In these latter days, we are told man should be made new, and if that fails, we can replace him with thinking machines. The past is therefore denigrated, largely a blank. Today, most history is obscure, except where memory is kept alive by frequent reference to some event, usually for purposes of propaganda. Thus, we hear endlessly about World War II, or rather a faerie version of it. But we never hear about many other important episodes in the years before or since. Today I will correct historical amnesia about one such event—the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the only wholly-spontaneous armed uprising against Communism in the twentieth century. And, not coincidentally, one which offers valuable lessons to 2024 America.
If you visit the National Museum in Budapest, or for that matter any Hungarian gallery that touches on history, you will see that a great deal of Hungarian art revolves around losing battles. It is always defeat for the Hungarians, but always heroic—the Hungarians are a tremendously stubborn people, very touchy on points of honor, and have always preferred losing everything to switching sides or cutting a deal, unlike many of their Slav neighbors. The last non-Habsburg Hungarian king, twenty-year-old Louis II, died fighting the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Mohács in 1526; no leading from the rear for Hungarians, then or ever. Hungarian history is replete with last-ditch defenses of ramparts and doomed sorties.
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The twentieth century was not kind to Hungary. Nor, for that matter, were most of the previous centuries, ever since the Ottomans occupied most of Hungary after Mohács. Before that catastrophe, Hungary had been one of the first kingdoms of Europe, but afterwards it never regained anything approaching that status. Hungary has thus long been a European footnote—more important than, say, Bulgaria, but no longer anywhere near the first rank of countries. So-called modernity, which peaked in the twentieth century, brought only misery to Hungary—the result of bad fortune, choices that did not pan out, and of the Hungarian national personality, less compatible with modernity than some other nations. More recently, Hungary has been swimming against the tide in failing Europe, with mixed success, the future of which is impossible to predict, but will mostly depend on its powerful neighbors, not on Hungary bargaining with equals.
In 1900, however, none of what lay ahead was obvious, or even remotely predictable. In 1867, in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, Hungary had finally managed to extract a degree of independence from the Habsburgs, who had driven out the Turks in 1686 and had retained effective sovereignty over the Hungarians for two hundred years. But defeat in World War I stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its thousand-year-old territory, parceled out to the winners who surrounded it, mostly entirely new countries, leaving a rump state hard to defend and with few natural resources. Then the 1919 Red Terror (which is the topic of another upcoming long-form article by me) gave Hungarians a foretaste of Communism, though fortunately they managed (ironically, with the help of their new neighbors who had just profited at their expense) to crush those early Communists, followed by serving them a generous helping of well-deserved justice.
In the 1920s and 1930s Hungary stabilized, under the moderately authoritarian rule of Miklós Horthy, the Regent for the absent Habsburg king (whom the victorious Allies kept far from Hungary). But the Hungarians chose the losing side again in World War II, even if an alliance with Germany was the only rational and reasonable choice. Hungary briefly regained much of its lost territory, to massive and universal jubilation. But it was not for long; the Hungarians were once more laid prostrate by the invading victorious Red Army in 1945. The Soviet Union defeated the combined armed forces of Hungry and Germany (notably at the heroic, but doomed, Siege of Budapest, where fifty thousand Germans and Hungarians died to defend the city) and laughably called it liberation as they slew, looted, and raped their way across the land.
The Hungarians knew what was coming; the silly myth that the Communists put about for decades, still repeated in some history books, that the Hungarians celebrated when the Russians conquered them is, well, exactly that. The Germans had, it is true, engineered a palace coup in early 1944 (which was not resisted in any way whatsoever, and barely noticed or cared about by most Hungarians), and in October had replaced Horthy’s nationalistic conservatism with the rule of the homegrown Arrow Cross, a very rough analog of Germany’s National Socialists. But even so, only traitors wanted the Russians to win, along with, to be fair, many of Hungary’s Jews, who had been completely integrated into Hungarian society and whom Horthy had largely protected from German designs, but hundreds of thousands of whom the Arrow Cross shipped off to be murdered by the Germans or worked to death when Horthy was forced from power (as happened to the grandfather of a close American friend of mine). There was essentially zero “resistance,” contrary to later myths, except that in 1945 some Hungarian soldiers captured by the Russians returned with them as collaborators, helping the Russians conquer Hungary.
On a personal note, 1945 was when my grandfather, ráczalmási Molnár Gyula, like many Hungarians, fled the country, never to return. He was a physician, and right-wing, and had briefly held a county-level medical administrative position; such men were at risk of death (in fact, others of my family were killed by the Russians), and he had a wife and three very young daughters. He did not want to leave; my family correctly despises the stupid Emma Lazarus poem about the “wretched masses.” But unlike today’s invading migrants, he contributed to his country of refuge, and died in 1999, at the age of ninety-seven. He was a great man, even if nobody remembers him today but me and a handful of others. When we die, nobody will remember. I should erect a statue of him. Maybe I will.
In 1945, another Hungarian national trait, irrational optimism, came out in full force. Yes, the Russians still occupied the country, and dismantled entire industries to ship the parts to the Soviet Union, while demanding enormous “reparations,” but the Hungarians hoped that the Russians would soon leave, and Hungary might become part of a neutral zone between the free world and Communism. They did not know that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had already sold them out to Joseph Stalin at the Second Moscow Conference, and there was never any chance that the Russians would not impose a fully Communist system on Hungary. Yet, perhaps wary of the Hungarian reputation for recalcitrance, they took their time about it, even though Hungary was the only fully Axis country in Central Europe. The Russians had brought with them a pack of so-called Muscovites, Hungarian Communists who had lived in Russia since the defeat of the 1919 Red Terror, and through them gradually imposed total Communist control, along with the inevitable fresh Communist terror (used to break down the social order and to thereby control and remake the populace, through constant insecurity and fear).
At first, though, they tried the road of free elections, perhaps believing their own propaganda about liberation. Unsurprisingly, very few voted for Communism (at the end of the war, the Communist Party in Hungary had less than a hundred members, all in hiding), though a minority did vote for the Social Democrats. The Muscovite the Red Army installed as Communist Party chief was Mátyás Rákosi, a very smart, very ugly, and very brutal man. In a well-practiced routine, regardless of election results the crucial ministries were from the first reserved for the Communists by the Russians, notably the defense ministry and, most importantly, the interior ministry—that is, the secret police, not, as in the American system, the land-and-forests ministry. Rákosi famously originated what he called “salami tactics”—gradual, rather than immediate and violent, Communist accession to total power in a one-party state. This technique, to be sure, could only work while the country was occupied by foreign troops, who held the real power.
The key mechanism of salami tactics was to pressure the other political parties still allowed (which did not include any right-wing parties), notably the centrist Smallholders’ Party, which held an absolute majority in Parliament after relatively free elections in 1946, to exclude anyone effective from their ranks by proclaiming them illegitimate “fascists.” Gradually Rákosi turned up the heat, arresting Smallholder and other elected parliament members and accusing them of conspiracy against the state. In 1947, Rákosi kidnapped the son of the Smallholder prime minister and used that leverage to force him into exile, replacing him with a Communist stooge from within the Smallholders. And, inevitably, in 1948 he took total power, naming himself “Stalin’s best pupil,” and beginning the totalitarian terror always required by any total Left victory, combined with a cult of personality around himself equaling that of Stalin’s, whose ear Rákosi claimed to have. Close to a million Hungarians, around fifteen percent of the population, were arrested at one time or another (including more relatives of mine) in the next few years, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, tortured, or both, and tens of thousands murdered. Along with this went the standard Communist structural program—the state becoming the sole employer; forced collectivization; governmental theft of private property, including industrial concerns and personal homes; and so forth.
The Warm-Up
The chief instrument of this terror was the secret police—the ÁVO, an acronym for Államvédelmi Osztály, Department of State Protection. (As with the KGB, the ÁVO changed names more than once, and in 1956 was actually ÁVH, State Protection Authority, but everyone still used the term ÁVO, as will I.) The ÁVO, about which no standalone work has been published in English (more on relevant books on today’s topic in a moment), had about 50,000 troops, organized military-style, in the usual method of Communist secret police (not including informers, who numbered perhaps a million). It filled its ranks primarily with two disparate types of people—hardcore Communists, many or mostly Jews resentful towards non-Jewish Hungarians (again of which more later), and former Arrow Cross toughs, usually from the countryside, whose past could be held over them and whose predilections toward violence were of use to the new regime.
The ÁVO, which operated as a law unto itself, was organized by László Rajk, minister of the interior, another longtime Communist, but not a Muscovite, and one of the four men who effectively ran the country in 1948 (the other two were Ernő Gerő, minister of finance, who had distinguished himself as a killer helping the Soviets in the Spanish Civil War, and Mihály Farkas, the defense minister and a nasty piece of work, even by the standards of these men, and whose son was an ÁVO torture specialist). The ÁVO headquarters in Budapest (now the House of Terror, a museum focused on the crimes of Communism, as well as of the Arrow Cross) was turned into a vast torture center, complete with an acid bath for dissolving corpses and flushing them into the sewers. The secret police operated around a hundred brutal Gulag-type labor camps throughout the country, the most famous one at a quarry in Recsk, in northern Hungary, where the death rate was very high. For a decade, no more hated group of men (and some women) existed in the nation. The ÁVO was actually separated into two groups, the less-hated border guards, who were conscripts, and the core secret police, who were volunteers. The groups were distinguished by the color of their collar tabs, which were respectively blue and green. Both, but especially the latter, received fantastic salaries, up to twenty times those of a normal worker. The ÁVO, to their later regret, were always easy to pick out, by distinctive uniforms and by having shiny boots in good condition, something almost impossible to find in Hungary.
Many of those whom the ÁVO persecuted were Communists and leftists. Sometimes show trials were held; most victims simply disappeared into the ÁVO’s system without any word to their families, often never to reemerge. Most high profile, in 1949, Rajk, whom Rákosi viewed as a threat, was arrested and executed, along with numerous Communists associated with him, after a massive show trial, as “Titoist imperialists.” (This was the period when Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, was on the outs with Stalin.) The Rajk trial began multiple rounds of typical Stalinist-type purges within the Party. Other victims of the ÁVO during the postwar years were factory workers of whom an example was being made; or small farmers; or anyone in the gentry class; or nondescript and unimportant men who had made the wrong personal enemies; or anyone who had been overhead making a joke at the Party’s or Rákosi’s expense. Very few, if any, were right-wing; those men had mostly wisely departed. None, of course, were guilty of any actual crime (there was a separate regular police force for dealing with actual, rather than political, crimes).
But unlike Stalin’s, Rákosi’s untrammeled personal rule lasted barely more than five years. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Hungary’s Soviet overlords, who were very well informed about and interested in matters in Hungary, no longer approved of Rákosi’s flavor of full-throated Stalinism, and Rákosi had no way or willingness to climb down from the theme around which he organized his rule. It did not help that Hungary’s economy was in the toilet, so the Russians made Rákosi share power with other loyal Communists of a slightly more reformist nature—most importantly, Imre Nagy, a Muscovite agricultural expert who had avoided excessive association with the terror and who thought Rákosi was too extreme (and who was picked in part because he was not Jewish, unlike all the other top members of the Hungarian regime). Between 1953 and 1956 the Hungarian Communists engaged in a seesaw power struggle, trying to purge each other, often with the cooperation of one faction or another within the Soviet Politburo. Nagy was forced out of the government in 1955, as well as expelled from the Party and fired from his civilian employment (as a teacher of agricultural matters); he was lucky to stay out of prison. But he retained considerably more popularity than any other prominent Communist, in part because he had overseen the distribution of confiscated farmlands to landless peasants after the war, and was known to be lukewarm on forcing peasants into collective farms. Most of all, even though in the 1930s he had acted as a KGB informer (something only fully revealed after the fall of Communism in 1989, and which protected him from Rákosi to some extent), he was the de facto leader of all the Communists who were not part of the current power structure, especially those who had been persecuted during the purges, but had survived.
The year 1956 brought turmoil to the Soviet satellite states in Central Europe, the inevitable result of Nikita Khrushchev’s attempts to engender mild Communist reforms in order to better advance Communism. Immediately after Stalin’s death, the Red Army in East Germany had shot some dozens of striking German workers, unhappy about dire economic conditions and ever-increasing production demands. In June of 1956, similar unrest spread in Poland, and again workers’ protests had to be put down by Russian tanks, killing dozens more. In Poland, the solution was to replace the top Communist leader, replacing him with Władysław Gomułka, who by comparison was moderate and made moderate noises, while still toeing the Soviet line one hundred percent. These events were closely observed and noted by the Hungarians, especially the Polish events—the Hungarians have always viewed the Poles, though ethnically distinct, as kindred spirits (probably because they have no common border and they are both, historically at least, devoutly Catholic, rather than Orthodox). Discontent rumbled throughout Hungary, and the beginnings of the Revolution began to take shape in the summer of 1956.
Sources
Books in English about the Revolution fall into three general categories. One is personal memoirs by men who had managed to flee to the West. A second is popular histories (there are very few, if any, strictly academic works, in English) written before the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991. These tend to closely resemble each other, but vary in their focus, often spending much time, too much time, on America’s relationship to the Revolution. A third is histories written after the fall of Soviet Communism; these benefit from the opening of both Hungarian and Soviet archives, though much is now lost and a good deal that is not lost has not been released, and from the willingness of participants living in Hungary to now speak openly.
I read about twenty of these books. (At the end of this article is a listing.) I did not read any books in Hungarian, though I have several of those; I can only read Hungarian extremely slowly and with a dictionary in hand, and I do not have the latest scholarship, rather mostly older Hungarian books. This may create gaps; it is possible that recent books in Hungarian shed light on events that English-language books do not (there are many books and papers, and there is an Institute for History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, established in Budapest in 1991). But I do not think that any such light is crucial to understanding and interpreting the Revolution. Unlike with other historical events with a political overlay, there is relatively little variation in the facts presented. Sometimes there is a variation in emphasis, or different views of minor facts, or disagreement about the interpretation of events—for example, was József Dudás, one of the rebel leaders, a notably charismatic and blustering man, actually helpful to the Revolution, or not? To what degree was Imre Nagy a hero, and to what degree merely a figurehead or pawn? But these are sidelights to a generally very coherent narrative.
This is a refreshing change from the examination of most historical events better known in the West. When I examined the Spanish Civil War, for example, I noted the existence there of “standard candles”—events, such as the bombing of Guernica, which receive very different factual presentations depending on the politics of the presenter. No such standard candles exist for 1956, and really, the politics of the authors is, for the most part, either not apparent, left, or center-left, because the authors were refugees from actual Communism but unwilling to abandon the Left entirely. No right-wing book, in English at least, has been written about the Revolution, perhaps because, for better or for worse, organized right-wing forces had no presence at all in the Revolution (despite the shrill claims by the restored Communist regime, which for decades made the silly claim that “Horthyite fascists” were behind it all).
Of the memoirs, all are interesting, but by far the most interesting to me was Sándor Kopácsi’s In the Name of the Working Class, published in 1986. Kopácsi, who died in 2001, was head of the Budapest police force at the time of the Revolution (the regular police, not the secret police; they wore blue uniforms and were therefore easy to distinguish from the ÁVO—though the ÁVO kept blue uniforms in storage against the day of judgment, which ultimately helped many of them escape justice). He was a devoted Communist, but that is not why the book is interesting—as I say, most of the memoirs are written by Communists or former Communists. It is because it is the only English-language memoir of which I am aware in which the memoirist himself participated directly as a man of high authority in a period of Stalinist terror. Kopácsi tries to distance himself, and his betrayal of the regime during the Revolution certainly is to his credit. But he was Director of Internment Affairs for two years, starting in 1949, in which capacity he reported directly to the minister of the interior, and signed off on innumerable internment decrees of men he knew to be totally innocent. His descriptions of this are fascinating, and invaluable for understanding the mindset of a Left functionary in such a period. Kopácsi was sentenced to death after the Revolution for his betrayal of the regime, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in an amnesty in 1963, and his book also narrates the difficulties a man such as he subsequently experienced in Hungary, which are similarly of great interest.
Of the histories, the best post-Communist one is historian Paul Lendvai’s 1956: One Day that Shook the Communist World, published in 2008. He was in Budapest during the Revolution, as well. Others I list at the end are also very worthwhile.
One important book, however, does not fit neatly into any of these categories. It is a book of which I had not before heard, but which at the time published, 1981, was by far the most complete history of the Revolution. This is David Irving’s exhaustively researched and nearly-unbelievably detailed Uprising!. The book is almost totally ignored by other writers, however, because Irving is today a controversial figure, though he wrote many well-regarded books about the Third Reich, including The Mare’s Nest, about the German rocket program. I haven’t yet read any of those (I do own several), but he is controversial because he argues that Jews were not as badly treated, nor as deliberately badly treated, by the National Socialists as the postwar consensus insists. However, his book about the Revolution was a disappointment, even though he was able to interview many key figures who spoke for the first time since 1956, including several important Russians. (He claimed he wrote the book because people said he was obsessed with the Germans, and he wanted to write about something new.)
The book is quite odd. Irving is obsessed with psychiatric analysis, and lengthy chunks of the book are taken up with Freudian analysis of revolutionaries, conducted at Cornell University after the revolution, including such gems as identifying “castration anxiety” in refugee intellectuals. It is also odd because he is indeed obsessed with the Jews. For example, he insists on exclusively using the out-of-place word “pogrom” to refer to payback received by the ÁVO. He repeatedly implies that the Revolution was largely driven by anti-Jewish animus (often invisible, but recoverable with psychoanalysis), but never provides a single piece of hard evidence, not even a quotation or a shouted slur, to support either that theory or that the ÁVO was attacked because it was full of Jews, rather than because it was full of torturers. This gives his work a slippery feel.
There is a connection between Jews and Communism, to be sure—Irving emphasizes the undisputed fact that the majority of important Hungarian Communists were Jews, along with much or most of the ÁVO, and that many Hungarians resented this. But his conclusion, that the Revolution was, in effect, a rebellion against the Jews is not supportable in any meaningful way. Examining the matter more closely, including third-party analysis of Irving’s work (also oddly, some of it appearing in Irving’s own recent republication of his book as an appendix), it appears that Irving received official cooperation from the Communist Hungarian government for the book—and the official propaganda line of that government was that the Revolution was designed to re-impose the rule of the Arrow Cross. Thus, it was in the interests of that government for Irving to weave fictions about anti-Semitism during the Revolution, which suggests a quid pro quo, no doubt one Irving was happy to honor, given his general views on Jews. However, we will return at the end to the Jews and the Revolution.
The Beginning of the Revolution
And so we arrive at the Revolution itself. The Revolution was an entirely spontaneous and unplanned affair. It was birthed, by accident, by Communist intellectuals, scribblers who for the preceding several years had mostly made their living churning out paeans to Rákosi, but many of whom resented their low and precarious position, and viewed with distaste both the terror and how Communism was being practiced. Seeing an opening after Stalin’s death, in 1955 some had started writing articles critical of abuses that would have seen them thrown in jail and tortured only a few years before. Some were disciplined, but not severely, and their efforts got a shot in the arm when, in February 1956, Khrushchev formally denounced Stalin’s crimes, which by extension was a denouncing of the crimes of Rákosi and his cronies, who were still very much in power. All Hungarians knew of this event, because Radio Free Europe continuously broadcast into Hungary. The bolder among them began to criticize Rákosi to his face at public meetings. Rákosi kept his cool, figuring that soon enough Khrushchev would come around to his way of thinking—which was a sensible enough strategy, given that Rákosi had managed to sideline Nagy after Nagy’s initial support by the Soviet Politburo.
In March of 1956, however, a debating group composed of disaffected Communist writers and intellectuals, the Petőfi Circle, was established. (Sándor Petőfi was a famous Hungarian poet, perhaps the most famous, who died young in the 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs.) Technically it was part of the Communist youth organization, DISZ (Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, the Association of Working Youth). Through the spring and summer, their meetings attracted more and more attention, until thousands were showing up, many shooting off their mouths about the regime, if still in guarded fashion. For the members of the Circle, opposition to certain elements and actions of the regime was an intellectual matter. What heightened general interest in the Circle’s activities, however, was bitterness generated by total economic immiseration. (Not only lack of food; a particular grievance of the workers was payment by piece-work, with ever-increasing requirements for output.) The three legs of the Revolution were thus “reform” Communists, general anger at the economic situation, and rising expectations caused by changes abroad. Khrushchev is said to later have sourly and accurately noted, “If ten or so Hungarian writers had been shot at the right moment, the revolution would never have occurred.”
Meanwhile, the Americans and the British encouraged unrest in Hungary through Radio Free Europe, the Hungarian desk of which was staffed by pseudonymous Hungarian émigrés who loathed Rákosi. They didn’t have any actual expectation of results, though. American and British intelligence thought the Hungarian regime was extremely stable and strong, and that there was zero chance for any actual unrest, even of the very limited East German or Polish variety. A CIA report in 1953 said, “The population does not now, nor will they in the future, have the capacity to resist actively the present regime.” And the British ambassador to Hungary relayed to his superiors, “[A]ny idea that Rákosi will not remain the most powerful single figure may safely be discounted.” This total failure of intelligence with respect to the internal workings of Communist regimes was a constant during the Cold War. As late as 1989, the CIA was making the same exact assessment of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and this should be a lesson to us about what we are told about today’s world.
The Soviets, however, were not as clueless as the Americans. Far from it, in fact. The Politburo was kept very well informed by the Soviet ambassador to Hungary—Yuri Andropov, a lifelong KGB man who was suave, highly intelligent, and spoke fluent Hungarian. Andropov relayed that the country was rapidly destabilizing, and ascribed the fault to Rákosi and his circle. Anastas Mikoyan, who managed the amazing feat of being a member of the Politburo, the core ruling circle of the Soviet Union, from 1923 to 1976, and acted as a sort of Politburo troubleshooter, therefore traveled to Budapest to take matters in hand. On July 13, he ordered Rákosi to resign (and to immediately travel to Russian exile for “health reasons”), to be replaced by Gerő, though he warned Khrushchev that even so, “day after day, the comrades are further losing their grip on power. . . . The comrades prepare reports . . . while enemy elements act among the masses and in the country unpunished. . . . Every day the influence of the hostile, opposition mood is expanding.” Three divisions of Russian troops, 75,000 men, were stationed in Hungary; Mikoyan thought that might not be enough, if push came to shove, but if combined with the Hungarian armed forces, plus a hastily-created plan to impose martial law, it would probably be adequate if things got any worse.
Gerő was the wrong choice. He was no Gomułka, who might have split the difference and diffused the tension; no Hungarian saw him as any different from Rákosi. Nothing changed; Petőfi Circle meetings became even larger and more clamorous. Gerő thought it might be a good idea to differentiate himself by rehabilitating the dead Rajk, something his widow had been publicly petitioning for at Circle meetings. On October 6, Rajk was reburied, taken from the secret hole into which his body had been thrown, covered with lime (the standard practice for the victims of Communist show trials). His funeral was attended by more than 100,000 people in terrible weather. Rajk, of course, when alive was no better than Rákosi, but by becoming a victim of Communist terror, he became an allowed stand-in for all the other victims, something Gerő should have foreseen. Rajk’s widow spoke, holding close her fatherless seven-year-old son; more than one revolution has originated in a widow’s tears and rage, as Gerő should also have known. Massive discontent was thus made manifest and spread by face-to-face conversations among citizens (necessary since the ÁVO ran a vast telephone listening operation). Gerő got no credit, and rising expectations continued to rise, something that was wholly incompatible with Gerő remaining in power unless something drastic turned the situation around. Andropov, a man of deep penetration, repeatedly warned Moscow and Gerő the situation was deteriorating further. Gerő, however, didn’t see it, and unwisely travelled out of the country, to Yugoslavia, until October 22.
But on October 22, thousands of students met at the Budapest Technical University, the most prestigious university in the country, with the announced topic being whether to form a new student group to supersede DISZ. Students were the spark and tinder of the violent phase of the Revolution, and it is crucial to remember that all of these young men were carefully selected by the state for compliance, the cream of the Communist crop. Nobody whose background included anything but impeccable worker or lower peasant origins, along with obedience by the entire family to all Communist dictates from birth, was permitted anywhere near a university, so nearly all of these men (along with a few women) were true Communist believers—but many were unhappy with Communism as Rákosi had implemented it. The chaotic meeting veered off course very quickly, despite the best efforts of the Communist administration to control the debate. After many hours, concluding with the singing of the forbidden national anthem, it ended in the creation of a list of demands, the Sixteen Points (more or less; the original version had twelve, but it kept changing, and by morning publication it was sixteen). The students also made plans for a demonstration the next day, with the supposed goal of showing sympathy for the Poles, to be held at the location of the statute of Józef Bem, a Polish general who had fought for the Hungarians in 1848. (Very strangely, several books on the Revolution claim he was executed by the Austrians, which is completely false. Actually, he fled to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam to avoid extradition, and became Governor of Aleppo. I suppose this shows how historical errors are propagated.) All of this was entirely spontaneous, a set of emergent events with, quite literally, no pre-planning by anybody.
The Sixteen Points were radical. They called for, among other things, the exit of all Soviet troops; national elections by secret ballot; trials for members of the Rákosi regime, including Rákosi and Farkas by name; release of all political prisoners; the removal of the giant bronze statue of Stalin that the regime had erected on the site of one of Budapest’s largest churches; and total freedom of speech and expression. The Sixteen Points were rapidly distributed by various methods, including hand-printing, during the night of October 22. Inside a city, it is always impossible to stop the flow of information, even without radio, TV, or internet. Communists and other left-wing authoritarians, who invariably turn to and rely on massive censorship to prop up their power (and something we see all across the West at this very moment), never seem to learn this lesson.
As October 23 dawned, the Communist leaders hurriedly met as soon as Gerő returned from Belgrade. They bickered and yelled at each other. They banned all public gatherings, then rescinded the ban. Nagy, whom the Sixteen Points demanded be permitted to form a new government, stayed home, paralyzed, not knowing what to do if the Party did not order it. (It did not help that he had a bad heart condition and was prone to depression, nor that his personality did not lend itself to quick or decisive action. Nobody would have chosen him as the leader of a revolution if they had any other choice.) At 3:00 p.m. two marches began. The first started from the Technical University, on the Buda (western and hilly) side of the city, which is separated from Pest, the eastern and flat side of the city, by the Danube. The second formed among other university students on the Pest side. They aimed to converge on the statue of Bem, at the northern side of Buda, just across the Margit Bridge, a major thoroughfare (which also connects Margaret Island, named after a thirteenth-century saint, the daughter of a king of Hungary, who lived in a convent there).
Tens of thousands joined along the way, marching ten, twenty, then forty abreast, including elite military cadets (whose political loyalty was supposed to be unquestionable). The chants started with ones generally acceptable to the authorities, but quickly changed into ones such as “Rákosi into the Danube!” But once the masses arrived at Bem’s statue, they had no clear purpose and, again, no plan at all. It was here that the most memorable symbol of the Revolution, the red-green-white Hungarian tricolor flag with the Communist emblem cut out of the center, made its appearance, and spread rapidly. Communist intellectuals, whose Petőfi Circle had started all this but who were unnerved by the results, made poorly-received milquetoast speeches by the statue, until someone in the restless crowd yelled “To Parliament!” This was the end of any influence by the scribbling intellectuals over the Revolution.
The famous and enormous Hungarian Parliament building is across the Margit Bridge and a little south, back towards the center of the city. As the marchers surged toward it, tens of thousands more joined—this time men and women whose workday had ended, many of them factory workers. By the time they reached Parliament, which is surrounded by a massive square, the crowd numbered hundreds of thousands, and the most-heard chant was “Russians go home!” (Russkik haza!) Nagy, dragged to Parliament by his allies against his will, made a timid and also ill-received speech, which he began by addressing the crowd as “comrades,” to their great disgust. At the same time, another huge crowd had gathered around the hated seventy-five foot statute of Stalin, some distance away, and had begun to try to pull it down, without effect. By ten p.m., however, workers from Csepel, another Danube island in the southern part of Budapest containing huge industrial works, arrived with acetylene torches, cutting the statue off at the knees, whereupon it fell full length on its face in the square.
Some thousands marched onward, to the main radio station, further south in Pest, garrisoned with ÁVO troops, to demand that the Sixteen Points be broadcast. The radio director pretended to make the desired broadcast, but the crowd quickly realized, by simply listening to the radio, that she was lying. Instead, she broadcast an ill-advised speech by Gerő, attacking the marchers and demanding that “counter-revolutionary elements” be suppressed. The enraged demonstrators began to throw bricks; the ÁVO responded with tear gas and firehoses, and then opened fire from the rooftop, killing several protestors. Hungarian tanks and infantry arrived, ordered to reinforce the ÁVO; some instead joined the protestors and began to distribute their small arms (the rest just returned to barracks). Protestors broke into and ransacked a nearby ammunition depot, and began assaulting the radio station in earnest. It is one of the ironies of the Revolution that all young people in Hungary had received extensive military training, including in partisan, guerilla warfare, such as sniping and using improvised munitions. The regime thought this would be useful if the Americans invaded, but it was instead useful for defeating the regime. By dawn the radio building was captured, along with most of its hundred-man ÁVO contingent, although several had been killed in the fighting. A few were shot on the spot; the rest held prisoner or simply released.
Meanwhile, continuously kept informed by Andropov, Khrushchev ordered Gerő to appoint Nagy as Prime Minister (replacing András Hegedüs, another Rákosi cutout). Even though the Prime Minister was not the supreme ruler (that, as in all Communist systems, was the head of the Party, here Gerő), the Soviets hoped this would defuse the anger of the crowds. But at the same time they ordered Soviet tanks, seven hundred of them, and 6,000 men, stationed just outside the city, to enter with guns blazing, assuming that the same combination of lead and promised mild reform would work as it had in East Germany and Poland, “sobering up” the population. Unfortunately for the regime, these were not elite troops, and the tanks were lightly-armored older models, susceptible to incendiary attack. And as the tanks entered the central city towards morning, the Russians discovered the Hungarian national characteristic of reacting with arguably-irrational fury to foreign invasion, and of fighting until the last dog dies. The tanks and men were attacked with great ferocity, by small protean groups that formed and moved unpredictably and fluidly, which used the complicated side streets of the city to attack and melt away, while hampering Russian movement by throwing up barricades made of cobblestones and turned-over streetcars on the main roads. Pest’s roads consist of three giant ring roads interlaced with cross-streets, many of them too narrow for tank movement, and so the Russians began to die by the scores, while the streets were littered with burning tanks and armored cars, creating new barricades for Soviet movement. We should remember the lesson here—that everything can change in just a few hours. Stability, political or otherwise, is always an illusion, never more so than when a people is oppressed by an illegitimate regime.
The insurgents, who seized even more weapons from depots and from armaments factories, quickly established four major centers of resistance. The most important, immediately and for the rest of the Revolution, was around the Corvin Cinema, in south-central Pest. It was ideally situated next to both major intersections and a warren of side streets; it had fuel storage useful for making Molotov cocktails; and it was next to a Habsburg-era military structure that was effectively a fortress, the Kilián Barracks. The barracks housed only conscript military engineers, but still, fearing they would join the rebels, the defense minister ordered a reliable military officer, Pál Maléter, a charismatic giant of a man, to take several tanks to reinforce the barracks. This, also, was an unwise choice. If there is a theme to the Party’s actions in the Revolution, before the Party evanesced into nothing, it is lack of wisdom in choices, no doubt due to ideological blinders and years of terror selecting for compliance rather than competence.
Maléter, like most of the men central to the Revolution, was a devout Communist. He had fought for Hungary in World War II, but turned traitor when captured by the Russians. Maléter was a climber and an opportunist, but he was brave and liked to fight, and he always had a contrary streak—for example, as a Communist officer he had long insisted on wearing his army medals from when he fought under Horthy, a dangerous provocation. No matter—some men respond when called to glory, and Maléter was one such, whatever his precise motivations. He redeemed himself in the Revolution, for when he arrived at the barracks, and saw the Russians killing Hungarians, he effectively joined the revolt, using a tank to block the main entrance, facing outward to fight. (Contrary to legend, he did not join immediately; he tried to split the difference for at least a day.) By the next day, he commanded about 600 insurgents at the barracks, while another 1,500 not under Maléter, but loosely under the four Pongratz brothers (their spokesman was Gergely, called Mustache, Bajusz, for his walrus facial hair) occupied the Corvin complex. The vast majority were very young civilians; most of the Hungarian military, now and later, simply stayed out of the fight entirely.
The regular police, under Kopácsi, who was a gregarious man with many friends, mostly in Nagy’s circle, refused to aid the ÁVO. Kopácsi ordered the police not to fight; some of the police joined the insurgents. At the same time, now and later, he sheltered many ÁVO, preventing their punishment by the incensed revolutionaries. (Other ÁVO men were kept under protective custody by other insurgent groups, as well, and often released out the back entrance.) He seems to have been a very brave man; before the Revolution, in 1946, he had faced down a mob of miners trying to lynch a policeman who had tortured one of their friends, and when police headquarters in Budapest were later besieged by the revolutionaries demanding the release of prisoners, he walked into the middle of a crowd of thousands carrying a folding chair, stood on it, and negotiated a settlement with the crowd.
Meanwhile, Nagy made another tone-deaf speech on the radio, declaring martial law and threatening the death penalty for “counterrevolutionary activities.” He demanded everyone go home and promised amnesty if they did so. To be sure, he was now the titular leader of a government that was responsible to the Party but against which the people were openly revolting, making his position extremely precarious. His speech pleased nobody; what they wanted was the Sixteen Points to be endorsed and put into action. At night on the same day, October 23, the Russians fell back into a few secured areas. The Kremlin had sent more top men to evaluate, including again Mikoyan, as well as the head of the KGB, Ivan Serov, and the Soviet Army’s chief of staff, Mikhail Malinin, and they quickly realized that the situation was very dangerous—notably when they were repeatedly shot at trying to tour the city in tanks. Still, Mikoyan sent Khrushchev an overly-optimistic report, suggesting that the situation was under control. By the end of the day a hundred Hungarians were dead, along with a few hundred Russians.
The Communist party almost immediately began to dissolve nationwide. Violence was widespread in the rest of the country; it is a myth, spread about after the Revolution, that the country as a whole was not directly involved in the Revolution, though Budapest gets the vast majority of the focus in the memoirs and in most of the histories. Industrial workers began a general strike (with the exception of essential services, such as electricity and transport), and the Communists realized with horror that the workers, most notably the Csepel workers, supposedly a jewel in the Communist crown, were wholly going over to the Revolution.
In Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city (though less than one-tenth the size of Budapest, which had 1.5 million people), and in many other towns, usually after a modest amount of shooting, the Communists simply handed over power to new people, who formed “Committees” and “Councils” to govern towns and cities. These, which unlike in Budapest did not usually include former Communists, established communication with the revolutionaries in Budapest, as well as with Nagy and the other nascent elements of a new national government. The most important of these was in Győr, in northwest Hungary, which amalgamated itself with several other town councils to form the “Trans-Danubian National Council,” led by Attila Szigethy, which exercised a good deal of influence on Nagy to more aggressively pursue the goals of the Revolution, to the extent that at some points civil war appeared a possibility when Nagy kept dragging his heels. Outside Budapest, there were relatively few Soviet troops inside towns and cities. Mostly they simply stayed put in their bases and did not involve themselves in what was happening, so the violence was exclusively between Hungarians and the ÁVO, with a few hundred people more dying in the action.
ÁVO members everywhere made themselves scarce, stripping off their uniforms and either leaving town or hiding quietly at home, though a few were handed quick justice at the end of a rope or on the wrong end of a gun, a harbinger of more such to come in Budapest. The ubiquitous hated giant red stars, prominent on every government building, were torn down across the country. The only truly major violence was a massacre perpetrated by the ÁVO in a small town near the Austrian border, Mosonmagyaróvár, where the ÁVO killed fifty-two (including a baby). The crowd there, quite justifiably and correctly, lynched the four ÁVO men they could get their hands on, tearing them to pieces, though most of the guilty managed to escape, because emotions quickly cooled and there was no central body tasked with dealing with them.
By morning on Thursday, October 25 (little night-time fighting took place during the Revolution), the Russians, on the back foot, had poured 14,000 more troops and 250 more tanks into Budapest. They also replaced Gerő as head of the Party with János Kádár, a longtime Communist but not a Muscovite, with a reputation as a slippery survivor, but also for asceticism and competence. (Nagy was known to say that “Kádár was born sitting on the fence.”) Kádár was destined to lead the Party for the next thirty-two years. Mikoyan and the other Russians on the spot wanted Kádár to work with Nagy to form the new government and, again, defuse the situation by offering “reforms,” though certainly none of the Sixteen Points. But simultaneously, the Russians and the ÁVO opened fire on a large but peaceful crowd still in front of Parliament, killing about a hundred and wounding hundreds more (probably on the orders of the KGB chief, Serov). This settled the direction of matters for the moment; thousands more Hungarians reached for the gun, taking the battle to the Russians, and it did not matter when Gerő’s “resignation” was broadcast over the radio. As with most revolutions, events quickly outpaced those who thought they were the decisionmakers.
By Saturday, the 27th, central Budapest was fully a war zone, and looked it. The Hungarians were very proud that civil order was nonetheless maintained—there was no looting (in fact, public donation baskets of cash for those injured were a prominent feature of the streets), and water and electricity were uninterrupted. Fighting died down, while Nagy promulgated a new government (that is, he put forth a slate of ministers), supported by Kádár. It had some non-Communists, and the Communists were of the more acceptable, anti-Rákosi type, but as always with Nagy, it was too little, too late. And at midday the Russians moved numerous tanks to attack Maléter in his fortress, where he now had only 150 men, having sent the engineers home—but they were all regular soldiers, not civilians. He beat back the Russians, destroying several tanks. It did not help that these were Russians who had been living in Hungary and mostly enjoyed the country, though no more than a handful, if that, joined the rebels, despite widespread wishful thinking and rumors to the contrary. On Sunday morning the Russians moved even larger forces to reduce the rebel strongholds, but Hungarian troops, whom they had counted on as reinforcements, refused to join them, and Nagy, finally almost wholeheartedly embracing the Revolution, supposedly threatened to resign if the attacks went through. After modest fighting, including losing more tanks to Maléter, the vacillating Russians sent the troops back to their mustering areas in the city. Five hundred of their men were dead, and around twice that number of Hungarians.
Apparent Victory
Khrushchev could not make up his mind what to do. His advisors, and the men he had sent to evaluate the situation, were divided—should they crush the rebellion with more force, which they undoubtedly could, or should they see what Nagy could do to restore the situation to an acceptable, Gomułka-type arrangement? The Suez Crisis (in which America took the side of Egypt’s left-wing government against Israeli and British efforts to prevent seizure of the Suez Canal by the Egyptians) was looming, however, and Khrushchev knew that could give him cover for the forcible solution. Playing for time, the Soviets announced a ceasefire on Sunday afternoon and removed most of the tanks and soldiers out of the city. And on Monday morning, they broadcast that their troops would withdraw entirely from Budapest. Still, Khrushchev vacillated. Abroad, crowds of Poles and Rumanians were demonstrating in support of the Hungarians; the contagion seemed to be spreading. Not only the Communists in charge in other Soviet satellites were worried; the Chinese were also concerned about the message being conveyed. Mao sent an emissary, who aggressively insisted the uprising should be crushed with overwhelming force.
Apparent Soviet withdrawal was the cue for Nagy to try to make his new government real, and effective. He moved his office from Party headquarters to Parliament, and began urgent negotiations with the various rebel groups to give up their weapons and to form a National Guard under the new government’s control. Although obviously necessary if Nagy was to actually be seen to have power, unsurprisingly, this effort met with limited success. Many of the revolutionary groups, composed not of university students (they had almost all gone home) but of teenagers and young workers, began to bicker and even fight among themselves. They, in the manner of such black-and-white men, thought half a loaf inadequate. What they wanted was total Hungarian independence from the Soviet Union, which in retrospect was what might charitably be called a stretch goal, but which the optimism of the moment made seem possible. Others besides the insurgents, notably Szigethy in Győr, also pressed Nagy for more action faster. Maléter, at least, who had the most sterling reputation, unreservedly supported Nagy—emphasizing that he wanted socialism, meaning reform Communism, not a return to anything that might be vaguely centrist or right-wing. And there was lots of talk, endless talk, another Hungarian specialty—usually emotional, even histrionic.
On Tuesday, the Soviets continued their withdrawal. The violence wasn’t over, though. Crowds still surrounding the Party headquarters were incensed at seeing large deliveries of foodstuffs unavailable to the masses, and rumors spread that hundreds of prisoners were being kept in imaginary underground cells. In the confusion, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, Hungarian tanks began to shell the building. Several of the ÁVO men inside, and other top functionaries, including the Budapest Communist Party boss, Imre Mező, came out to surrender. They were shot; several were hung upside down and their bodies burned. Twenty-five were killed, including one whose heart was cut out (although this may just be an urban legend). These killings, while entirely just, were perhaps unwise, in part because photos of these executions circulated internationally, published in Life and Paris-Match (whose photographer died in the cross-fire). Nagy, certainly, was desperate to avoid giving the Soviets any excuse to break their promise to withdraw, and so tried his best to dampen the rage of the populace. No contemporaneous source seems to reflect a negative Western reaction, despite what modern historians tend to imply, so it is not clear whether the photographs were bad for the Revolution. Actually, what is surprising to someone looking at these events from seventy years away is how few reprisals there were against the men who had terrorized the country for ten years. A few prominent Communists were harassed in their homes, but nothing more.
Also on Tuesday, the Prince Primate of Hungary, the Roman Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty, a popular, almost mythic personage, was released from eight years of solitary confinement after his show trial, in which he had confessed under torture. Mindszenty, who after the Revolution took refuge in the American Embassy and lived there for fifteen years, was the only personage of the Revolution who might be considered right-wing, but he had little influence over the course of events. (Irving, for some reason, hates him and even bizarrely refers to him as “senile,” which is completely false. This is more evidence for Irving having swallowed, or agreed to espouse, part of the post-Revolution Communist line.) Ten thousand other political prisoners were also released, all across the country. Events seemed to be rapidly moving toward a new civil society forming in Hungary, free of the Communist yoke. It was not an illusion, but it was doomed. But you cannot fault the Hungarians for their euphoria.
Nagy formed a second government, only a few days after announcing his first, which had naturally not had the time to do anything, and announced that one-party rule was over, along with that he was negotiating with the Russians for permanent total withdrawal from the country. By Wednesday morning, however, the 31st, over the strong objections of Mikoyan, Khrushchev had finally and definitively made up his mind to crush the rebellion with a full-scale invasion—but he wanted to keep Nagy in the dark as long as possible, meanwhile acting to round up formal support from the other Soviet satellites, making them responsible as well. Thus, Andropov was instructed to keep lying to Nagy, as the Russian troops left Budapest—but many headed west, toward Austria, not east, towards Russia, and others halted not far away from Budapest. Nagy knew this, and that many fresh Soviet troops were entering the country from the east. But a combination of optimism and no other alternative kept him and the other members of his new government on the track of negotiations with the Russians.
On Thursday and Friday, Khrushchev went on a secret and fast whistle-stop tour of Soviet satellites, beginning in Poland and ending in Yugoslavia (which had, at this time, a prickly relationship with the Soviet Union, as Tito presented a largely-fictional guise of independence to the West). Seeing which way the wind was blowing, even though he could not know of Khrushchev’s decision, on Friday Nagy announced that Hungary would quit the Warsaw Pact (it had only been signed in 1955, and in an indication of Hungary’s actual role in that signature, for many hours nobody in the government could find a copy of the “treaty” to examine), and that Hungary would become neutral “with immediate effect.”
That evening, Kádár, along with the new Communist minister of the interior, Ferenc Münnich (another die-hard Communist not hated as much as the Rákosi-Gerő clique), mysteriously vanished. They had arranged with Andropov to betray the Revolution and were secretly flown to Moscow (though that was a surprise to both), to return along with invading Soviet troops. Nagy still tried to triangulate—he acted to appease the Soviets as much as possible, and proceeded as if everything was normal and that the Russians were not lying, even though he knew many thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks were pouring into Hungary, and that the Russians had seized all the major airports (when asked, Andropov said securing the airports was needed to ensure the safety of evacuating Russian civilians). Preparing for the worst, Nagy made Maléter minister of defense (and in his usual contrary way, unlike all the other soldiers who joined the Revolution, Maléter kept his red star military decorations on his uniform, and threatened anyone who suggested that Hungary could ever go back to its pre-Communist ways, a stance obviously incompatible with free elections, but presumably everyone figured they would deal with that problem later).
On Saturday, November 3, in Moscow, Khrushchev met with Kádár and Münnich, along with the rest of the Politburo. The question was which man would be installed as Party chief, and therefore effectively dictator, after the end of Operation Whirlwind, as the Russians had named their coming invasion. Kádár was chosen, somewhat surprisingly, since he was not a Muscovite (unlike Münnich) and had a reputation, accurately enough, as a trimmer. Münnich was made his number two. Khrushchev had been successfully convinced by Andropov and others, correctly as it turned out, that Kádár would be more accepted by the populace. Kádár’s only demand was that Rákosi and Gerő not be allowed to return to Hungary; he had no wish to end up in prison or dead if the Soviet Politburo turned against him. (Rákosi died in Russia in 1982; Gerő returned in 1960, and died in obscurity in Budapest in 1980.) To be fair, Kádár knew well enough that “if it had not been me it would have been someone else,” and he had been tortured under Rákosi, an experience he had no desire to repeat. In truth, he had no choice but to take the assignment.
On Saturday night, still pretending they were departing, the Russians held the second negotiating session of the day with Nagy’s government. The first had been at Parliament; they suggested the second be held at a Russian military base in the Budapest suburbs. Maléter was the lead negotiator, and everyone suspected a trap, but he and his team went anyway. The negotiations were being held with Malinin, when Serov entered with armed men and arrested all the Hungarians. Malinin, an honest man for a Communist, was appalled, but Serov whispered in his ear and Malinin left the room, scowling. Most of the Hungarian negotiators never saw freedom again.
The End
On Sunday, November 4, Operation Whirlwind sprang to life, crushing the Revolution with overwhelming force. The Russians brought 150,000 troops (mostly from Central Asia with no knowledge of or love for Hungary; many thought they were fighting the Americans in Berlin), 2,500 modern tanks, and overwhelming air support. Ivan Konev, the experienced Soviet general in charge, had promised Khrushchev it would take no more than three days of substantial action, and he was as good as his word. Nagy refused to order any resistance by the Army or the National Guard; oddly, he then announced over the radio that Hungarian troops were “in combat”; this was false. Also false was his claim that “the government is at its post”; in fact, he and several of his closest allies, and their families, immediately fled to the Yugoslav embassy, which Tito had offered as a refuge. While this saved his skin, for a short while, it ended any political or moral influence Nagy had. Hungarian troops had had their leadership decapitated (not only Maléter, but other high-level commanders had been successfully duplicitously seized by the Russians) and could organize very little resistance, which in any case would have been futile. Even the Hungarians have to admit defeat at some point.
The insurgents who still had weapons did fight back, for a short while, as did units of the new National Guard. But the modern Russian tanks were no longer vulnerable to Molotov cocktails, and their tactics were total destruction. They reduced all the rebel strongpoints, which were manned by far fewer than they had been a few days before because of the formation of the National Guard and the collection of weapons, with profligate shelling and with jets, destroying any building that might hold insurgents. (Many more Hungarians would have died, except for that most of these buildings had deep cellars, often connected to each other, allowing shelter and escape for some.) Fighting lasted for seven days, until November 11, although it was mostly over in three, just as Konev had promised, and later fighting was only in isolated areas (including Csepel). About 1,500 more Hungarians died, bringing the total to around 2,700, with around 20,000 wounded (along with about two hundred more Russians, bringing the total to seven hundred).
The Russians announced that Kádár was now in charge (playing prerecorded speeches by him pretending to be in Budapest). This was no real surprise to those who had figured out he had vanished to Russia, but it was a surprise to most Hungarians, since only a few days earlier he had enthusiastically and publicly supported the new government. His betrayal earned him the reputation of a Judas, which never left him, even though over the coming decades he became much more popular than he started.
The Aftermath
As the smoke cleared, revealing a city choked with rubble and corpses, the workers began a new general strike, the only tool they had left in their arsenal, and a real potential problem for Kádár. (Americans are not used to general strikes, and do not really understand their history, but they are a powerful tool of the oppressed, even if they depend on cohesive action that tends to be lacking in working-class Americans.) The Russians, with the help of traitorous Hungarians, combed Budapest to arrest anyone with any role in the Revolution. They also began seizing and deporting some thousands of random young people from the streets of Budapest to Russia, but this policy soon ended, and the youngsters were returned (no doubt a sign of how things had changed in Russia; Stalin would have done far, far worse, and did). The other major immediate effect of the crushing of the Revolution was that 200,000 Hungarians fled across the Austrian border. Most of them ended up in America; Congress passed a special law to allow their immigration, back when America actually decided whom to admit to America based on what would benefit America.
The new Hungarian government took a lethally aggressive stance against all the rebels, despite earlier promises of amnesty. Massive resources were devoted to hunting down anyone who had taken part. (Tyrannical leftist regimes always spare no effort to track down and punish any opposition, as we have seen over the past few years with the American Regime’s criminal actions against the heroes of the January 6th Electoral Justice Protest.) The Russians kidnapped Nagy and the others who had taken refuge at the Yugoslav embassy, which sent Tito into conniptions—he was no fan of the Revolution, seeing it as “white counterrevolution,” but was not pleased to be given the back of Khrushchev’s hand, after he had supported the crushing of the Revolution, which he did not have to do.
Nonetheless, it took some months for Kádár to reestablish control. His biggest challenge was that workers had organized workers’ councils to run all the industrial enterprises, independent of the Party, which was certainly in keeping with Communist doctrine, but utterly antithetical to Communist practice. These councils used work slowdowns and strikes to push their demands for more self-government, and tried to rebuild a national organization by using the threat of more general strikes. By December, only a tiny fraction of Party members had joined the “new” Party, renamed the Socialist Workers’ Party, further threatening Kádár’s position. He first tried sugar—he raised wages; he ended forced deliveries of agricultural goods; he abolished November 7, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, as a holiday, and restored March 15, the anniversary of the 1848 Revolution, as a public holiday. He used conciliatory quasi-Communist language, rather than Rákosi- or Gerő-type harangues. The Soviets were displeased with these departures from orthodoxy, but wisely left Kádár alone, no doubt realizing that too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the broth. In December, a miners’ strike in a provincial town, where the workers demonstrated in front of police headquarters, demanding release of two arrested compatriots, ended with 131 miners being slaughtered. At this point, Kádár reversed course, ordering arrests of the leaders of workers’ councils, which led to more strikes and violence. He then announced the death penalty for striking or inciting a strike, whereupon the workers’ councils folded, and the Party was able to reestablish total control.
There was plenty of ongoing repression. Kádár created special police units, nicknamed “puffy jackets” (pufajkások) because they wore distinctive quilted jackets, which travelled the country beating and torturing those identified as insurgents, or who were otherwise identified as troublemakers. Unlike previous Communist terror, this was not random; it was roughly equivalent to the American Regime’s efforts during the past four years to terrorize Trump supporters (including the intensive studying of photographs to identify targets for vengeance). All tyrannical regimes try to forestall troublemakers by making an example of anyone who opposes them.
Ultimately about four hundred people were executed. Tens of thousands were jailed, many for years—including quite a few who were persuaded to return to Hungary from abroad with false promises of amnesty. In a sign of the changing times, however, torture was not used to extract confessions, and certainly far fewer were executed than would have been, had Lenin or Stalin still been in charge in the Soviet Union, or Rákosi in Hungary. Many executions were for trivial “offenses” (such as that of Major Antal Pálinkás, who had been ordered by the government to retrieve Mindszenty from his prison). To his credit, Nagy refused to apologize or recant, and in his trial gave as good as he got, with his final words at trial being “I do not ask for mercy.” He was hanged. Maléter was also hanged, devil-may-care to the end. In an echo of Rajk’s funeral, it was Nagy’s reburial in 1989 that triggered the end of Communism in all the Soviet satellites. Viktor Orbán, a young man, gave a stirring speech at the funeral, repeating many of the demands of the Sixteen Points. But that is another story.
Kádár, forty-four years old at the time of the Revolution, managed, for the next three decades, to make Hungary, as it was said, the most comfortable prison in the Eastern Bloc. Most prisoners were released in 1963, in order to persuade the United Nations to stop examining the “Hungarian question,” which had been a continuing embarrassment for Kádár. Small businesses were allowed; depoliticization was encouraged; further efforts were made to increase wages (although broader promises he initially made, such as negotiations to remove Soviet troops, disappeared down the memory hole). Kádár, in other words, largely managed to solve the immiseration problem, in part by borrowing dollars from the Soviet Union, but also simply by relaxing Communist orthodoxy, permanently. Communist morale never recovered; the Party was always treated as somewhat of a joke in poor taste, even though Party members received advantages and benefits—but it was possible, for example, to obtain some career advancement without Party membership. Gradually a loyal bureaucracy re-established itself, cementing Kádár’s power.
Khrushchev, however, paid a heavy price, though his choice was not necessarily the wrong one from his perspective. Crushing the Revolution split all the Communist parties in Western Europe, which up until that time had been wholly reliable proxies for Soviet interests. Communist prestige internationally took a hit. Soviet internal bickering prefigured Khrushchev’s later fall. Still, in the short term he shored up his position, both with the Soviet satellites and with international Communist regimes, most notably Mao’s. That was his prime goal, and he was completely successful in accomplishing it. No doubt, given the chance again, he would not have done things any differently.
I travelled repeatedly in Hungary myself during Kádár’s rule, as a small child with my parents and as a teenager by myself (and lived in Hungary for eight months in 1991, immediately after the end of Communism, when many buildings still bore the pockmarks of bullets from the Revolution). When I was a child, the secret police monitored and followed my parents; but by the 1980s, even that effort was not made, except perhaps for politically-sensitive visitors. Living in Hungary didn’t seem great, by Western standards, but it was a lot better than under Rákosi, or in Poland or Czechoslovakia, and vastly better than in Rumania, Albania, or the Soviet Union itself. Few went to jail (Hungary under Kádár had a tiny fraction of the political prisoners the United States holds at this very moment); nobody was tortured—although to be sure there was little or no overt opposition to the new regime. The main tool of the regime’s control was employment; anybody perceived as possibly antithetical to the regime often found it difficult to obtain desirable employment or receive higher education. My grandfather’s cousin, for example, József Antall, later the first post-Communist prime minister, who had participated in the Revolution as a student, was arrested several times and barred from teaching, his preferred career. He became a librarian (although he made the most of that, focusing on medical history and becoming well-known in that area).
In another irony of history, over the decades Kádár ultimately became quite popular. It helped that he was a model of personal rectitude, could trim continuously (there were frequent battles within the Party, often against Kremlin moles and always won by Kádár), and kept his sense of humor. There was no Kádár cult of personality; he even forbade his picture in public offices, the very opposite of Rákosi. People either forgave him his betrayals, or took refuge in the defense that he had no choice, did the best he could under the circumstances, and was not such a bad guy. In some ways, this was participation in a consensus amnesia combined with resignation, but really, it was not wrong— Kádár was probably the best that could have been managed.
Nor was Hungary, later, really a prison—average Hungarians, at least those not under a cloud, could quite easily travel to the West, if they could access hard currency (for example, in the 1970s and 1980s my grandfather sponsored several relatives to visit the United States). Most people simply became apolitical. For intellectuals, no doubt there was an element of Czeslaw Milosz’s concept of Ketman, a pleasurable psychological state obtained when one deceives those in power about one’s true motives and beliefs, while nonetheless strictly obeying the orders of those in power. Certainly, public mention of the Revolution by normal people was taboo (though in the 1970s Kádár took to referring to it as a “national tragedy,” rather than “counterrevolution”), and revolutionaries released from prison in the 1960s were harassed for years (Kopácsi talks in detail about this). But taboo topics were few, and the vast majority of citizens had no interaction with the secret police or any other apparatus of repression.
Kádár died in 1989, mentally deteriorated, at almost the exact same time that Communism itself died in Hungary.
And Today
It was perhaps in part because of this depoliticization that, when Communism ended, newly-free Hungary completely failed to deal out justice to the guilty of the Revolution and of the periods before and after. After all, many ÁVO killers and torturers were still alive and relatively young in 1989; none were ever brought to trial. Even aside from justice for criminal acts, all Communists should have been punished in some way or another. For example, Party members should have been lustrated (stripped of political rights), including the handful in my own extended family. Instead, not even the man who ordered the massacre at Mosonmagyaróvár, István Dudás, was punished in the least. But as has happened too many times, those in the West who manage to extricate themselves from Left tyranny unwisely prefer to forget, forgive without repentance being concretely shown and reparations made, and move on, rather than dealing out necessary justice and then setting up structures deliberately designed to permanently cripple and suppress the Left. (The Left never makes this mistake, invariably fanatically pursuing any enemies across the globe for the rest of their lives.) In Hungary, this failure even resulted in the rebranded Communists returning to power for some years in the early 2000s, largely because they owned nearly all the media, due to manipulating the privatization process (as happened in most countries freed of Communism). Since then, fortunately, as with all left-wing parties in Hungary, they have been kept from power by Orbán’s Fidesz party, which holds a supermajority in Parliament and has, no surprise, been under continuous attack from the American Regime—though that will hopefully end under the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
I cannot really say what the Hungarians think about the Revolution today. There is only one museum in Hungary which centers on the Revolution (opened by Gergely Pongratz in a provincial town in 1991). I do not know why there is little official attention paid to the Revolution (although October 23 is a national holiday). Perhaps it is connected to the argument that the Revolution was not a victory. Victor Sebestyen said (writing in 2006), that Hungarians “do not want to be associated with grimy Communism and something unfashionable, such as a heroic failure—even one on such a grand scale as the 1956 Revolution.” But as I said earlier, the Hungarians are used to celebrating their defeats. Nor am I so sure it was not a victory; you can look at it from different angles. The original total success of the Revolution, the only one to overthrow a Communist government and defeat a foreign army by force, should not be discounted. If Khrushchev had taken a different path, which he almost did, the Hungarians might have won total victory. The Revolution was not, as some claim, the equivalent of a rebellion in a Roman province, a meaningless paroxysm, because the Romans would never have considered letting a province go. In the modern ideological age, matters are somewhat different. Apparently-relevant historical comparisons are not always apt; we must always account for ideology, which is usually stronger than any other force, certainly among Left tyrannies.
If the Revolution had succeeded, what would the counterfactual history of Hungary in the late twentieth century have been? Because it was a very brief event, many emanations of it seem like a man momentarily caught in a strobe light. That is, aspects of Hungary in the Revolution seem fully formed, complete in our minds, when they were actually undergoing chaotic motion, and would assuredly have ended in a very different place than they appeared to be during the Revolution. Most of all this applies to the politics of the Revolution, and what would have happened to Hungarian politics had the Russians departed for good. Those who were prominent in the Revolution, in Budapest at least, as I have emphasized, were all men of the Left. They stridently proclaimed that the Left would always hold power in Hungary, even when Communism was gone. This meant different things to different men—perhaps social democracy, or some type of center-left program. But never a return to right-wing governance, which was continually ruled out, though no specific mechanism for that ruling-out was ever offered.
The reason for that lack of specificity is obvious—you can’t promise free elections while simultaneously ruling out some people winning, and a very significant portion, probably a majority, of Hungary in 1956 was right-wing or center-right, though every person in the country knew better than to advertise such beliefs. Even in 1947, far from a free election, the Catholic and other center-right parties polled nearly fifty percent, and the current longstanding supermajority moderately Right government of Hungary is probably not dissimilar to what any post-Revolution government would have ended up being. In 1956, the masses who enthusiastically supported Horthy were not represented in any manner in any of Nagy’s stillborn governments, nor were more centrist right-wing views. These views could no longer have been suppressed in a political system that had actually become free. These contradictions would have had to have been sorted out after the Revolution. The yearning for other politics can be seen in the prominence and popularity of Mindszenty (who had been imprisoned by the Communists in 1919, by the Arrow Cross in 1944, and again by the Communists in 1948). His role was effectively to act as proxy for people on the Right, for whom nobody otherwise spoke, though they would ultimately have spoken, and given the high feelings generated by the preceding twenty years, no doubt this would have been a very excitable process.
Thus, had the Revolution succeeded, there would have been a political free-for-all. That chaos would have been made worse by a power vacuum, where nobody was generally recognized as being in charge (already a problem even during the Revolution)—no politician, no military leader, no man with clean hands and charisma. Nagy would probably not have lasted long, even had his health held out; he was no man of destiny, merely the least-bad option for the greatest number of players. Even had he lived and maintained power for a time, there is no reason to believe that Nagy would have kept power in free elections. As I say, those would have likely have elected a center-right majority, especially because all the Left parties had been, whether they liked it or not, tainted by their association with Communism. The Communists had long since destroyed the Social Democrats (though they briefly re-formed during the chaotic October days), but the populace had not forgotten that the Social Democrats supported most Communist policies and had helped bring them to power. The movement on the streets had rapidly became explicitly anti-Communist, after all, leaving the Communists who started it all behind. And a very significant percentage of the street-level fighters were right-wing, as several works note—though exactly how many is impossible to tell, given that the Revolution was such a brief event.
Of course, there is always a power vacuum after a successful revolution, as the revolution unveils numerous new paths, many not even dreamed of beforehand. This is even more true when a revolution is spontaneous and driven from below, rather than one where a new elite merely replaces an existing elite. And such a vacuum also tends to arise because men die in revolutions who were expected to take leading roles. Franco, for example, took charge of the Spanish national rebellion against Left terror only because the man who was expected to lead died in a plane crash. Who is to say what Hungary would have become?
America and the United Nations
In all this discussion, I have deliberately spent little time on the American response to the Revolution, because it was irrelevant, despite oceans of ink wasted analyzing it. The main American characters were the President, Dwight Eisenhower, and his two closest foreign policy advisors, the Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen, respectively Secretary of State and head of the CIA. They had aggressively verbally encouraged revolts among the Soviet satellites, but they did not mean it, nor were they willing to back up their words with actions when push came to shove. Quite the contrary—Eisenhower’s main concern was his re-election (which occurred during the Revolution) and currying favor with the Egyptians (and thus indirectly other Third World nations), continuing the bad American habit in those years of demanding so-called decolonization at the expense of American and Western interests. Eisenhower’s only concrete action with respect to the Revolution was to try to prevent Franco from helping the revolutionaries. Other than that, he and his men merely issued several mealy-mouthed statements, carefully crafted to assure the Soviets that they would do nothing to aid the Revolution under any circumstances.
The major impact of America was that nearly all Hungarians, quite reasonably given the propaganda fed to them for years by Radio Free Europe, expected the Americans to intervene with military aid. Innumerable rumors circulated that any moment, American troops would arrive to help, or were already crossing the Austrian border. Perhaps the Hungarians should have known better, but after all, they were the first overt betrayal by the Americans, of many. Such betrayal was a constant of the Americans during the Cold War. When the Communist Khmer Rouge were about to capture Phnom Penh in early April 1975, after the United States had already betrayed the Vietnamese, the American ambassador in Cambodia offered select Cambodian officials the chance to leave with the Americans. Sirik Matak, a former Cambodian prime minister, responded (and this reply was later publicized by Henry Kissinger, that man who embodied all the complexities and contradictions of twentieth-century America): “I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we are all born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in [the Americans].” Matak died. No doubt this sentiment was exactly that of the revolutionaries of 1956, though none put it into such compelling words.
It is even less worthwhile to narrate the role the United Nations, misled in part by the Americans and hampered by its own miserable incompetence, took in these events. All you need to know is that the odious Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, a man once super-famous but best forgotten by history (and well on his way to that fate), afterwards congratulated Eisenhower on his excellent performance with respect to both Hungary and Suez. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the United Nations never did a single thing worth doing during the Cold War. When was the last time you even heard about the United Nations, other than as a perverse joke? Still, almost all books, except the most recent, about the Revolution spend a great deal of time discussing the UN. No doubt most of this is because the authors wrote at a different time, when many people foolishly wanted to believe that the UN was a symbol of nascent world government.
The Jews and the Revolution
As promised, we will now discuss the Jews and the Revolution, because in certain circles considerable emphasis is placed on this matter. Before the disastrous twentieth century, there was little tension between Jews and other Hungarians. Jews were very well integrated into the larger society. Yes, there was some unhappiness at Jewish domination of certain desirable professions, the universal Western result of Jewish intellectual interests and white-collar focus combined with Jewish in-group preference for other Jews, but both anti-Semitism and Jewish attacks on the fabric of their own society were minimal—in fact, most Jews were center-right, and many, including the vast majority in Budapest, assimilated fully, including adopting Christianity. After all, in that era most left-wing action was working class, and there were few Jews in the working class, though many Jews in the small leadership of left-wing groups, as almost always has been the case. (There was a definite stereotype of “Judeo-Bolshevik”—but like all stereotypes, it mostly reflected the truth.)
For example, as I mentioned, József Antall, prime minister from 1990 until 1993, was my grandfather’s cousin. Not well-known is that he was a quarter Jewish. My great-great-grandfather was Lipót Staudinger. Among his children were two daughters, Karolina (my great-grandmother, my grandfather’s mother) and Jolán. The latter married István Szűcs (a Christianized Jew; his name had been Moses Frankel). Their daughter Irén married a man named József Antall, who was minister for refugees before and during the war (and was honored posthumously by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations for admitting to Hungary Jews fleeing Poland in 1939). And their son was the prime minster, also József Antall. For most people, most of the time, none of this was regarded as relevant, merely as a curiosity. A great many people, especially in the bourgeoisie, had some Jewish blood in their family tree.
But hatred arose in 1919, when the Red Terror swept over Hungary. The vast majority of the leaders, and almost all the most notorious killers, were Jewish. Completely understandably, this caused great resentment among many Hungarians, and some innocent Jews were attacked (along with the guilty being punished) after the defeat of the Terror, thus further poisoning the well. (A bit strangely to us, quite a few Jews who were oppressed by Jewish Communists at this time themselves became anti-Semitic. Such a thing is only possible, of course, in a stratified society where Jews are largely assimilated.) While the Arrow Cross did not make anti-Semitism as central to their ideology as the National Socialists, they assuredly fed off it, being extreme nationalists, and when Hitler placed them in power, the National Socialists expected the Arrow Cross to follow through on a program of deportation to extermination or forced labor, which they did (although many Jews survived, due to opposition by the still-influential Horthy and the Catholic Church, as well as erratic focus in the waning days of the war). And quite a few Jews then returned the favor, eagerly cooperating with the victorious Russians to hunt down and kill anyone associated with the Horthy regime. So it goes with ethnic blood feuds.
The Communist leaders in 1956 were very aware that the predominance of Jews among them was a matter of resentment among those they ruled. Kopácsi, for example, notes that he was explicitly chosen to work in the ministry of the interior in part because he was not Jewish. And it was to dilute this problem that the Communists used gangs of Gypsies, historically on the outs with Hungarians for good reason, to seize food and equipment from farmers during forced collectivization. But, perhaps surprisingly, it is completely false that the Revolution was in any way another turn of the wheel, despite flailing attempts by the reinstated Communists to assign blame for the Revolution to “reactionary Horthyite and Arrow Cross counterrevolutionary elements.” (For example, Kádár had a lengthy pseudo-history of the Revolution published, the “White Book,” in which this theme is predominant.)
The modern historian Lendvai, for example, examines the evidence, and concludes that anti-Semitic incidents in 1956 were non-existent. The head of the American legation, who kept himself well-informed, reported that there was zero evidence of any “anti-Semitic outbursts.” He also noted how surprising this was given the prominence of Jews in the ÁVO and the Communist leadership. This theme is continued through all the authors I read who discuss the matter, even (if only by omission) Irving. Moreover, Jews played an important role in the Revolution—for example, one of the major insurgent leaders, the very young István Angyal, the leader of an important revolutionary group, had survived Auschwitz as a child; he was executed after the Revolution. The revolutionaries were keenly aware that it would look bad if Jews were targeted as Jews; on more on than one occasion, men who might have been summarily executed were let go because they looked Jewish, and the crowds did not want the bad optics administering justice might have caused. Thus, the Revolution was against Communism, not Jews, despite claims one hears even today to the contrary.
In Conclusion—Lessons for America Today
And what does the Revolution tell modern America? It is not a mere historical curiosity, because the themes of the Revolution, most of all rebellion against Left tyranny, still cycle through Western history. As of this writing, November of 2024, with the triumph of Donald Trump and the apparent rise for the first time in history of actual Right power in America (rather than loser catamite “conservatives” whose only goal is to mildly slow down Left action for a few years), we seem to have avoided a revolutionary situation, which would have arisen had the Left continued its oppressing of normal America. (It is too early to say whether my predictions of Left violence resulting from Trump’s ascension will be falsified, though they have been so far; check back in January.)
But, hypothetically, a revolt in twenty-first-century America against Left tyranny, or any modern revolt against Left tyranny, would be much more difficult for the Left to defeat than it was in the twentieth century. Aside from the ubiquity of military-grade firearms now in private hands (and we should remember that the role of such firearms is, for a modern insurgent as it was for those of 1956, not only to defeat the enemy but to acquire heavier weapons—and also that every modern military vehicle except certain heavy tanks is vulnerable to completely-legal .50 BMG rounds), this is the result of technology and its ability to spread information. In Budapest, the revolutionaries used mimeographs and hectographs (you can look those up if, as is likely, you have no idea what they are); they did not even control the radio for much of the Revolution. Now, the internet allows exquisite coordination in secret. Nor is America under the thumb of an external hegemon; America’s struggles would be decided by Americans, a luxury the Hungarians lacked.
It is also of interest to us that the Revolution was not initiated by, and did not involve, elites. The beginnings of a counter-elite could be discerned after its initial success, but contrary to the claims of many today, the Revolution proves that a split in the existing elite is not at all necessary to initiate an overthrow of an existing regime (as does the manner of the end of Communism in all the Soviet satellites in 1989, as Stephen Kotkin discusses in his excellent Uncivil Society). For some reason, especially on the Right, the myth has taken hold that mass or popular action is always irrelevant to abrupt changes in power, when recent history shows exactly the opposite. Part of this false claim is a desire to seem intelligent and insightful, to believe that one sees beyond the veil of things to the real truth. But most of the time what appears to be the obvious truth is, in fact, the obvious truth.
This ignores, however, that to have a revolution, you must start the revolution, and no matter how much oppression, or how much immiseration, or how great the rising expectations, a revolution, meaning violent overthrow of the existing order, does not start itself. It starts with mass demonstrations, or with a failed coup that triggers mass street action. (The end of Communism came about in 1989 because of such demonstrations, not because of intellectuals or dissidents. It is always a question of whether the will of those in power can hold out.) But when would normal Americans today engage in marches and civil disobedience? Our own Regime knows the danger, and works tirelessly to infiltrate any group that might initiate such action, and to imprison those who undertake such action, while covering such action in a cloud of slick, lying propaganda, as we have seen in the years since the January 6th Electoral Justice Protest. However, again, in the Age of Trump, the world has changed, in ways that are as of yet hard to pinpoint. If the Regime strikes back, we may yet face the same choice as did the Hungarians. One can image some future rough equivalent to the Electoral Justice Protest, which was not dissimilar to the rally at the statue of Bem, being fired upon by the Regime, rather than just bombarded with teargas and flash-bangs, and a wholly-justified response similar to that of the Hungarians in 1956. Or, perhaps more likely in the short term, such an event will take place in Britain, which is now an oppressive police state far worse than 1970s Hungary, and rapidly approaching the condition of 1950s Hungary.
Let’s hope not. Peace is often better. But not the peace of the soundproofed torture chamber and the grave, as the Hungarians demonstrated with their blood. We should remember, and absorb the lessons of, their sacrifice.
Books (In Reverse Chronological Order)
1956: One Day that Shook the Communist World (Paul Lendvai; 2008). Discussed in the body of the article.
Explosion: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (John P. C. Matthews; 2007). Written by a man who worked for Radio Free Europe in 1956 (not on the Hungarian desk). Detailed, but based mostly on older material.
Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Victor Sebestyen; 2006). Readable high-level popular history from a noted historian (who was born in Hungary but left as an infant).
Revolution in Hungary: The 1956 Budapest Uprising (Erich Lessing; 2006). Coffee-table picture book by one of the key photographers of the Revolution.
Journey to a Revolution (Michael Korda; 2006). Readable short history by a popular author who as a young man living in Britain went to deliver humanitarian aid during the Revolution.
A Testament of Revolution (Béla Lipták; 2001). Highly personal memoir by an active participant in the Revolution, including in the writing of the Sixteen Points, who was a twenty-year-old student at the time.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression 1953–1963 (György Litván ed.; 1996). Set of articles by historians using newly-released documentation about the Revolution.
In the Name of the Working Class (Sándor Kopácsi; 1986). Discussed in the body of the article.
Uprising! Hungary 1956: One Nation’s Nightmare (David Irving; 1981). Discussed in the body of the article.
Seven Days of Freedom (Noel Barber; 1974). Popular history by a British journalist who went to Hungary during the Revolution (where he was shot in the head, but survived).
Memoirs (József Cardinal Mindszenty; 1974). Mindszenty’s memoirs, published the year before he died.
That Day in Budapest (Tibor Meray; 1969). Lengthy and detailed memoir by a Communist intellectual of importance during the Revolution. Contains a long and interesting exegesis of the Sixteen Points, including more obscure ones such as the demand that Hungarian uranium deposits no longer be stolen by the Soviets.
The Hungarian Revolution (David Pryce-Jones; 1969). Older short popular history.
Revolution in Hungary (Paul Zinner; 1962). An erudite, thoroughly-researched history written as part of Columbia University’s Research Project on Hungary. Mostly covers the pre-Revolution period, with expert insightful detail.
My Happy Days in Hell (György Faludy; 1962). Colorful memoir of a famous Communist poet imprisoned at Recsk; notable for detail about that episode.
Political Prisoner (Paul Ignotus; 1959). Memoir of a Communist writer who left Hungary before World War II. He returned after the war, and in 1949 was arrested and imprisoned until 1956. Interesting because it contains detailed descriptions of ÁVO tortures and interrogation techniques, as well as prison life.
The Bridge at Andau (James Michener; 1957). Somewhat florid and histrionic narrative history written by Michener, then a world-famous fiction author, immediately after the Revolution. Famous, but of very limited value today.
The Hungarian Revolution (George Mikes; 1957). Expansion by BBC reporter of his time in Hungary during the Revolution, including much time in the provinces. However, contains numerous inaccuracies and exaggerations, and relies a good deal on unreliable anecdotes.
Hungary’s Fight for Freedom (Life Magazine special report; 1956). Ninety-six pages of the most notable pictures taken during the Revolution.
National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe: A Selection of Documents on Events in Poland and Hungary, February–November 1956 (Paul Zinner ed.; 1956). Another offering from Columbia University’s research project tied to the region; various central original documents, especially Party pronouncements and radio addresses during the Revolution.
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