In response to your request No. 01629 of 10 January 1940 regarding BÉLA SZánTÓ, based on the materials available to us, we inform you of the following:

During the time when Béla Szántó was a member of the CC and one of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party (1926 – 1929), he displayed opportunistic views toward the Hungarian workers' movement. The 1929 open letter from the ECCI about Szántó's views read: “Szántó fell into opportunism [by] overlooking the decisions of the Fourth Profintern Congress, the Sixth Comintern World Congress, and all of the Third Period. This misunderstanding of the character of the Third Period [was] the most dangerous deviation of the present moment. Szántó denied the leftward movement of the working class in Hungary, confused the situation in the workers' movement with the situation in the increasingly fascist trade unions, and promoted in the Foreign Committee absolutely baseless pessimistic views on the prospects for the revolutionary movement in Hungary. He went so far in his petit bourgeois evaluation of the mood of and the situation within the working class that he considered large groups of the working class lost for the revolutionary movement and developed a ‘theory’ about the decomposition of the workers' movement.”

These opportunistic views of Szántó's were condemned by the ECCI Political Secretariat and by the Second Congress of the CP of Hungary. The condemnation of Szántó's line was not the result of incorrect information by the CC of the CP of Hungary at the time but was a result of mistakes committed by him, which he himself admitted, as the ECCI's open letter also pointed out. It is true that that CC also committed serious political and organizational mistakes, which were sharply criticized in the ECCI's open letter. However, that CC was not dissolved.

At the time of functional struggle in the CP of Hungary, approximately 1928 – 1929. Béla Szántó was a supporter of Béla Kun and belonged to his narrow circle of friends. Later Kun's attitude toward Szántó changed and became hostile. This was due to the fact that Béla Szántó wrote a book about the history of the Hungarian revolution, in which he criticized Béla Kun's activities in that period. They disagreed mainly over the evaluation of foreign policy during the proletarian dictatorship in Hungary and of the Hungarian working class.

In 1935, Szántó) gave a speech about the history of the Hungarian revolution and the Hungarian Red Army in the Hungarian Club for political émigrés. In the discussion that followed. Béla Kun's supporters accused Szántó of Trotskyist deviations. Regarding this, Szántó Zoltán (brother of Béla Szántó) reports that Béla Szántó's speech at that time was basically correct and “had nothing to do with Trotskyism.”

This question was not reviewed in the ICC in 1935, and, in general, the question about him was not raised. In 1936, Szántó Béla appealed to the ICC to lift the party penalty (a harsh reprimand with a warning, which was imposed on him in 1928 for slanders against a certain comrade [Alpari]). The NKTP party committee (at that time Szántó worked as a director of the library in the NKTP) gave him then a positive reference and supported his appeal to lift the party] penalty, but there was no ICC decision on this question.

On [the basis of] the resolution of the ECCI Secretariat, the CC of the CP of Hungary was dissolved in 1936 for sabotaging the decisions of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, for gross violations of the rules of secrecy, for suppressing self-criticism, and because among the CC members were agents of the Hungarian police. The majority of the members of that CC have been arrested by the NKVD.

In 1937 – 1938, Szántó Béla appealed to the ECCI Secretariat regarding publication of his book, but this question remained under deliberation.