On December 4, 1956, Anton Bachkai (Bacskai in Hungarian) walked into his church in the village of Mala Kopania (Kiskopány), sprinkled it with holy water, and began the liturgy. For the first time in seven years, he praised the Pope. In 1949, the Soviet regime had forced this Greek Catholic priest into Russian Orthodoxy. Now he told his flock the story of the Apostle Peter. “Peter turned against Christ’s church, but then repented,” Bachkai said later. “Peter was pardoned by God, and so will I be.” A rival Orthodox priest complained that parishioners knew the reason: the uprising in Hungary. God may have pardoned Bachkai. The KGB did not. Early in 1957, it arrested him for “worshiping the Vatican and the imperialist West.”
Author: Dr. Johanna C. Granville (more about her below)
Seventy years ago this October, the Hungarian revolution sent tremors across the Soviet bloc. Just across the border, in Soviet Ukraine, officials warned loudly of Hungarian “contagion.” The KGB hunted priests, students, and teenagers. But how dangerous were the Hungarians of Transcarpathia to Soviet power? The files of the KGB, still kept in the archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Uzhhorod, show what that fear looked like, how little stood behind it, and where the regime’s real fear lay.
The night of November 3 to 4
Late on November 3, 1956, Károly Lusztig was finishing his newspaper for Sunday when the telephone rang. Officials summoned the Hungarian editor to Uzhhorod. Over a secret line, a deep voice dictated János Kádár’s first proclamation as head of the new Soviet-backed government, and Lusztig translated it. “My legs started to tremble,” he later wrote. “‘This means blood’ flickered through my mind.” Yet this Hungarian communist of Jewish heritage, who had lost his whole family in the war, also called it one of the most exciting nights of his life. Months later, Tibor Barzsó felt no such thrill. Forced to translate for the Soviet army, he “could hardly wait to get rid of the uniform.” The regime needed Transcarpathian Hungarians even as it distrusted them, and their loyalties split.
On November 4, Soviet tanks rumbled through Hungarian villages in western Ukraine toward the border. In Koson (Mezőkaszony), István Ormos said he heard Hungarian music drifting across from Barabás, then cries for help. In July 1957, Prokopy Savchuk, head of the KGB in Transcarpathia, admitted that children in Solotvyno (Aknaszlatina) had spread leaflets. Adults feared war. Between October 16 and November 10, citizens in the region withdrew 4,491,000 rubles from their bank accounts and deposited only 50,000. Hungarian teenagers wrote leaflets of their own. The historian György Dupka recorded their memories in interviews, and the files of the KGB add details from their interrogations. Many compared the deportation of young insurgents from Hungary into Soviet prisons to the malenky robot of 1944. None of this amounted to an organized movement.
Older Hungarians remembered other systems, and in the regime’s eyes that memory made them dangerous. In 1958, the forester József Kivári praised the goods and the efficient accounting methods of prewar Czechoslovakia and Hungary to his colleagues. He served four years in a camp in Mordovia as a result. Dr. M. V. Somogyi, chief surgeon at the hospital in Berehove, told a closed meeting of the party on October 22, 1956, that the Soviet party had become “Menshevist.” He lost his post. Neither man had done more than speak. The regime punished words, not deeds.
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Fear and reality
The regime’s actions show how seriously it took the danger. Between October 1 and November 14, 1956, Transcarpathia recorded more political arrests than any other region in Ukraine. Graphologists worked overtime on the leaflets. Of thirty Hungarian cadres recommended for promotion in 1957, only one reached the ruling committee of the party in the region. The contrast with Romania is striking. The Hungarians of Romania, far more numerous, had a Hungarian university in Cluj and an autonomous region of their own. Transcarpathia’s 145,000 Hungarians had neither, nor even a cultural association like Csemadok in Slovakia. Their leaflets appeared only in Hungarian, which few Ukrainians could read. Except in Soviet uniform, none crossed the heavily guarded border to fight in Hungary. The few who tried were arrested. The teenagers who wrote leaflets paid with up to three years of their youth in prison camps. The regime’s alarm was genuine. The actual threat from Transcarpathian Hungarians, however, remained negligible.
In the archive of the SBU in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, the original leaflets survive, written by hand in Hungarian. Sándor Szécsi, a cousin of István Ormos, drew a Hungarian flag on his leaflet. His colored pencils, sharpened with a knife, are still attached to his file. In Russia, many similar files have been closed again. Hungary, by contrast, is now opening the files of its own communist secret police.
If you missed it: 70 years after the Hungarian Revolution: What became of the ’56ers who fled to Australia?
The regime’s pretext to strike at Ukrainian nationalists
The regime feared another group far more, and with better reason: Ukrainian nationalists returning from the Gulag. The nationalist underground had fought Soviet rule into the 1950s, and some groups still had typewriters, oaths, and dues. Yet officials exaggerated this danger too, and the crisis next door gave them an excuse to act. On November 1, 1956, Kyiv banned former leaders and active members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from returning to the western regions. By January 1957, officials had rejected 82 percent of more than 75,000 appeals to return home.
Bachkai had wagered on a pardon from God, not from the state. His church outlived the regime that banned it. In 1989, the year Hungary reburied Imre Nagy, Soviet authorities allowed Greek Catholic communities to register again. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself was gone.
Note about the author
Dr. Johanna C. Granville is a historian of political upheaval in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and a former Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She is the author of The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004). Her new book, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Tremors in the Soviet Bloc, appeared with Oxford University Press on September 3, 2026.
