A Revolution Forestalled
A round the middle of October, 1956, the Polish government was faced with the prospect of immediate, bloody revolution. A variety of groups without organization and differing widely in their political, social, and economic persuasions were united in their desire for a cataclysm that would somehow bring with it a regeneration of Poland. The Communist leadership was loathed by everybody—by the simple workingman because of the wretched economic conditions, by the educated because of its soulless and brutal oppressiveness, by the faithful because of the persecution of the Church, by the anti-Semites because it contained Jews in leading positions, by the nationalists because of its abject subservience to Moscow. The revolt in Poznan, at the end of June, had been the first rumbling before the earthquake. The tremendous popular demonstration during the Czestochowa pilgrimage, on August 26, had been a tremor that shook the foundations of the state. When the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party met in Warsaw on October 19, a country-wide outbreak was expected in a matter of days, perhaps hours. That undoubtedly was also the appreciation made by the Kremlin. Soviet troops in Poland, in Eastern Germany (where they were actually moved to the Polish borders), and probably also in the Russian military districts to the east and southeast, stood to arms. And the highest-priced delegation ever to leave the Soviet Union in a body—it comprised not less than four members of the Presidium, Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich—arrived uninvited in Warsaw, determined to put iron into the backs of Communist Moscow’s Polish stooges.
What occurred in those three crucial days, from October 19 to 21, is only a matter of conjecture, but the Russian delegates must have been told something like this: “There are over 25 million Poles and they all want political reforms and economic improvements. Above all they want a change in the government. If you try to keep in power or to reinstate your crew, Rokossowsky and Jakub Berman and Hilary Mine, you will have to fight the people. You will undoubtedly win, but you will have a permanent revolt on your hands. You will have to increase your garrisons in Poland tenfold and Polish Communism will be dead forever. This need not happen if you lighten your grip, if you remain in the background, if you let us look after things.” There are many indications that Khrushchev and company did not yield in good grace, but in the end they did yield. That allowed Gomulka to snatch the revolution away from the would- be revolutionaries. He conceded them a little personal freedom. He called a truce in the struggle against the Church. He removed the Jews from the Party leadership, but condemned anti-Semitism. He promised economic betterment. Best of all, he gained the hearts of the nationalist firebrands by some actions which looked like bearding the masters in the Kremlin: he dismissed Marshal Rokossowsky and most of the Russian and pseudo-Polish officers in the armed forces; he talked strongly about equality while insisting on the necessity of the alliance with Russia and conjuring the specter of a threatening Germany. Gomulka was helped by his years of imprisonment and disgrace which made the people forget his lifetime record as a devoted and militant Communist, and by what may prove the statesmanship (or the error?) of Cardinal Wyszinski, who called for forgiveness and national unity. In the end, there was no revolution in Poland. The immediate cost to Communism—a certain loosening of Poland’s ties with Russia—is slight compared to what could have happened if there had not been a Gomulka at the helm in the critical hour. It remains to be seen whether the danger of revolution is laid for good.
A Revolution which Got Out of Hand
At the same time when revolution died unborn in Poland, the situation was rife for a violent outbreak in Hungary as well. Poles and Hungarians, although of quite different races, have always had certain affinities— they are the Spaniards of Eastern Europe. Passionate, romantic, often unreasoning, overbearingly nationalist sometimes to the point of megalomania, but also brave physically and morally, they have quite often cooperated in the past. It is, for instance, significant that the Lafayette of the great Hungarian revolution of 1849 was a Pole, General Josef Bern. There is no doubt that the Polish people’s seeming victory over their Russian masters was the spark which ignited the accumulated dry tinder of the Hungarian revolt. The storm broke on October 23.
The reasons why everything went so differently in Hungary from what had happened in Poland lie not so much in the circumstances as in the personalities of the principal actors engaged in the drama. In Poland, there was a very strong man (Gomulka), supported by energetic and devoted lieutenants (Ochab, Spychalski, Zambrow- ski) and by armed forces which were firmly in the hands of a group of Polish-nationalist commanders. In Hungary there was no leader at all, but rather a man propelled to leadership by popular demand (Imre Nagy), ill served by disloyal (Kadar) or politically undecided lieutenants, and by armed forces in which the top commanders never quite showed where they stood and which consequently never quite became a real instrument of power. Thus in Poland we witnessed a purposeful revolution from the top, a “palace revolution” if this term may be applied to the Marxist milieu in which it took place. In Hungary there was a revolution from the bottom, passionate, flaming, uncontrolled. Where the Polish revolt fizzled out, the Hungarian died in a sea of blood.
Who Was in Charge?
The fate of Hungary was decided on the afternoon of October 23, in the very first hour of the revolution. At that time the reins of government were in the hands of a group of small men, the products of decades of Stalinist schooling and of subordination during the long years of Rakosi’s absolute command over the Hungarian Communist Party. To men like Erno Gero, the first secretary of the Party, Andras Hegediis, the prime minister, or Laszlo Piros, the minister of the interior and boss of the police, nothing better occurred than to use force when they were faced with mass demonstrations of the Hungarian youth. AVH bullies fired into the crowd and were promptly torn to pieces by the enraged demonstrators. Soon more blood flowed, with the people hunting down AVH agents and the AVH shooting at the people.
On the night of October 23-24, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party met. It must have been quite a different meeting from that in Warsaw five days earlier, in which Gomulka seized control of the Party apparatus and of the state. In Budapest, the only subject under discussion seems to have been how the present crew could best keep itself in power. The decision was made to yield to popular demand and to admit Imre Nagy into the government. He was to be premier, but otherwise there was to be no change in the government clique. Hegediis simply made room for Nagy by ostensibly moving down one notch to the post of First Deputy Premier. From the sequence of events it would appear that at that same meeting the decision was made to call upon the Soviet troops in Hungary to put down the revolution. That this is the way it happened is quite possible. Considering the type of men who were at that crucial meeting, it is much more probable that they simply complied with the demand of their local Soviet rulers, the ambassador (Andropov) and the Commander-in-Chief (General Malinin), that a mantle of legality be provided for the fact that Russian troops were even then fighting in the streets of Budapest.
Why there should have been a popular call for Imre Nagy is difficult to understand. Nothing in Nagy’s background made it likely that he would be anti-Soviet. He had become a Communist while in Russia, and in 1918 had even taken Soviet citizenship. He had served under Bela Kun during the latter’s short-lived Bolshevik dictatorship in Hungary in 1919. In the ’Thirties and ’Forties he had spent almost fifteen years in the Soviet Union. He survived the great purges (which engulfed so many outstanding foreign Communists living in Russia, including Nagy’s old master, Bela Kun) which is proof that he was either considered utterly unimportant or else a devoted Stalinist. In 1945, he came back to Hungary in the baggage train of the Red Army, and thereafter for ten years held high office under the Rakosi regime (minister of agriculture, speaker of Parliament, prime minister). It is true that he was accused of “right devia- tionism,” dismissed from his office in March, 1955, and expelled from the Party in April, 1955. He does not, however, seem to have been bothered personally. Nor did he speak up—he was no Djilas. The best explanation for his sudden popularity is that he was the only well-known leftist politician who seemed to be in opposition to the discredited ruling group and whose opposition was of recent enough date to be remembered by the leftist intellectuals who in the beginning led the revolution. With his benign face adorned by a walrus moustache, he looked like the typical Hungarian “bacsi,” or uncle, and that may have helped. If the revolutionaries thought that in him they had put another Kossuth at their head, they were sadly mistaken.
All through the twelve days during which, nominally at least, he was the leader of the Hungarian nation, Imre Nagy stumbled along always at least one step behind the events. His intentions were perhaps good, and he was probably inspired by sincere Hungarian patriotism, but the task that was thrust upon him—admittedly a tremendously difficult task—was well beyond his capabilities. At first, he did pretty much the bidding of the official party leadership which quickly passed into the hands of the rising star, Janos Kadar. Had he been able to appease the revolutionaries he might well have remained premier under Radar’s secretaryship of the Party just as he had been premier under Rakosi’s. When the revolution thundered on and the Party leadership deserted him because he had shown himself useless as a tool, Nagy floundered over into the democratic camp. The last cabinet over which he presided (constituted on November 3) contained a single Communist (Losonczy), but was otherwise composed of members of the liberal parties, Social Democrats, Smallholders, and Petofi peasants. He might have continued to preside over that frankly anti- Communist combination as well, if the Soviets had allowed it to survive.
In the meantime, a multitude of uncoordinated revolts raged, nurtured by high idealism, by hatred, and by despair. The Petofi Club, which had intellectually fathered the revolution, tried in vain to dam it. The Workers Councils gained and lost and gained control again over segments of the revolutionary masses. In Budapest a real leader arose in Josef Dudas (he died a martyr on the gallows, on January 19, 1957) but even he was unable to assert his authority throughout the seething city. The arming of the very young, while it provided the Press with many heart-warming and heartrending stories and pictures, made it even more difficult for anybody to gain control of the revolutionary forces. In many places local revolutionary councils exercised authority in a reasonable and efficient manner; elsewhere they were unable to put the reins on a popular movement that had got out of hand.
150,000 Men Without Cohesion
There is no doubt that the great majority of the Hungarian Army and Air Force regulars were on the side of the revolution. Unfortunately, the top leadership of the armed forces, from the Minister of Defense, General Istvan Bata, and the Chief of the General Staff, General Lajos Toth, on down, either remained loyal to the Communist government or preferred sitting on the fence rather than taking sides. As a consequence, very many officers and men fought with the revolutionaries—or at least let them have their arms—but as individuals, not in organized units. Had it stayed together in combat units, the Hungarian Army could have made things difficult for the Russians. It might even have influenced Soviet policy on Hungary just as the Polish Army was undoubtedly a factor in the Kremlin’s appreciation of the Polish situation. As it was, the Russians, once they had decided on all-out military action, were able to put down the revolt quickly in the five days between November 4 and 9 and with forces smaller than the peacetime strength of the Hungarian Army.
The Hungarian Air Force seems to have been from the beginning with the revolutionaries. It was a much less important force than the Army, and it exercised little influence on the events except for an act of political folly when, on October 30, it threatened to bomb the Russians unless they left Budapest within twelve hours.
The role which the armed forces played in the Hungarian revolution is typified by the fate of Colonel (he was made a Major- General by Imre Nagy) Maleter, the officer who might have become the De Gaulle of Hungary. Unable to lead a regiment against the Russians, he distinguished himself by the heroic defense, at the head of a motley crew of young freedom fighters, of the Kilian Barracks in Budapest. Although he was a comparatively junior officer, the sudden fame he had gained made Nagy appoint him Minister of Defense, on November 3. That same evening he and two other officers, General Istvan Kovacs and Colonel Szucs, went to see the Russian Commander-in- Chief, apparently at the latter’s invitation, to discuss some technicalities of the Russian withdrawal. It was a trap in the approved Soviet style, and the three officers were arrested. After the fateful morning of November 4, events moved too quickly for anybody to weld the Hungarian armed forces together for an organized fight.
Cardinal Mindszenty
It has been asserted, most strongly in the German press, that had Cardinal Mindszenty been less unbending and had he thrown all his weight behind Imre Nagy, the nation might have rallied around the premier, the desultory fighting might have stopped, and the government might have had a chance to come to an understanding with Moscow, on the Polish pattern. It is almost certain that on October 31, the day of Mindszenty’s release from prison, the Soviet leaders were still undecided how they should deal with the Hungarian situation. Had Nagy by then not been swept off his feet by the tempo of the revolution and had he been able to accept unreservedly the principles in the Soviet declaration of October 30 (in practice, continuation of close Soviet-Satellite ties, including the stationing of Soviet troops in the countries involved, but recognition, at least on paper, of satellite equality with Russia), the Soviet government might have found it politically advantageous not to bring the Hungarians to heel by force. Before Cardinal Mindszenty could, however, have done anything to save the situation, the die was cast. On October 31 Hungary denounced the Warsaw Pact and asked the United Nations to guarantee her neutrality, and on November 1 the Kadar group, obviously on Moscow orders, broke with Imre Nagy, to establish a Soviet puppet government at Szolnok.
It is at any event most doubtful that Cardinal Mindszenty ever wanted to prop up the Nagy government. The Cardinal is said to be a severe man, not given to compromise. In his radio address on November 3 he emphasized: “By the Grace of God, I am the same as I was before my imprisonment. I stand by my convictions physically and spiritually intact, just as I was eight years ago. ...” Nagy was a Communist, a leading member of the Rakosi administration that had mercilessly persecuted the Church and thus a man who had clearly come under the general papal excommunication decree. The only broadcast—already mentioned—that Cardinal Mindszenty made in his few days of full liberty was moderate in tone and it emphasized forgiveness, but it did not mention Nagy and it certainly did nothing to strengthen his government. By then it was doomed in any case.
Was the West Blameworthy?
The London Economist once remarked that what the Western broadcasts beamed to the satellites were trying to do was “steering between the Scylla of enthusiasm and the Charybdis of despair.” It is obviously most difficult to encourage people to resist Communist oppression spiritually but at the same time to discourage them from resisting physically because the time of liberation is not yet. It amounts to keeping the spirit up and the hopes down—but the morale of an enslaved people is largely based on its hope of liberation. There is also always the danger that the listeners will read into a broadcast what they want to hear, that they will steer closer to Scylla than was intended. These general difficulties affecting all political broadcasts directed behind the Iron Curtain must be borne in mind when examining the accusations levelled in particular against Radio Free Europe of encouraging the Hungarians to revolt against their oppressors.
The Federal Government of Germany (on whose territory the transmitters of Radio Free Europe are located) has instituted an inquiry to determine whether Radio Free Europe had raised in the Hungarian revolutionaries hopes of help from the West. Doctor Oncken of the Foreign Office is in charge of the investigation during which huge quantities of scripts and tape recordings are to be examined. At the time of the writing of this article, the inquiry was still under way. It had so far unearthed nothing untoward except for a single script of November 4, the offending last sentence of which was, according to Radio Free Europe officials, never transmitted. On the other hand, it is certain that Radio Free Europe was very highly regarded by most Hungarians and was taken to be the true voice of the West. Practically all calls for help were addressed to it. It is also more than probable that politically inexperienced young people engaged in a desperate fight against Soviet troops read more than was meant into such announcements as that Mr. Stevenson had wired the President to take immediate steps on the behalf of free Hungary, or that the President had written to Mr. Bulganin asking that Soviet forces be withdrawn from Hungary.
In sum, no fairminded person can say that Western broadcasts triggered off the Hungarian revolution or urged the Hungarians to keep on fighting, but the Hungarian experience may make it advisable to exercise even more caution than heretofore lest hopes of early liberation from the West rise high again behind the Iron Curtain. There is no danger of that for the present and while the memory of the Hungarians’ lonely fight remains fresh.
The Balance Sheet
After a very gallant fight fought by very courageous people, darkness has again descended over unfortunate Hungary. Under these circumstances it is distasteful to contemplate what might have been if the heads of the revolutionaries had been as clear as their hearts were big. Here, in North America, we are inclined to look more at the fact that the Hungarians dared to stand up against Soviet might and less at the consequences of the Soviet victory in Hungary. It is the other way around in Europe. There, it is regarded with deep regret that there was no leader in Hungary who could have made his passionate countrymen stop fighting, at the latest on October 30, after the now famous declaration of the Soviet government on its future relations with the satellites. Nagy’s frantic calls on the Hungarians to consider themselves victors and to lay aside their arms must have been echoed especially in Belgrade and Warsaw. There, too, the news that the Hungarian government had decided to try and pull Hungary out of the Soviet orbit altogether must have been received with dismay. For it is widely believed that the Russians would have gone a long way to keep Hungary in the Soviet bloc without using force.
This appreciation of Russian intentions may be quite incorrect, but it cannot be said that it does not make sense. It is consistent with the pattern of Soviet policy in the Khrushchev era, with its concern for Asian opinion, in particular Indian and Chinese, and its endeavor to mend the broken threads of Russo-Yugoslav relations. Peiping’s stand in the Polish crisis should have been enough to make the Kremlin approach the Hungarian problem gingerly. Nor is the explanation that the Soviets waited twelve days, until November 4, before they struck because they needed the time to assemble enough forces, particularly convincing. Reinforcements for the Soviet garrison in Hungary started to pour across the border from the Carpathian Military district on October 25, but remained stationary for days in northeast Hungary; some troops were readily available in Roumania; and, at any event, a comparatively (for Russia’s military resources) small force, such as could have been brought in without straining the lines of communication too much, was all that was needed in the end to put down the revolt. It is quite possible that after their initial intervention during the first days of the revolt had shown that control for the Hegediis-Gero puppet government could not be regained by a short and inconspicuous police action, the Soviets vacillated militarily because they thought that they could achieve their aim without all-out military action.
This would have saved the Hungarians much suffering. It might also have kept open the split in the Communist bloc first caused by Tito’s defection and widened by Gomul- ka’s assertion of Polish independence. Before the Hungarian crisis, China seemed to be moving away from Russia; the satellite leaders were making their pilgrimages to Belgrade. All this has changed. It did not require Chou En-lai’s fence-mending mission to see that the events in Hungary have brought the leaders of the Communist countries of the world closer together. To them, being free of Moscow tutelage was one thing, seeing the West gain through their discord yet another. China and Poland seem to have stopped edging away from Moscow. Tito and Tito- ism have fallen very much out of fashion again. The free world has, of course, derived also some lasting benefits from the Hungarian revolution. Hungarian Communism is dead (the movement was not particularly strong even before the revolt, but now it is practically non-existent). Russia’s true intentions have become plain to some people who had been willing to give the Kremlin leaders the benefit of the doubt. There is turmoil and discord in the Communist parties everywhere, and there have been some important defections from the Communist ranks. These are great achievements; yet one may wonder whether they outweigh the human and the political debit posts on the balance sheet of the revolt. The Hungarians are wont to say that for the last thousand years they have from time to time bled themselves white for the sake of Europe. History bears them out. To bring the supreme sacrifice is always tragic for a nation; it is doubly tragic when it was brought in vain. Today, only a few months after the events, it looks as if the result of the passionate, wild, uncontrolled rising of the Hungarians would be only more grief and more oppression for that unfortunate nation. Let us hope that history will give the gallant Hungarians the consolation that in their latest fight against Eastern tyranny they have again spilled their blood for the good of all free peoples.