The Hungarian Revolution Revisited

...In Hungary, Rakosi and his successor Geroe, like the Stalinist Bourbons they were, had been unable to learn anything from previous events and were unwilling to forget the days under Stalin when they enjoyed absolute domination...

...But Western intellectuals ought to have learned that even when all seems lost there may yet be another "unexpected revolution," when men will cry out: This is not the way to live...

...and it posed an as yet unsolved problem for the political sensibilities of our age...

...the allegedly "atomized" workers had established self-governing bodies literally within hours: the first workers' councils was set up at the Incandescent Lamp Works in Budapest on October 24, and within three days the movement had spread over the whole country...

...voiced his suspicion that we were urging the Hungarian situation to divert attention from Suez...

...The Hungarian revolt rose, above all, on a wave of national sentiment, transcending all class boundaries and unifying the country against the foreign overlords...

...One further factor distinguished Hungary from the other satellites: the Communist party had long been wracked by violent internal terrorism, under Rakosi, who imprisoned hundreds of leading party members and thousands of militants...

...Then why, we may ask, did the revolution not spread to other satellites where some of the same conditions prevailed...

...And among the participants themselves hardly any seemed to have anticipated the outbreak...

...Western commentators were still too often inclined to accept at face value the Soviet affirmations of monolithic unity...

...Like many 19th-century revolutions, this Hungarian one was nursed among students and intellectuals...

...The military forces sent to the area hesitated briefly, then sided with the crowds...

...The major issue was not military at all...

...The Australian, as well as other delegates, suggested that the situation in Hungary was desperate and urged the Council reconvene no later than the next day, November 4. When this was put to vote, the only two who voted against it—and hence for further delay—were the Iranian President of the Council and Lodge...

...In Hungary, Stalin's death had forced into the open the disagreements and controversy in the party leadership, and thus had created the conditions favorable to a spontaneous mass movement...

...More particularly, their appeal for the population of the underdeveloped countries was in great part built upon the image of Russia as a fraternal ally in the struggle against imperialism...

...It threw into bold relief central issues of policy and political morality both in the East and in the West...

...And while nobody can say for certain whether they would have accepted the offer, it is certain that they would seriously have considered it...

...To be sure, the Russians could have brought in overwhelming forces to crush the Budapest fighters within a short time...

...That conflict was entering its most crucial phase precisely on November 1, the day when the presidium, "having thought about it a long time"—as Khrushchev said later—decided to remove the Hungarian government by military intervention and reinstall a subservient full-fledged Communist regime...

...Yet such an alternative was, I believe, available...

...it challenged many previously held notions about the dynamics of revolution in the 20th century...

...The infuriated crowd attacked back, wresting its first weapons from the police reinforcements arriving on the scene...

...Now, most students of totalitarianism before the Hungarian events had not sufficiently considered that the dominating elite wthin totalitarian regimes anywhere may be quite prone to "internal contradictions...

...Help...

...Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested...

...the General Assembly began its extraordinary session on Suez...

...Only the prior erosion of the unity of the party elite made possible the re-emergence of the masses on the public scene...

...Finally, when Budapest was already securely in Russian hands, the Assembly voted an American resolution condemning Russia and asking her to withdraw her troops at once...

...This is not to say that personal rivalries and the contentions of different cliques for power and preferment invariably cause mass activity...

...When they were finally released, they provided an alternative set of leaders—together with the non-Communist political figures also being released slowly—who were ready to articulate the smoldering feelings of discontent among the people...

...But we know that no move along these lines was ever officially attempted...

...Speaking against the terror and deceit to which they had been subjected for the past decade, and with that rare confidence which is possible to individuals only when they know that behind them stand millions of their countrymen, the intellectuals and students raised the most revolutionary of 20th-century slogans: This is not the way to live...

...Yet, though it lasted only a short two weeks, this revolution turned out to be among the most crucial historical events of the postwar period...

...Ever since the failure of the Spanish Revolution, most intellectuals of the West had come to believe that the age of spontaneous revolt against state tyranny was over, the days of the barricades past: for with the monopoly of weapons in the hands of a totalitarian state, spontaneous resistance was foredoomed...

...Shortly before adjournment, John Foster Dulles, in closing, briefly mentioned Hungary, saying that he hoped the matter would be kept urgently before the Security Council...

...under the unspeakable ultra-Stalinist Rakosi, the regime of terror had been more rigid and domineering than ever...

...He informed the Soviet ambassador that the Hungarian government immediately repudiates the Warsaw treaty, and at the same time, declares Hungary's neutrality...

...Help Hungary...

...It was democratic also in the sense that it led almost immediately to the establishment of Revolutionary and Workers' Councils —that is, to institutions of popular self-government...

...But the brief "liberal" interlude under Imre Nagy's premiership from 1953 to early 1955 had raised high expectations in the country at large, and when Nagy was toppled by the Stalinists the return to the old regime was acutely resented and popular discontent especially exacerbated by the withdrawal of various liberal concessions previously granted...

...As Hans Morgenthau wrote in Commentary* shortly after the revolution: "The events of the fall of 1956 have opened up a gap between our verbal commitment to a policy of liberation and the actual policy we pursued when the opportunity, not to initiate liberation, but to support it after it had alerady been achieved, arose in Hungary...

...This appeal suffered serious damage from the very outbreak of the Hungarian revolution...

...Imre Nagy, who was to become the revolutionary Prime Minister and who had done much to prepare the intellectual climate that helped precipitate the events, acted in the beginning more like a bewildered Communist sorcererapprentice than a revolutionary leader...

...The revolution forced upon them the realization that there is a limit to terror...

...Two recent studies, Ferenc A. Vali's Rift and Revolution in Hungary* and Paul Kecskemeti's The Unexpected Revolution,** the former a detailed factual account, the latter a briefer but more penetrating sociological analysis, afford a welcome occasion for attempting to assess the meaning of the revolution—with the advantage of distance provided by subsequent history...

...it was, therefore, indubitably one factor in the final loosening of the reins both in the Soviet Union and its satellites...

...The signal was discontinued soon after this appeal...

...I am convinced that at least one of the determinants, perhaps the major one, was the outbreak of the Suez conflict...

...However, questions of this sort are not really the decisive ones...

...One can give no definitive answer, but it is a fact that not only were objective political and economic conditions particularly bad in Hungary, but the Hungarian people actually felt their deprivations more keenly than the people of the less developed satellites...

...Nevertheless, American official passivity when finally confronted with the "liberation" for which American policy under John Foster Dulles had clamored for years, needs a fuller explanation...

...Help the Hungarian writers, scientists, workers, peasants, and intelligentsia...

...The Hungarian events forcibly reminded us that this view had seriously oversimplified matters...

...Not until 2:30 P.M...

...There is no need to expand on them...

...The Russians had to take into consideration the impact of their actions on public opinion in the West and neutral countries, and they also had to watch the repercussions in their own bloc and among their own Western Communist parties, where much of their ideological appeal depended on maintaining the myth of Russian fraternity and "socialist guidance...

...Revolutions are not always brought about by a decline from bad to worse...

...It is perhaps idle to speculate on such matters, but I am not at all certain that Western threats to send "volunteers" to Hungary—much as the Soviet Union has several times suggested the intervention of their `volunteers" in the Middle East—might not have led the Russians to reconsider their decision of November 1 to re-occupy all of Hungary...

...The Russian tanks which had been rolling into Budapest since daybreak had taken over...

...But this is as true as it is irrelevant...

...Two hours later this message was being circulated in mimeograph form to all UN delegates, but it bore no marks of urgency, buried in the incoming boxes with a pile of other mimeographed material...

...This we ought to remember, even as we recall the brutalty and ferocity of Khrushchev's allegedly "liberal" course...

...The Polish Communist party, especially after the warning signal of the Poz...

...An Indian daily, the Amabala Tribune, wrote at the time: "Both the Soviet Union and the Western powers are imperialists, the difference between the two being one of degree...

...By the time the Council did meet again the Russians had already begun their invasion...

...It resembled in many ways the course of events prophesied by Rosa Luxemburg, the romantic and utopian visionary of the revolutionary left of World War I, rather than the Bolshevist image of a scientifically managed uprising which prevailed in the October revolution of 1917...

...When the Council met later in the afternoon, more than twenty-four hours after Nagy's appeal had reached New York, it consumed hours in legalistic arguments...

...The Russians must have looked upon the Suez adventure as something akin to a providential aid...

...by the four great powers...

...Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter...

...The United States, far from seeking out or creating opportunities for opening the door to liberation, has proven to be unwilling to even enter the door when a satellite nation kicks it wide open...

...nan riots, succeeded in containing the thrust of the masses and the disaffected intellectuals by making major concessions to their demands, neutralizing these demands in effect by partially incorporating them into official policy...

...It must be remembered that the street fighters succeeded initially in driving the Soviet forces out of Budapest...

...For Khrushchev and his companions it was a traumatic event, revealing within their empire hatreds and discontents which they had either been unaware of or able to disregard...

...United States representatives in the UN and elsewhere let it be understood that their country would have acted more forcefully in regard to Hungary had the • Edited by Wilbur Schramm, Stanford University Press, 1959...

...opposition to Israel, and 'to the Franco-British action in Suez, was now an open fact: with this deep rift among the allies, it was unlikely that they would intervene in Hungary...

...Is comment needed...

...of November 2 was anything said about Hungary on the floor of the Assembly, at which time the Indian delegate made a passing reference to "some difficulties in Hungary...

...Most had been part of the small underground during the Horthy regime and the Nazis, but even Moscow Communists like Nagy, who had come back only with the Russian armies, were in prison for years...

...Analyzing the French Revolution he wrote: " . . . The French found their condition the more unsupportable in proportion to its improvement...

...I know of no observer who expected the revolution...

...Nobody in the West, certainly, had any inkling of the events to come...

...British and French not made this impossible by their Suez action...

...The Hungarian episode may also have led the Kremlin masters to realize that their power rested on foundations more fragile than they had thought...

...Help...

...To be sure, the Hungarian October uprising could not have happened had there not been a prolonged crisis within the top ruling group, brought on by the question of the succession to Stalin...

...finally Henry Cabot Lodge made a most moving speech about Hungary—but proposed no resolution to put the matter before the Assembly...

...Will the West be wiser, if history gives us another chance...

...We turn to the leaders of intellectual life in all countries...

...Early on November 4, the revolutionary station Radio Free Kossuth broadcast: "This is the Association of Hungarian Writers...

...And certainly, the revolution was one of the events which contributed to the emergence in the Communist world of a more polycentric vision of Communism, to an awareness of the risks, if not of the impossibility, of insisting upon monolithic unity in the Soviet camp...

...Government appeared in no hurry to move...

...Here is the chief reason why the State Department inhibited any kind of effort in the UN to exert real pressure on Russia...

...even the crowds swarming into the streets of Budapest initially had on the first day of the outbreak no revolutionary intentions...

...Would not any help to Hungary have brought forth Russian atomic retaliation and hence involved the world in atomic suicide...

...The offer of an American withdrawal on condition of full freedom for Eastern Europe would have transformed the situation...

...It is a heart-rending and at the same time sickening experience to consult the UN records of those days...

...The policy-makers of the West, the Edens as well as the Foster Dulleses, will not be able to escape a heavy share of the responsibility for the crushing of the Hungarian revolution...

...This Is Not the Way to Live The hard-boiled realists who dominated the field of Soviet study prior to the Hungarian revolution were wont to sneer at those who still believed in the possibility of a type of revolution that belonged to the 19th century...

...But, according to Anthony Eden's reminiscences in Full Circle: "The United States representative [in the UN...

...Therefore I request your excellency promptly to put on the agenda of the forthcoming general assembly of the UN the question of Hungary's neutrality and the defense of this neutrality • "The Revolution in U.S...

...it was too late...

...But even more important, at the very moment that neutralist public opinion began to concern itself with the emergence of Russian imperialism, its attention was diverted to the sudden imperialist adventure of France and Britain in Egypt...

...And one ventures to think that this cry of despair and of hope, arising then most forcibly in Poland and Hungary, may perhaps not be irrelevant to an understanding of the stresses and strains that plague contemporary Soviet society...

...Our time is limited...

...The Prime Minister...

...It is rather ludicrous to contemplate Anthony Eden, himself largely responsible for the Suez adventure, complaining that the United States by sharply moving against Britain had diverted attention from Hungary...

...As Kecskemeti observes about the Budapest general strike: for the "first time in history the syndicalist myth of the revolutionary strike as set forth by Georges Sorel actually became the basis of sustained action by the entire industrial population of a country...

...Impulse to Revolution This was, indeed, a spontaneous revolution...

...The matter is indeed considerably more complicated...

...but it was the industrial workers whose revolutionary activity was best organized and lasted the longest...

...Kecskemeti's title is well chosen...

...Stanford University Press, 178 pp., $4.75...

...but when such disagreements reveal uncertainty among the elite to the extent that its domination suddenly appears vulnerable, when the public image of unity is shattered, then the arcanum of power loses its efficacy...

...The policy of "liberation" having been exposed as a sham, it became clear that the American government was committed to main• taining the status quo and was unwilling, and probably unable, to suggest a political alternative...

...Their attitude provided a damaging contrast to the alacrity they were showing in arraigning the French and ourselves...

...Finally, there is no evidence that either the regime in office or its Kremlin masters had any intimation of what was to befall...

...But Lodge rose in the Assembly to say "how much our hearts go out to the people of Hungary, and with how much warmth and feeling we think of them...

...The Hungarian Revolution had begun...

...And yet, one of the most amazing things about the events in Hungary was the fact that in so many respects they resembled the Revolution of 1848...

...The old social democratic tradition of the Hungarian working class had re-asserted itself...

...The Hungarian revolution failed—but even in its failure it deeply influenced the subsequent course of history...

...In Hungary, a short interlude of improvement had been followed by a new tightening of economic and political restrictions...

...who clamored for more freedom surely thought only of reforms...

...These events made obvious what some of us had suspected all along, that the United States was actually pursuing a policy of containment conceived not in terms of liberation, but of an implicit and thus far unacknowledged agreement to recognize the existence of spheres of influence...

...By the end of October there were no more Soviet tanks in the city...

...The U.S...

...De Tocqueville saw clearly that partial improvement rather than utter unrelieved misery lies at the root of revolutionary upheavals...

...When the Council again met the next day, Lodge stated hopefully "that adjournment for a day or two would give a real opportunity to the Hungarian government to carry out its announced desire to arrange for an orderly and immediate evacuation of all Soviet troops...

...Though rankling with hatred of the leadership in power, these party militants were not necessarily enemies of the Soviet regime...

...In the writings of analysts like Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism was seen as a system in which the ruling elite had succeeded in so atomizing society and isolating men, in so disintegrating any form of class or national allegiance, that no possibility of articulated discontent, let alone open revolt, could be foreseen...

...On November 1, shortly after noon, a teleprinter at the UN building began to clack out a call from Premier Nagy to Dag Hammarskjold: "Reliable reports have reached the government of the Hungarian People's Republic that further Russian units are entering into Hungary...

...When the Soviet Russian tanks rumbled into Budapest on the 4th of November, they destroyed, as Ignazio Silone noted at the time, the only free soviets in existence anywhere in the world...

...On the evening of October 22, 1956, groups of students converged on the Budapest Radio station requesting that it broadcast their demands: for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, and for free elections and freedom of expression...

...Foreign Policy," February 1957...

...When All Seems Lost . . But what could the West have done...

...But the fact remains that the Suez action in itself, as well as the split between the United States and the FrancoBritish coalition, helped greatly to take the heat off Khrushchev...

...The U.S...

...Shortly after 9 P.M., tear gas bombs were thrown from the radio building at the waiting crowds, and the secret police opened fire, killing and wounding a number of the demonstrators...

...American policy-makers, one fears, have learned little...

...Mr...

...demanded the instant and immediate withdrawal of these Soviet forces...

...The Soviet Politbureau and Presidium patently hesitated during the crucial days, playing it by ear...

...Yet I daresay that had such a proposal as Lowenthal speaks of been put forward seriously, there would have been a chance that the frightful world in which we now live might be a very different place...

...At 5 P.M...

...You all know the facts...

...Richard Lowenthal was one of the few political commentators who suggested it soon after the event: "The West could have offered to make the loss of the satellite empire strategically tolerable for Russia by matching a Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe with an American withdrawal from Western Europe...

...At the same time, it was a profoundly democratic revolution, demanding the restoration of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and the right to organize opposition parties...

...Among the welter of somewhat contradictory demands that arose in Hungary once the people had won a bit of freedom, there appeared an overreaching cry (I paraphrase here from a pamphlet Irving Howe and I wrote at the time of the revolution) which, though articulated most eloquently by the students and intellectuals, clearly voiced the feelings of the vast bulk of the population: This is not the way to live...

...Nothing that has happened since this was written could lead one to disagree with the analysis...

...The students and writers • Harvard University Press, 590 pp., $9.75...

...Such an attitude, if widespread in the non-Western world, would have irremediably destroyed the key Soviet weapon in the ideological battles of the cold war...

...And by a chain reaction, the masses who had passively hoped at most for concessions from above may suddenly gather enough strength to make active demands...

...Whey then did they return, a few short days later, to crush the revolution with the most callous brutality...

...Help...

...not only would it have given immense encouragement to the freedom movements throughout the satellite states, but it would have added to the calculations of the Soviet leaders the one consideration which might have induced them to give in...

...In the Council, the Soviet veto of course prevented any action...

...America's action in the Hungarian crisis revealed that the so-called policy of liberation had in fact never been a policy but only a verbal smokescreen, a "noble lie...

...in fact, the absolute rigidity of the American posture has not fundamentally changed since the days of John Foster Dulles—though there have been many changes of detail...

...Most probably this was the reason that, after prolonged hesitancy and soul-searching and a great deal of factional squabbling in the Kremlin, the Russians made their decision to withdraw from Budapest...

...strikes and sporadic fighting would continue for a while, but the Hungarian Revolution was dead...

...Indeed, a study of the world's leading newspapers for November 2, 1956 (One Day in the World's Press: Fourteen Great Newspapers on a Day of Crisis*) shows graphically how world attention shifted from Hungary to Suez...

...These self-governing bodies became together with the Freedom Fighters who did the actual battling the very mainstay of the Revolution...

...it was political...

...and the U.N...

...Effects of the Suez Crisis And yet Russian tanks did crush the revolution, thus seemingly confirming the skeptic's prediction that in the age of Great Powers no revolution on the fringes of an empire stands a chance...