Introduction
The organization of the book is mainly centered around the issue of when athletes defected, or attempted to defect, the type of punishment that they received for it, and why. Defecting was the greatest crime that an athlete could commit in the 1950s. In the eyes of the leadership, it constituted a complete rejection of the regime. This book looks at the lives and actions of five men who sought to defect, and how the sport leadership tried to handle the situation at different moments. Using the immediate post-1956 period as the end date highlights the fundamental influence that the failed Hungarian Revolution – specifically the mass defection of athletes after the Melbourne Games – had on the elite sport community in Hungary.
Using a range of digital tools, this book brings to life the history and stories about Hungarian athletes under socialism. I created a timeline using TimelineJS to trace the circuitous route of soccer player László Kubala’s defections in the immediate post-World War II period. This digital tool is useful for portraying his movements due to the nature of Kubala’s travels, and the extent of the information available about what happened. A second timeline depicts the travails of Sándor Szűcs, who received the worst punishment of all: execution by the order of a military tribunal. There is no timeline depicting the life of Géza Kadás, because very little credible information is available about him, outside of the two documents cited on the page. A third timeline shows Gábor Benedek’s life. His trajectory from a champion athlete, to a pro-Revolutionary athlete, to a defector in 1969 is fascinating. Although I have asked four other pentathletes about Benedek, each of them refrained from saying anything about him in the interview, seemingly out of respect for Benedek’s reputation. The last athlete-defector portrayed here is water polo player Dezső Gyarmati. His page includes two photos, and an in memoriam video that was made after his death and shown numerous times on television. The video, despite being in Hungarian, effectively depicts the Hungarian public and sport community’s reverence for Gyarmati.
Having conducted numerous interviews with former athletes, coaches, and sport leaders for my dissertation research, I included five audio clips from my interviews with three men: pentathlete Attila Császári, soccer player Kálmán Ihász, and fencer Gábor Erdős. Each clip explains the athletes’ experiences and opinions about elite sport under socialism. In their clips, the men talk about the reason why the Eastern Bloc states supported elite sport, how the smuggling process worked (for people who avoided getting punished), and what happened to athletes if they got caught. A Scalar note-symbol next the highlighted word indicates where the transcription or translation of the clip can be found. Due to the sound quality of the interviews, the volume may need to be turned up to hear the clips.
There is a final page in the Table of Contents just before the Conclusion about the ambiguous crime of smuggling. This page is included for three reasons. The first reason is because many more athletes participated in smuggling than defecting. The sport leadership therefore dealt with the issue on a continual basis, and did not maintain specific rules about it. As a result, it was much harder for athletes to determine the “rules of the game” when it came to bringing goods across borders. The pages about smuggling are also included because the topic provides another interesting lens into the sport leader-athlete relationship in relation to punishments. Lastly, the vast majority of my athletes participated in smuggling on some level, and my oral history stories about it are incredibly rich. The audio clips, their stories, and voices add a human element to the overall topic that I thought necessary.
I will add a few additional tools to the book next semester. I will include an audio clip from an interview with a well-connected soccer fan who knew Hungary’s top soccer players in the 1950s, once it is transcribed. In his interview, he mentioned how the memory of Szűcs’s punishment was widespread in the soccer community, and how it convinced his athlete contemporaries to remain in the country between 1951-1956. I will also add a timeline to portray Gyarmati’s life. Using a forthcoming book from Harry Blutstein, I will be able to include the definitive dates of his defection activities in late 1956 until his return in 1958.
The impact of the 1956 Revolution, particularly with the mass defection of over forty Olympic athletes after the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, directly influenced sport leaders to implement a significant change in tactics with athletes. As elite athletes, they received lighter punishments than their ordinary Hungarian counterparts experienced, except for perhaps Sándor Szűcs. At the same time, these men endured more scrutiny from the Hungarian leadership as a result of their privileges and popularity within the public eye than the average person. Had these men been ordinary Hungarians, perhaps their plans for defection or smuggling endeavors would not have attracted the attention of state leaders. Athletes thereby occupied a unique position between the Hungarian state and OTSH and Hungarian society. This position gave athletes the hardest task of all: the challenge of balancing their top privileges and status on the one hand, with their increased visibility and scrutiny under the eyes of Hungarian leaders on the other. This book uses the lens of punishments to highlight the unique conditions of elite sport in socialist Hungary, and how sport leaders and athletes adapted to the changing cultural and political circumstances of the time.
[1] Steven Ungerleider’s work is the best example of the works that take a moralistic approach to studying the GDR’s doping regime. It does contain excellent information about the control that the Stasi exerted and how it was organized and implemented. Steven Ungerleider, Faust’s Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine, Thomas Dunne Books, 2001. For the Soviet case, see the two recent documentaries, Red Army and ESPN 30 for 30: Of Miracles and Men.
[2] In the last five years, two excellent works have been published that depict the broader milieu of elite sport in East Germany. See Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix, Sport Under Communism: Behind the East German ‘Miracle,’ Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and Alan McDougall, The People’s Game: Football, State and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.