A Historical Myth in the Propaganda of the “Hungarian-Soviet Friendship”

This paper examines how the Hungarian communist writer Béla Illés (1895-1974) portrayed the case of the later executed Alexey Gusev and his fellow soldiers in his 1945 writing with the aim of legitimizing and historically underpinning the Soviet-Hungarian friendly relations. These in fact never-existing Russian soldiers fought for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and resisted the intervention of the Tsar in 1849. This paper studies the story of this fiction up until the 1980s and the end of communism in Hungary. In his 1948 study, Alexander Stikalin described the Gusev-case as a “myth” without further explanation. Although this fiction cannot be conceptualized as a myth according to all myth definitions, this paper claims that according to the myth definitions outlined by Jan Assman and Lucian Boia, it can be considered a myth. As such, this fiction turning into a myth can later evolve into an “invented tradition” of a community.