Alexander Radó

On 20 April 1956, Radó was elected an honorary fellow of the resurrected and ideologically compliant Hungarian Geographical Society, less than one year after he arrived back in Budapest.[20] Radó never directly took part in it directly, in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,[24] although the ÁFTH were planning to remove him.[26] At one point, he believed he was capable of bringing together two opposing sides who were personal friends; Imre Nagy on one side and two Soviet generals on the other, but he was unable to facilitate a modus vivendi between the two. [24] In the same year, Radó was appointed to a position at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences that was formerly taken by the Marxist geographer Markos György. György had been sacked by the Ministry of Education.[26] as he was affiliated with an intellectual organisation that was associated with the 1956 revolution, making him politically unreliable.[27] By 1 September 1958, Radó had completely taken over the Department of Economic Geography (Gazdaságföldrajzi Tanszék) as a self-styled Professor of Geography, despite a lack of dissertation or research that was commensurate with the position.[28] His lack of qualifications was addressed on 22 September 1958, when the Hungarian Academy of Sciences awarded Radó the Doctor of Sciences degree (DSc), a Soviet era academic award that was considered the highest qualification on the scale.[27] The granting of this qualification without doing any of the actual work to achieve it, was as shocking then as it would have been today.[27] and would not have been achievable without significant political support.[27] The award caused both anger and shame within the geographers community and brought him into conflict with established academics, from before the Soviet takeover.[27] According to the cartographer István Klinghammer "[he] blasted into local academic life in a typically ‘Stalinist’ manner. He insulted many and treated people unworthily, and hence gained many enemies".[28] As he had the political support, any conflict that occurred in relation to Cartographia or indeed even with the Academy of Sciences, he invariably won, resulting in many academic colleagues being purged, with some staff forced to retire, others having their funding removed.[28] The Hungarian cartographer György Kisari Balla who worked in the ÁFTH, stated, "We dreaded him. A good word from him meant a raise, a bad opinion a career change".[28]

During the late 1950s to early 1960s Radó reformed Hungarian geography to adhere to the Soviet model.[28] During this period, he published heavily, on articles espousing his admiration of Soviet political figures, for example Lenin, to essays on geomorphology and political geography.[28] He focused particularly on economic geography as it could be subjected to the needs of Marxist–Leninist theory to support the belief that physical and human geography were separate academic disciplines, although closely related. Specifically, this was a rejection of environmental determinism and the work of Alfred Hettner and Alfred Weber, rejected, as it failed to take into account, Soviet modes of production.[28]

He held the view, based on the official doctrine of Marxist–Leninist theory, that applied geography had primacy over theoretical geography.[29] He stated in 1957, that "...Soviet Union geography provides one of the most important scientific bases for the construction of theory and the means by Soviet people can learn actively to transform their natural environment".[29] He confirmed in 1962 that his ideas were a reflection of Nikita Khrushchev proposals to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961, that the application of scientific principles could strengthen communist society.[29] It implied that the role of geography was to provide the scientific basis for Soviet spatial planning, which was an entirely unoriginal idea.[29]

It is uncertain whether Radó continued his espionage activities after he entered academia in Budapest.[30] In 1955, he told his son, that he refused both the Soviet and Hungarians offers of cooperation in establishing an intelligence service.[29] However, the CIA believed this was untrue. Their experience of Radó's successful espionage career during the interwar period led them to believe that he would use his position in cartography to collect GIS information that would be important to the Soviet Union.[30][29] Radó's career in the late 1950s and early 1960s had expanded to include attendance at several professional conferences abroad that were held several times a year and he also held positions in a number of international cartographic organisations. He also corresponded with many foreign partners in execution of his academic work, where he would request and receive GIS, cartographic and statistical data for various maps that he published.[30] The CIA produced a report in 1968,[11] where they described Radó as an important Soviet intelligence agent and his work was to collect the data for use by the Soviet Union.[30][31] At the time the Americas warned many partner cartographic agencies in the west, that they should not cooperate with Radó.[30]

In 1960, Radó's wartime role as a spy for the Soviet Union was discovered by Swedish journalists and revealed to the attendees of the conference of the International Geographical Union in Stockholm, much to the dismay of the Hungarian attendees who were swarmed by reporters[32] and that turned Radó into a celebrity .[33] The Soviet KGB who were present as part of the Soviet delegation, were also acutely embarrassed as they had always denied the presence of Soviet agents in Europe.[32] After the exposé, the Soviets and Hungarians tried to capitalise on the situation by attempting to present a myth of Radó as an anti-fascist hero of World War II.[32] Over the next several years, speculation of the wartime career of Radó, along with the operations of the Rote Drei continued to appear and in particularly in 1963, when Kim Philby was exposed as a Soviet spy.[33] In 1966, Pierre Accoce and Pierre Quet released a novel with the title: "A man called Lucy; 1939-1945" that was a full-length history of the Rote Drei.[33] The authors argued that the intelligence provided by Rudolf Roessler was critical in ensuring the defeat of the Wehrmacht advance in 1942–1943. The publication led to further speculation that included a series of articles by Der Spiegel on 16 January 1967 titled: "Verräter im Führerhauptquartier" (Traitors at the Führer's headquarters)[34] along with the subsequent CIA reports on Radó in 1967 and the Rote Drei in the 1970s.[33] The conclusions presented by the book and the article series were at odd with the official Soviet history of World War II, simply that the Wehrmacht had been defeated by ground forces of the Red Army and not German intelligence reports forwarded by Soviet agents and communist informers in Europe.[35]

Radó was instructed by the Soviet KGB to disavow the conclusions espoused in the books and newspaper series.[35] In 1967, the Soviets planned to produce a youth novel, a biography of Radó's wartime career in Switzerland, that was politically acceptable to them.[32] The novel's message was to suggest that the defeat of Germany was due to the excellent Western intelligence agencies and not to the Soviet strategic effort.[32] Instead Radó decided to write his own memoir "Dóra jelenti" (Codename Dóra) that was first published in Hungarian in 1971 .[32] The book was censored by both the Soviet KGB and Hungarian intelligence with around 10% of the textual content of the book removed.[32] The book was translated into 23 languages and became an "anti-fascist oratory".[25] In 1978, a film of the book was made with the same title.[36] In 2006, the original uncensored manuscript was published in Budapest.

Radó's career reached its peak in the second half of the 1960s and continued into the 1970s.[32] During those years, he continued to strengthen Hungarian cartography, for example by creating new positions of employment in the industry and creating political forums for discussion, and by using his academic position to build relationships in the international geographic and cartographic communities.[32] However, his career did face some setbacks. In 1966, he was forced to rescind his academic chair at the university, due to a new law that forbade state officials from holding more than one senior position. Radó choose to remain at the ÁFTH over his university chair.[37] In 1967, his nomination for vice presidency of the IGU was rejected.[38] Nor was he able to attain election to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.[38] He had approached György Aczél the doyen of communist science, with the assurance that he woud be elected to the HAS, but Aczél refused to help him.[37]

Throughout the later period of Radó's career, he continued his ideological campaign to purge all Hungarian geographers and cartographers who did not follow the Soviet line.[39] In 1975, he wrote a polemic where he criticised several long-dead Hungarian cartographers and geographers, in an attempt to expunge them from history. [39] He was particularly critical of Hungarian geographer Pál Teleki who was later prime minister of the Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946).[39] Radó took a particular dislike to Teleki's geography, calling it a "backward, obsolete scientific construction designed by its very essentials to propagate the ideology, ambitions, and bourgeois conceptions of the outdated socioeconomic system in which it was produced".[39] In a visit to the Eötvös Loránd University, he requested that Teleki's portrait be removed from the Department of Geography.[39] This was followed in 1979, by Radó blocking the Hungarian Geographical Society attempt to hold a conference to re-evaluate Teleki's work, that was to be held on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Radó stated "that everything has already been written about Teleki".[39]

Radó was celebrated on his 80th birthday, by the Földrajzi Közlemények, the journal of the Hungarian Geographical Society when they wrote a feature on Radó that was published across two issues, to salute their president.[40] A reception was held for his birthday at the Soviet embassy in Budapest. János Kádár, who was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party was in attendance.[40]

When Radó died the Hungarian press and foreign geography and cartography journals commemorated him by publishing a necrologue.[lower-alpha 2] He was described by Márton Pécsi, the next president of the geographical society, as "I knew him as someone for whom work, revolutionism, the striving for innovation, Marxist internationalism, and socialist patriotism together formed the essence of his life”.[40]

In 1930, the first of three volumes of the Atlas for Politics Economy Workers' Movement was published by Radó in Germany.[41] A year later, a Japanese version was published with the title Atlas für Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung.[41] In a review in the International Affairs, the journal of Chatham House, the volume was described as "Marxist propaganda, anti-capitalist in aim...the author indulges in one wild extreme of fantasy depicting the Soviet Union as encircled".[42] The subject of the creation of the atlas began with Radó in a conversation that he had with Vladimir Lenin, that places the atlas firmly within the idiom and the traditions of the Russian Revolution.[43] The atlas was presented across six chapters in black and white along with colour to represent political and economic developments between individual states. The Soviet Union was coloured in a bold red, similar to the old British cartography standard of red or pink that had been in use since the 19th century to emphasise the British Empire. Its use on the atlas was clearly for the same purpose, to show that the Soviet Union was claiming its own existence in direct competition with the old empires. To emphasise the size of the Soviet Union, Radó used the Mercator projection.[44] Although far more than a propaganda tool, numerous maps in the series were used for propaganda purposes, for example showing the Soviet Union as isolated with titles like "The Isolation of the Soviet Union in Europe" or "The Armament for the Next War" showing the countries borders surrounded by heavily armed European and Asian countries.[45] The naming of ethnic groups was an important aspect of the maps production in Soviet empire with many ethnic groups.[45] On most maps, Radó uses the term "Soviet Union" except one "The Proletarian Great Power - The Soviet Union" where he takes cognizance of the Bolsheviks. This led to difficulties for Radó when the Bolsheviks lost power and led to an analysis of Soviet ethnic peoples that resulted in other Soviet maps being produced that began the enforcement of those people into the country of the Soviet Union, in a process known as Sovietization. Radó largely ignored ethnic groupings in his maps of the Soviet Union, instead showing the area as a monochromatic and homogeneous space. In contrast, in other areas of the world he documented the groupings, for example in maps of Europe and America,[46] where he detailed the political divisions.[47]

The second main atlas, created by Rado and Marthe Rajchman, was published in London in 1937 by Victor Gollancz,[48] was of a smaller format, published across six chapters. It contained many more maps than the previous atlas and made extensive use of statistics to explain the detail.[47] In a review in the International Affairs, the atlas was described as:

"The compiler has set out to demonstrate how much information about the world today can be conveyed in maps and diagrams, eked out by a liberal amount of letterpress. Frontiers, trade relations, industrial development and distribution of races, incomes and constitutions are all shown in different sections. Some of these things lend themselves better than others to this treatment: but the only complete failure is with the forms of government, which altogether defy the rough-and-ready classifications of the cartographer. The arrogant title has already suffered its nemesis. Austria is shown as independent and Czechoslovakia as unpartitioned."[49]

Two editions were published, one in English and one in German. The only difference between the two versions was that the English language maps were in black and white, in contrast to the German Atlas, which were in colour. [47] Unlike the 1930 atlas, this new atlas presented the Soviet Union on an equal footing with other nations, politically, economically and militarily and was seen as no longer encircled.[47] Several maps were included that showed the Soviet Union as globalized with good communications, trade and infrastructure links and these maps were favourably viewed by reviewers. [50] Radó used the extensive statistics that he had available, to clearly delineate each ethnic republic and their population figures. However, in maps of the Soviet Union, the areas were shown as a homogeneous whole and drawn in a monochrome.[51]

The first change to occur was in the Földméréstani Kozlemények (Periodical of Geodesy) journal, which had been printed from 1949. Its name was changed to Geodézia és Kartográfia with Radó listed as a member of the editorial board.[52] In 1956, it was expanded with a new section called Változások a Térképen (Map Changes) that consisted of several pages of cartographic map changes garnered from both western and communist countries.[52] In 1959, his title was changed to Coordinating Editor-Sandor Rado, Doctor of Geographic Science.[52] In 1962, the publishing schedule of Geodézia és Kartográfia was increased from four to six issues a year, increasing the usefulness of the data to cartographer.[53] However, as the data was published in Hungarian, it made the data of limited use.

Radó's most important contributions were in cartography, but he worked more as an organiser than a researcher.[29] In 1957, he recruited a team of researchers at the Karl Marx University of Economics along with people from the AFTH to create the "International Almanach" that was published by Cartographia. These were three huge volumes of basic statistical data, that were published in 1959, with two further updated editions produced in 1960 and 1967.[29][23] In 1957, Radó launched the Terra Térképszolgálat ("Terra Map Service"), a new service from the AFTH that offered political maps, i.e. geographic background summaries on areas in the news, for newspapers and magazine.[54] The project in essence was an extension of Geopress and continued production into the 1980s.[29]

In September 1965, Radó began to publish the journal Cartactual.[53]

In 1965, Radó produced an novel edition of the map in collaboration with French geographer, Ivan du Jonchay for the Larousse publishing house.[29][55] The atlas was produced in three languages, French, English and Spanish[56] with an index with 34000 entries and a table of statistics with 310 tables.[56]

Radó was awarded two civil awards from his home country. The first was in 1963, when Rado was awarded the Kossuth Prize from the Hungarian National Assembly.[58] In 1970, he was awarded the State Award of the Hungarian People's Republic.[37] He was also awarded several military decorations in Hungary, that included the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Merit for a Socialist Homeland and the Order of Merit for the Order of Labor.[37]

Radó received the Order of the Great Patriotic War from the Soviet Union. [37] There is doubt whether Radó received the Order of Lenin. He was expecting to receive the award when he visited the Soviet Union in 1949, but he was summoned there for a completely different reason.[37] However, two biographers claim that he received the award in 1942,[59][60] while another claimed he received it in 1943.[48] Radó in an interview himself stated that he did not receive the medal.[57]

In November 1936, Radó was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society.[5] During the 1960s and 1970s, Radó was president of the Hungarian national commissions of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA).[37] In 1972, he was elected to the chair of the ICA commission on thematic maps.[39] During the following year, he was elected as president of the Hungarian Geographical Society (Magyar Földrajzi Társaság).[39] In 1977, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Lomonosov University.[39]

In 1987, the Military Cartographic Services of the GDR in Halle was renamed to Militärkartogrfischer Dienst (VEB) “Sandor Rado” to honour Radó.[39]

The following are Radó's main geographic and cartographic publications:

• Radó, Alexander (1925). Führer durch die Sowjetunion [Guide to the Soviet Union] (in German). Moscow: Staatsverlag der RSFSR.
• Radó, Alexander (1930). Atlas für Politik, Wirtschaft, Arbeiterbewegung [Atlas for politics, economics, labor movement] (in German). Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik.

The following are Radó's other geographic and cartographic publications:

• Radó, Alexander (1924). Politische und Verkehrskarte der Sowjetrepubliken [Political and transport map of the Soviet republics] (in German). Braunschweig: G. Westermann. Completed after. As of January 1, 1924
• Radó, Alexander (1929). Gross-Hamburg. Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag.
• Radó, Alexander (1933). Europäisches Russland und [die] Randstaaten [European Russia and [the] peripheral states] (in German). Georg Westermann Verlag. ISBN 978-9949-096-05-3.
• Radó, Sándor, ed. (1962). Welthandbuch; Internationaler politischer und wirtschaftlicher Almanach [World Handbook; International political and economic almanac]. Budapest: Corvina Verlag.
• Magyarország autóatlasza [Car atlas of Hungary]. Budapest: Cartographia. 1979. ISBN 9789633501573.
• Radó, Alexander (1979). Donauknie und Umgebung : Reiseführer und Atlas [Danube Bend and surroundings: travel guide and atlas] (in German). Budapest: Kartográfiai Vállalat.

The following is the autobiography:

• Radó, Sándor (1973). Под псевдонимом Дора: Воспоминания сов. разведчика (in Russian). Voenizdat.

Radó, Alexander (1974). "Dora meldet" – Buch gebraucht, antiquarisch & neu kaufen (in German) (1st ed.). Berlin: Militärverlag der DDR.

Radó, Sándor (1977). Codename Dora. London: Abelard. ISBN 9780200723398.

• Barth, Bernd-Rainer (November 2009). "Egy térképész illegalitásban: tények és legendák nyugati és keleti titkosszolgálati archivumokból". In Ábel, Hegedüs; János, Suba (eds.). Tanulmányok Radó Sándorró [Studies Sándorró Radó] (in Hungarian). Budapest: HM Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum.
• Ruland, Bernd (1973). Die Augen Moskaus: Fernschreibzentrale der Wehrmacht in Berlin ; zwei Mädchen gegen Hitler [The eyes of Moscow : teletype center of the Wehrmacht in Berlin ; two girls against Hitler]. Zürich: Schweizer Verlagshaus. ISBN 9783726361341.
• Koestler, Arthur (1955). Die Geheimschrift : Bericht eines Lebens, 1932 bis 1940 [The cipher. Report of a life. 1932 to 1940.] (in German). Wien: K. Desch. pp. 318–326.
• Schlögel, Karl (2016). Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik [In space we read time: about the history of civilization and geopolitics] (in German) (5th ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl. p. 229. ISBN 3-596-16718-3.

• Wise, M. J (1980). "Radó Sándor titokzatos élete. Fedőneve: Dóra". Wise, M. J.: Radó Sándor titokzatos élete. Fedőneve: Dóra Földrajzi Közlemények. 104 (28): 1–2. sz. 5–6. ISSN 0015-5411.
• István, Kardos (2004). "Egy életrajz és ami mögötte van : Radó Sándor (1899-1981)". Egyenlítő (in Hungarian). 2 (6): 4–48. ISSN 1589-6714.
• Pécsi, Márton (1982). "Búcsúbeszéd Radó Sándor (1899–1981) ravatalánál". Földrajzi Közlemények (in Hungarian). 106 (3): 290–292. ISSN 0015-5411.
• Jéki, László (December 2001). "Fizika a színpadon I." MTA Részecske- és Magfizikai Kutatóintézet (in Hungarian). 5 (12).