Record of Conversation of General Consul of the USSR in Cluj L. P. Akulov with First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee of the Romanian Workers Party of the Magyar Autonomous Region L. Chupor

Record of Conversation of General Consul of the USSR in Cluj L. P. Akulov with First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee of the RWP of the Magyar Autonomous Region L. Chupor about Inter-Ethnic Problems, Attitude to the Catholic Church, and Other Issues^[1]

Cluj

March 20, 1953

SECRET

On March 20, during my visit to the Magyar Autonomous Region, I had a conversation with First Secretary of the Province Committee of the RWP [Romanian Workers' Party] Chupor Ludowik, in which he gave me a brief overview of the situation in the province.

Presently, the province has for the most part completed the preparations for the spring sowing campaign. Collective farms, State Agricultural Farms, and Machine and Tractor Stations have timely finished repairs of tractors and other agricultural machines. The seed needed for the sowing has been fully cleaned and treated with chemicals. Individual farmers' preparedness for the sowing is much weaker: by March 15, individual farmers have fulfilled the agricultural machinery repairs plan only by 89%; and only 62% of the seed has been prepared for sowing. The sowing is only beginning in the province; in the mountain areas it has not begun yet, because they still have snow in the fields.

Ethnic tensions and collective farms building continue to be serious problems. The most difficult situation developed in the regions of Mures and Chuk, because after the Magyar Autonomous Region was created, the attention of the province organizations was centered at the regions that were split from the Stalin province. The rest of the regions received practically no attention. As a result, the regional leadership committed a lot of leftist excesses in the area of collective farm building, on the issues of exposing the village bourgeoisie, levying taxes, and so on.

Recently, the class enemies, the Catholic Church, and various religious sects have intensified their hostile activities in all the regions of the province. Their subversive activity is mainly aimed at disrupting the spring sowing campaign. The hostile elements are telling the peasants not to carry out the agrotechnical measures, stepping up propaganda against the state collection of bread, and against paying the agricultural tax, spreading alarming rumors, and so forth.

The Catholic Church and the religious sects of Jehovah's Witnesses and the Pentecostals have substantially intensified their activity. Their agents travel to villages, gather people and call them to widely celebrate religious holidays in order to distract them from working. The Jehovists call upon the people to work for peace, but without using weapons, killing people, or spilling blood. They insist that people should not take up arms even in case of war.

The sectarian agents have infiltrated even the army, as a result of which a small part of soldiers of the military garrison in Tyrgu-Mures is infected with such "pacifist" feelings.

Several anti-Soviet actions on the part of the hostile elements have been registered in connection with I. V. Stalin's death. Class enemies spread rumors about the coming war, demolition of communism, etc.

During the mourning period, we found anti-Soviet graffiti on several buildings on one of the streets of Tyrgu-Mures.

One of professors of the medical institute in Tyrgu-Mures stated that Stalin had died a long time ago.

In the Regin region, a worker of a forest farm said that they should not wear any red clothes anymore, because Stalin's times had passed, and it would be over with Communism very soon.

In spite of all this, all the measures implemented by both party organizations and the people's soviets find support among the masses of working people.

Then Chupor spoke about the situation in the medical institute in Tyrgu-Mures.

During the last month, the commission of the Province Party Committee, which worked at the institute, established that there were three nationalist groups among the professors and students of the institute: the Hungarian chauvinists, the Jewish nationalists, who spread the Zionist propaganda, and the anti-Semites.

Hostile elements-obvious enemies of the people's democracy regime-have infiltrated both the student and the professor circles. Over 54% of students come from the strata of petty and big bourgeoisie in terms of their social background. The high percent of the bourgeois elements among the students can be explained by the fact that after the exposure and the crushing defeat of the rightist deviation in the RWP, the majority of students with bourgeois background were allowed to stay to complete the course of studies at the institute.

There are Hortists, Nilashists,^[2] and open and disguised nationalists, who still keep their Hungarian citizenship, among the faculty.

The majority of them created an aura of indispensability around themselves as valuable specialists. Up to now, they were engaged in quiet sabotage. For example, recently we have found valuable medical equipment and instruments, which the institute badly needed, and which was hidden by them. Since 1945, they have been sabotaging extension of water pipes to the operating, experimental, and other rooms of the institute.

Many faculty members have connections with hostile elements, and help those. Doctor Peter Paul, a son of a landowner, recently put some kulaks in the institute clinic, in order to let them stay in the clinic so that they could avoid paying taxes.

The Surgery department experiences an especially difficult situation. Old, reactionary inclined cadres consciously prevent the young people from mastering their profession.

Former nuns work there as nurses. Recently they responded to the call to join the blood donors' movement by refusing to give their blood on the grounds that they did not want their blood to go to Korea. Part of faculty is tightly connected with the reactionary catholic clergy. Professor of the institute Papoi often meets with catholic priests in his office; and treatment is not the purpose of their visits.

One can often find anti-Soviet books, brochures, and photographs in the Surgical Clinic, which are brought there, as we know now, by the nuns, who work there as nurses.

Professors Miskoltsi Desideriu and Putnoki Juliu work at the institute. The first one is a former senator of the Horti parliament; his wife is a baron's daughter. In 1945-1946, Miskoltsi received money from head of the Transylvanian Catholics, presently arrested catholic bishop Marton Aron, in order to distribute them among students with a purpose of ensuring catholic influence among them, and of creating a network of catholic agents.

Before 1944, Professor Putnoki was an active Nilashist in Transylvania. In 1944, he escaped to the American occupation zone of Germany together with the retreating fascist troops. Nobody knows when and how he returned to Romania.

In their practical work, they are guided by the Western, and not Soviet, science. In their rhetoric, they accept Pavlov's teaching, but in practice, they distort, deform, and vulgarize it.

The party organization of the institute is very weak. After the May Plenum of the Central Committee of the RWP, many class-alien elements were expelled from the institute's party organization, among them were 8 Zionists, a daughter of a big landowner, professor Magyar Julia, research associate, former fascist Borto Stefan, and others.

163 students of bourgeois background were expelled from the organization of the UTM. However, even now, the socialist face of the youth organization is still unsatisfactory. Presently, about 300 members of the UTM out of 650 are children from bourgeois families.

Both the party and the youth organizations devoted insufficient attention to political education of the faculty and students. The fact that during the elections to the Great National Council, many portraits of Soviet and Romanian leaders, including that of the candidate, secretary of the Central Committee RWP A. Mogioros, were torn off the walls, could be explained only by the domination of the hostile elements and by the low level of political education.

The institute's Marxism-Leninism Department is very weak. There, like in the institute in general, there are very few people who are truly loyal to the regime of people's democracy.

Presently, the province party committee undertook some measures for reorganization of the party and the youth organizations, for purging them from hostile elements, and for improving the work of those organizations. Secretary of the RWP Province Committee for Propaganda Lukach was put on the faculty of the Marxism-Leninism Department.

The province party committee has also introduced its proposals for strengthening the leadership core of the institute, and improving the quality of general and political education among faculty as well as among students to the Central Committee of the RWP.

General Consul of the USSR in Cluj L.Akulov

[1] Copies sent to V. Molotov, V. Dekanozov, I. Tugarinov, and A. Lavrentiev.

[2] He refers to supporters of the Horti regime and the fascist organizations in Hungary.