What the Hungarians wrought: the meaning of October 1956.

IN October 1956, just fifty years ago, Hungarian freedom fighters rose against their Soviet colonizers and oppressors. Their forebears had done the same under Lajos Kossuth in 1848, and the Habsburg and Russian autocracies then combined to suppress them bloodily. The Soviets were even more brutal. Approximately 2,500 freedom fighters were killed in twelve days of fighting, as well as nearly 100 members of the secret police, known as the AVO, and several hundred Soviet soldiers. In the aftermath, about 300 prominent Hungarians were judicially executed, including Imre Nagy, the prime minister who was the revolution's figurehead. Some 850,000 police prosecutions were opened, as a result of which 22,000 people were imprisoned. A few others were deported to the Soviet Union, and 200,000 fled to the West, among them the cream of the intelligentsia, including scientists, well-known writers such as Pal Ignotus, Tibor Meray, and Gyorgy Paloczi-Horvath, and not least General Bela Kiraly, the revolution's chief of staff.

Stifled in blood and terror, the revolution appeared a failure, and Communism set firm to be another long Dark Age. As Orwell had predicted, the future was to be a jackboot stamping on the human face forever. To do their bidding, the Soviets installed Janos Kadar as Communist Party leader and prime minister, the very essence of a quisling, a dour character with a thorough understanding of the mechanics of repression. It was his express purpose to hang Imre Nagy and other former close colleagues as well. So he was able to rule unchallenged for thirty years; and yet things did not work out as intended. Resting on force and the secret police, Communism proved unable to satisfy basic material and spiritual needs, and gradually withered on the vine, not only in Kadar's Hungary but throughout the Soviet bloc.

The Soviet Union had the military resources to prolong its empire. As from 1985, however, the general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, believed that the decline of Communism could be remedied. Consent was to replace force as the instrument of government. Almost at once, such a complete repudiation of Communism caused the whole system to fall apart. Aday came in 1989 when the Hungarian authorities simply opened the Iron Curtain; everybody and anybody could escape into the West; the Soviet bloc was no more. The revolution of 1956 had preserved the nation's sense of itself and kept alive everywhere the memory of freedom. Victory was posthumous, to be sure, but the human face nonetheless had survived the jackboot.

Nobody could have predicted this outcome. Sandor Marai, a deservedly popular writer, describes in his autobiography how he had taken refuge in the countryside to await the coming of the Red Army as it drove out the Germans late in 1944. Sure enough, he was in an orchard one misty morning when the first Soviet soldier appeared, but this man could bring no freedom, Marai immediately noted, because he had none for himself. Fleeing to the United States, Marai was only one among tens of thousands who escaped while they could. Stalin was then at the height of his power, and his policy towards the Eastern European countries the Red Army now occupied was to remodel them in the Soviet image. Consent did not enter into consideration.

In 1945 there were no more than a few hundred Communists in Hungary. Arriving from Moscow, their leaders, Matyas Rakosi and Erno Gero, had survived the Great Terror of the Thirties through craven obedience to Stalin. Rakosi was squat and bald, with virtually no neck, and his physical appearance seemed to correspond to the monstrous character within; Gero had been a commissar in the Spanish civil war with powers of life and death. They and their colleagues were prepared to commit every crime, including murder. Within a few short years, they rigged elections to seize power, eliminating other political parties by means of what Rakosi notoriously boasted were the "salami tactics" of intimidating some and corrupting others; collectivizing land; installing the AVO police state; and imprisoning the elite in concentration camps. Memoirs by Bela Szasz and the poet Gyorgy Faludy and others are classics of the prison literature of the twentieth century, recording the suffering and torture they had to endure in the AVO headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street in central Budapest, the Gyujto prison at Kobanya, the camps at Vac and Kistarcsa, and similar sites in the local gulag.

Stalin--still familiarly Uncle Joe--had a virtually free hand to consolidate Soviet conquests in Europe. Churchill protested about the descent of the Iron Curtain, and President Truman announced his doctrine in defense of democratic countries threatened with Communist takeover. In general, however, the average Westerner at that time held that the countries of Eastern Europe had had a bad war, pro-German, and they had to take what was coming to them. Bernard Shaw, as arrogant as he was infantile, could write in The New Statesman in October 1939 (of all moments) that after Hitler's blitzkrieg and partition with the Soviet Union at least we would not have to hear about Poland again. Another high-powered booby, Harold Nicolson, greeted the Soviet occupation of Hungary in The Spectator similarly, observing that Hungarians had done much harm and little good in Europe, and "now they will not again be able to disturb the peace."

In the winter of 1948, Stalin fell out with President Tito of Yugoslavia, who was pursuing a nationalistic and therefore heretical version of Communism. Show trials were arranged in the new Soviet satellites to bring supposed "Titoists" to heel, and since there were none, these had to be manufactured by the secret police. Rakosi settled on Laszlo Rajk and some associates, possible rivals for power within the Communist Party. These victims were alternately beaten and tortured, or persuaded to confess on the grounds that the Party demanded this last service of them, exactly as Arthur Koestler had imagined in his famous novel, Darkness at Noon. Rajk and others duly confessed to a farrago of nonsense, and were hanged. Covering this grisly farce, an unidentified special correspondent for the London Times judged the victims guilty as charged. This phenomenon of fellow traveling remains inexplicable.

INNOCENT TIMES

At this point, I must declare an interest. In the days of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a forebear of mine, a successful industrialist, used to buy property in Hungary on the grounds that "land never flies away," as he believed in that innocent pre-Nazi and pre-Soviet period. The Hungary of his day was "a false but enchanting country," as Pal Ignotus described it, wittily adding, "The national genius allowed even decent people to live quite merrily." To the Communists, we were petit bourgeois, if not landowners and capitalists, possibly even feudal.

By the time I was able to visit them, the properties had long been expropriated. Kapuvar, a house in the nineteenth-century gothic style, had been converted into a depot for Soviet tanks. The stud at Lesvar was abandoned, in ruins. A Soviet major had insisted on riding one of its prize-winning racehorses, but when this thoroughbred threw him he drew his revolver and shot it. I was shown 1930 photographs of harvesting at Pusztaszabolcs, and there was my fourteen-year-old mother and her younger sister with scores of other girls in the cornfield with an early model of a threshing machine. A favorite with the whole family was one Istvan Nagy. Taken prisoner on the Eastern front in 1943, and sent to Siberia, he had lost his toes from frostbite and never really recovered, dying soon after his release. His widow also cherished photographs. On one derelict building was the tablet recording that my forebear had built the local school and installed the telephone. With tears in their eyes, Mrs. Nagy and other villagers used to plead not to be forgotten. Communism could not last, they said, the old days must return.

Cold War politicians, diplomats, and Radio Free Europe in Munich liked to call for the "rollback" of Communism. Was that feasible? A preliminary step was the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1955 from their zone in Austria, and the neutrality of that country. Then in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor as general secretary, used the opportunity of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party in Moscow to denounce at least some of Stalin's crimes. The speech was too explosive to remain secret. Here was an admission from the top that Communism was not a matter of consent, only of force. All those who had done Stalin's bidding were now officially implicated as accessories in crime.

In the case of Hungary, outright Stalinists like Rakosi and Gero were wholly compromised. Prisoners by the thousands had to be released from the camps and prisons. The judicially murdered Laszlo Rajk was declared innocent, and on October 6, 1956, he was reburied in the Budapest cemetery reserved for national heroes. An immense and somber crowd attended. Rajk's widow, Julia, spoke, and his young son was present. On the following morning, the leading Communist newspaper commented on its front page, "It is not only mourning that silences the people before these coffins, but also passionate hatred."

Disgrace and crime were out in the open. The promotion of Imre Nagy to be prime minister at this point might well have headed off revolution, but the Kremlin continued to prevaricate for several days before finally appointing him. An agricultural expert by profession, Nagy had spent years in Moscow proving himself a reliable Communist, and was almost certainly a secret-police informer. By nature cautious and legalistic, not an ideologue, he was the very man to back away slowly from Stalinism. His besetting sin was credulity, and it did him in. Khrushchev himself liked to maintain that if he had ordered the shooting of ten Hungarian writers at the right moment there would have been no revolution--a remark revealing how Stalinist his own mentality remained.

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Instead, the intellectual elite organized large meetings, and on October 23 students marched in a demonstration that by the end of the day brought 250,000 people onto the streets. They set fire to bookshops selling Marxist publications, and to the Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society. In one of the city squares a bronze statue of Stalin stood on a marble plinth, altogether some thirty feet high. Using ropes and cutting equipment, the crowd destroyed this statue, leaving only its empty boots--a symbolic precedent for dictators, as Saddam Hussein was to discover. People next tried to storm the radio station; shots were exchanged; demonstrators and secret policemen were killed. Military units under Bela Kiraly and his deputy Colonel Pal Maleter went over to the demonstrators, and so did police units under Sandor Kopacsi. An uprising in the heroic style of the nineteenth century with flags and barricades--another 1848--had suddenly materialized.

The Soviet response was a characteristic mixture of hypocrisy, deception, and violence. Two members of the Politburo flew in to Budapest--Anastas Mikoyan, who preferred a political solution, and the very different Mikhail Suslov, skilled at devising ideological justification for murder. They relied on senior KGB officers and the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, Yuri Andropov, another Stalinist hardliner with a future career as head of the KGB and general secretary of the Party. Among them, there was never any confidence in Nagy, and they secretly arranged to replace him with Kadar. Preparing to attack in strength, they pretended to be seeking peaceful compromise. Unable to read the situation clearly, Nagy was driven to measures that went against his grain, resigning from the Party, declaring neutrality on the lines of the Austrian precedent, and appealing to the United Nations. The Soviets summoned Colonel Maleter and others to a meeting in one of their barracks to discuss Soviet withdrawal, but this was a trap. Arrested, Maleter was hanged. His last recorded words were, "Long live independent and socialist Hungary." Nagy was similarly duped. Having sought and obtained refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, he was promised a laissez-passer, but was then hijacked from the vehicle driving him away. He too was hanged. Khrushchev had Nagy executed, according to Fedor Burlatsky, a Kremlin insider, "as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries."

'THE HEART OF AMERICA GOES OUT ...'

I was in Budapest not long after the Soviet repression, and saw houses and even streets shattered by the shelling of the tanks, on the scale of outright war. Suspicion and fear haunted the city. President Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, might have made an issue of it, but these events had taken them by surprise. Besides, they were otherwise engrossed in the imminent presidential election. Spencer Barnes, the charge d'affaires in the American legation in Budapest, urged the administration to build on the "tremendous revulsion against Soviet domination," and to consider giving material aid to the freedom fighters. All that Eisenhower could find it in him to say on hearing the first news of shooting in Budapest was, "The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary." Raising the specter of nuclear war, he made it unmistakably clear that the Soviet Union was free to deal with the revolution as it saw fit. Rollback therefore subsided into containment, a stand-still policy that stayed in place until President Reagan was elected. Robert Murphy, undersecretary of state and a veteran participant in great events, summarized Washington's failure: "Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give the Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way."

Worse still, Eisenhower and Dulles were mesmerized by the attack on Egypt that Britain, France, and Israel were launching at that very same moment, and which has gone down in history as the Suez campaign. The coincidence led to the false equivalence that imperialism was in play in both cases, to be condemned equally, although one was pro-Soviet and the other anti-Soviet. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian one-man ruler, had taken delivery of arms from the Soviet bloc, and was in the process of consolidating his version of the standard Third World country, anti-American and Sovietized. It would have been greatly in the American interest for Nasser to be overthrown, as the three Western allies intended. But the campaign had been planned in secret, without the knowledge of Washington. Astonished and then annoyed by the conduct of their allies, Eisenhower and Dulles made sure to abort the Suez campaign. Within months they realized that they had merely played into Soviet hands. The mistake was by then irreparable on two fronts. The Soviet client in Hungary had received a free ride, and the Middle East was condemned to be one of the bloodiest arenas of the Cold War, with consequences that to this day grow only more menacing.

Kadar and the Communist Party were in a quandary when they had to explain why they shot, hanged, and imprisoned so many of the Party members, workers, and peasants who according to doctrine were owners of the Communist state. For the purpose, they turned truth on its head: The revolution had actually been a counterrevolution, inspired and promoted by the CIA, Radio Free Europe, a clutch of former fascists and landowners, and for good measure the Catholic Church. Every one of these accusations was not just false but without any semblance of reality. The charge against the Church was particularly vicious. Its chief representative, Cardinal Mindszenty, had been first in solitary confinement in prison, and later under house arrest, since the day after Christmas 1948, victim of a show trial for espionage and currency speculation. Released just hours before the final Soviet counterattack, he had time only to make one rather awkward speech, and then place himself under the protection of the American legation, where he was to remain for years, a symbol of victimization.

A book called 1956: Counter-Revolution in Hungary--Words and Weapons, published in 1969, was the standard work in defense of the Soviet-imposed regime. Today its mendacity has lost the power to hurt but bears witness to those times. Imre Nagy's views, as reduced in this book's jargon, "were essentially identical with the programme suggested and transmitted by the organs of international imperialism." The heading of a final chapter proclaims, "Shoulder to Shoulder with the Working Masses for Socialist Consolidation." Its author, Janos Berecz, had studied in Moscow, became a member of Hungary's Central Committee in 1980, and eventually ideological secretary, with responsibility for propaganda. His voice would have been influential in the event that the Hungarian Party had decided not to open the Iron Curtain in 1989 but instead to shoot people as in 1956. When I interviewed him in 1993 in his pretty house in the Buda hills, he said that he had given up his "one-sided approach" and conceded that the 1956 revolution had been lawful. A businessman, he--and indeed the rest of the Party--eagerly volunteered for the petit-bourgeois ranks they had once persecuted. Signs of penance may be detected. The secret-police headquarters on Andrassy Street is now an anti-Communist museum, and in its underground cells are photographs of former prisoners there, some of whom I am proud to have known.

Reflecting long after the event, Peter Kende, a prominent Hungarian journalist, considered that 1956 had been "the Waterloo of leftist thought." Hannah Arendt, an archetypal intellectual of the Left, thought that this revolution "illuminated the immense landscape of post-war totalitarianism." In shock at Soviet reality, the British Communist Party shriveled. In Italy, even as faithful a Stalinist as Palmiro Togliatti expressed doubt and dismay. Jean-Paul Sartre, probably the world's foremost Soviet apologist, wrote that the Soviets had won nothing and lost everything, merely "kindling hatred in people's hearts." In the Soviet Union itself, the courageous Andrei Amalrik spoke for fellow dissidents when he stated that "1956 was a turning-point in the history of the Communist bloc." So it was. Large numbers of people had proved ready to sacrifice themselves in order to be free.

With wonderful irony, after exactly half a century crowds are again demonstrating in Budapest, this time against what they say is bad, even dishonest, government. They will not be shot for withholding their consent and demanding another government. The hopes of 1956 have come true.

Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor. Among his many books is The Hungarian Revolution, published in 1969.