Hungary: And Still They Fight Back!
Howe, Irving
The crisis of the Communist world has not come to an end; it has only begun. That the Russians, by spilling enough blood, could reestablish military control over Budapest, was never in...
...It is unbelievable...
...a full-scale faction fight inside the American party —these are a few of the known symptons...
...By the sheer power of their will and their solidarity, the Budapest workers, backed by the unexampled cohesion of workers and peasants throughout Hungary, have brought the Russians to an impossible predicament...
...Many revolutions have been defeated in our century, but can anyone remember a revolution in which the spirit of the vanquished remained so high as in Hungary today...
...The problem thus posed for the Russian leadership is ultimately insoluble— though they can count upon the imperialist adventures of Eden and Mollet, together with the diplomatic accomplishments of Dulles, to help bail them out...
...Meanwhile, a few additional points: • The Hungarian people have fought not merely with a heroism beyond praise but with a resourcefulness that requires the most careful study...
...For from the be-factories could run without students but not without workers—they were more easily crushed by the Russians...
...The Russian system is the enemy of socialism, the enemy of freedom, the enemy of mats...
...there also appeared in Hungary organs of proletarian action, the workers' councils...
...But that does not exhaust the meaning of that strange phenomenon which goes under the name of "national Communism...
...And this, remember, after defeat...
...The formula fits Hungary exactly...
...see p. 94) . club of Communist writers became...
...19, 1956), in which he spoke as an unambiguous defender of the Hungarian revolution but also, for the first time, analyzed the Tito government in terms that recognize its basic social kinship with the Russian autocracy...
...Internationally, the Communist movement continues to suffer severe losses...
...15, 1956...
...On November 1 it declared: "As from today we are no longer the tool of a colonialism disguised as Socialism, not a figure on the chess board of some conqueror or other...
...continue to function...
...No greater evidence could be found that this was no "white" revolution than the message of Hungarian Jewry, signed by the Budapest Board of Rabbis, and broadcast by Radio Budapest on November 2: "Hungarian Jewry enthusiastically salutes the achievements of the revolution, pays reverent homage to the heroes, and identifies itself with the free and independent homeland...
...it is also a question of what his supporters and his critic-supporters in the Polish factories and among the Polish intellectuals want...
...after plague and hunger...
...the resignation of two members of the Canadian party's national committee...
...but several trade union leaders...
...Deutscher is a cynic who cannot distinguish between his infatuation with power and the Laws of History...
...We have no evidence, but I submit that the most plausible explanation for the recent behavior of the Russian leadership, its violent oscillations between repression and concession, threats and inducements, is fear, perhaps even panic...
...On the other hand, he has approved the second Russian intervention in Hungary, accepting the pretense that "counterrevolutionaries" had taken over the Hungarian revolution and going so far as to declare that the puppet Kadar and his handful of supporters represent "that which is most honest in Hungary...
...Only the appalling Isaac Deutscher, while not supporting the Russian intervention, has dared to say, without a shred of evidence, that Cardinal Mindszenty became "the spiritual head of the insurrection" (The Reporter, Nov...
...How deeply the crisis has cut into the Communist world, no one has yet surmised...
...At the same time she issued a warning...
...Our respect for the blood of the Budapest workers, if nothing else, should burn this fact into our memories forever...
...But the trend is all the other way...
...How rich was their capacity for creating new social forms that no one had anticipated: the Petofi Circle, a • A special 16-page issue of DISSENT, mailed free to all subscribers...
...able in the single month of Hun-ginning it had a distinctly class chargarian freedom...
...In the special issue of DISSENT* we tried to compose a preliminary analysis of the East European events...
...a center of revolutionary opposition and dual power...
...The only sane explanation is that the political consequences of the escape of one of the satellites would be too grave for the Soviet system to stand...
...The workers' councils of Budapest remain...
...after blood...
...But their reduction of Hungary to the status of an occupied country merely intensifies those contradictions that had led to such bitter struggles within the realm of totalitarian power...
...Less quick to move but bringing to bear a greater "social seriousness" than the students, the workers of Budapest took over the struggle and to this day they continue to resist...
...Let me raise briefly a political question...
...These, with the soldiers' committees and the student organizations, came together in a spontaneous popular expression, the main goal of which was the ouster of the Russians and the reestablishment of Hungarian democracy...
...On the one hand, he has been alarmed at the new signs of Russian belligerence, and this has resulted in a crisis of relations—upon a strictly state-to-state basis—between Russia and Yugoslavia...
...Either they must return to outright repression, which means to transform Hungary into a mere colony and to repress all those forces they had to let loose in eastern Europe...
...They had exposed themselves resistance perfected in India...
...A line of blood has been drawn...
...But it was immediately in-—by means of which they have in part fused with a social content, that is, already negated the effect of Russian the methods of the class struggle...
...Let this be remembered in the coming days...
...Jean Paul Sartre's statement denouncing the Russian intervention...
...It would be premature and facile to write off the Communist parties: they remain, in some countries, mass movements of consequence, and they continue to survive largely because the genuine socialist left in Europe and Asia is so frequently weak and spiritless...
...but we should not be so ready to assume it...
...For the consequence of may well be that this is merely an this extraordinary resourcefulness in analytical distinction, that in practice combining the traditional with improthese two "stages" were simultaneous vised techniques of social rebellion— in time...
...For it is not only a question of what Gomulka does...
...Even Nehru was finally compelled to say something in defense of the Hungarians— forced by pressure from within India, mainly pressure exerted by the Indian Socialist leaders, Jayaprakash Narayan and Asoka Mehta...
...Not only were the traditional parties of democracy reconstituted...
...And this was too much: the lonely rebel, who had by his own efforts moved from totalitarian Stalinism to an independent democratic socialism for eastern Europe, had to be silenced...
...No sooner did a little freedom shine across Budapest than there reappeared the traditional parties of Hungarian democracy which the Communists had so brutally suppressed— and which various dim-witted or malicious apologists for Stalinism in the United States have declared to be "obsolete...
...The revolution began acter...
...It was, so to speak, inundated by waves of dual power...
...For if the revolts broke out in Hungary and Poland, it should be remembered that the possibility for their outbreak was partly created in Moscow, itself, by the "relaxation" proclaimed at the 20th Party Congress...
...An imprisoned 23-yearold worker—younger, it is worth noting, than Trotsky was when he led the St...
...Multi-party listings will not be permitted on the ballot, though an "arrangement" will be worked out between the Polish CP and the farcical puppet "parties" for joint slates...
...It is frustrating, and impossible, to try to keep up with the Hungarian events in a quarterly...
...The immediate occasion for his arrest was his first-rate article in the New Leader (Nov...
...statements of alarm from French fellow-traveling writers...
...once authority gets weakened or divided at the top, long-standing grievances suddenly become motors of action...
...or they must risk the possibility that the "national Communism" they are ready to tolerate will become a national revolution against their empire...
...There must be many more...
...Within the limits of the Warsaw Pact and a Communist system, but only within those limits, individual Communist Parties are to be permitted a good deal of national independence...
...I might add that this is a valuable political demand in its own right, regardless of whether it makes things "tolerable" for the Russians.— I. H.] In a situation where Soviet Communist control of eastern Europe was actually crumbling, the offer of an American withdrawal on condition of full freedom for eastern Europe would have transformed the situation...
...Gomulka has made clear that, whether by his desire or not, there will not be genuinely free elections this winter in Poland...
...The Hungarian revolution has forced him to show his true political colors...
...The striking workers are threatened with slave labor in the mines...
...with remarkable fearlessness, and beYet it was not the same kind of cause they were both more vulnerable passive resistance that the Indian na-and expendable than the workers— tionalists had used...
...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 Ito the Hungarians.]" • If anyone still had any doubt as to the political-moral nature of the whole Communist world, let the events in Hungary teach him the truth...
...Petersburg Soviet in 1905—is the leader of the Budapest Workers' Council...
...December 1, 1956 IRVING HowE P.S...
...The peasants of Hungary continue to feed Budapest...
...The crisis of the Communist world has not come to an end...
...And why should such a dash for freedom stop short on the Soviet frontier...
...Freed from prison, let us not allow the country to become a prison of another color...
...It intervention...
...after deportations...
...and they may yet wring concessions from the armed conquerors...
...demand that Nagy, so barbarously kidnapped by the Russians, be returned to Hungarian political life...
...As Richard Lowenthal has written (Problems of Communism, Nov.-Dec...
...The reverberations of the Hungarian revolution will remain with us for years to come...
...In their few days of freedom, the workers and students of Budapest quickly improvised emergency and representative institutions of their own...
...Together with this ingenuity born of desperation there was a stubborn loyalty to more traditional social forms...
...And Tito...
...sublime...
...The Hungarian revolution to say nothing of a heroism that our began to reflect the needs and com-century can forget only at its moral plaints of those classes—the workers peril—now seems to be that a measure and peasants—which had suffered most of dual power remains in Budapest...
...So powerful is the selfdiscipline of the Hungarian workers and peasants that no black market of any significance can be found in the city...
...This fact is behind the recent arrest of Milovan Djilas, Tito's former second-in-command, who has broken with the whole political-intellectual structure of Communism...
...keep insisting that the Russians leave...
...If one goes, the Russians seem to believe, others—perhaps all—will follow...
...And that, in their clumsy oafish way, is exactly what Khrushchev and Bulganin have begun to sense...
...But heavy blows have been struck: new opportunities exist...
...The Socialist leader, Anna KethIy, in the first issue of the revived party organ Nepszava, described the nature of the revolution: "The Social Democratic party .. . with its own bare hands, has won its chance of living and it has won this from a regime which called itself a popular democracy, but which in form and essence was neither popular nor democratic...
...It is generally assumed that there was nothing for the world to do but see the Hungarians go down in defeat...
...That the Russians, by spilling enough blood, could reestablish military control over Budapest, was never in doubt...
...December 7, 1956...
...we hope in the spring issue to print an "outline history" of the Hungarian revolution...
...It is at the moment of loosening, of "liberalization," that the masses start moving and refuse to tolerate the old oppressive gesture which now no longer appears to be part of an unalterable order of things...
...And it is not yet dry...
...They have discovered that, with one or another variation, the "historical laws" that lead to conflict and clash in the capitalist countries, also operate behind the Iron Curtain...
...We greet with profound respect the heroes who have made possible this rebirth of the party, thousands of young intellectuals and workers who have fought, starving and in rags, spurred on by the idea of a free and independent Hungary...
...But to provide DISSENT readers with some information that is particularly important in view of the campaign that has already begun in both Communist and certain non-Communist circles to discredit the Hungarian revolution, here is a section from an excellent dispatch to the New Statesman, Nov...
...Perhaps this is so...
...Consider how significant it is that even the New Statesman and Nation, long a receptacle for genteel fellowtraveling, was driven to write these words in its November 10 issue: We have been watching not only the end of the Hungarian bid for freedom, but the end of the Soviet myth...
...Totalitarian regimes can stand up to the most bitter discontent the resignation from the British CP of of the masses for a long time...
...Three major social techniques or kinds of social struggle were observ December 15, 1956 In a manner unparalleled in history, the workers of Budapest have continued to defy the Russian imperialist occupation...
...For Tito, like any dictator, must recognize that the Hungarian revolution threatened not only Khrushchev but himself: it threatened the very structure of totalitarian rule...
...But one step outside the Warsaw Pact, and the Russian tanks will move...
...The Soviet Empire is still held together with bonds of steel...
...In Poland, too, the limits of "national Communism" have begun to emerge...
...It became the weapon of the by employing the methods of a na-Budapest workers who conducted a tional struggle, for the moment unit-general strike, not as a revolutionary ing all classes as in the revolutions offensive, but as a last-ditch resistance of 1848...
...the tearing-up of party cards by Austrian workers...
...Genuine democracy, the absolute prerequisite for genuine socialism, is not close at hand in Poland today...
...So powerful was this upsurge from below—an elemental pressure that came from both the ranks of the Hungarian Communist Party and the masses outside it—that the Nagy government, originally created to resist the masses, was soon swept along...
...Let Richard Lowenthal speak on this matter again: The West, he writes "could have offered to make the loss of the satellite empire strategically tolerable for Russia by matching a Soviet withdrawaI from eastern Europe with an American withdrawal from Western Europe...
...from the absence of democracy and At first, as the most inflammable the forced collectivization...
...A line of blood, in Hungary, as wide as a river...
...Their dilemma is one which springs directly from the decisions of the 20th Congress: how do you give people freedom and at the same time limit it to prescribed doses...
...Their answer is now clear...
...17, 1956, which deals with some of the standard accusations against the Hungarians: Nobody who was in Hungary during the revolution could escape the overwhelming impression that the Hungarian people had no desire or intention to return to the capitalist system . .. Particularly significant was the call of the [Hungarian] Council of Free Trade Unions...
...Those who, in the face of Hungary, still dare to describe Russian totalitarianism and imperialism as "socialist" make a mockery of the most fundamental values of socialism...
...Every socialist, every democrat, every human being devoted to liberty must today align himself with the Hungarian people...
...There was one political slogan that could have been raised with great effectiveness by the West...
...And then, section of the population, the students after the Russian intervention, the had been the ones to lead the demonHungarian revolution, defeated but strations, voice the demands and exnot broken, entered its third phase: press the will of the Hungarian peoit went over to the tactics of passive ple...
...Let us watch over the factories, mines and land, which must remain in the hands of the people...
...Beaten as they have been by the Russian tanks, numbering their dead in the thousands, further deprived of allies who have been deported to Russia or have had to flee to Austria, the workers of Budapest retain a sufficiently high level of fighting spirit, a sufficiently intense awareness of their moral claims and historical possibilities, to be able to force the puppet Kadar regime to negotiate with them...
...This is an example of what man, even in the twentieth century, can still do...
...Why then have the Russians been prepared to throw away all the fruits of their post-Stalin diplomacy...
Vol. 4 • January 1957 • No. 1
