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.
Andrew James 
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