Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s main supporter in her election as Conservative leader and in her early governments, once said that, in the past, Britain’s trouble had been that she had never had a proper capitalist ruling class. In 1979, the first Thatcher government sought consciously to put this right. The task it set itself was daunting – the liberation of British enterprise from a hundred years of reactionary accretions, in order to return the machine to the point along the path where it had stood when it was diverted away. It was helped by the fact that, with the empire gone, very little remained to sustain the older, obstructive, pre-capitalist values any longer, or to cushion Britain against the retribution her industrial shortcomings deserved. This movement promised to mark the real and final end of empire, the Thatcher government’s determination to restore the status quo ante imperium, which meant, in effect, before the 1880s, when imperialism had started to take such a hold on Britain. Thatcher looked back to the Victorian values of Benjamin Disraeli’s day, if not to those of William Gladstone. She itemized these values in January 1983 as honesty, thrift, reliability, hard work and a sense of responsibility. This list strikingly omitted most of the imperial values, like service, loyalty and fair play, though she did, later on, add ‘patriotism’ to them. Nevertheless, the new patriotism of the early 1980s was very different from that of the 1880s, even when it was expressed in a way which seemed to have a ring of Victorian imperialism about it.

Part of the backdrop to the Falklands War was the residual fear of global nuclear war. With hindsight, the Soviet Union of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko may seem to be a rusted giant, clanking helplessly towards a collapse, but this is not how it seemed prior to 1984. The various phases of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) were underway, but to well-informed and intelligent analysts the Soviet empire still seemed mighty, belligerent and unpredictable. New SS20 missiles were being deployed by the Soviets, targeted at cities and military bases across western Europe. In response, NATO was planning a new generation of American Pershing and Cruise missiles to be sited in Europe, including in Britain. In the late winter of 1979 Soviet troops had begun arriving in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev was an obscure member of the Politburo working on agricultural planning, and glasnost was a word no one in the West had heard of. Poland’s free trade union movement, Solidarity, was being crushed by a military dictator. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter had issued an ultimatum: the Soviets must withdraw or the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympic Games due to be held in the summer of 1980. Margaret Thatcher supported the call for a boycott, but the British Olympic Association showed its independence from government and defiantly sent a team, supported by voluntary contributions from students, among others. Two British middle-distance runners, Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett each won gold medals.

Western politics echoed with arguments over weapons systems, disarmament strategies and the need to stand up to the Soviet threat. Moscow had early and rightly identified Margaret Thatcher as one of its most implacable enemies. She had already been British Prime Minister for eighteen months when Ronald Reagan’s administration took over in Washington. He may have been many things Thatcher was not, but like her, he saw the world in black and white terms, especially in his first term to 1984. She was from a Methodist background, he was from a Presbyterian one, so they both shared a view of the world as a great stage on which good and evil, God and Satan, were pitched against each other in endless conflict. Reagan found a ‘soul mate’ in Thatcher. Already dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’ by the Russians, Thatcher was resolute in her determination to deregulate government and allow the benefits of capitalism to flourish at home and abroad. Although the UK was committed to Europe, Thatcher was also a strong believer in Britain’s “enduring alliance” with the United States. Reagan and Thatcher saw eye-to-eye on many key issues. Their shared detestation of socialism in general and Soviet communism, in particular, underpinned their remarkably close personal relationship which was eventually to help steer the world away from Armageddon.

Of course, in a sense, the Falklands War of 1982 could be seen as an imperial war, fought as it was over a fag-end of Britain’s old empire: but that was an accident. There was no imperial rationale for the war. Britain did not fight the Argentines for profit, for potential South Atlantic oil reserves (as some suggested), or for the security of her sea lanes, or indeed for the material or spiritual good of anyone. She fought them for a principle, to resist aggression and to restore her government’s sovereignty over the islands in the interests of the islanders themselves. The war also served to restore to Britain some of the national pride which many commentators had long suggested was one of the other casualties of the empire’s demise. That was what made an otherwise highly burdensome operation worthwhile if that sense of pride could be translated into what Sir Nicolas Henderson had described three years earlier as a sense of national will. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher believed that if British Leyland could be injected with some of the same ‘Falklands spirit’ then there was no reason why British industry could not reverse its decline. The popular jingoism the affair aroused and encouraged showed that a post-imperial Britain would not necessarily be a post-militaristic one. But it was not an imperial jingoism per se, more one which expressed a national pride and patriotism. It did not indicate in the least that ‘imperialism’ proper was about to be resurrected, even if that were practicable; or that anyone intended that it should be.

However proud Britons were to have defended the Falklands, no one was particularly proud any longer of having them to defend. Most of Britain’s remaining colonial responsibilities were regarded now as burdens it would much rather be without and would have been if it could have got away with scuttling them without loss of honour or face. In her new straitened circumstances, they stretched its defence resources severely, and to the detriment of its main defence commitment, to NATO. They also no longer reflected Britain’s position in the world. When Hong Kong and the Falklands had originally been acquired, they had been integral parts of a larger pattern of commercial penetration and naval ascendancy. They had been key pieces in a jigsaw, making sense in relation to the pieces around them. Now those pieces had gone and most of the surviving ones made little sense in isolation, or they made a different kind of sense from before. If the Falklands was an example of the former, Hong Kong was a good example of the latter, acting as it now did as a kind of ‘cat-flap’ into communist China. The Falklands was the best example of an overseas commitment which, partly because it never had very much value to Britain, now had none at all.

Diplomatically, the Falklands ‘Crisis’ as it was originally known, was an accident waiting to happen, no less embarrassing for that. At the time, the defence of western Europe and meeting any Soviet threat was the main concern, until that began to abate from 1984 onwards. The British Army was also increasingly involved in counter-insurgency operations in Northern Ireland. Small military detachments helped to guard remaining outposts of the empire such as Belize. But Argentine claims to the Falklands were not taken seriously, and naval vessels were withdrawn from the South Atlantic in 1981. In April 1982, though, Argentina launched a surprise attack on South Georgia and the Falklands and occupied the islands.

Even if oil had been found off its shores, or South Georgia could have been used as a base from which to exploit Antarctica, Britain was no longer the sort of power which could afford to sustain these kinds of operations at a distance of eight thousand miles. The almost ludicrous measures that had to be put into place in order to supply the Falklands after May 1982 illustrate this: with Ascension Island serving as a mid-way base, and Hercules transport aircraft having to be refuelled twice in the air between there and Port Stanley, in very difficult manoeuvres. All this cost millions, and because Britain could not depend on the South American mainland for more convenient facilities.

But it was not only a question of power. Britain’s material interests had contracted too: especially her commercial ones. For four centuries, Britain’s external trade had used to have a number of distinctive features, two of which were that it far exceeded any other country’s foreign trade and that most of it was carried on outside Europe. However, between 1960 and 1980, Britain’s pattern of trade had shifted enormously, towards Europe and away from the ‘wider world’. In 1960, less than thirty-two per cent of Britain’s exports went to western Europe and thirty-one per cent of imports came from there; by 1980, this figure had rocketed to fifty-seven per cent of exports and fifty-six per cent of imports. In other words, the proportion of Britain’s trade with Europe grew by twenty-five per cent, compared to its trade with the rest of the world. Of course, this ‘shift’ was partly the result of a political ‘shift’ in Britain to follow a more Eurocentric commercial pattern, culminating in the 1975 Referendum on EEC membership.

By 1980 Britain was no longer a worldwide trading nation to anything like the extent it had been before. Moreover, in 1983, a symbolic turning-point was reached when, for the first time in more than two centuries, Britain began importing more manufactured goods than it exported. It followed that it was inappropriate for it still to have substantial political responsibilities outside its own particular corner of the globe. British imperialism, therefore, was totally and irrevocably finished, except as a myth on the right and the left. I remember Channel Four in the UK screening a programme called ‘the Butcher’s Apron’ in 1983 which argued, from a left-wing perspective, that it was still very much alive, and that the Falklands War was clear evidence of this. Likewise, there were, and still are, many nationalists in Scotland and Wales who used the term as a metaphor for the ‘domination’ of England and ‘the British state’ over their countries. Of course, in historical terms, they could only do this because the British Empire was a thing of the past, and the sending of Welsh guardsmen to recover islands in the South Atlantic was an unintended and embarrassing postscript, never to be repeated.

The imperial spirit had dissipated too, despite Mrs Thatcher’s brief attempt to revive it in Falklands jingoism and whatever might be said by supercilious foreign commentators who could not credit the British for having put their imperialist past behind them so soon after Suez and all that and certainly by 1970, when they had abandoned overseas defence commitments ‘east of Suez’. But Britain had indeed left its past behind it, even to the extent of sometimes rather rudely ‘putting its behind in its past’ to emphasise the point. Scattered around the globe were a few little boulders, ‘survivals’ from the imperial past, which were no longer valued by Britain or valuable to her. There were also some unresolved problems, such as Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, as an independent territory in 1980. Britain had clearly dissociated itself from its white racist leaders even at the cost of bringing an ‘unreconstructed Marxist’ to power. After that, smaller island colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific continued to be granted their independence, so that by 1983 the Empire had effectively ceased to exist.

In 1984 Bernard Porter wrote, in the second edition of his book on British imperialism, that it was…

… unlikely that any subsequent edition of this book, if the call for it has not dried up completely, will need to go beyond 1980, because British imperialism itself is unlikely to have a life beyond then. That chapter of history is now at an end.

It was not a very long chapter, as these things go; but it is difficult to see how it could have been. The magnificent show that the British empire made at its apogee should not blind us to its considerable weaknesses all through. Those who believe that qualities like ‘will’ and ‘leadership’ can mould events might not accept this, of course; but there was nothing that anyone could have done in the twentieth century to stave off the empire’s decline. It was just too riddled with contradictions.

The Imperialists themselves were the first to predict the decline; that Britain could not help but be overhauled and overshadowed by the growing Russian and American giants. Britain did not have the will to resist this development and the empire was not, in any case, a fit tool for resistance. While Britain had it, in fact, the Empire was rarely a source of strength to the ‘mother country’, despite the attempts of imperialists to make it so.

A part of the narrative of the Falklands Crisis not revealed at the time was the deep involvement, and embarrassment, of the United States. Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan had already begun to develop their personal special relationship. But the Argentine junta was important to the US for its anti-Communist stance and as a trading partner. Prior to 1982, the United States had supported the Argentine generals, despite their cruel record on human rights, partly because of the support they gave the ‘Contras’ in Nicaragua. Therefore, they began a desperate search for a compromise while Britain began an equally frantic search for allies at the United Nations. In the end, Britain depended on the Americans not just for the Sidewinder missiles underneath its Harrier jets, without which Thatcher herself said the Falklands could not have been retaken, but for intelligence help and – most of the time – diplomatic support too. These were the last years of the Cold War. Britain mattered more in Washington than any South American country. Still, many attempts were made the US intermediary, the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, to find a compromise. They would continue throughout the fighting. Far more of Thatcher’s time was spent reading, analysing and batting off possible deals than contemplating the military plans. Among those advising a settlement was the new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, appointed after Lord Carrington’s resignation. Pym and the Prime Minister were at loggerheads over this and she would punish him in due course. She had furious conversations with Reagan by phone as he tried to persuade her that some outcome short of British sovereignty, probably involving the US, was acceptable.

Thatcher broke down the diplomatic deal-making into undiplomatic irreducibles. Would the Falkland Islanders be allowed full self-determination? Would the Argentine aggression be rewarded? Under pulverizing pressure she refused to budge. She wrote to Ronald Reagan, who had described the Falklands as that little ice-cold bunch of land down there, that if Britain gave way to the various Argentine snares, the fundamental principles for which the free world stands would be shattered. Reagan kept trying, Pym pressed and the Russians harangued, all to no avail. Despite all the logistical problems, a naval task force set sail, and with US intelligence support, the islands were regained after some fierce fighting.

Back in London in the spring of 1984, Margaret Thatcher’s advisers looked into the new, younger members of the Soviet Politburo who had emerged under Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the ‘old guard’. He was old and frail, like his predecessor, Yuri Andropov. The advisors to the Prime Minister wondered with whom she, and they, would be dealing with next, and issued a number of invitations to visit Britain. By chance, the first to accept was Mikhail Gorbachev, who visited Thatcher in London. He arrived with his wife, Raisa, itself remarkable, as Soviet leaders rarely travelled with their wives. By comparison to the old men who had led the Soviet Union for twenty years, the Gorbachevs were young, lively and glamorous. The visit was a great success. After Thatcher and Gorbachev met, the Prime Minister was asked by reporters what she thought of her guest. She replied with a statement that, again with the benefit of hindsight, was to usher in the final stage of the Cold War:

Sources:

David Killingray (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Bernard Porter (1984), A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1983. Harlow: Longman.

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan Pan.

Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), pictured above, was a South African statesman and member of the British Imperial War Cabinet from 1917 to 1919. In June 1917, as a colonial prime minister, he joined the ‘new imperialists’ – Curzon, Milner and Balfour – in the cabinet, giving his view of the development of the British Empire and Commonwealth as he saw it:

The British Empire is much more than a State. I think the very expression ‘Empire’ is misleading, because it makes people think as if we are one single entity, one unity, to which the term ‘Empire’ can be applied. We are not an Empire. Germany is an Empire, so was Rome, and so is India, but we are a system of nations far greater than any empire which has ever existed; and by using this ancient expression we really obscure the real fact that we are larger and that our whole position is different, and that we are not one nation, or state, or empire, but we are a whole world by ourselves, consisting of many nations and states, and all sorts of communities under one flag…

I think that this is the fundamental fact which we have to bear in mind – that the British Empire, or this British Commonwealth of Nations, does not stand for unity, standardisation, or assimilation, or denationalisation; but it stands for a fuller, a richer, and more various a life among all the nations that compose it. And even nations who have fought against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests are as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the children of your household and your own blood. It is only in proportion as that is realised that you will fulfil the true mission that you have undertaken. Therefore, it seems, speaking my own individual opinion, that there is only one solution, that is the solution supplied by our past traditions of freedom, self-government and the fullest development. We are not going to force common Governments, federal or otherwise, but we are going to extend liberty, freedom and nationhood more and more in every part of the Empire.

T E Lawrence was one of those who took Smuts’ vision of Empire at face value. He became closely identified with this new strategy of ‘extending liberty’ by inciting an Arab Revolt against Turkish rule, under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca, Husain Ibn Ali. Lawrence was an Oxford historian turned undercover agent, an archaeologist, a linguist, a skilled cartographer and an intuitive guerrilla fighter, as well as a masochist who yearned for fame, only to spurn it when it came. He was the illegitimate son of an Irish baronet and his nanny; a flamboyant Orientalist who delighted in wearing Arab dress. His affinity with the Arabs was to prove invaluable. His aim was to break the Ottoman Empire from within, by stirring up Arab nationalism into a new and potent force that he believed could trump the German-sponsored jihad against the British Empire. Turkish rule over the deserts of Arabia had been resented for centuries and sporadically challenged by the nomadic tribes of the region. By adopting their language and dress, Lawrence set out to turn their discontent to British advantage. As liaison officer to Husain’s son Faisal from July 1916, he argued strongly against deploying British troops in the Hejaz. The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was…

…that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews, but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.

It worked. With Lawrence’s support, the Arabs waged a highly effective guerrilla war against Turkish communications along the Hejaz railway from Medina to Aqaba. By the autumn of 1917 they were probing Turkish defences in Syria as General Edmond Allenby’s army marched from Sinai towards Jerusalem. The Arab revolt helped to turn the military tide for Britain in the middle east, and so take the pressure off the Suez Canal and the oil fields for the duration of the war. But this did not solve Britain’s long-term problem of how to safeguard her middle eastern interests now that the old Turkish buffer was gone; or the short-term problem connected with it, of how to avoid quarrelling with her friends over it. To settle these problems she had come to a secret arrangement with France in April 1916 – the Sykes-Picot Treaty – which was supposed to determine how the Ottoman empire would be partitioned after the war. When it was revealed to the world after April 1917, following the entry of the USA into the war, Sykes-Picot was on the face of it a blueprint for a cynical piece of imperialistic plunder, and Britain was embarrassed by the look of it to the Arabs, who got to know of it from the Russian Bolsheviks later that year. T E Lawrence claimed that it was evident to him that Britain’s promises would amount to nothing, and confessed that he himself had been party to deliberately misleading them:

I risked the fraud, on my conviction that the Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.

Writing in 1954, Lord Vansittart claimed that Lawrence’s Arab army was overrated, and that it had raced rather than fought its way to Damascus. He had believed that the Arabs occupied the city first, but later found out that it was the Australians who bore the brunt of the siege.  Of Lawrence himself, he wrote that…

He felt too big for the pumps in which he entered my office, boasting of having torn off his British decorations… Lawrence was one of the people I was glad to have known and not to have known better. He was an acquaintance, not a friend, a relative so distant that we never mentioned the subject… He wanted to go far with him, seeming to think that I could ‘do something about’ the kingdom terrestrial yet not of this world, on which he had set his public heart.

In June 1917, there were six ‘young imperialists’ in the wartime cabinet, including Leopold Amery and Mark Sykes, who were there to advise on eastern and middle eastern affairs. Harold Nicolson was seconded to work with Sykes. John Buchan was deputy director of a new Information Ministry created to brief ministers. It was a remarkable resurrection of a school of imperialism which had been thought to be dead and buried for years, spurned by successive electorates since 1906. In ordinary times it would have remained mouldering under the ground, but the extraordinary circumstances of war had acted like an earthquake, throwing up the coffin and breaking it open. As Bernard Porter has put it, Joseph Chamberlain walked the earth again. Leopold Amery’s first and foremost war aim was the immediate security and, still more, freedom for the development and expansion of the British Commonwealth in the world outside Europe. A Cabinet Committee on Territorial Desiderata chaired by Curzon in 1917 recommended that this expansion be concentrated in east Africa and the lands between Egypt and India. It was clear what these new imperialists had in mind, if they were still in control of government when the war was over.

The Great War was a total war, and, for its duration, it stretched the Empire’s resources to the limit. When peace eventually came, she would be much less able to hold the empire by force: even now she could ill afford to keep tied up in the colonies troops which were badly needed in Europe, or to count on reinforcing them in an emergency. In India, for example, the number of British troops numbered only 15,000, which was 23,000 fewer than on the eve of the mutiny, sixty years earlier. The perils of the situation were clear, and could only be met by compromising with any insurgency or emergency which might arise. Given the somewhat feigned antipathy of the USA for being harnessed to imperialists after April 1917, concession was a means by which the British could retain control of their empire, but it was also a way in which that control was diluted as well. The war forced it into all kinds of actions which were unwise in the long-term, but the sort of war it was made these almost inevitable. In wartime there could be no long-term coherent policy for the empire. Everything was overshadowed by the war on the Western Front. Consequently colonial policy decisions could not be other than pragmatic, unplanned, short-term, often inconsistent. Quite often they came to be regretted afterwards, especially those made to curry favour from various quarters, to nationalists in India and the middle east.

In India the promises came very slowly, because until 1917 it looked as if they might be done without. India was relatively tranquil when war broke out, and Indians refrained from exploiting the difficulties of their British ‘masters’. It seemed that Britain would not need more than 15,000 troops to control them. Nevertheless, some of the members of the government, including Edwin Montagu, were keen to announce reforms from the beginning. India’s representation at Imperial Conferences of the ‘white’ self-governing dominions, were met with considerable opposition from those dominions who protested that India was neither ‘white’ nor ‘self-governing’. Despite this, India was admitted at the beginning of 1917, and promises of political reforms followed in August. Both concessions were late enough to suggest that they were born out of fear rather than persuasion, for in the year before the nationalists had healed both of the main breaches: between Congress and the Muslim League by the Lucknow Pact of December 1916, and between moderates and extremists when Tilak, released from gaol in 1914, was readmitted to Congress in the same month, capturing it soon afterwards. In 1916 the nationalists had gone on the offensive under him and, ironically, the Englishwoman Annie Besant. Montagu wrote later that it was her activity which really stirred the country up. By June 1917, they were threatening enough to persuade the Indian government to intern Mrs Besant, which provoked further agitation. In July the viceroy wrote home that the situation was urgent, and any further prevarication over the reforms would be fatal. It was at this moment that Montagu, who had returned to the India Office as Secretary of State in July, was allowed to make a declaration of intent for India to provide…

…the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.

Montagu was able to use the words ‘responsible government’ in 1917, even though it provoked a storm in the House of Lords and a flurry of resignations in India, because the situation was then more desperate: nationalist opposition more widespread, the need to arrest the further defection of moderate opinion, according to Chelmsford, more urgent, the country, according to Montagu, rolling to certain destruction. This was the result of the war, but the war had also made it less likely that the promise of Liberal reforms to India, when it did come, would be enough to stem the nationalist tide.Indian nationalism was fired enormously by the war: its grievances compounded, its following augmented, its organisation greatly improved, its expectations increased; a seething, boiling, political flood, as Montagu described it in November 1917, raging across the country. Yet the Montagu Declaration and the Montagu-Chelmsford Report had held it back; if nothing else, as Montagu wrote in February 1918, I have kept India quiet for six months at a critical period of the war. The reforms represented the biggest concession Britain had yet made to the demands of the nationalists.  Whether they were big enough to keep pace with them was yet to be seen when the war finally ended.

                 

Sources:

Bernard Porter (1984), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism. London: Longman.

Niall Ferguson (2005), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

            

Invasion & Miserable Isolation: 2-4 November

By Friday 2 November, Hungary’s five days of freedom, from 28 October to 1 November were effectively over. All Saints’ Day was followed by All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, a day for visiting the graves of departed relatives. The streets in Budapest and elsewhere in the country became appropriately more calm and more sombre, but not just in remembrance of the dead, but also out of fear for the living. Despite the ominous signs of a Soviet return, however, the positive atmosphere of ‘victory’ continued in the capital and negotiations were underway for a return to work and a resumption of services on the following Monday, 5 November. Continuing to hope for the best, on 2 November, Imre Nagy began to construct a new government including three Smallholder, three Social Democratic, two National Peasant and two Communist Party ministers. It resembled the results of the last free election of November 1945. Maléter was named Minister of Defence and János Kádár was also included. By the 3rd, there was an open nationalist rebellion within the newly formed HSWP.  The following radio announcement about the Cabinet ‘reshuffle’ was also made on 3 November:

The composition of the National Government is as follows: Imre Nagy – President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Foreign Affairs… János Kádár – Minister of State.

There may have been some significance in Nagy taking over the Foreign Ministry from Kádár, but the latter was still in a very powerful position both in internal and external affairs. There was no indication at that time that he had already sided with the Soviet invaders, yet by that same evening he was already assembling his own Temporary Revolutionary Government of Hungary on Soviet soil just across the Hungarian border with Ukraine. Nagy also made a further complaint to the UN about more Russian tanks entering Hungary.

Having informed other members of the Warsaw Pact of the impending invasion in Brest the previous day, on 2 November Khrushchev entered into negotiations with Tito to secure Yugoslavia’s support in crushing the revolution. In the changing atmosphere of these days, the Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, Yuri Andropov, obviously more aware of the scale of the invasion being planned by Khrushchev, briefly thought that there might be a siege of his embassy. Béla Király, Military Commander of Budapest, wrote (in 1989) of how he received a phone call from Imre Nagy saying that Andropov had called him with the news that a mob was besieging the embassy. Nagy pressed Király to deal with the matter urgently, so the latter organised a group of armed civilians and another one of Hungarian army personnel to go with him. He gave them a briefing about the importance of maintaining diplomatic immunity, pointing out that the Soviets should not be given any excuse to bring their troops back to Budapest. Arriving at the building, Király found no sign of any attacking mob. Andropov made up an improbable story about old ladies seeking accommodation because their flats had been burnt out, but quickly turned the conversation towards the proposed negotiations with the Soviets over their withdrawal of troops. Béla Király suspected that there was some kind of psychological ploy involved in what was, in any case, one of the more bizarre events of these autumn days.

While the talks between Khrushchev and Tito were ongoing, in New York, the Yugoslav Representative to the UN Security Council was sitting between the Hungarian and US Representatives at its meeting on the 2 November to consider the critical situation in Hungary. The US Representative, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, stressed American sympathy for Hungarian independence, dating back to 1848. The next day, he introduced a draft resolution calling on the Soviet Union to desist from any form of intervention, particularly armed intervention, in the internal affairs of Hungary. President Eisenhower announced that the United States would supply Hungary with twenty million dollars worth of emergency food and medical aid through the Red Cross. The Security Council decided to postpone further discussion of the Hungarian Crisis in order to focus on the Suez Crisis.

On 3 November in Hungary, although reports continued to arrive about the deployment of Soviet troops around the capital, official negotiations began in Parliament about the withdrawal from Hungary of all Soviet forces. They began at mid-day. The Hungarian negotiators, Defence Minister Pál Maléter, Minister of State Ferenc Erdei, and Chief of the General Staff István Kovács awaited their Soviet counterparts, who, according to Tibor Méray, were given full military honours:

The brilliantly bedecked officers, headed by General Malinin who wore a green uniform, his breast covered with decorations, climbed the steps on a thick red carpet.

The talks seemed to be going well. Apart from matters of the transport and provisioning of their withdrawing forces, the Soviet delegation was mainly concerned about ‘technical’ issues such as the repair of Soviet war memorials damaged during the uprising, the future protection of Soviet war graves in Hungary and the type of ceremony to mark the final evacuation of Soviet troops from the country. The Hungarians had no particular objections to any of the proposals. When the session was adjourned, it was agreed that the discussions would continue that night at the Soviet air base at Tököl, on Csepel Island, to the south of the city. A Hungarian convoy arrived just before the agreed time of 10 p.m., with Pál Maléter, Erdei and Kovács, and a fourth member of the team, Colonel Miklós Szücs, Head of Military Operations. They were led to a room where they found only the Soviet interpreter. General Malinin then arrived and sat down in a frosty manner. Hardly had Maléter begun to speak when he was interrupted by Malinin, who said that he hadn’t been able to establish contact with the Soviet government. At that point, the head of the KGB, Ivan Serov, entered the room with several others, pointing pistols at the Hungarians, who were then disarmed and escorted into separate military detention rooms.

Kovács was visited by László Piros, the former interior minister, who had been brought there in anticipation of a Soviet attack and the installation of a new government under János Kádar. Piros informed him of this and told him that he should give orders to the Hungarian Army not to resist the Soviet troops. Kovács refused to give a direct order under duress, but wrote a letter calling for the avoidance of bloodshed between the two armies. The following morning the prisoners were being returned to Budapest, accompanied by Soviet and ÁVH officers, when they were fired upon by Hungarian soldiers and National Guard civilians, killing seven Soviets and four ÁVH men. The Hungarian Army was acting on Maléter’s own orders, given on 1 November. After being returned to the air base near Tököl, the Hungarian negotiators were flown by helicopter to the Soviet base at Mátyásföld, to the east of Pest. From there, they were transferred to a prison in Buda.

The other major events in Hungary on that day related to Cardinal Mindszenty, who had returned to his Buda residence three days earlier after being released from house arrest. He had issued a short statement on 1 November, lending his support to the struggle for freedom which was unparalleled in world history. On 3 November, he addressed a press conference in the morning in which he withheld his support for the Nagy government until a Christian Democratic Party had been formed and given a voice in the cabinet. Afterwards, in the Kádár era, this was interpreted as clear evidence of Mindszenty’s counter-revolutionary stance. Then he made a live speech on the radio at 8 p.m. in which he called for a revaluation of old-fashioned nationalism. The speech undoubtedly unnerved some members of the Nagy government. What bothered them was the references to the government as the successors to a fallen régime. They suspected that Mindszenty wanted to see their government, or at least the reform communists in it,  fall as well.

On the night of 3 November, while the UN Security Council was in session, a Soviet Army of fifteen divisions and sixty thousand troops, with more than four thousand tanks, was massing along the USSR/ Hungary border. During the night they entered Hungary, surrounded the capital and sealed the country’s borders. An advanced division entered Budapest and occupied the Parliament building.  At dawn the following morning, 4 November, over a thousand Russian tanks entered the city. Shooting began immediately. Tom Leimdorfer takes up the story from the civilian point of view:

In the early hours of Sunday, 4^th November, we woke to sounds of explosions and heard the rumbling of tanks. We turned on the radio just in time to hear the unforgettable broadcast words of Imre Nagy:

‘Today at daybreak Soviet forces started an attack against our capital, obviously with the intention to overthrow the legal Hungarian democratic government. Our troops are fighting. The government is in its place. I notify the people of our country and the entire world of this fact.’

Nagy vowed not to surrender, but soon took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy, where he was to stay for over two weeks. Early the same morning, the new cabinet member István Bibó visited the US Legation with a message asking President Eisenhower to call on the Soviet Union to withdraw, noting the American Liberation Policy which was pursued with so much firmness and wisdom.  Two hours after Nagy’s statement, Radio Budapest broadcast an SOS signal, “Help Hungary! Help! Help!” and then went off the air. Many Hungarians, buoyed up by the promises of Radio Free Europe, were still certain that the West would come to their aid, and Tom recalls listening to the plaintiff voices of intellectuals before the radio building was captured:

This was followed over the next three hours by pleas for help from the West from organisations of writers, academics. Then the radio went dead, then some music was broadcast.

But no support was forthcoming, except in the form of a strong protest from the White House to the Kremlin. Cardinal Mindszenty and his secretary left Parliament and arrived at the US Legation, which granted them refuge, though the secretary later left and was captured by Hungarian security forces. The Cardinal also asked for American assistance in defence of Hungary. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles were deeply concerned but, distracted by the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt and the approaching climax of the national elections, they did nothing except loudly condemn the Soviet action in the final speeches of the campaign. Despite Soviet claims that the West was behind the rising, in reality the Western powers had clearly been caught by surprise by the sequence of events. Britain and France were preoccupied, and the US the stakes of intervention were too high. The National Security Council concluded that there could be no American military or political intervention in the affairs of Soviet satellites, no ventures behind the Iron Curtain. As with Poland, Eisenhower and Dulles realised that they could not risk a nuclear war over the fate of an East European nation. As the citizens of Budapest, like Tom and his mother, crouched in their cellars once more, they most were realistic about their future:    

The shelling came closer. When one shell exploded nearby, we all rushed out of flats and down the stairs to the cellars below our block. Indomitable as ever, Mami was telling me what it was like 12 years before when she was sheltering with me (aged two) during the siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944/45. We listened to the roar of tanks going past the block, presumably towards the Parliament. Everyone was sombre. We all knew this was the end of the revolution. Some talked of help from the West, but most knew it was impossible. The West was busy with Suez and certainly nobody wanted a nuclear war.

The United States, in practice, could not embark on ‘rollback’ and would have to settle for continued ‘containment’. The Hungarian people were abandoned in their hour of need, and left to defend themselves. The Soviet forces met little resistance from the Hungarian Army units, but considerable resistance from armed civilian groups, which was to continue for several days. Most foreign journalists abandoned the Duna Hotel and sought refuge in various embassies before leaving the country. Tom Leimdorfer expresses how isolated and alienated everyone felt:

When the shelling died down, we crept up to our flats again. No lights were switched on, we tried to get a makeshift meal in the dark and stay away from the window.  We spent the next day in miserable isolation, trying to get some news over the phone, rushing down to the cellar again for a brief period when we heard tank shells nearby.

Determined this time to avoid any risk of fraternization with the rebels, the Soviets sent in tanks rather than infantry against the Hungarians, and staffed them with crews from the non-Russian-speaking republics. The Kremlin also realised that they had picked the wrong man in Imre Nagy. Soviet ambassador  Andropov had switched his support to János Kádár as the leader who would restore authority and guarantee loyalty to the cause of international communism. As Nagy went into hiding with some of his supporters in the Yugoslav Embassy, Kádár reappeared inside Soviet-occupied Hungary, announcing on the radio, from Szolnok, the formation of a new government led by him :

… 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, working-class and country, requested the Soviet Army Command to help our nation smash the sinister forces of reaction and restore order and calm in the country…

Returning to Budapest in a Soviet armoured car, Kádár welcomed the Soviet troops; the new government could use their support in fighting the counter-revolutionary threat. He also promised economic and social reforms, as well as new agreements with the other Eastern bloc nations. 

Ambassador Lodge announced news of the invasion at the UN General Assembly, after a session of a session of the Security Council which began at 3 a.m. (US Eastern time). He asked the Security Council to pass the resolution that the United States had introduced the previous day. Although nine nations supported it, the USSR used its veto. The Security Council then called for an emergency session under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution, which allowed the General Assembly to meet to consider issues when the Security Council was unable to maintain international security and peace. The GA met in a special session from 4 November, when it approved a resolution, submitted by the US, which called on the USSR to end military operations in Hungary and to withdraw its forces. The resolution also called on the Secretary-General to investigate the situation and to send observers to Hungary. Member states were asked to send relief supplies. After consulting with the Department of State, Minister Edward Wailes, appointed as Ambassador to Hungary in July, had finally arrived in Budapest on 2 November. He remained at the Legation but, at Washington’s direction, refused to present his credentials to the Kádár government as a protest against the arrest of Hungarian citizens who had visited the Legation on these days. The New York Times accused the Soviet Union of the foulest treachery and basest deceit known to man, and claimed that the invasion of Budapest was a monstrous crime against the Hungarian people that can never be forgiven or forgotten. 

(to be continued…)