arrest of Smallholders Secretary Bela Kovacs, and forced the resignation of Premier Ferenc Nagy (no kin), the leader of the Smallholders.

The Two Faces: while stone-bald Matyas Rakosi engulfed the Social Democrats, and began slicing up the opposition with his "salami tactics" (a slice at a time), Nagy gave Communism its soft face. Appointed Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, he made a reputation as a "sincere" and "earnest" speechmaker, taught agrarian science at Budapest University, published books on theology, made no protest when his daughter married a practicing Protestant clergyman. By sitting around Budapest cafes fingering his soup-strainer mustache, talking soccer and politics, hinting that there were other methods of doing things than those adopted by Russians, he cultivated "liberal" attitude, but miraculously survived when (after Tito's defection from Stalin orbit in 1948) Soviet terror struck down Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk and hundreds of other Hungarian Communists.

Nagy's lard-smooth face was needed after Stalin's death, while Soviet collective leadership was still collecting itself. Worried that Berlin riots might have chain reaction in satellites, the Russians in 1953 pulled the hated Rakosi back to Moscow, put up Nagy to head fictitious "People's Front." Nagy (called Hungary's Malenkov) condemned the previous "megalomaniac economic policy" and "exaggerated industrialization," promised workers more food, clothes, an end to "disciplinary measures." But one month after the fall of Malenkov in Russia, Nagy was denounced as a "rightist deviationist" who "encouraged nationalism and chauvinism." Reported ill (coronary thrombosis), Nagy vanished in February 1955. Rakosi was back, tougher than ever.

The Late Choice: Hungary was in a ferment that only grew with Khrushchev's posthumous "rehabilitation" of Bela Kun and Rajk. Students and intellectuals openly demanded "an end to this present regime of gendarmes and bureaucrats." The Russians sent First Deputy Premier Mikoyan down to Budapest to suggest that Rakosi take a health cure in Russia. The Russian solution: to supplant one gendarme bureaucrat by another. Old-Line Stalinist Erno Gero, the ruthless agent "Pedro" of the Spanish civil war (TIME, July 30), was pushed into the Hungarian leadership in July of this year, and told to clear his "liberalization" plans with Tito.

Gero returned from Belgrade last week, to find Budapest astir with the example of Poland's successful breakaway. Within hours after Gero's return, the revolt broke out. Desperately searching for a soft face to smile at the workers, while themselves taking the most vigorous counter-revolutionary measures, the Russians found Imre Nagy. It was his fate to be put forward too late.

While Nagy began assembling a governmental apparatus that would promise to meet the demands of the rebels, the Communist Party organization was put into the hands of a man who could be described as "Hungarian to his fingertips"--his fingernails having been ripped out by Dictator Rakosi's torturers during the anti-Titoist terror in 1951.

PARTY SECRETARY JANOS KADAR

(pronounced Kahdahr)

Born: 1912, of peasant family, in a village close to the Yugoslav border.

Beginnings: after village school, became a toolmaker's apprentice and joined the trade union movement. At 19, leader of illegal Communist youth group.

World War II: while Hungary's Big Five (Nagy, Rakosi, Gero, Joseph Revai and Zoltan Vas) lived comfortably in Moscow, Kadar sweated it out in the Hungarian Communist underground Beke Part (Peace Party; membership, 1,000). Trying to make liaison with Tito's partisans, he was captured by Hitler's Gestapo, but escaped in time to meet incoming Russians. Delighted to find a real tough Communist resistance fighter, the Big Five made him a Politburo member, and deputy police chief (he knew who was who in Nazi Hungary). In 1948 he was Minister of Interior during the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty.

The Purge: tough, ruthless Kadar fell into Rakosi's dragnet during the anti-Tito campaign, resisted intense torture, including the fingernail treatment, applied by Police Chiefs Gabor Peter and Vladimir Farkas (both now in jail). Secretly tried, he was moved from prison to prison because of his reputation as an escape artist. Released during the post-Stalin "liberalization" period, he got a minor job in one of Budapest's 22 party districts.

A muscular man with rough proletarian manners, rated no speechmaker, brusque, brown-eyed Kadar vowed he would get Rakosi, who worried about Kadar's growing popularity in the Communist youth organizations. By picking Kadar to succeed Gero as party boss last week, the Russians reckoned to appease Hungarian national feeling, but still keep a hard-core Communist in the key party position.

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