The Hungarian struggle for freedom was defeated by forceof arms, yet the uprising in 1956 led in the long term to the collapse of communism. The ideals of the revolutioninfluenced even those who had come to power in Budapest through the military intervention of Soviet troops. Hungarian researchers released their latest findings thisautumn regarding the social background of the freedomfighters.
Seventy years ago, on October 23, 1956, Hungarian youth and university students took to the streets of Budapest to show solidarity with the Poles, who were facing the threat of Soviet military intervention. Older generations quickly joined the young people—not only university students but also workers, public employees, and intellectuals. Famous Hungarian writers also appeared in the crowd. Meanwhile, in Poland, an armed intervention by the Soviet Army was ultimatelyaverted; the new local communist leaders who had come topower in the autumn of 1956 had no intention of withdrawingfrom the Warsaw Pact—the Eastern military bloc of the bipolar world—or upending the prevailing geopoliticalbalance of power. In Hungary, however, the students’ peacefuldemonstration escalated into a revolution. The revolutionariesdemanded the withdrawal of foreign (Soviet) troops, and soon—following the Kremlin’s armed intervention—breaking free from military blocs and achieving neutrality were added totheir demands. Thus, the armed insurgents (resistance fighters) embraced the students’ agenda as the revolution rapidlytransformed into a fight for freedom.
By the end of October, the demands of the students and insurgents regarding Hungarian domestic politics had largelybeen met; pluralism and a multi-party system began to revive, workers in many places took control of their factories—drawing inspiration, among other things, from the Yugoslavmodel—and revolutionary committees assumed leadership in local administration. However, in the realm of foreign policy, the neutrality so fervently desired by the Hungarians remainedout of reach. Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact—announced by the revolution’s Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, onNovember 1, 1956—infringed upon the geopolitical interestsof the Soviet Union. Yet, the Hungarian Prime Minister’s veryaim had been to eliminate the legal grounds for a threatenedmilitary intervention; by withdrawing from the military pact, the contractual terms restricting Hungarian sovereignty wouldhave ceased to be in force.
However, as early as 1956 in Budapest, the Soviets werealready applying the doctrine that would later—in 1968—come to be named after Brezhnev. This doctrine concerned the limited sovereignty of the smaller nations within the Soviet bloc; it was applied by Khrushchev in Budapest in 1956 and by General Secretary Brezhnev in 1968 during the suppressionof the Prague Spring. In practice, this meant that the Soviet Union would not tolerate the challenging of the leading role of communist parties, the dismantling of the Soviet-style system, or withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact by its satellite states.
Against this backdrop, Khrushchev—the Moscow party leaderpreoccupied with internal power struggles—decided, alongside other Kremlin leaders, to militarily crush the Hungarian revolution and war of independence in 1956; thisdecision followed roughly a week of hesitation and consultations with, among others, China. Hungarian freedomfighters waged a heroic yet hopeless struggle against the Soviet Army. Although Time magazine named them ’Man of the Year’ in 1956, Washington politicians had no desire toupend the existing geopolitical status quo, and thus took no substantive action to assist the Imre Nagy government orHungary in their stand against the Soviets.
Thus, while the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence failed militarily, it did not fail in terms of itsideals. Although János Kádár—installed by the Kremlin toreplace Imre Nagy—arrived in Budapest from Moscowalongside Soviet army tanks, a decade later Hungary becamethe second socialist country, after Yugoslavia, to abolish the centrally directed planned economy. Furthermore, the Yugoslav model of enterprise self-management influencedHungarian economic policy thinking right up until the regimechange of 1990. (The question of how successful this modelwas within Yugoslavia itself is a separate matter.)
Thus, the 1956 revolution exerted its influence not militarily, but intellectually. Milovan Djilas’s assessment holds true: the Hungarian revolution of 1956 marked the beginning of the end for communism. And we have long known that the ideologicalimpact of the Hungarian freedom movement was felt first in the West rather than in the East. It was at this time that the ideological foundations of the French Communist Party wereshaken, and the first rifts began to appear within the Italian Communist Party—though these fissures would only lead tothe emergence of Eurocommunism—a trend distancing itselffrom the Soviets—after the crushing of the 1968 PragueSpring.
Thus, the Hungary of 1956 was but a single drop in the oceanof East-Central and Southeastern Europe: it shared commonfeatures with the aspirations of Polish communists pursuingtheir own path, and the Yugoslav example also influencedHungary at the time; yet—much like the social tensions thatled to the East Berlin workers’ uprising of 1953—the ’adjustment of work quotas’ for Hungarian laborers and the tightening of conditions regarding performance-based wageswere also factors in the outbreak of the 1956 revolution in Budapest.
The revolution soon escalated into a war of independence. The author of this article, together with László Eörsi, has compileda more detailed list than ever before of the armed individualswho fought the Soviets on the streets of Budapest. Asresearchers at the 1956 Institute Foundation, we identified3,999 insurgents from among those who fought on the streetsof Budapest. This represents 27–40 percent of the insurgentforce, which is estimated to have numbered roughly 10,000–15,000. Our recent research has demonstrated that, contrary tocommon misconceptions in Hungary, a significant portion of the revolutionaries and insurgents were not merely youngpeople; there was also an older social stratum—notparticularly poor, yet living in precarious circumstances. Wetermed this group a ’Soviet-type precariat’.
This precariat played a significant role in the military leadership of the uprising. On the western side of Budapest—in Buda, at Széna Square—the fighting was spearheaded by a legendary leader who had been forced to endure severe tortureat the hands of the secret police and state security interrogatorsduring the 1950s. János Szabó—known as ’Uncle Szabó’, oneof the oldest leaders of the uprising—had been (baselessly) accused of spying for Yugoslavia; a man of leftist leanings in his late fifties who had even served in the Hungarian Red Army in 1919, he began to pray while in prison in order tosurvive the ordeal.
Uncle Szabó was born in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; he fought on Italian soil at the end of World War I and lived in the Kingdom of Romania during the interwar period, but alsospent time in Bulgaria and the French Foreign Legion beforesettling in Hungary. At one point, he even slipped across the border into Yugoslavia, yet it was in Hungary that he enduredhis true ordeals. He was among the first leaders of the 1956 uprising to be executed (in early 1957). His life story demonstrates that the Soviet-type precariat—that sociallyprecarious stratum—lived not merely in financial insecuritybut often faced mortal danger, and did so long before the armed uprising of 1956.
However, the uprising—crushed by the Soviets—transformedboth the young, impoverished insurgents and the oldermembers of the precariat, whose futures were more uncertain, into heroes of freedom. Examining their lives and paths maycontribute in the future to a better understanding not only of Hungarian history but also of the destiny of Central-Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
Iván Miklós Szegő
