The Hungarian Far Right Believe Putin Is Fighting Communists in Ukraine: The Publishing Front
It so happened that my last foreign trip before the full-scale Russian invasion was to Budapest in November 2021. I stayed in the city’s Terézváros district, less than 150 meters from Terror Háza, or the House of Terror — a museum depicting the crimes of Hungary’s past fascist and communist regimes. I couldn’t make time for a visit due to leaving the hotel early in the morning to get the most out of my brief stay and coming back when the museum was already closed. And I do not regret, knowing about the museum’s controversial management.
Opened on February 24, 2002, on the eve of the National Memorial Day for the Victims of Communist Dictatorships, the institution was funded, as an act of populism, by the government of Viktor Orbán during his first premiership. Since its inception, the museum has been led by Mária Schmidt, a historian and staunch supporter of the Hungarian authoritarian leader, described by critics as a “Holocaust revisionist,” “history whitewasher,” and “anti-Semite” for downplaying the role of Hungary and its Arrow Cross (Nyilasist) regime in the destruction of Jews, as well as for the controversial content of a “conservative Christian” magazine she owns.
Schmidt’s tweets are no less controversial. In her latest one at the time of writing, she prattles, “Communist ideology had strengthened in the West after the 90s, giving rise to the LGBTQ & BLM.” As we’ll see, this kind of “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, equating human rights movements and other modern trends with communism, enjoys popularity in Hungary.
In April 2022, responding to a tweet about the Soviet invasion of Hungary to suppress the anti-communist revolution in 1956, she wrote, “The invasion was carried out by Soviet troops, including Ukrainians. Based on the decision by the Ukrainian Khrushchev.”
I’m unsure whether she confused Khrushchev with Brezhnev, or if she decided he was Ukrainian because he made his party career in Ukraine, or because he was born in a region historically populated by Ukrainians, but Khrushchev never identified as Ukrainian. Anyway, using a (false) ethnicity argument while ignoring where the decisions were made (clue: the Kremlin) — and apparently having no problems with Russians, who were the primary force behind the invasion — demonstrates an ethnic bias and, coupled with her aversion to BLM, prompts me to add “racist” to Schmidt’s portrait.
A mere few months after Russia had launched its full-scale invasion, Mária Schmidt felt compelled to pen a book offering her “analysis” of the war, Vision of the Russo-Ukrainian War (Látlelet az orosz-ukrán háborúról), where, disregarding the Kremlin’s ongoing preparations and ideological rationale for the invasion, she claims Putin just fell for America’s “provocation” and got involved in a proxy war where the real goal is cutting off China from Russian natural resources.
Orbán, Schmidt, and their ilk have pushed Hungary into an anti-democratic, anti-Western downward spiral of right-wing conspiracy theory-spiced populism, corrupt, borderline delusional, dripping with hate, manipulative, fact-twisting, and cynical, turning the country into a malignant ulcer in the European organism.
Beneath the veneer of condemning the fascist past, the Orbánists promulgate the same sort of nationalist, irredentist, and imperialist views that gave birth to fascism in the first place. Orbán’s cherished idea of “Greater Hungary” implies retrieving the “historical” lands now belonging to Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, as well as small portions of Austria and Poland. And Hungarian Turanism preaches the “brotherhood” of peoples with roots in Central Asia and the Ural region, which accounts for Hungarian nationalists’ gravitation towards both Turkey and Russia, the latter being the “cradle” of the Turanian peoples, and the Russians viewed by some as “Slavicized” Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples.
On the other hand, the ostensible bashing of communism does not prevent the hypocrite populists from using the “good old days” trump to pull the strings of nostalgic compatriots, easily manipulated into “Russia is our friend, America is our enemy” thinking. The monument to the Soviet Red Army in Budapest’s (what an irony!) Liberty Square, guarded round-the-clock, is the epitome of this.
All this looks like an emulation of Orbán’s role model Vladimir Putin’s tactics used to boost his propaganda and justify expansive aggression, complete with Greater Russia, “brotherly peoples” (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as “one nation”) — and, by extension, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy — as well as nostalgic invocations of the “great Soviet past.”
Schmidt is not the only one who took up writing as soon as the war in Ukraine broke beyond Donbas and the occupation of Crimea. Indeed, the battle for brains in the Hungarian publishing market is not yet lost to the Neo-fascist craze, although the country’s establishment pushes hard to suppress “undesirable” content such as LGBTQI+ books and flood the reader with cheap anti-Western propaganda.
The analysis of titles published in Hungary after February 24, 2022 shows that pro-Ukrainian voices are not absent, yet risk going unheard in the vast sea of low-effort scribble of delusional pundits and opportunists wishing to capitalize on the war.
These voices include the popular Ukrainian authors Serhiy Zhadan and Andrey Kurkov (both already familiar to the Hungarian reader); war diaries from Kharkiv by Yeva Skalietska, a 12-year-old refugee girl (first published in the United Kingdom), and Sergei Gerasimov, a Russian-speaking science fiction writer (also published in Germany, but not yet in Ukraine); biographies of Zelenskyy by the journalists Serhiy Rudenko (published in Ukraine in 2021) and Gallagher Fenwick; The Lost Daughters of Ukraine, a novel by Erin Litteken, an American writer of Ukrainian extraction; and Donbas by the Slovak reporter Tomáš Forró.
This is counterbalanced by a flush of new editions of Russian classics, from Pushkin and Dostoevsky to Bulgakov and Vasily Rozanov, as well as contemporary authors such as Marina Stepnova, often coming from the same publishers who give the floor to Ukrainians. Noteworthy is the translation of King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, a nice historical novel by Uladzimir Karatkievich, a 20th-century Belarusian author who actually sympathized with Ukrainians — the only problem is this edition was officially, openly sponsored by the Belarusian embassy, which makes one wonder about the role of the Russian and Belarusian governments in other publications.
While the above might appear relatively harmless, if we ignore the glorification of imperialism here and there and the very fact that it contributes to the popularization of Russia and its culture at the time of its genocidal aggression against Ukraine, the real plague is blatant, unscrupulous pro-Russian propaganda.
Besides Schmidt, a few months ago, when I did my research, I identified over half a dozen fresh titles in this category that are about the current war or clearly triggered by it — and they keep coming. This does not include business-as-usual firehose of anti-American, far-right, traditionalist, and similar intellectual junk that has been coming our for years.
A case in point is Vertical Coffin: The Russo-Ukrainian War — Without Myths (Függőleges koporsó: Az orosz-ukrán háború — mítoszok nélkül) by Robert C. Castel. An Israeli citizen, Castel is better known in Hungary than elsewhere, being born in the Romanian city of Arad, noted for a historically significant Hungarian-speaking population, including Hungarian-speaking Jews. An obscure security policy expert, in 2022 Castel suddenly found his niche, a goldmine to boost his career. Overnight, he emerged as an authority in a new field of study, the Russo-Ukrainian war, frequenting TV shows and writing a book. “The Ukrainians will lose this war, even if the Russians do not win it,” he concludes in the book. The author assures us he is pro-peace and recognizes Putin as the aggressor, but blames the West for not wanting to live in peace.
However, the most audacious propaganda award goes to Kárpátia Stúdió, a publisher with a distinct far-right and conspiracy theory slant in the back catalog. Not for publishing Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian Mission, or Black and White (Feketén fehéren) by Tóth György László, another know-it-all take on the Russo-Ukrainian war from a former Orbán’s team member and crusader against the “dictatorship of liberal, human rights fundamentalism,” or anything recently written. Kárpátia Stúdió deserves the award for resurrecting something old and long forgotten with a new contextualized description: Russia on Fire: The Prehistory of Communism (Az égő Oroszország: A kommunizmus előtörténete) by Károly Huszár.
Károly Huszár (1882–1941) was a conservative politician who briefly served as prime minister and acting Head of State during the tumultuous days of the Hungarian Republic (1919–1920), before the restoration of the Kingdom of Hungary under Miklós Horthy. Having been persecuted under the Hungarian Soviet Republic (which existed for only 133 days in 1919), he had ample reason to dislike communists and sympathize with the Russian White movement. It was thanks to Huszár that some leaders of the movement, including Anton Denikin, were invited to stay in Hungary after the triumph of Bolshevism.
Huszár began writing before World War I, authoring titles like Jewish Poison (Zsidóméreg) and Freemasonry Is a National Menace (A szabadkőmívesség nemzeti veszedelem). Following 1919, his primary adversary was communism. After writing The Red Terror in Hungary (1920), he authored a book, first published in 1926, to explain the victory of Bolshevism in Russia, analyzing the entire history of the Russian Empire and especially focusing on its final years.
And now, having decided to reprint the book in 2023, Kárpátia Stúdió added a subtitle, The Beginnings of the Great Reset, turning Huszár into a prophet who “knew it all” a century ago. Marketing the book, the publisher writes:
The special importance of Károly Huszár’s book is that it connects the past with the present, because we can discover amazing similarities and lessons with the events of our time. With the experience of the past, one can really understand the abyss towards which the green communists are leading today’s society.
Another topicality of Károly Huszár’s book is the current Russo-Ukrainian war. The same American financial circles that unleashed the revolutionary viruses on the Russians in 1905 and then in 1917 now want to once again bring the country freed from Bolshevism under their control. “Color revolutions” were exported to the region, and control and the role of the mass murderer Lenin were given to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was brought to power in a coup.
What a creativity! Breadth of thought! Factuality! Democratic election is now called a coup (unless they mean the Euromaidan of 2013–2014, with which Zelenskyy had nothing to do). The color green obviously refers to the environmental politics, but, remembering Mária Schmidt’s tweet, “green communism” extends to everything the far right despise, including LGBTQI+, BLM, and “liberal, human rights fundamentalism.” And Russia was “freed from Bolshevism!” Lenin’s mummy comes back to life to die of laughter in his mausoleum at Red Square. Communists around the world who, financed by the Kremlin, rooted for Putin in his fight with “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine are rendered speechless.
At the same time, many genuine Neo-Nazis globally support Russia and its imperialism. For some of them Moscow is the safest place on Earth, as in the case of Adrian Preißinger, the founder of Der Schelm, a German publisher and online bookstore selling Nazi literature, who has been hiding from justice in Russia for the last few years.
The “Ukrainian Neo-Nazis” narrative primarily targeted the “leftist” West and, for the most part, failed. (It worked with the actual totalitarian-minded communists, but they do not identify with “the collective West.”) The far right, including the actual Neo-Nazis, needed something else, something that would have resonated with their mindset. The “left=communist” fallacy was an obvious choice and nothing new, but twisting the reality to the point of the war with Bolshevism in Ukraine and equating Zelenskyy with Lenin required a new level of delusional ingenuity.