The Expropriation of 1956:

Twenty-five years ago, Árpád Göncz (pictured right), then President of the Republic of Hungary and a former prisoner of the Kádár régime, delivered a speech on the anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy in 1958 in which he made the following observation on the 1956 Revolution:

“Everyone has the right to interpret 1956. But no one has the right to expropriate 1956. Only the knowledge of the undistorted truth can mellow the one-time confrontation into peace.”

Just the use of the noun ‘Revolution’ involves interpretation, which is why some historians still prefer to refer to it as an ‘Uprising’. István Bart places it next to the events of 1848-49 and 1918-19 as, in Hungarian, a ‘forradalom’ (revolution). He defines it in the following terms:

… the bitter, desperate uprising against the Soviet Empire was one of the few events in the history of Hungary that was also of importance to the history of the world as a whole; the euphoric experience of the precious few days of freedom that followed the rapid, overnight collapse of an oppressive régime could never be forgotten, despite the … strict taboo against any mention of it; its defeat left an equally deep mark on the nation’s consciousness, as did the painful realization that Hungary’s fate was decided by the Great Powers, and not by the bloody fighting on the streets of Budapest; none the less, the events that led to the change in régime (>’rendszerváltás’) became irreversible (with every Hungarian citizen realizing this full well) when it was openly declared that what had happened in Hungary in 1956 was a revolution and not a “counter-revolution”.

Margaret Rooke, in her Case Study on The Hungarian Revolt of 1956 (1986), (intriguingly sub-titled János Kádár: traitor or saviour?) attached a glossary in which she defined ‘liberal democratic’ as a form of government in which several parties of both Right and Left compete for power in free elections; freedom of expression, organisation etc. Based on the variety of sources she consulted for this study, she described the government of Imre Nagy in these terms. She also defined the Petöfi Circle as a ‘Liberal and nationalist’ student society, named after the nationalist poet of the 1848 Revolution, Sándor Petöfi. The circle sponsored public debates and became a focal point for discussion within the wider press in Hungary.

In 1972, János Kádár gave a speech to his Communist Party colleagues at his sixtieth birthday celebration in which he addressed the problem of the nomenclature of the events of the autumn of 1956:

In 1956 a grave and critical situation arose, which is called counter-revolution by historians. We know that this is the learned definition of what happened in 1956. But there is also another name for it that we can all accept; it was a national tragedy. A tragedy for the Party, the working-class, for the people as a whole and for individuals as well! It was a wrong turning, and this resulted in tragedy. And if we are now past it – and we can safely say we are – it is a very great thing indeed.  

What Kind of Revolution?:

But we also need to consider the adjectives which are often used to ‘appropriate’ the revolution. Sixty years on, Hungarians can certainly agree with Kádár that it was a national tragedy which needs to be commemorated as such, but as a historical event, if we accept that it was not simply a spontaneous ‘insurrection’,’uprising’ or ‘revolt’, but that it was a revolution, was it a socialist one, or was it liberal or nationalist in its ideological origins?

Imre Nagy became a focal point as both Communist reformers and liberal intellectuals supported him. In April 1955 Nagy had lost power as PM and was expelled from the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Communist Party) in the wake of Khrushchev’s consolidation in Moscow. But following the new Soviet leader’s “secret speech” to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956, Hungarian party boss Mátyás Rákosi announced in March that Lászlo Rajk, who had been convicted of spying for the CIA and executed in 1949, would be posthumously exonerated and rehabilitated. At the same time, however, Rákosi forced more collectivisation of agriculture and cracked down on the private sector and the arts.

The US Legation reported that…

… his removal or retirement… would be interpreted… by the general population as a victory for passive resistance.

On 19 June, Rajk’s widow made a speech to the Petöfi Circle in which she made it clear that this conflict could not be resolved except by the latter tendency gaining the upper hand over the hard-liners:

Comrades, there are no words with which to tell you how I feel facing you after cruel years in jail, without a word, … a letter, or a sign of life reaching me from the outside, living in despair and hopelessness. When they took me away, I was nursing my five-month old infant. For five years I had no word of my baby.

You not only killed my husband, but you killed all decency in our country. You destroyed Hungary’s political, economic and moral life. Murderers cannot be rehabilitated. They must be punished!

Where were the members of the Party while these things were happening? How could they allow such degeneration to take place without rising in wrath against the guilty?

Comrades, stand by me in this fight!

Then the unbelievable happened. Along with the audience, the Communist officials on the rostrum stood and gave the widow a standing ovation. In July, Soviet leaders in Moscow ordered a reorganisation of the HWP, hoping the move would avert an insurrection like the unrest which had flared in Poland the previous month. Rákosi was sacked as Party First Secretary and Ernő Gerő, his long-term hardline accomplice replaced him, while János Kádár, a ‘homegrown’ reformer, became Secretary of the Politburo. Kádár was well-known, first as a tool of Stalinism, then as a victim. To most people, he seemed an ordinary rehabilitated Party bureaucrat, a few steps down from the top, but with a past that did not differ from that of many others. Yet he was both friend and betrayer of Rajk, whom he then helped to frame when he was imprisoned in the 1949 purges. He is reported to have persuaded Rajk to confess to being an ‘imperialist spy’ by telling him:

Of course we all know that you are innocent. … The Party has chosen you for the role of traitor; you must sacrifice yourself for the Party. This is terrible but after all you are an old militant and cannot refuse to help the Party. 

Rajk had been a comparatively ‘nation-minded’ Communist who had been moved from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before his public destruction. His trial, ‘confession’ to being a Titoist and imperialist spy had been followed by his execution as his wife listened from her own nearby cell. Kádár had also been imprisoned at that time, and his brief moment of notoriety had seemed to be over. But now, with Rákosi’s replacement, Kádár quickly rose to the top of a violently changing and increasingly discontented Communist Party. Its top ranks had melted away around him and he was left almost alone. Gerő was far too closely identified with Rákosi to be able to implement the slow economic and political liberalisation that Moscow hoped for.

In August, the US Legation reported that the Government was making an effort to gain support from Nagy’s adherents within the Party, and from non-Communist elements, and that…

… the basic conflict continues between those wishing to cushion the effect of the Twentieth Congress in Hungary and those wishing to permit a more natural development of ideological thought and practice (within limits).

 

Nagy was reinstated to the Hungarian Workers’ Party (HWP) at the beginning of October when an estimated 200,000 people demonstrated against Stalinism, inspired by the ceremonial reburial of Lászlo Rajk and other victims of the 1949 purges. Political opposition groups continued to meet in universities in Szeged, Sopron and Budapest, formulating their demands. On 16 and 23 October, two groups of students met and made the first open Hungarian demands for the removal of Soviet troops. Hungarian newspapers covered the meetings and the students continued to meet and organise openly. In his recent article for the Hungarian Review, Gyula Kodolányi has pointed to the evidence that some planning did go into the events which followed. The political police fired into the unarmed crowd at the Hungarian Radio Station on the evening of the 23rd when the demonstrators pressed for the proclamation of the Hungarian youth, with its list of their political demands, to be broadcast. Armed conflict broke out at the block of buildings next to the Radio building. Hungarian troops ordered to the spot by Gerő’s ‘Military Committee’ handed their weapons over to the demonstrators, some of them also participating in the siege of the Radio Station themselves.

At the same time, another huge cheering crowd toppled the enormous Stalin statue in City Park and hauled its several pieces through the centre of the city. With this, the Hungarian Revolution, apparently unplanned and without leaders, had started.  There is some evidence that hard-liners in Moscow and Budapest decided in the summer to ignite a small-scale conflict, in order to finally do away with the Imre Nagy faction of the Party and to teach a lesson to the ‘hot-headed Hungarians’. Kodolányi has concluded from this and other scraps of evidence that:

Provocation was certainly an element in igniting the spirits of Hungarians – but the outcome, an armed revolution that humbled the Soviet Army units stationed in Hungary was certainly not in the calculations of the masterminds of the Kremlin and Gerő. 

As a source for other elements of the 1956 events, Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution is often referred to as a positive appreciation of the 1956 events. She argued that the Revolution itself was not a mere response to probable provocation, but an immense surge of soul and community wisdom in a whole nation, an event that remained unique in modern history.

In search of a political solution, Gerő and his friends brought in Imre Nagy on the night of 23 October to become Prime Minister for a second time. That was certainly unplanned, as Nagy was on holiday at the time and was pathetically out of touch with the situation, addressing the hundreds of thousands waiting to hear him on Kossúth Square in the late evening with “Comrades!” They booed him for this, but Nagy was not yet ready to accept the leadership of a non-Communist Revolution, and certainly not an anti-Soviet one, despite strong pressure from some intellectuals.

Indeed, a report written by Sefton Delmer which appeared in the Daily Express on 24 October emphasised the seemingly ‘orthodox’ nature of the demonstrations on 23 October:

The fantastic, and to my mind, really super-ingenious nature of this national rising against the ‘Hammer and Sickle’, is that it is carried out under the protective red mantle of pretended communist orthodoxy. Gigantic portraits of Lenin are being carried at the head of the marchers. The purged ex-premier Imre Nagy, who only in the last couple of weeks has been re-admitted to the Hungarian Communist Party, is the rebels’ chosen champion and the leader whom they demand must be given charge of a new, free and independent Hungary. Indeed the socialism of this ex-Premier and – this is my bet – Premier soon to be again, is no doubt genuine enough. But the youths in the crowd, to my mind, were in the vast majority as anti-Communist as they were anti-Soviet, that is, if you agree that calling for the removal of the Red Army is anti-Soviet.

In a BBC broadcast made in 1962, the revolutionary refugee Pál Ignotus recalled that…

Even those who feel strongly against the present régime … would all agree that nothing of the sort of the semi-feudalist capitalism of pre-war Hungary … should be restored. Those who sparked off the 1956 Revolution were against the then existing régime, not because they found it too socialist, but because they did not find it genuinely Socialist.

Béla Kovács, minister of agriculture in the Nagy government as a member of the Smallholder Party commented at the time:

No one should dream of going back to the world of aristocrats, bankers and capitalists. That world is definitely gone!

Bob Dent, the Budapest-based writer, having researched all the documents recently published in English on the events of 1956, has supported this view:

The attacks on the Party were attacks on its monopoly of power, not on the ideal of socialism or workers’ power as such. … It is even more difficult to find substantive evidence showing that the overall orientation was towards a capitalist restoration.

On the contrary, Dent has pointed out that the crucial role of factory workers, both in Budapest and in other towns, has been underestimated until  recent research uncovered it:

The first workers’ council to appear was established outside the capital at the … iron and steel works in Diósgyőr in the industrial north-east, … on 22 October, the day before the events are usually regarded as having begun. This and similar bodies represented a form of direct democracy somewhat different from the forms of multi-party parliamentary system and from the classic Soviet-style, one-party system.

He has demonstrated how these councils outlived the crack-down by Kádár’s government and survived the initial repression which destroyed the Revolution elsewhere, on the streets and in the universities. Even Kádár himself, in a radio broadcast on 24 October, before he first joined Nagy’s revolutionary government and then formed his own with Soviet backing, recognised that the Revolution had begun ‘innocently’ enough, but was then taken over by reactionaries:

The demonstration of university youth, which began with the formulation of, on the whole, acceptable demands, has swiftly degenerated into a demonstration against our democratic order; and under cover of this demonstration an armed attack has broken out. It is only with burning anger that we can speak of this attack by counter-revolutionary reactionary elements against the capital of our country …

The fight is being waged chiefly by the most loyal unite of our People’s Army, by members of the internal security forces and police, who are displaying heroic courage, and by former partisans with the help of our brothers and allies, the Soviet soldiers. 

On the following day, 25th, Ernő Gerő disappeared permanently. Kádár made another radio broadcast announcing that the Politburo had ‘entrusted’ him with the post of First Secretary of the HWP in a grave and difficult situation. He warned that the Nagy Government must conduct negotiations with the Soviet Union in a spirit of complete equality between Hungary and the Soviet Union. Over the next few days, however, with Gerő out-of-the-way, Kádár’s attitude towards the Revolution and the Government seemed to soften considerably, resulting in his joining the multi-party cabinet less than a week later. Meanwhile, Nagy kept reshuffling his government, consulting with the two ‘liberal’ emissaries of the Kremlin, Mikoyan and Suslov, who were in constant transit between Moscow and Budapest. He tried to persuade them that concessions, the admission of the most urgent national demands, would appease the fighters and open a peaceful way out of the conflict.

Turning Points & Days of Change:

Peter Unwin, the British diplomat and envoy in Budapest during the Revolution and Kádár era, and wrote a monograph of Imre Nagy, Voice in the Wilderness (1992). He wrote that of how 28-29 October represented a turning point in Nagy’s thinking, and therefore in the Revolution. On 28th, Nagy made the most significant of his radio broadcasts to date, announcing a ceasefire and the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest: negotiations would start about their complete withdrawal from Hungary. As soon as order was restored, the security police would be abolished. Budapest Radio also announced that the Central Committee had approved the declaration promising the end of the one-party system made by the new Hungarian Government. On 29th he fulfilled this later promise with immediate effect. With these measures, he gained attention, closing the gap between the reform communist leadership and the insurgent street-fighters.

On 30 October, it looked as if the Revolution had triumphed. A further announcement confirmed that Kádár and the Central Committee (Politburo) of the Hungarian Workers’ Party had backed the cabinet’s decision to abolish the one-party system and to place the country’s government on the basis of democratic cooperation between coalition parties as they existed in 1945. This effectively meant a return to multi-party free elections. Under these terms, Kádár became an ex-officio member of Nagy’s Government. On the 30th, Mikoyan and Suslov spent the whole day in Budapest, and when they left Budapest to return to Moscow, according to Unwin, they remained committed to supporting Nagy’s interim government and its decision to concede a more multi-party government.

Therefore, breaking with the confines of a reform communist programme, Nagy had embraced the multi-party system. The Soviet-backed Government had at first sent tanks in, then yielded and prepared to allow some freedom to the Hungarian people, within the limits of the one-party state. But Hungarians of all classes had had enough. These limits were precisely what they wanted to get rid of. The continuing disturbances and the distribution of leaflets calling for a multi-party system drove Nagy to swing away from an exclusively Communist state and to break all the guarantees of Russian security within the Warsaw Pact. “Russians go home!” was the universal cry. Kádár also had to echo it, but this was just what the Russians dared not do, and the dramatic reversal of the Kremlin’s behaviour took place on that night as the Soviet envoys were flying home.

By the time Mikoyan and Suslov arrived in Moscow, the balance in the Politburo had already tipped towards the hardliners and the Army leaders who clamoured for revenge for their humiliating losses on the streets of Budapest. Unwin summed up that it was decided that the Hungarian Revolution must be destroyed by force. It may also have been thought that Nagy could be detached from the revolutionary leaders and perhaps even put in charge of an administration that would follow Soviet orders. As it turned out, the man who could be detached was János Kádár. Imre Nagy did not move when he heard the news of new troops pouring into the country from 30 October, and began his journey towards martyrdom.

Also on 30 October, Cardinal Mindszenty was released from his life imprisonment, which had begun in December 1948. He had been badly treated while in custody. In his own account, he said that his guards had a meeting and decided to leave their watch duties, leaving him free. The following morning, he was escorted by armed civilian units to his residence in Buda’s Castle District. A crowd of well-wishers and journalists was waiting outside the building, where the Hungarian tricolour and the papal colours were flying. Although both American magazine reports and the records of the Kádár régime claim that the cardinal blessed the weapons of the freedom fighters and called for foreign intervention, the mainstream Hungarian newspapers that covered the cardinal’s arrival in detail reported no details of a statement of this kind. They simply stated that Mindszenty gave a few words of greeting to the crowd from the balcony. In his own memoirs, he said that he blessed the kneeling crowds and then entered the building he had not seen for years. He showed that he didn’t approve of the idea, expressed in slogans painted on the streets calling for a “Mindszenty government”.

The following day, 1 November, Mindszenty made it clear that he had called for the formation of a Christian Democratic Party as his price for supporting the Nagy Government. The same day he released a short press statement, broadcast on the radio, in which he said that he felt “no hatred in his heart” after his years of imprisonment. Calling the “struggle for freedom” which had taken place “unparalleled in world history”, he greeted the Hungarian youth and called for prayers for the victims. Two days later, on 3 November, the primate held a press conference at his residence in the morning before making his famous live radio broadcast that evening. In the press conference, he made it clear, to the point of irritation, that he had no intention of heading a government. However, different people interpreted his radio address in differing ways. The ‘official’ view of the Kádár régime, established the next day, was that was that Mindszenty’s radio address was a clear-cut expression of reaction and counter-revolution. János Bercz, in a work published in English at the end of the era, thirty years later, still felt able to write that in the speech Mindszenty presented his programme for the restoration of capitalism, though he didn’t quote anything from it as supporting evidence of this assertion. What Mindszenty actually said, at least according to his own memoirs, was:

“We desire to live in friendship with every people and with every country. … The old-fashioned nationalism must be revalued (‘re-evaluated?’) everywhere. … we give the Russian empire no cause for bloodshed. … We have not attacked Russia and sincerely hope that the withdrawal of Russian military force from our country will soon occur.”

After calling for a general return to work, echoing the Nagy Government, he stated that the uprising was “not a revolution, but a fight for freedom”. The post-1948 régime had been forced on the country, he said, but now had been swept away by the entire Hungarian people…

“because the nation wanted to decide freely on how it should live. It wants to be free to decide about the management of its state and the use of its labour.”

Declaring his own independence from any party, the cardinal called for fresh elections under international control in which every party would be free to nominate. But then he immediately warned everyone not to give way to internecine struggle, even adding that the country needed “as few parties and party leaders as possible”. On political and social matters in general, he affirmed that Hungary was…

“… a constitutional state, in a society without classes and … democratic achievements. We are for private property rightly and justly limited by social interests … we do not oppose the direction of former progress.

As for church matters, Mindszenty called for the immediate granting of Christian religious instruction the restoration of the institutions and associations of the Catholic Church. Towards the end of his broadcast, he asserted that what he had said was “clear and sufficient”. However, for many, it was neither clear nor sufficient. On the question of the return of church lands, for example, in his memoirs, he tried to clarify that he had meant that would be no opposition to the state of affairs which has already been proven right by the course of history, yet this addendum was far from clear either. The speech itself greatly disturbed some supporters of the Nagy government, especially his characterisation of it as “the successors of a fallen régime”. They suspected that he would like to see the government fall too, or at least the communist elements in it. If they suspected that at the time, it is hardly surprising that his words could so easily be misinterpreted and twisted by Kádár’s supporters in the days and years that followed.

Meanwhile, on 1 November, the radio had announced that the revolution had been declared a success, having shaken off the Rákosi régime and achieved freedom for the people and independence for the country. Significantly, it added that without this there can be no socialism and that the ideological and organisational leaders who prepared this uprising were recruited from a range of Communist writers, journalists, university students and members of the Petöfi Circle, as well as from thousands of workers, peasants and political prisoners. The foundation of the new Hungarian Workers’ Party was being established by János Kádár, and the announcement went on to declare that:

Either the Hungarian democratic parties will have enough strength to stabilize our achievements or we must face an open counter-revolution.

The same day, Kádár gave an interview to an Italian journalist, who asked him what type of communism he represented. His reply was: the new type, which emerged from the Revolution and which does not want anything in common with the Communism of the Rákosi-Hegedüs-Gerő group. Asked if it had anything in common with the Yugoslav or Polish type, he responded…

“… our Communism is Hungarian. It is a sort of “third line” with no connection to Titoism or to Gomulka’s Communism. It is Marxism-Leninism, adapted to the particular requirements of our country, to our difficulties and to our national problem. It is not inspired by the USSR nor by any other type of Communism, … it is Hungarian National Communism.”

As to whether this form of Communism would be developed along democratic lines, Kádár assured his interlocutor that there would be no dictatorship and that the opposition would be heard because it would have the national interests of Hungary at heart and not those of international Communism. A further brief announcement was made later the same day, by Nagy himself, informing the Hungarian population that the new government had renounced the Warsaw Pact. Apparently, in the meeting which decided on the withdrawal, Kádár had dramatically offered to fight the Russians with his ‘bare hands’. After the meeting, however, Kádár suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from Budapest. Up until that point, he had seemed to be in favour of the dramatic swing towards Hungary becoming a pluralistic, democratic state.

Nagy continued to negotiate with the democratic coalition parties on the composition of a new representative government, and with representatives of various social groups and revolutionary councils bent on establishing a new order, while General Béla Király united and consolidated the insurgent forces in a newly created National Guard. The following day, the 2nd, Nagy announced that his new government included three Smallholder members, three Social Democrats, two National Peasant Party and two Communist Party ministers, thus resembling the cabinet which resulted from the November 1945 free elections. Pál Maléter was named Minister of Defence, quickly re-establishing control of the streets. The new government was announced on the radio on the 3rd. That day, Hungary became a liberal democracy again for the first time since 1948, but it was to last only until the next morning.

Operation Whirlwind – The Empire Strikes Back:

At dawn on Sunday 4 November, Soviet forces started Operation Whirlwind, a general attack on the country and its capital, with an armoured force bigger than that of the Red Army which ‘liberated’ Budapest from Nazi occupation in 1944 and more troops than those of the Nazis who occupied Paris in 1940. The invasion marked the beginning of the end of the Revolution, almost as soon as it had succeeded. The announcement of Kádár’s new Hungarian Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government was made later that same day from the Soviet-Hungarian border:

“… Exploiting mistakes committed during the building of our people’s democratic system, the reactionary elements have misled many honest workers, and in particular the major part of our youth, which joined the movement out of honest and patriotic intentions …

The Hungarian Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government, acting in the interest of our people … requested the Soviet Army Command to help our nation smash the sinister forces of reaction and restore order and calm in the country.”

I have given more detailed accounts of these events in a series of articles elsewhere on this site. Here, I am more concerned to establish the extent to which the leadership of the Revolution was either non-Communist or anti-Communist. However, the life of the Hungarian Revolution had just blossomed in that fateful moment. Over the following months, the revolutionaries tried all forms of armed and peaceful resistance, of tough negotiation, of demonstrations and protest against the Kádár régime that only slowly consolidated itself by the spring of 1957. As Kodalányi commented:

The life of the revolution blossomed out in all of us Hungarians who lived through it, and in everyone in the wide world who sensed its essence together with us. A flower of spiritual life that would not fade.

One of the earliest accounts of the Revolution, The Tragedy of Central Europe, written by Stephen Borsody in 1960 (revised in 1980), summarised what happened next and how the Soviet leaders justified their action:

Upon reconquering Hungary, the Soviets installed a puppet government under János Kádár, a renegade national Communist, and re-instituted a rule of terror reminiscent of the Stalin era. To justify their bloody deed, the Soviet leaders branded the Hungarian Revolution as a ‘counter-revolution’ launched by ‘Western imperialist circles’ and led by Horthyite Fascists and aristocrats.

Contrary to this ‘branding’, writing in 1977, Domokos Szent-Iványi, one of those ‘liberal’ aristocrats, claimed that he had actually succeeded in preventing the clandestine Hungarian Independence Movement (MFM) from taking part in the Revolution. This was important to him because the pro-Rákosi Communist Party and Press had already shown their determination to put the “blame on ex-prisoners”, in particular on the so-called “Conspirators” for the fighting in Budapest and the country. Even the secret police, the ÁVH had to admit that none of the ‘Conspirators’ had actively participated. The ‘provocations’ of the Rákosi-Hegedüs-Gerő gang greatly contributed to the success of the Kádár régime in this respect, he claimed. The last meeting of a group of eight of them had taken place on 3 November, the date on which Nagy’s Government was announced, along with the declaration of neutrality. At the meeting, Szent-Iványi had outlined the current situation as he viewed it, and gave his opinion about coming events. Many of the leading members, including István Szent-Miklósy, former Major of the General Staff, and László Veress, former diplomat and press officer for the Prime Minister’s Office during the war, left Hungary within a few days of the Soviet invasion on 4 November. Clearly, the Hungarian Independence Movement, the remnant of the aristocratic Horthyite ‘liberals’, did not play a major role in the events of 1956, and deliberately so. Albeit with the benefit of hindsight, Szent-Iványi concluded that…

… As in the past… Hungary was once more abandoned in 1956 by the West Powers which believed that their interests had to be defeated around the borders of Suez and Israel and not on the Eastern bulwark of European Civilization. … Hungary must… try to arrive at some peaceful settlement and cooperation with her most powerful eastern neighbour, the Soviet Union.

Before the Soviet takeover, on the 2nd, Anna Kéthely (pictured right), President of the hurriedly reorganised Social Democratic Party, had become Minister of State in Imre Nagy’s government. Two days later, she was in Vienna attending a meeting of the Socialist International when the Soviet invasion of Hungary began. Unable to return to Hungary without facing certain imprisonment, she was given the mission by the Nagy Government of protesting to the United Nations. She testified against the invasion at the UN’s HQ in New York on 30 January 1957, as shown in the picture.

By then, of course, Nagy was a prisoner of the Soviets, tricked into leaving the Yugoslav Embassy on 22 November, where he and many members of his government had been taking refuge since the 4th, before being transported to Romania. Kéthely told the UN that she could not believe that he would have accepted his part voluntarily. Protests were made from throughout the world in the period 1956-58. In a letter to the editor of Pravda, written in January 1957, members of the British Parliamentary Labour Party, including Barbara Castle and Tony Benn, questioned the Soviet Government’s justification for its intervention in Hungary as it had appeared in the newspaper:

… your newspaper has portrayed the Hungarian uprising as ‘counter-revolutionary’. May we ask exactly what is meant by this expression? Does it include all systems of government which permit political parties whose programmes are opposed to that of the Communist Party? If, for example, the Hungarian people were to choose a parliamentary system similar to those in Finland or Sweden, would you regard that as counter-revolutionary?

… you have said that the Hungarian uprising was planned long in advance by the West and you have in particular blamed Radio Free Europe. Are you seriously suggesting that masses of Hungarian workers and peasants were led by these means into organising mass strikes aimed at restoring the power of feudal landlords and capitalists?

The philosopher Albert Camus was ostracised by Jean Paul-Sartre and his friends for his unflinching condemnation of Soviet aggression and of the West’s moral and political failure to do what could have been done on behalf of the revolutionaries and the country. In her detailed analysis of the Hungarian Revolution, Origins of Totalitarianism, recorded in 1957, the ‘libertarian socialist’ Hannah Arendt wrote:

This was a true event whose stature will not depend on victory or defeat: its greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted. What happened in Hungary happened nowhere else, and the twelve days of the revolution contained more history than the twelve years since the Red Army had ‘liberated’ the country from Nazi domination.

Freedom and Truth – The Libertarian Legacy of 1956:

Arendt marvelled at the way in which the Revolution was initiated by the prime objects of indoctrination, ‘the over-privileged’ of the Communist system: intellectuals of the left, university students, and workers, the Communist ‘avant-garde’:

Their motive was neither their own nor their fellow-citizens’ material misery, but exclusively Freedom and Truth. …an ultimate affirmation that human nature is unchangeable, that nihilism will be futile, that … a yearning for freedom and truth will rise out of man’s heart and mind forever.

In the same spirit of optimism, she also reflected on how, ever since the European revolutions of 1848, a new order was immediately created by a freely convened gathering of citizens. The wonder of the restrained and resourceful operation of Hungary’s spontaneously formed revolutionary and workers’ councils, already referred to above, was one of the great social achievements of the Revolution of 1956. Although by their own admission, there was no direct involvement of the ‘centrist’ liberals in initiating the events of 1956, there was an unmistakable historical thread running through from the reform movements of the 1930s to the clandestine anti-Nazi resistance of 1944, to the democratic parties of the reconstruction between 1945 to 1948 and, with the memory of 1956 in their minds, to the new liberal democracy of 1989-90, despite the stupefying thirty years of János Kádár’s ‘liberal’ socialism. Arendt also observed as a unique trait of the Hungarian Revolution the unanimity of the nation in the spirit of the uprising:

 The amazing thing about the Hungarian revolution is that there was no civil war. For the Hungarian Army disintegrated in hours and the dictatorship was stripped of all power in a couple of days. No group, no class in the nation opposed the will of the people once it had become known and its voice had been heard in the market place. For the members of the ÁVH, who remained loyal to the end, formed neither group nor class, the lower echelons having been recruited from the dregs of the population: criminals, nazi agents, highly compromised members of the Hungarian fascist party, the higher ranks being composed of Moscow agents, Hungarians with Russian citizenship under the orders of NKVD officers.

Echoing the United Nations Special Report of the same year, 1957, this analysis carries weight because of the widely acknowledged integrity of its author. It carries a special significance because of the Soviet propaganda, also spouted by the Kádár régime, which from its very beginning branded the events as a rebellion of fascists, anti-Semites, reactionaries and imperialists.

Nagy was eventually executed, along with Pál Maleter and Miklós Gimes, on the orders of the Russians in 1958 to appease the hard-line Chinese. In his last speech to the Court, on 14 June, Imre Nagy was determined to demonstrate his reasons for backing and then leading the Revolution:

“Twice I tried to save the honour of the word ‘socialism’ in the Danube River valley: in 1953 and 1956. The first time, I was thwarted by Rákosi, the second time by the armed might of the Soviet Union. Now I must give my life for my ideas. I give it willingly. After what you have done with it, it’s not worth anything any more. I know that History will condemn my assassins. There is only one thing that would disgust me: if my name were rehabilitated by those who killed me.” 

Margaret Rooke concluded that the Revolution represented a huge swing of the political pendulum. For ten years the hand had been held by force at the extreme of Rákosi’s one-party rule, directed by the Soviet Communist Party. Suddenly it was released and immediately it swung back through the various stages of Communism past the vital point of permitting other parties to function. But when it swung up in the direction opposite to Communism, from multi-party social democracy, through social democracy to liberal democracy, that was a swing too far for the Soviet system to accommodate. The hand was stopped and then made to swing back, not being allowed to swing again for another thirty years and more. The immediate aftermath of the Revolt was repression. The writers, whose onslaught had fatally undermined Rákosi, were almost silenced. Cardinal Mindszenty, the Catholic primate, was compelled to seek asylum in the US Embassy. In 1958, the year of the trial and executions of Imre Nagy and Pál Maleter, the exile Tibor Meray wrote Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin, commemorating Nagy’s life and death, in which he observed:

To say that Hungary’s history had never known a leadership more thoroughly detested than this ‘Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ would be in no way an exaggeration … Little by little the rule of the Rákosi-Gerő clique was restored … The activities of Kádár Government soon gave the lie to the glowing promises with which it assumed power.

However, there was virtually no Communist Party with which Kádár could run the country; it had sunk in numbers from 900,000 to 96,000, most of them being Stalinists and/or careerists hated by their fellow Hungarians, who were therefore unreliable supporters of Kádár. After 1961, he could afford to relax rigid controls, and although collectivisation was eventually insisted on, the collective farms were more like state-controlled co-operatives, with working shareholders running them. Entrance to university was no longer confined to the children of workers, peasant and Communist intellectuals. George Lukács, the country’s greatest philosopher, was again allowed to publish his works. An agreement with the Churches, to which sixty per cent of the population belonged, was reached. An amnesty was declared for all 1956 refugees. In 1962, George Páloczi-Horváth, an exile from 1956, broadcast this on the BBC:

When we were marching on that revolutionary protest march, if anyone had told us that in five or six years life would be in Hungary as it is now, we would have been very pleased, because it would have accomplished a great deal, if not everything we wanted to achieve.

In 1968 the New Economic Mechanism officially introduced private incentive and individual enterprise into the economy. A degree of pluralism was re-introduced when trade unions were given more power and non-Party candidates were allowed to stand in parliamentary elections. However, only the Communist-dominated Fatherland Front was allowed to exist. But 1968 also showed the realities of power under the layers of growing prosperity and individual freedom. Hungary was compelled to send some its forces to Czechoslovakia in support of the Soviet intervention there against Dubcek’s liberalisation (see the picture below).

The cage may have been made more comfortable, but the bars were still there and the keeper kept his eyes open. In the 1970s, Hungary enjoyed a massive rise in living standards. The new co-operatives made peasants’ incomes higher than workers’ ones. Hungary had ‘weekend cottage socialism’.

 

In a material sense, and in terms of the personal and national autonomy of Hungarians, Kádár had succeeded, even if at the expense of the alleged results of prosperity – apathy, lack of high ideals, money-grubbing and high rates of divorce, abortion and suicide. In 1974, William Shawcross wrote Crime and Compromise, in which he summed up Kádár’s position in Hungary:

Out of the rubble of the Revolution which he himself had razed, he has somehow managed to construct one of the most reasonable, sane and efficient Communist states in the world. Hungarians now speak, not only ironically, of their country as the ‘gayest barracks in the Socialist camp’ and praise Kádár for making it so. … Hungary today is personified by Kádár and many Hungarians are convinced that without him their country would be a very different and probably far worse place to live.

Writing in 1977, Domokos Szent-Ivanyi commented that…

… from 1956, the Kádar régime was able to win the confidence both of the Hungarian people and of the Soviet Union and has brought peace to the country and its inhabitants.

Nevertheless, for many intellectuals, the continuing limitations on freedom of speech and action reminded them that there were still taboos in place. The first of these concerned Hungary’s links with the Soviets and foreign policy questions itself. It was generally well-known that it was Nagy’s announcement on Hungary’s neutrality, detailed above, that had changed the stakes in the Revolution itself, rather than the previous announcement of a multi-party government and promise of free elections. Secondly, it was forbidden to criticise the armed forces in any way, as well as the judiciary and the internal security organs. Thirdly, it was not permitted to criticise any living individual by name. The reason for this was the need for ‘cadre responsibility’ so that no-one needed to worry about being attacked from outside the Party. Fourthly, certain facts and subjects could not be subjected to sharp criticisms. These could be made in anecdotes, satire or by means of technical analysis, but not in a direct, radical manner.

In October 1981, Gordon Brook-Shepherd wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Revolt. He travelled beyond Budapest to hear survivors from a feudal world … declare that, although Communists were all atheists, Kádár himself was ‘a good man’. Moreover, things were better then than they used to be, This verdict came from a family who had made their daughter break off her engagement to a purely because the fiancé was the son of a local party boss. Brook-Shepherd found that for many ‘ordinary’ Hungarians, much of the ‘fine talk’ about ‘freedom’ was an irrelevance:

Freedom for them today is defined as a weekend house, a better apartment in the city, a shorter wait for a better car, more frequent foreign travel and for the intellectuals (as one of them put it to me), ‘the privilege to go on censuring ourselves’. If you do not get what you like, you eventually like what you get. 

In 1986, the English Language version of Sándor Kopácsi’s In the Name of the Working Class was published in Toronto. As Budapest’s Chief of Police, Kopácsi was ordered to suppress the uprising, but the former Communist partisan defied the Stalinist authorities and then joined the Revolution under Imre Nagy. He was given a sentence of life imprisonment by the same Court which sentenced Nagy, Maléter and Gimes to hang. Kopácsi’s book makes it evident that the Revolution was initially a Communist uprising, as other sources quoted here suggest, begun not to deny but to fulfil what its participants believed to be true Marxist-Leninist ideas. But in his 1986 Foreward, George Jonas admitted that…

It is hard to say whether originators of the uprising realized at the time that events might carry political reform in Hungary much further, not in the direction of ‘fascism’ – this was simply not on the cards in 1956 – but in the direction of liberal democracy. It is hard to say whether the reformists considered at the time (as the Kremlin certainly did) that if the revolution succeeded Hungary could end up as a genuinely non-aligned parliamentary democracy whose freely elected governments might include no Marxist parties at all.

In fact, even János Kádár, according to a broadcast on Budapest Radio on 15 November 1956, had admitted that, while his Government hoped to regain the confidence of the people, it had to take into account the possibility that we might be thoroughly beaten at the election. Of course, that election was never held because Khrushchev and the Politburo saw ‘democratic Communism’ as a contradiction in terms. They knew, as did Kádár, that Communism and real political freedom were not compatible for the simple reason that, if free to choose, the people in European countries such as Hungary, were not likely to choose Communism. The Soviet leaders were not willing to risk this, nor even an independent Communist régime. One Tito was quite enough, as far as they were concerned. Idealist reform-communists like Imre Nagy identified the dangers differently. They argued that a thaw in the icy grip of the Soviet Union was necessary to avoid a complete popular rejection of the Communist model. Nagy and his collaborators supported the Uprising in Hungary in order prevent one. As Jonas points out:

Nagy and his followers wanted to rescue the system. They believed that allowing events to take their course, following the clear desires of the Hungarian students, workers, soldiers and intellectuals was the best way to rescue it. They also hoped that the Soviet Union might permit this to happen. They were probably wrong in their first belief and undoubtedly wrong in their second. 

… In our century the cause of the Marxist-Leninist state – unlike fascism or other totalitarian movements – succeeded in attracting many humane and intelligent people such as Colonel Kopácsi or Imre Nagy. In a sense, therein lies the tragedy of Communism; in a sense, therein lies its danger…

On 23 October 1988, we heard an announcement by the HSWP that the events of 1956 were no longer to be viewed as a ‘counter-revolution’. The following spring, a commission of historians agreed that the term, ‘people’s uprising’ was appropriate, and this was a signal factor in sparking the series of ‘liberalisations’ which followed in 1989. Bob Dent has commented on the connections between the events of 1956 and those of 1989:

… there were overlaps between the goals of 1956 and 1989-90: the idea of national independence, the demand for a multi-party system, a free press and the end of all forms of dictatorship. But … in some significant respects, 1989-90 … was simultaneously both more and less than 1956. … it involved elements not present thirty-three years previously and omitted others which were.

Authors have rarely reflected deeply themselves on Hannah Arendt’s comments about the ‘direct democracy’ of the workers’ councils as being at the core of what was positive. Bob Dent has pointed out that:

For ‘the West’, the workers’ councils did not fit neatly into any ‘acceptable’ category. In so far as they were ‘anti-Soviet’ or ‘anti-communist’, or perceived as such, that was fine. If they were in favour of liberal reforms such as the introduction of free speech, a multi-party system and parliamentary elections, that was also fine. But it was not quite ‘acceptable’ if they were, as they actually were, ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘pro-socialist’, even ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that they were firmly in favour of maintaining social ownership of property and putting it under workers’ management. … The Hungarian workers’ councils have been neatly described as ‘anti-Soviet soviets’, and for many that apparently contradictory notion has not been easy to digest, neither in post-1989 Hungary nor indeed elsewhere – therefore easiest, perhaps, to ignore them.

On the other hand, the events of 1989-90 clearly went far beyond those of 1956 in the popular desire to accelerate privatisation and develop a free-market economy. Ideas of ‘rejoining Europe’ in 1989 were not part of the objectives of 1956, nor was the idea of joining NATO – the demand in 1956 was simply for neutrality, but at that time it proved to be an impossible demand. But Gyula Kodolányi, as Senior Adviser to the first freely elected Prime Minister of Hungary in 1990, József Antall, heard the democratic legacy of 1956 frequently referred to by leaders such as Chancellor Kohl, President Chirac and President Havel: the Hungarian Revolution of that year had made an indelible mark in their political development. They immediately trusted the reformers of 1989-90 as inheritors of that tradition, and that aura made a favourable climate which made the process of Hungary’s return to Europe a matter of continuing the course set in 1956. Thus, the achievements of that autumn formed a ‘spiritual constellation’ which guaranteed the régime change of the later years, not just in Hungarian hearts and minds, symbolised by the reburial of its ‘martyrs’, but in international relations too. In 1989-90, world leaders recognised the significance of the Revolutions of that year because of their own initiation into the idea of freedom by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

 

Sources:

Bob Dent (2006), Budapest 1956: Locations of Drama. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó.

Bob Dent (2008), Inside Hungary from Outside. Budapest: Európa Könvkiadó.

Margaret Rooke (1986), The Hungarian Revolt of 1956: János Kádár – traitor or saviour? York: Longman Group.

Sándor Kopácsi (1986) (Translated by Daniel & Judy Stoffman, with a foreword by George Jonas), In the Name of the Working Class. Toronto & London: Fontana.

Marc J Susser (2007), The United States & Hungary: Paths of Diplomacy, 1848-2006. Washington: US Department of State Bureau of Public Affairs.

István Bart (1999), Hungary & The Hungarians: The Keywords – a Concise Dictionary of Facts and Beliefs, Customs, Usage & Myths. Budapest: Corvina.

Gyula Kodolányi (2016), ‘ “With Nine Million Fascists” – On the Origins and Spirit of the Hungarian Revolution’ in Hungarian Review, Vol. VII, No. 6, November 2016. Budapest: György Granasztói/ Danube Institute.

 

The ‘Gulag’ State…

Despite the strength of world opinion, expressed through the United Nations as well as by individual governments, the Kádár Government was determined to stick to its line that the ‘uprising’ of the previous autumn had, in fact, been counter-revolutionary. In Hungary itself, there wasn’t much room for discussion or debate about this at the beginning of 1957. On 5 January, the government introduced more stringent measures of control, threatening the death penalty for striking or agitating for a strike, as well as for anyone even disrupting normal work. The leaders of the Csepel Central Workers’ Council, the last organ of the revolution and now of resistance, were arrested. Elek Nagy was sentenced to twelve years in prison, József Bácsi to ten. The Csepel militants went back to work, defeated and disorganised. On 17 January, the Writers’ Union, one of the initial intellectual forces behind the uprising, was dissolved by the authorities. Many intellectuals were arrested and served time in prison, while many others had already managed to escape abroad.

The May Day Demonstration…

On 1 May the Kádár government held a mass demonstration in Heroes’ Square in Budapest, a traditional May Day parade, but this year also designed to show the strength of its support from among the general Hungarian population. As photographs of the event confirm, the square was filled with people, at least a hundred thousand. Some party estimates put it at four times that number. György Lítván, former director of the 1956 Institute, who was himself one of the curious onlookers, explained how…

It was a genuine demonstration by many thousands and it was at the same time forced – not in the physical sense, but maybe in some enterprises there was a bit of pressure; on the other hand many people wanted to show their new orientation, their readiness to support the new régime… It was an experience to see how swiftly people could forget their opinions, their attitude of the previous months and very quickly adjust themselves.

Probably for this reason, much of the recent writing on the events of 1956-57 has tended to ignore the rally, though one exception is the work of Békés (et al.) which asserts that by early 1957 a wave of acceptance had swept over the country and that the turnout for the traditional May Day celebrations in Budapest was simply an expression of this, of a continuity which had been broken, not supplanted, by the memory of October and November. The authors conclude that force alone could not account for the change…  but that a feeling of political apathy… had developed due to the litany of strikes, speeches, meetings and negotiations, all of which had come to nothing except the creation of a well of frustration. It was those who sought a means of expression for this who swelled the considerable ranks of the political establishment of the Rákosi-Gérő régime, members of the party and its huge bureaucracy as well as other ordinary citizens who either supported the régime of felt no particular apathy toward it. Some of these people…

… had undoubtedly felt terrorized during the revolution because of their status or sympathies, and possibly humiliated or remorseful in its aftermath… Contrary to general opinion in Hungary today, this group represented a not inconsiderable proportion of the overall population.

While these crowds may, genuinely, have celebrated a combination of liberation and victory, that does not mean, as the régime’s sources claim, that the sympathy of the entire country was demonstrated in the event. This is no more credible than the UN Special Committee’s 1957 report on Hungary which claimed that, following the Soviet intervention of 4 November, in the light of the evidence it had received, that it may safely be said that the whole population of Budapest took part in the resistance. The means by which Kádár managed, through a clever combination of stick and carrot, to generate sufficient support to establish a régime which lasted thirty-three years, is well summarised in László Kontler’s recent History of Hungary. For him, the Heroes’ Square May Day demonstration was one of…

…acquiescence, if not sympathy, by the people of a capital which, after the shocks of invasion and destitution, could not but want to believe in the message of tranquility and safety that the concessions transmitted.

Party membership rose from a mere 40,000 in December 1956 to 400,000 a year later. Despite the efforts of Revai, who returned from Moscow in January 1957 and tried to arrange a reversal to ‘orthodoxy’, Kádár received assurances from Khrushchev and was confirmed in his position at the party conference in June through the election of a centralist leadership, including Marosán and others not implicated in the pre-1956 illegalities, like Ferenc Münnich, Gyula Kállai, Jenő Foch and Dezső Nemes. At the same time, the reorganised Patriotic Popular Front, whose new task was to transmit and popularise party priorities to society at large, was chaired by the hardliner, Antal Apró. After the disintegration of the Alliance of Working Youth,  the Communist Youth League was set up in March 1957 to take care of the ideological orientation of young people and ensure a supply of future cadres. Purges and voluntary resignations among the officer corps, the confirmation of first Kádár and then Münnich in the premiership, and the approval of his policies in May, all consolidated the restoration of the party at the centre of state power. In addition, the external guarantee was signed on 27 May, by which the Soviet troops were given temporary residence in Hungary. Their number became stabilised at around 80,000 once the Hungarian army was considered politically reliable.

The People’s Court…

Sándór Kopácsi, the deposed Chief of Police, later recorded the harsh system of repression to which he and the other internees of the Budapest gaol were subjected. On the morning of 6 February, 1958, the prisoners were lined up in the corridor. He met Pál Maleter again, whom he hadn’t seen since they had crossed Budapest, singing, on a Soviet half-tank a year previously. From a third cell emerged Zoltán Tildy, the former President of Hungary, and a former Protestant pastor, a minister in Nagy’s government who had negotiated the surrender of parliament to the Soviets. He had been under house arrest throughout almost the whole of the Rákosi years and was now, aged seventy, imprisoned again. They were joined by four other prisoners and then Imre Nagy himself:

He came out of the cell as if he were coming out of a meeting room, his face preoccupied. I found him a bit thinner, but the build was the same: the peasant or the sixty-year-old blacksmith, the village strongman in the most commanding period of his life. The legendary pince-nez straddled his nose as before. For an instant, he turned toward us and his glance passed us in review… He gave each of us a brief, friendly nod. Our presence seemed to reassure him… We were to be tried by the Supreme Court in order to rule out the possibility of an appeal. The judge was Zoltán Rado, a seasoned man, fat and rather friendly…

This turned out to be a rehearsal, however, though Moscow’s order to interrupt the proceedings didn’t arrive until the next day. They were all accused of having fomented a plot aimed at reversing by force the legal order of the Republic of Hungary. In addition, Nagy was accused of high treason, and Maleter and Kopácsi with mutiny. Then József Szilágyi was called forward and, when asked if he acknowledged his guilt, he replied:

In this country, the only guilty one is a traitor named János Kádár Supported by the bayonets of the Soviet imperialists, he has drowned the revolution of his people in blood.

There followed a sharp and bitter exchange between Rado and Szilágyi. Except for Nagy, the prisoners were all then returned to their cells. During the next two days of hearings, the Kremlin changed its mind four times as to what verdicts would be pronounced. Khrushchev found himself in an awkward position, since his policy of reconciliation with Tito was shaky.   At the time of its second intervention, the Kremlin was still counting on Tito’s friendship and, to begin with, he got it, but after the kidnapping of Nagy and his entourage from the Yugoslav Embassy, relations between Moscow and Belgrade deteriorated, and they had remained strained in November 1957 when Tito refused to accept the hegemony of the Soviets over the ‘fraternal parties’ at a conference of world Communist parties. When Khrushchev interrupted the Nagy trial and sent Kádár to Belgrade to negotiate with Tito, the latter leader told Kádár:

You have to do it like Gomulka: Fight to get the maximum of independence vis-à-vis the Russians and we’ll support you.

When Kádár told Khrushchev of this ‘duplicity’, he became furious, and his desire to teach Tito a lesson explains why, two years after the Hungarian Uprising had been quelled, and the population pacified, the Russians relentlessly pursued the trials and executions of the Nagy government. However, Kopácsi had saved Kádár’s life at the time of the uprising, and Kádár managed to persuade the Russians that he should not be executed, in exchange for his help in convicting Nagy. First it was Szilágyi’s turn, however. After a brief trial in which Kopácsi was a forced witness, he was sentenced to death, and his hanging was carried out on 24 April in the prison courtyard. He climbed the scaffold, head held high, declaiming, long live free and independent Hungary!

At the trial of the other defendants, the prosecution tried to prove that they had been part of a Nagy conspiracy which had begun in 1955, and that, allied to the forces of reaction, both within the country and outside they had provoked the counter-revolution to re-establish the old regime. They asked for the death sentence against Imre Nagy, Pál Maleter and Miklós Gimes, the young journalist. For Kopácsi, they requested life imprisonment. On 14 June, Nagy spoke to the court:

Twice I tried to save the honour of the word “Socialism” in the Danube River Valley: in 1953 and 1956. The first time I was thwarted by Rákosi, the second time by the armed might of the Soviet Union. Now I must give my life for ideas. I give it willingly. After what you have done with it, it’s not worth anything any more. I know that History will condemn my assassins. There is only one thing that would disgust me: if my name was rehabilitated by those who killed me.

He was followed by Pál Maleter, who said he had respected the oath of a socialist soldier and went with the people through fire and storm. Kopácsi spoke of how he had fought in northern Hungary with the Soviet Army, and that even in October 1956 he never had a Russian uniform in (his) sights. Revolution isn’t simple, he said. Neither is what follows it, whether the revolution is victorious or otherwise. The ‘People’s Court’ condemned to death Imre Nagy, Pál Maleter and Miklós Gimes. Kopácsi was sentenced to life imprisonment, Ferenc Donáth to twelve years, Ferenc Jánosi to eight years, Zoltán Tildy to six and the journalist Miklós Vásárhélyi to five. Imre Nagy refused to enter a plea for clemency, and although Maleter’s and Grimes’ lawyers made appeals on behalf of their clients, both were rejected.

The Graveless Dead…

Cover of the 2008 film about the arrest, imprisonment, trial and execution of Imre Nagy

At 6 a.m. on Monday 16 June, Nagy, Maleter and Gimes were hanged in the yard known as the ‘little dungeon’ at the central prison. Everybody was ordered to keep away from the windows. According to the prison ‘information agency’, the Russians forced Nagy to be present while the others were executed. He stood, tottering, at the entrance to the yard. If the report is correct, this was the second time he had had to witness the execution of an innocent friend. In 1949, Rákosi had forced him to attend the hanging of Rajk, who had been personally promised by Kádár that his life would be spared and who, before dying, cried out, János, you tricked me!

The last words of Nagy and Maleter, spoken from the gallows, were the same: Long live independent and Socialist Hungary! Gimes remained silent. The Soviet authorities were apparently satisfied. Pravda described the verdicts as severe but just. Peking’s major paper carried the headline, Good news from Budapest! When Choi En-lai had visited Hungary some months previously he had complained that not enough people had been hanged. Khrushchev had demonstrated to him and Mao that his hand didn’t tremble when dealing with deviationists.

Serov, the KGB chief, however, felt that leaving Kopácsi and the others alive was a scandal. The day after the executions, he began trying to correct what he viewed as the leniency of the Budapest court. On the direct order of the Hungarian emissary of the KGB, Hungarian Politburo members Antal Apró and Karoly Kiss organised public meetings to gain support for cancelling the verdict and demanding that everyone in the Nagy group be hanged. The two men went to the large metallurgical factory, Ganz Mavag, to prime workers to push for these demands. There would be a vote taken at a general by a show of hands. The result seemed assured, but several former Resistance fighters at the factory prevented the KGB from going too far. General László Gyurkó asked to speak, having been sent by the Partisans’ Union. He briefly described the Resistance background of those who would be the victims of further death sentences. He urged the meeting to reject the idea of interfering in the verdicts already pronounced. The show of hands defeated the proposal, and with it Serov’s hard-line. The workers’ meeting demonstrated that there were different currents of opinion in Budapest, and that there was no widespread support for further retribution.

In September 1958, Sándór Kopácsi was transferred to the central prison where the executions had taken place six weeks earlier. In May 1959, the political prisoners were moved again, this time to Vác prison, fifty kilometres from Budapest, which was full of criminals. Tibor Dery, the elderly writer was thrown into a cell with a murderer who beat him badly in exchange for alcohol and tobacco from the ÁVH captain. Kopácsi intervened to stop this, and Dery survived his detention to become president of the Writers’ Union and write many more works. The police chief then found himself thrown into ‘the hold’ for two weeks before being put on ‘coal duty’, pushing a hundred kilos from a boat on the Danube for ten hours every day. He realised that this was the ÁVH’s way of finishing him off, so he asked to see the prison commandant, who was a Holocaust survivor. Kopácsi was relieved of his duties. The following year, the writers were given an amnesty, but the Imre Nagyists as they were known, were not yet released. A hunger strike went through the prison and the ÁVH imposed a total blackout. Many of the Nagyists were transferred back to Fő utca and threatened with death. Several committed suicide. The Vác prison became an ÁVH hell, with the prisoners deprived of the most elemental rights. Even the guards were beaten. Kopácsi remarked:

It would have been the end of us if our community hadn’t been what it was, a team prepared for any ordeal. It was in prison that I learned to respect strength of character, the last defence of a man in distress… What moved me most… was the ingenuousness and tenacity of the prisoners. Despite the dense network of informers, we manufactured radios that were good enough to bring in the news from Western stations. At any given time there was hardly a cell that didn’t have its own miniature receiver, the size of a coin and lacking for nothing… Thanks to the radios, gipsy music played late into the night in the ears of the poor jailbirds dreaming of the bustling life outside the prison walls.

After seven years in prison, Kopácsi and the other Nagyists finally said goodbye on 25 March, 1963, thanks to the general amnesty decreed by Khrushchev to mark the implementation of the détente he had worked out with President Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous October.   

By this time, 1960s, the tone, if not the content, of the comments made from both ‘outside observers’ and exiles towards the régime had also softened somewhat. In 1962, Eric Bourne, the journalist who had written his eye-witness accounts of the uprising, commented in The Christian Science Monitor that…

Few Hungarians these days talk about the uprising… Many – with varying mental reservations – fall in with the régime’s general effort at conciliation and accept the ‘guided’ liberalisation from the top with relief. But it is evident that the liberalisation has its calculated limits and that the régime, which has gone further than any other in Eastern Europe with de-Stalinization, is concerned to keep the process from getting out of hand.

Two ‘émigré’ journalists, the first, Lászlo Tikos, exiled in the USA, and the second, George Pálóczi-Horváth, in Britain and broadcasting on the BBC, made the following optimistic comments:

Hungarians now enjoy greater personal, spiritual and political freedom, an increased measure of national independence and economic well-being, and an end to isolation from the West – all things that the 1956 revolution stood for and that are now more in evidence than at any other time since the Communist take-over. (Tikos)

When we were marching on that revolutionary protest march, if anyone had told us that in five or six years life would be in Hungary as it is now, we would have been very pleased, because it would have accomplished a great deal, if not everything we wanted to achieve. (Pálóczi-Horváth)

Perpetual Persecution…

As a former political prisoner, however, Sándór Kopácsi continued to receive the attention of the ÁVH and its network of informants. One day at work he casually remarked that on the outside he was surrounded by as many informers as he had been in prison. The remark was reported and the next day he was summoned to the Fő utca ÁVH HQ. He was told that he had broken the rule prohibiting a liberated prisoner from revealing anything he had experienced in prison. The penalty for this was a further ten years in prison, so he denied the report and agreed to sign a statement reiterating his promise not to infringe the regulation. He and his wife met dozens of other spies; on foot, on the tram, in the bus, and even on the doorstep of their apartment. They openly asked him for news about himself and others of his prison comrades he might have been in contact with. There were so many that they decided to invite the least disagreeable of them in for coffee, or got them to take them for country drives if they had cars.

Their daughter Judit’s life was made unbearable, however. From the day her father was imprisoned, she was made the object of official discrimination. At school, she was put on a list of children deemed socially alien. Her mother went to see the principal:

‘Socially alien to whom?’

‘To the workers’ state,’ the principal replied with a straight face.

‘My daughter has nothing but working-class ancestors, on her father’s side as well as her mother’s side, for four generations.’

‘Agreed,’ said the principal. But her father has betrayed the working class.’ 

Some of the children at the school took advantage of the situation to tease Judit mercilessly, possibly encouraged by the teachers and the parents. The bullying got so bad that, at the age of fourteen to fifteen, she was seriously contemplating suicide. An old social democrat, whom Kopácsi had rescued from the ÁVH in 1952 and who had subsequently escaped as a refugee in 1956, came to the family’s help. He had settled in Quebec and had become a Canadian citizen. He was visiting Hungary, and called on the Kopácsis. He and his wife offered to take charge of Judit, but her father said they could not part from her. Soon afterwards, however, Judit tried to poison herself. Kopácsi wrote to László Sárosi and six weeks later she was on the plane to Quebec. They did not see her for another six years, by which time she was a Canadian citizen. Finally frustrated by their inability to speak freely, Sándor and Ibolya Kopácsi emigrated to join their daughter, then with a family of her own, in 1974. They settled in Toronto, where Sándor ended his working life at Ontario Hydro.

Progress and Reaction…

Later in the year that Kopácsi was released, in June 1963, the United Nations agreed to normalise relations with Hungary following the general amnesty. The US was also seeking to move towards a policy of seeking gradual change in Eastern Europe. In Hungary, some restrictions were slowly relaxed, especially in cultural spheres, and a new economic course continued to be followed. Kádár famously announced, whoever is not against us is with us, allowing a broadening of discussion and debate. Nonetheless, relations between the US, in particular, and Hungary remained strained, and were exacerbated by the actions of Hungarian troops in August 1968, when they took part in the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia to remove the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek, which had come to power in the Prague Spring. The first full US Ambassador, appointed a year before, noted Kádár’s…

… early endorsement of reformist developments in Czechoslovakia, his widely publicised meditator role, and his apparently only last-minute conversion to a need for forceful measures.

Even the man who admitted signing the request for the Soviet invasion in 1956 (three days after it happened), András Hegedűs, openly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As a result, and although he had been Rákosi’s prime minister, he was fired from his job as a statistician and expelled from the party. In Britain, too, Hungary’s part in the armed intervention led to a setback for developing cultural links. The emerging civic links between Coventry and its twin-town of Kecskemét in the midlands of Hungary had to be ‘put on ice’, and were not fully defrosted again until the Cold War entered its permanent thaw in 1989.

Re-burial and Reconciliation…

As 1989 began, a momentous year in European history, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law allowing citizens to form independent associations, including political parties, thus paving the war for an eventual end to Communist rule. In February, a groundbreaking report prepared by a historical commission of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party officially rejected the interpretation of the 1956 Uprising as a counter-revolution. Instead, it was described as a popular uprising against the existing state power, since under Stalin, the ideal of international communism was turned into a merciless imperial programme. This was followed in June by an important step designed to heal old wounds and come to terms with the events of 1956-58. Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter and three others executed in 1958 received a public reburial and state funeral, attended by an estimated 250,000 Hungarians, broadcast nationwide on state-controlled radio and television. The ceremony also paid tribute to the hundreds of others who had died in the retribution meted out by the Kádár Government. The next day, János Kádár died. These developments led to much open public discussion about the events of 1956, for the first time. On the anniversary of the uprising on 23 October 1989, Mátyás Szűrös, the Acting President, proclaimed the new, democratic constitution of a country now called “the Republic of Hungary”, no longer the “Hungarian People’s Republic”, the ‘different’ country I had entered just a week before.      

 

Sources:

Bob Dent (2006), Budapest 1956: Locations of a Drama. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Marc J Susser (ed.) (2007), The United States and Hungary: Paths of Diplomacy. Washington: US Department of State.

Sándor Kopácsi (1989), In the Name of the Working Class. London: Fontana.

26-30 October: Days of Victory in Hungary

Half an hour after the radio announced the fall of Gerő on 25 October, ten thousand demonstrators  gathered around Sándor Kopácsi’s police headquarters. In unison, the young people shouted ‘take down the star!’ Kopácsi commented:

The roof of our building, like that of every public building, bore a large, five-pronged star in red metal, studded with a hundred red electric bulbs. Ours was at least five or six metres high. I listened to the crowd and watched it, surrounded by my officers and the two Soviet counsellors… This was a delicate situation: the red star was the symbol that had always guided my path. It was my identity, the distinctive symbol of the ‘great family’. The crowd was getting impatient: ‘Down with the star, down with the star!’

‘Better go up and take it down, guys’.

The secretary of the party organisation at police headquarters, a former Resistance fighter who had fought in Tito’s underground, looked at me unhappily…

My deputy sent a commando up to the roof, equipped with tools. When the crowd saw the policemen taking down the star, they shouted with glee. The hostility they had demonstrated since the massacre to everything and everyone associated with the red star dissipated a bit.  

The ÁVH were a different matter, however. They were so panic-stricken that they even opened fire, mistakenly, on their own comrades sent to relieve them. More than a hundred of those who had not been involved in unjust trials, torture, or in commanding the troops that had committed atrocities over the past three days were given refuge in the police headquarters by Kopácsi, whom they trusted to defend them against the crowd. They included his friends from the Partisans’ Union and Bartos, the AVH’s quartermaster, whom Kopácsi knew had never been involved in anything other than the supply corps. He let them have several offices where they played cards or used the phone to talk to look for a more private hide-out. Several dozen officers and men gave themselves up as prisoners, while others were hauled in to the headquarters by the new National Guard. They were fed as normal and lived in open cells until the day of the second coming of the Soviet Army.

Tom Leimdorfer remembers that on the Friday, 26 October, there were rumours that the revolution had spread to other towns, and that the Hungarian Army (or part of it) had joined the revolution. There was also much speculation about the role of the government and the response of the Soviet leadership. More immediate problems came in the form of privations resulting from the state of emergency:

Family and friends were ringing to check if we were alright. We were running out of food and so were other families in the block. Then we heard that the shop on the ground floor would open as there appeared to be a lull in the fighting. We went to join the queue. To my surprise, a Russian soldier came along the line and entered the shop, asking for bread and milk. There was no animosity towards the individual soldier, but everyone pretended not to understand what he was saying. Then someone asked me to translate, saying that I should know from my school lessons.

The next two days continued for Tom, as for many others forced to stay at home, as a blur of boredom, uncertainty, rumours and counter-rumours of political developments. Meanwhile, Nagy had quietly chosen his course of action. On Saturday 27th, he reshuffled his cabinet to include some relatively credible communists like Lukács, and two former Smallholder Party leaders, Tildy and Béla Kovács. He was siding with the revolutionaries.

Then on Sunday, 28 October, everything changed. ‘Free’ Radio Kossuth stopped referring to the ‘counter-revolution’ and started talking about an uprising against the crimes of the former régime. Indeed, Nagy started to talk about a ‘national democratic movement’, also announcing a cease-fire and even the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest. He acknowledged the revolutionary bodies created during the previous days, promised an amnesty and the disbanding of the AVH. On the economy, he promised agrarian reform. There was also an official announcement by the Central Committee of the Party approving the Government’s declaration promising the end of one-party rule. It added:

In view of the exceptional situation, the Central Committee has passed on its mandate to lead the Party to a new Party Presidium of six members. Its chairman is János Kádár. 

Throughout Hungary the mood of anger following Bloody Thursday had turned to one of expectation on Sunday. Open elections were held in towns and villages. Imre Nagy requested that Khrushchev honour the cease-fire and order the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. He agreed to their withdrawal from the capital, but at the same time deployed more divisions along the Ukrainian border with Hungary. Nevertheless, the population of the city were convinced of victory:

Suddenly, people felt free to leave their homes and joyful crowds filled the streets of the capital. Next morning we saw lines of Soviet tanks crunching their way out of city.

As Nagy had announced on the radio the previous day, an agreement had been reached over their movement out of the capital. Beginning on 29th, by noon on the 31st there were few tanks and armoured vehicles to be seen on the streets of Budapest. This gave rise to a kind of (as it turned out, false) euphoria, adding to the idea that the revolution was victorious.  On the Monday morning, 29 October, Imre Nagy moved his main office and base from the Party’s headquarters in Akadémia utca, where he had been since being recalled to government, to Parliament. Together with his entourage of associates, and his new government colleagues, Nagy was bombarded with requests and demands presented by visiting delegations from all over the country. One of the earliest delegations to have discussions with Nagy was composed of representatives of armed groups of insurgents from different parts of the city. They offered conditional recognition of his government, demanded the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops by the end of the year and immediate dissolution of the AVH. Nagy was more interested in their laying down of arms, since a general cease-fire had already been ordered, and the Soviet troops were already leaving Budapest. The delegates agreed that they would hand over their arms to Hungarian forces once the Soviet forces had left the country completely. There was also some discussion about the formation of a National Guard, during which Nagy is reported to have asked the delegates, “Lads, do you really believe that I am not as Hungarian as you are?” One of the leaders replied, “Maybe, but there’s a revolution going on, and what counts is who is the greater revolutionary, not what kind of Hungarian you are.”

There were constant streams of workers’ representatives, sent by the newly formed workers’ councils. New councils were also formed in several government departments, challenging the centralised power of the state. Most importantly, several thousand members of the Hungarian Army defected to the workers’ cause, taking their weapons with them. The Uprising was successful, and the Revolution all but complete. Tom Leimdorfer confirms this atmosphere in a capital which emerged battered but liberated:

On Monday, it seemed that everyone was on the streets. Budapest looked war-torn. There were smouldering fires, some houses in ruins others with gaping shell holes. Our block of flats and the one opposite were both pot-marked with machine gun fire. The overhead cables of the trams were twisted and torn, many roads blocked by the debris of battle including burnt out tanks, cars and buses. Some people were burning publications of communist propaganda and works of writers who supported the regime. We were busy checking how relatives fared and buying provisions from shops which were beginning to open. The next day we were hearing totally different voices on the radio and heard that the leading communist members of staff had been dismissed. The first free newspapers appeared on the streets. They were thin publications, but everyone wanted to read them.

Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe, the CIA-backed station that broadcast into Eastern Europe, was talking up the situation in typically dramatic fashion, to the annoyance of the Soviets and the concern of their Hungarian comrades. It proclaimed the West’s backing for what it called Hungary’s “freedom fighters”. World opinion supported the Hungarian uprising. It seemed that Imre Nagy had the confidence of the people and the Soviet leaders (Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Suslov and their envoy Andropov) were prepared to give the new government a chance, trusting that the moderate communists (Nagy, Kádár and Munnich) would keep Hungary within the Warsaw Pact. Carried along by the momentum of events he could barely control, Nagy made a further radio announcement on 30 October that he was abolishing the one-party system forthwith and forming a new coalition government:

The constantly widening scope of the revolutionary movement in our country, the tremendous force of the democratic movement has brought our country to a cross-road. The National Government, in full agreement with the Presidium of the Hungarian Workers’  Party  (Communist Party), has decided to take a step vital for the future of the whole nation, and of which I want to inform the Hungarian working people…

The Cabinet abolishes the one-party system and places the country’s Government on the basis of democratic co-operation between coalition parties as they existed in 1945…

We wish to inform the people of Hungary that we are going to request the Government of the Soviet Union to withdraw Soviet troops completely from the entire territory of the Hungarian Republic. 

Nagy’s  ‘National Government’ included several ministers from other parties, prominent among them being the iconic figure of the veteran Social Democrat leader Anna Kétly. Kéthly had opposed the fusion of the Social Democratic Party, which she had led before the war, with the Communist Party, which formed the Hungarian Workers’ Party. She was therefore purged from the political scene in the Rákósi era, spending a number of years in prison on trumped-up spying charges. British journalist Basil Davidson interviewed her in Parliament a few days before her appointment. She told him that her party’s participation in the Nagy government would depend on a number of conditions being met, including the return of its newspaper, Népszava (‘People’s Voice’). In addition,

“she said that there were dangers, even now, of a right-wing putsch. ‘Among the revolutionaries’ she told me, ‘there are right-wing Fascist extremists who would clearly love to capture our national revolution so as to impose another kind of dictatorship’. These were dangers against which Hungarians should remain on their guard, which is very different from saying that Fascists had succeeded in capturing the revolution.”

Immediately following her appointment, several suppressed Hungarian political parties began to reconstitute themselves, including the Social Democrats and the National Peasant Party. Nagy also agreed to recognise the revolutionary councils that had been created, including the one in the army which was established the same day. Its leader was immediately appointed to the new government. As Tom Leimdorfer remarked:

Suddenly, incredibly and briefly, it all seemed possible…  Perhaps that was the high point. That Tuesday, we heard that Cardinal Mindszenty was released from prison. This was also good news and we awaited eagerly what he would say on the radio. This was when I saw a very worried frown come over my mother’s face. This was not a speech to help reconciliation. Then in the afternoon a group of AVO  men were shot at point-blank range and some of their bodies were hung from the lamp posts of one of the main boulevards. There were other reports of violence and revenge killings. The revolution was showing its ugly side and we were beginning to have some doubts and fears. My mother met up with some colleagues who said that the border was open and many people were crossing to the West. She asked me if I thought we should try to get to England. I was horrified that we should even think of leaving at that time and she dropped the idea.  

Despite the speed of the changes carried through by Nagy, and the doubts and fears about the violent excesses being carried out in the name of the Revolution on the streets of Budapest, it looked as though the Soviets would give in to this massive display of people power opposing the apparatus of the state. A declaration was issued outlining the relationship between the Soviet Union and the socialist states. In it the Kremlin acknowledged that Hungarian workers were “justified” in pointing out the “serious mistakes” of the previous régime. The news agency TASS announced that the Soviet Union “deeply regrets” the bloodshed in Hungary, and agreed with the removal of Soviet soldiers from Hungarian soil. The statement was published in Pravda the following day, the 31st, at the same time as it was reported in the Hungarian press. The CIA Director, Allen Dulles, called it “one of the most important statements to come out of the USSR in the past decade”. The notes taken at the Soviet Party Presidium meeting also suggest that the wording of the statement was genuine for the point at which it was issued:

The communiqué represented a genuine initiative by the more ‘liberal’ wing of the Soviet leadership to create a more even balance in relations between the USSR and its satellites, and they managed, at least very briefly, to get their hard-line colleagues to agree. 

What may have played a role in changing the change of mind and heart in the Soviet Politburo was the last report from Budapest of Mikoyan and Suslov, made on 30 October. In it they relate the worsening situation referred to by Tom Leimdorfer, highlighting the strengthening role of what they call “hooligan elements”, the weakening of the HWP’s position and the “wait and see” position of the Hungarian army. The report was “one-sided”, tending “to accentuate the anti-Communist sentiments of the population, and grossly exaggerating the atrocities that were being committed.” An account was kept of all the Soviet war memorials overturned and war graves desecrated, “corroborating this bleak picture with reports of the lynchings at Köztársaság tér”. Nevertheless, it is evident from Tom Leimdorfer’s remarks that these brutal hangings of suspected AVH men did make a profound impact beyond simple numbers on the people of Budapest, as of course, their perpetrators meant them to. Moreover, Khrushchev is reported to have used the phrase “they are murdering communists in Budapest” more than once in the hearing of the Yugoslav Ambassador to Moscow.

It was at this moment that the world went mad, or at least the Israeli-British-French ‘triumvirate’ did. Their dead-of-night intervention to in Egypt to prevent Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal made the outcome of the Hungarian revolution dependent on superpower bargaining. Neither the USSR nor the USA were interested in military confrontation, but both were concerned to defend their strategic interests; the Soviets were willing to remain passive in the Middle East if they received assurances that there would be no Western intervention in Hungary. This was also agreed by the end of Tuesday 30 October. This tacit agreement meant that the promise which had been expressly given by Radio Free Europe on Eisenhower’s behalf, which played no small role in the resolve of the Hungarian insurgents, was thus broken, while the Soviet leaders sought and obtained the agreement of Tito to their planned alternative of intervention.

Alex von Tunzelmann believes that, in return, the situation in Hungary helped to push an already volatile situation between the superpowers closer to the brink. Khrushchev had to think very carefully about Suez when he was dealing with Hungary, just as Eisenhower had to think carefully about Hungary when he was dealing with Suez:

Both crises were referred to the UN, which was awkward because normally Britain would have stood by the US and condemned Soviet aggression – but since it was doing exactly the same thing, the UN was hamstrung. The US went against Britain and France at the UN for the first time, so this was the real danger to that alliance.

However, before either crisis was discussed in New York, it was a decision made by Imre Nagy which may well have sealed the fate of Hungary’s Revolution.

(to be continued…)

Bloody Thursday, 25 October, in Budapest

Alex von Tunzelmann, speaking about her book on the twin crises of the autumn of 1956, states that ‘Bloody Thursday’, 25 October, is still a very significant date in Hungarian history. It’s still very hard, she claims, to know precise details of what happened, and there are still very many contradictory reports, but effectively thousands of people were gathered in a large and peaceful protest in the main square in Budapest when somebody started shooting. The previous day, as the Hungarian historian Sándor Kiss has pointed out, there were armed conflicts throughout Hungary, so that it was completely natural that the authorities wanted to protect their headquarters. That morning, at dawn, the thirty thousand Soviet troops from barracks in the countryside and border patrol units entered Budapest, and sealed off the capital city. Although the First Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Gérő had made the request for military assistance by telephone to Khrushchev the day before, it was not until the 26th that the outgoing PM, Hegedus, signed the order, antedating it to the 23rd in order to give it a semblance of legality.

Tom Leimdorfer, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at the time, recalls hearing the announcement that ‘there will be no school today’. This was no surprise to him, as there had been no school the day before either. The radio also spoke reassuringly of peace returning apart from ‘isolated snipers’ and dispersed ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements. People were advised to stay indoors and there was to be a curfew every evening, as there had been overnight. Later that morning of 25th, less than forty-eight hours after the initial demonstrations on the first day of the uprising, it seemed to some that it might soon be all over, since the impossible seemed to be happening. As the overnight curfew ended and people began going out to work or to look for food. On the streets of the capital Soviet troops continued to fraternise with the Hungarian people.

There is no real consensus about what happened in Kossúth Square on ‘Bloody Thursday’, though there is general agreement on how the events of the day began. In the morning American journalist Leslie Bain was on the streets, near the Astoria Hotel, when he saw three Soviet tanks draped with Hungarian flags and flowers. Girls were kissing Soviet soldiers who were reacting in a friendly manner. Many eye-witnesses have recorded similar scenes. Leaflets in Russian had been distributed asking the soldiers not to fire on Hungarians, who were not ‘fascist counter-revolutionaries’ as the soldiers had been told by their commanders. Bain wrote that it was the most joyous fraternisation between a populace and foreign troops I had ever seen, including the reception received by American liberating troops in Paris. 

Apparently, throughout the morning a false rumour spread around the capital that Imre Nagy would be making a speech from the balcony of the Parliament building later that day. People joined together in groups for safety which meant that even larger crowds than two days earlier began marching to Kossúth Square again. Tom Leimdorfer watched many of them streaming past their apartment block (their flat was on second floor of the five-storey block). The demonstration was quite spontaneous, with the crowd, accompanied by Soviet tanks, heading for Parliament. The cries were ‘Down with Gerő!’, ‘We are not fascists!’ and ‘We want Imre Nagy!’ The demonstrators were unarmed, but this time there was no question of Tom joining them.

On reaching the square, now numbering several thousand, they found other Soviet tanks and armoured cars guarding parliament. According to Sándor Kiss, in order for them to have the square under control, the tanks needed between four and six points at which army units could be gathered, ready to intervene if necessary. So, before any firing occurred, the square had been secured under weapons cover by the Soviet and Hungarian troops.  While the crowds arrived fraternisation continued, as the picture below of a captured Soviet tank in front of the parliament building shows. This was not one of the tanks guarding parliament, but had been captured earlier in the morning near the Astoria Hotel. This time, the rebels were waving the flag of the usurped post-war democratic Hungarian Republic from the tank.

Throughout the square the crowd, several thousand strong, waited patiently for the Prime Minister’s speech. Some reports say that a delegation from the demonstration entered the parliament building looking for Imre Nagy, though at the time he was still at the Party HQ in nearby Akadémia utca, negotiating with the Soviets and his Party colleagues, not expecting to make a speech to the crowds. A technician from the Plastics Research Institute, twenty-seven-year-old George Jalics was on the streets with his sister Zsófi that morning. They had joined the demonstration and found themselves towards the head of it. Jalics later recalled:

When we got to the square in front of the parliament, we were practically in the first row… Defending the building were five T-34 Russian tanks in a semi-circle. The crowd stopped about a hundred yards from the tanks. Somebody even said that it was not worth getting shot just for a few yards. But then, a strange thing happened. A dialogue began between the throng and the crew of one of the tanks. Suddenly eight or ten people ran up to the tank, climbed up on it, and stood there, signifying the accord between the demonstrators and the tank crews… since there was no reason to fear the tanks any more, we all continued on our way to the parliament. Zsófi and I had been in the first row, so we ended up at the top of the steps, on the left side. By this time the square was packed with demonstrators. 

We all sang the National Anthem and waited. For a while there was no reaction from the building. Then a huge Hungarian flag, without the hated communist emblem, was hoisted up on the building. Then we chanted, ‘We want Imre Nagy!’

Suddenly, around midday, the carnival mood had changed completely, as Tom describes:

Soon we could hear shouting and then sound of machine-gun fire, cries, shouts, people running, complete mayhem. We kept back from the window, but from where we were, we would not have seen the broken bodies of over a hundred massacred demonstrators, mowed down by the AVO with many others injured. We only heard the details later, but were fully aware that something dreadful happened just a stone-throw away from our door.

George Jalics recalled that the guns opened fire when the demonstrators began demanding the removal of the Party First Secretary:

After a few minutes had passed, we began to shout ‘Down with Gerő!’ …At that, there was plenty of reply from the ÁVÓ submachine guns located on the rooftops. We only learned about this several years later. As the volleys hit, the crowd scattered in all directions. We were swept along with the crowd down the steps, and then in a big ‘U’ ended up next to the south side of the building, under the roof of one of the side entrances. 

The shooting came, most probably, from ÁVH units hidden on nearby rooftops, and killed almost a hundred of the demonstrators. In the confusion, some of the Soviet tanks returned fire on the ÁVH units on the rooftops. Jalics related how…

As we stopped, tightly hemmed in, we noticed that two or three steps from us, in the direction of the square was a Russian armoured car, with a mounted heavy machine gun, firing at the roof of the Agricultural Ministry building across the square. It was so close that the empty shell cases almost fell on us. During breaks the Russian gunner would assure us that everything would be fine. It was obvious that he was not going to harm us. 

Sándor Kopácsi, Budapest’s chief of police who later defied the occupying Soviets, had a view over the square from his office in the central police HQ when the events unfurled below him. His account, written in French in 1979, differs in some important details, but confirms the overall narrative given by Jalics:

If we weren’t having much influence on the course of events, at least we had front-row seats. For quite a while we had been hearing a noise, like that of a storm, punctuated by ringing cries. Suddenly, from the upper windows, we saw an immense crowd arrive on the adjacent street. They had come from the municipal park, and were carrying flags and banners and chanting ‘Russians go home!’ and ‘Down with Gerő!’

Men, women, young people – there must have been at least ten thousand of them. From where we were, we saw, as the crowd could not, the three large Soviet Joseph Stalin tanks coming from the opposite direction, straight toward the crowd.

It was like a nightmare. How would the crowd react? Would the Russians panic? We were petrified, powerless to do anything but pray. The tanks arrived on the street. The tank soldiers saw the crowd and the crowd saw the tanks. They were nose to nose.

The tanks stopped and stayed in place, motors idling. The crowd couldn’t stop; it kept coming, swarming around the tanks… Any second, the automatic weapons in the tanks could trigger a bloody slaughter. Instead of that, something else happened.

A boy, undoubtedly a student – the scene took place just below us – pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and passed something through the loophole. It wasn’t a grenade but a sheet of paper. It was followed by others. These sheets, many of which my men would later collect, were tracts in Russian composed by students in the faculty of oriental languages. They reminded the Soviet soldiers of the wishes of the Hungarian nation and the unfortunate role of policemen in which they had been cast. The tracts started with a citation from Marx: ‘A People that oppresses another cannot itself be free.’

Then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little, and the commander… emerged slowly into the view of the apparently unarmed crowd. Then he flung the turret open and perched himself on the top of his tank. Immediately hands reached out to him. Young people leapt up on the tank. A young girl climbed up and kissed him. Someone handed the commander the Hungarian tricolour, and instantly the flag was affixed to the tank. The crowd erupted in a frantic ovation. In this jubilant atmosphere, the commander’s cap was thrown into the middle of the crowd. In exchange, someone plunked a Hungarian Army ‘kepi’ on his head. The crowd sang ‘Kossúth’s Song’ and then the Hungarian National Anthem. And, at the top of their voices, they cried, ‘Long live the Soviet Army’. Yet these were the same people who, fifteen minutes before, had determinedly chanted ‘Russians go home!’ 

Half an hour later, Kopácsi received a telephone call, however, received a frantic call from the female police captain who had reported to him the previous day informing him of the ÁVH platoon which had armed itself with heavy machine guns on the roof of the Parliament building. The lieutenant commanding the platoon came down to get water for his men. When he saw the crowd he hurried back up yelling, “This can’t happen. We’ve got our orders.” Kopácsi passed the news to his senior officers, but none of them could believe that the ÁVH would fire on an unarmed crowd accompanied by Soviet tanks. To make sure, he called the Ministry of Interior to explain the peaceful nature of the crowd, to be assured that the ministry knew what was going on. Three minutes later, his captain called him again with the dreadful news that the ÁVH had opened fire ‘from every roof’, and that the Soviet tanks had returned fire in defence of the crowds. The ‘butchery’ ended with the intervention of the twenty Soviet tanks surrounding parliament. Their captain fired his guns at the security forces, forcing them to abandon their positions. Eventually, in the meantime, the police chief managed to get through to Imre Nagy:

“There’s a crowd in front of the Parliament demanding Gerő’s dismissal. They’re being slaughtered”

“The comrades from the Soviet Politburo have just left. Gerő has been dismissed and replaced by Kádár at the head of the party. I am prime minister. What else does the crowd want?”

“Comrade Nagy, perhaps you haven’t yet been informed of what is happening. The ÁVH is slaughtering unarmed people. There are three hundred dead in front of parliament. Your new government is drenched in the blood of innocent people. I can’t find the words to tell you…”

Nagy understood. In a voice suddenly changed, he said, “I’ll do what is necessary right away. This is horryfying, it’s a disgrace.”  

The massacre released new passions, especially as news of similar events were arriving from some of the provincial towns. A hunt for the ÁVH agents started, resulting in their lynchings and torture. Under these circumstances, Gérő’s replacement by János Kádár went almost unnoticed. Like Nagy, Kádár was another of those who had been purged in the early 1950s. He was also brought back into government and appointed First Secretary of the party, replacing Gérő, as well as Foreign Secretary. This was an initiative of the Soviet advisors, Mikoyan and Suslov, who had arrived on 24th. Gérő disappeared, suddenly and permanently. The radio announced the fall of the First Secretary, and Kádár made the following broadcast:

The politburo of our Party has entrusted me with the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee in a grave and difficult situation… The Government should conduct negotiations with the Soviet Government in a spirit of complete equality between Hungary and the Soviet Union.

Not a word was broadcast about the butchery in front of parliament. The official statement, released much later, had it that the perpetrators were not the ÁVH, but insurgent provocateurs. A few hours earlier, the announcement of Gerő’s departure might well have quelled the discontent. Now, the massacre in the square had turned the atmosphere too ugly for such a compromise. The horrible news of the massacre spread rapidly throughout the city and the hunt was on for those responsible. Toward 3 p.m., ten thousand people surrounded the national police headquarters, which was thought, mistakenly, to house the ÁVH. Fighting continued, while the party organisation and the local administration started to collapse, their role being taken over by spontaneously appointed local revolutionary committees and councils; workers’ councils were created in factories. Nagy assured Moscow of Hungary’s loyalty, but the Kremlin was split between those who wanted to accommodate the new government and those advocating a further show of strength. Nagy had to decide between crushing the uprising by resorting to Soviet arms, and trying to solve the crisis with the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, those revolutionaries were busy removing all the red stars they could find from government buildings.

There are no official documents to confirm Kopácsi’s account of how the first shot came to be fired. It was widely held at the time, by eye-witnesses, that the shooting had come from the roof of the Ministry of Agriculture (above), directly across from parliament, and that the perpetrators were indeed the state security authority (ÁVH or ÁVO). Their immediate motive was almost certainly to put an end to the fraternisation, but had perhaps received previous orders to open fire if they feared an attack on parliament, as Kopácsi suggested. Historian Sándor Kiss has pointed out that,

The massacre had a retributive purpose. The crowd demonstrating was not armed, and they arrived with peaceful intentions. They wanted to demonstrate their support for Imre Nagy, and this demonstration was dispersed not once, but on two occasions. If we look at… (recent) research,… we find that they shot at the people trying to escape… If you just wanted to clear the square, then you only shoot at those that are there, to scare them away, by shooting in the air. No, not here, they shot directly (at the people), and that’s the point.  

The ‘innocence’ of the crowds themselves is also confirmed by the absence of legal documentation. At the reprisal trials conducted after the defeat of the Uprising, where the Kádár régime’s prosecutors could pin some act of violence on the insurgents they immediately began court proceedings. In the case of the Kossúth tér shootings, they did not do so. Even the ‘official’ versions of the early Kádár era tended to accept that the first shots had been fired from the roof of the ministry building. For instance, the report of the Hungarian parliamentary guard, published in the third volume of the White Books concurred with the view of Jalics and Kopácsi given above. Nevertheless, as late as 1986 the view that the firing into the crowd was a provocation by the insurgents was still being repeated. Other Eye-witness accounts contained the following observations:

At first it sounded like a single or a short series of shots, later it was continuous shooting.

We threw ourselves to the ground and began to crawl over under the arcade (at the entrance to the Ministry building).

I was standing in the doorway (of the Ministry… wondering) where I should go, should I follow the children? I didn’t dare to step out, and then people were running from the Ministry of Agriculture. I saw one man had pieces of brain on his trench coat. Then I began to cry, and I didn’t know what was going to happen or what was happening. Then there was quiet, the circus was over and I ran to the square… My little daughter was lying right there by the Rákóczi statue. I held her in my arms. I didn’t know she wasn’t alive. My daughter had long hair and it was covered with blood. She must have been shot in the throat. I didn’t dare to take the personal identification to the 5th District city council for a long time… 

Perhaps the most credible view of how the events of ‘Bloody Thursday’ developed comes from John MacCormac’s account in the New York Times of 27 October in which he wrote that the political police opened fire on the demonstrators and panicked the Soviet tank crews into the belief that they were being attacked. Yet even he gives contradictory accounts of the actions of the Soviet tank crews, claiming that one of them also opened fire on demonstrators, and admitted that the whole episode took place in mysterious circumstances for which no explanation has been forthcoming. The historian Miklós Horváth concludes:

Uncontrolled shooting begins, there are many different armed units, from government guards to border control, to soldiers, the area is filled with those from the ministry of the interior and the secret police.

They (a Russian unit) came up to the square, and an armoured vehicle arrives at Báthory Street, today the corner of ‘Martyrs’ Square, and they have no idea how the fire fight broke out, and they’re shooting at everyone. This armoured vehicle… also shot fragmentation grenades in the direction of the Rákóczi Statue (in the centre-left of the square facing parliament). This caused the greatest slaughter.

I can’t rule out that they shot from the Ministry of Agriculture building, though in the square the shots echoed. It’s not known if these were the rounds hitting the building’s walls, or the sound of the shots coming from the square which they thought were coming from the roof of the building, but the injuries of the dead and their location indicates that most victims, a significant number, were the victims of Soviet weapons. 

The two views are not mutually exclusive, of course. The UN Report of 1957 agreed that the firing directed at the crowds came from both the rooftops and some of the Soviet tanks. This is the position followed by the latest memorial to the victims (below), which takes the form of a display of memorabilia and re-enacted video/ photographic images.