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4.5
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was one of the most remarkable events of the Cold War. Seemingly out of nowhere, and quite improbably, an entire people bravely rose up against the ruling communist party and the occupying Red Army. And for a brief moment, and even more improbably, they were victorious.Victor Sebestyen, a British citizen of Hungarian birth, artfully reconstructs these dramatic events in “Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.”A major theme in Sebestyen’s narrative is the acephalous nature of the uprising. “It was the least organized revolution in history,” he says, “haphazard, spontaneous, rudderless.” Khrushchev had just delivered his condemnation of Stalinism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February. Hungarian Communist hardliner and dictator Matyas Rakosi, once trumpeted as “Stalin’s Best Pupil,” had been ousted by the Soviets in favor of the more moderate Imre Nagy. Meanwhile, in Poland, worker demands for reform yielded modest, but promising results, including the political rehabilitation of the popular and progressive communist leader Wladislaw Gomulka on October 20th. A few days later, on Tuesday, October 23rd, thousands of Hungarian students marched in a planned demonstration in support of a stunning list of demands, the so-called Sixteen Points, first of which called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.The official government response in Budapest to the demonstrations was weak and indecisive. Looking back on the events of 1956, Khrushchev remarked: “If ten or so Hungarian writers had been shot at the right moment, the revolution would never have occurred.” Tens of thousands of students and disaffected workers marched through the streets of Budapest, cheered on by onlookers, singing the national anthem and shouting “Ruszkik Haza!” (“Russians Get Out!”). Spontaneously, marchers began to rip out the communist emblem at the center of the Hungarian flags they carried. They marched on the national radio station and demanded access. Less than 24 hours after the start of the loosely organized student marches, the AVO, the Hungarian secret police, had opened fire on unarmed demonstrators and the Red Army had been called out of its garrisons to quell the violence. As soon as the old T-34 tanks rolled in Budapest in the pre-dawn hours of October 24th, Soviet troops found themselves in “an urban guerrilla war against a determined and inventive enemy.” The Hungarian Communist Party, for over a decade an all-powerful force in the everyday lives of every Hungarian, crumbled.Sebestyen is a fluid writer and tells the story of the revolution clearly and honorably, but not without tinges of emotion and personal feeling. For instance, he ridicules the humiliating subordination to Moscow under which the Hungarian Communist Party operated (e.g. “The Soviet magnates had ordered the Hungarians to appear before them, like liege lords demanding obeisance”). When describing the relationship between Budapest and Moscow he uses words like “colony,” “satrap,” “vassal,” “viceroy,” “overlord,” “potentate,” “panjandrum,” “proconsul” and “plenipotentiaries.”A few personalities stand out in Sebestyen’s narrative. Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov may have been the two most senior Soviet officials on the ground in Hungary sent by Khrushchev to monitor and advise the Politburo on the crisis, but Soviet ambassador, and future KGB chief and Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov emerges as the quintessential Marxist Machiavellian in the drama. Suave, articulate, fluent in Hungarian, and utterly cunning, Andropov may have done more than anyone on the Soviet side to snuff out the revolution.Shocked by the ferocity and popular nature of the revolution, Moscow at first agreed to remove additional hardliners from the Hungarian government, such as Enro Gero, “the Soviet Union’s most slavish puppet” according to the author, and encouraged the recently re-empowered Imre Nagy to take dramatic steps in the direction of reform. Andropov served as Nagy’s primary intermediary with Moscow during the revolution and continued to assure him that all was well and that the Soviet government supported his actions.On November 2nd, and knowing full well that the decision had been made to overthrow the nascent independent Hungarian Republic, Andropov sat side-by-side with Nagy talking about setting up his new government. When Nagy made official inquiries into reports that the Soviet Army was not withdrawing from Hungary but invading, Andropov calmly responded, “When you talk about a massive invasion you are obviously exaggerating. It is just that some units are being replaced by others. But they too will be pulled out. The whole question is not worth a wooden kopeck.” Meanwhile, Operation Whirlwind was already underway, 150,000 Soviet soldiers and 3,000 tanks from the 38th Army and the 8th Mechanized Army under the direct command of Warsaw Pact commander Marshal Ivan Konyev were slicing through Hungary and in the process of surrounding Budapest. Andropov’s assurances to Nagy was an act of mendacity stunning even by Soviet standards.All told, some 2,500 Hungarians were killed in the revolution, most in the days after the second Soviet invasion. The vaunted Red Army suffered over 700 killed-in-action, nearly all at the hands of teenage students and middle-aged factory workers with no military experience or training. Moscow installed Janos Kadar as the new leader of Hungary. He may have been “loathed as a Judas,” as Sebestyen claims, but he held on to power for over three decades, stepping down only in 1988. Over 20,000 people were later arrested and 330 were executed, including Prime Minister Imre Nagy. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians, roughly 2% of the populations, fled to the West in the months following the fighting.After years of broadcasting hopeful messages to the people behind the Iron Curtain via Radio Free Europe, and despite Republican campaign rhetoric eschewing containment in favor of rolling back communism, the Eisenhower administration, distracted by an impending presidential election and the Suez Crisis in Egypt, did nothing to help the Hungarian cause. Chief among Ike’s concerns was that Moscow understand that Washington did not view Hungary as a potential ally. For its part, Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and the United Nations were perhaps even more irrelevant and detached from events.In closing, I’d highly recommend “Twelve Days” to anyone with an interest in history or perhaps planning to visit Budapest on holiday or on business. I’d also strongly encourage any prospective reader to watch the excellent 1986 BBC documentary, “Cry Hungary: A Revolution Remembered,” which is available for free on YouTube.The Hungarian Communist Party collapsed again, this time for good, on October 23, 1989, precisely 33 years to the day after the start of the 1956 uprising.
