[...]
Before the collapse of the Soviet Empire no objective history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution could be published in Hungary proper. The Kádár regime, which was born out of the Soviet military intervention, could never face those "regrettable events" without the fear that its legitimacy would be challenged. This prompted György Litván, himself an important player on the revolutionary stage of 1956, for which he was later imprisoned, to edit and co-write a textbook (with four collaborators) published in 1991 in Hungarian. The English version is a full and, on the whole, very reliable account of the events taking place in Hungary in October-November 1956, during the twelve momentous days "that shook the Kremlin" and the aftermath.
The present English edition, entitled The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (edited and translated by the historian János M. Bak and Lyman H. Legters) opens with an excellent chapter by George Schöpflin, sketching Hungary's political history after the Second World War. Schöpflin stresses the gradual nature of the Communist takeover, pointing out that the first post-war government included only two Communists and that it took well over two years of tactical manoeuvring and the "strongly manipulated" elections of 1947 to secure the greatest number of seats in parliament. This was the point of no return, and by 1949 the Hungarian Communists created a Stalinist state, not dissimilar from most Communist-ruled countries in the same region. In Schöpflin's estimation, by 1953 "Hungarian society was close to breaking point," the level of economic output stagnating, and the entire society apathetic and sullenly hostile to its rulers.
Clearly, reform of some kind was needed. After Stalin's death and the East Berlin riots, the Soviet leadership realized this, and they "suggested" new policies to the Hungarian Party. Their candidate to put into practice this more consumer-oriented, less dictatorial course was Imre Nagy, a Hungarian Communist of peasant origin: in June 1953 he became Prime Minister. His "New Course" lasted for only a year and a half, but it managed to regenerate some faith in a more humane form of Socialism. His removal and the Stalinist Party Secretary Mátyás Rákosi's return to complete power was resisted by a sizeable group of the reformist intelligentsia. This resistance was partly fuelled by Khruschchev's anti-Stalinist revelations at the 20th Soviet Party Congress and was encouraged by the new international context in which Austria's neutrality was accepted by both military alliances. Ultimately, these were were the most important factors which made the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 possible.
Chapter Three, "From Mass Protest to Armed
Uprising," describes the events preceding the mass student demonstrations
in Budapest on October 23, 1956. Here, the significance of the reburial
of the executed and later rehabilitated Communist leader László
Rajk on October 6, and the small student demonstration that followed is
rightly pointed out: "The day was like a dress rehearsal... for 23 October"
(p. 49). Four pages later, however, the 22 October meeting at the Technical
University in Budapest is described in nearly the same words
(p. 53). The lengthy mass-meeting at the
Technical University did formulate a list of radical demands, but the demonstration
for the next day was not their idea -
it had originated from
the students of the Faculty of Philology and the Academy of Fine Arts.
In fact, the next day saw two mass demonstrations: one on the Buda side
of the Danube comprising the engineering students and a much larger one
on the Pest side in which all faculties based in Pest took part. The two
groups met at the statue of General Bem, a Polish hero of the Hungarian
struggle for freedom of 1848/49, but it was really the demonstration on
the Pest side (they actually only chanted slogans of reform demands) that
made the whole event accessible to the non-academic population of the capital.
This is not quite clear from Litván's book, where on page 55 we
read the astonishing information that according to the Hungarian Radio,
the student's march should have started at the Writers' Union Headquarters
and ended at the Polish Embassy. (The student's march was an expression
of sympathy with the Polish reform efforts.) For anyone who knows Budapest
topography, this is a joke: the two buildings in fact face each other.
The events that followed are related and analyzed as objectively as possible, though sometimes the finer details are left untold or unclarified. I think ten to fifteen thousand is rather too generous an estimate for the number of civilian "armed fighters" who took part in the anti-Soviet resistance (p. 64). Soviet losses are put (in recently declassified documents) at 669 dead, which is quite substantial for only a few days' fighting; Hungarian losses were given as 2,700 in 1957 (p. 103), and while this is criticized as "unreliable" by the authors, it could perhaps be increased by several hundred on the basis of painstaking detective work but certainly not up to the figure of 20-30,000 dead as was first reported in the Western press (and still quoted by some British textbooks). What is truly astounding is the extent of reprisal after the Revolution was put down by Soviet forces and the random massacres of the security police. Between the end of 1956 and 1959, at least 35,000 people were subjected to police investigation "for political crimes," and by 1961 more than "350 people were executed" (p. 144), many of whom did not even take part in the armed struggle against the Russians. These reprisals culminated in the execution of Prime Minister Imre Nagy and several of his associates in 1958, a political crime which both set the foundations for János Kádár's "soft dictatorship" and played a major role in the demise of the same regime in 1989.
Was the Hungarian Revolution in vain? As
Péter Kende points out in his Afterword, in the short run it may
have disturbed "the evolutionary process" transforming Stalin's Russia
into a more liberal and less belligerent Communist state, but "the decision
to intervene in Hungary and
the concomitant political principles sealed
the fate of the Soviet empire" (p. 168). In other words, what was needed
after Stalin's death was not only democratization but de-colonization of
the whole vast empire. The intervention in Hungary showed (just as the
Czechoslovak intervention in 1968) that Russian imperialism took precedence
over any less rigid interpretation of Marxism or economic modernization.
While Soviet communism was bound to fail "historically," Kende argues that
the "endgame" could have been different and less humiliating for Russians
had they not stopped the Hungarian "leap into the future" in 1956. And,
finally, when the time arrived to shake off the party-state, Hungarians
had a native model to fall back on: the first (temporarily successful)
anti-totalitarian revolution in history. Since 1989, democratic institutions
have been established in an independent Hungary and, whether genuinely
popular or not, democracy is taking roots on ground prepared in 1956.
[...]