London Letter
Walzer, Michael
Events in Hungary, The Manchester Guardian has written, have "slightly weakened the Communists, without rallying the nonCommunist left." The words were intended to describe the French...
...And they were even willing to see more than this rather frightening "equality": "The flame of liberty, once the inspiration of Communists and the •terror of reactionary regimes, today threatens the empire the Communists have built...
...For these "leftists" the events of October and November have been a constant source of astonishment ("the Russian action...
...11 An advertisement appearing in a leading Warsaw newspaper last December—so the story goes—offered to "exchange practically new independence for better geographical position...
...But the effect of Cole's reasoning has been to make that restriction less and less deplorable...
...It has created a welfare state far surpassing that set up in England during the Attlee years...
...If only Marie Antoinette had been sweeter, and her husband less a fool...
...That is to say simply that America would recognize Russia's dominant interest in Eastern Europe, and Russia America's in the West...
...the latter two from G. D. H. Cole's article "Reflections on Hungary," Jan...
...Events in Hungary, The Manchester Guardian has written, have "slightly weakened the Communists, without rallying the nonCommunist left...
...And such a freezing would leave future Hungaries to their fate...
...26, 1956...
...rather it seems an offer of guidance along a path of "gradual transition to democracy...
...It would be an insult to the Hungarian people," Tribune wrote, "to suggest that they cannot deal in conditions of freedom and the open clash of ideas, with reactionaries, as they are dealing with Stalinists...
...Hence Cole finds himself unable to place the Russians "beyond the pale, or to refuse to admit that they had valid reasons for not following the parliamentary democratic way...
...Britishers seem to have disliked precisely those elements of the Hungarian revolution which made it a revolution: the collapse of the previously established government, and the confusion and disorder which inevitably followed: the "losing of control," and "the feelings out of hand...
...History does not stay with the happily arranged patterns: the Hungarians broke out of the cold war pattern because they found it insufferable...
...Cole's article coupled a denunciation of the Russian repression with a practical justification of the same act...
...R. H. S. Crossman, having just returned from Poland, insisted in the I59 May 5, 1956 New Statesman, that opinion there was neither anti-Russian nor anti-Communist...
...Socialists who recognized the value of the challenge ought to have launched a vigorous campaign to break up the NATO-Warsaw Pact tension and free all Europe from the coercion which it implies...
...More than an announcement of sympathy and support, this should have been the affirmation of a common faith...
...It requires the existence of a moral basis to socialism...
...Working class rallies were held throughout London and a gigantic mass meeting in Trafalgar Square...
...Those who seized upon the admitted grievances of the workers of Poland were not concerned with the privation of the workers...
...Despite the difficulties of the cold war, argued the New Statesman's lead article of June 23, 1956—a week before Poznan—the two groups ought to remain on speaking terms...
...The Poles could afford the irony...
...recent events in Hungary face left-wing Socialists with an appallingly difficult problem of judgment...
...Its reasoning is simple...
...There he seems to argue not only that political "restrictions" do not affect other areas of human life, but also that the restrictions amount to little more than the absence of a parliamentary system...
...It was thus that Tribune paid tribute to the "glory" of Hungary: "The brain, after all, cannot be invaded...
...I should say that this report deals not with the bulk of the British labor movement, but with a group of "left" intellectuals who in England play a role more prominent than their numbers might suggest...
...greets any socialist attempt to express sympathy with the Hungarian workers...
...And why...
...12, 1957...
...But G. D. H. Cole's summing, up for the New Statesman (Jan...
...111 The Hungarian revolution was pre-judged a "tragedy" before it had half begun...
...The Hungarian revolution was a demand for an alternative to the cold war...
...And this leads him—as if by consequence—to a typical New Statesman conclusion: Socialists "must get ready to hold out the hand of friendship to men with whom, despite all their difference, they do have a great deal in common...
...For that effort has met with far greater success in facing a receding imperium than in confronting contemporary Europe...
...Is there not a strong possibility that socialists, frozen to their "positive role," would then strive to prevent the monolith, corrupt in all its parts, from collapsing too quickly upon the heads of its erstwhile creators...
...But what is the socialist's role to be when the "gradual transition" breaks down, when an armed demonstration occurs in Poznan, or a revolution in Budapest...
...Still it must be said that in the organization of protest meetings and the collection of funds they far outdistanced their more leftward brothers...
...It appeared at last that the Statesman's polite understanding of Russian achievements and problems was at an end...
...Such an act of recognition is by no means an insignificant socialist duty...
...They had done, The New Statesman wrote, splendidly: "The change of administration was carefully planned, skillfully and bravely carried out...
...As for the people within each sphere—they would have the undoubted benefits of peace and reduced armament...
...Yet during the same weeks British socialists seized upon Eden's Egyptian war as an issue which they could fight...
...If only it could have followed the path that Gomulka had set...
...thought they saw their chance of turning it to their own ends...
...The Nagy government never got off the ground...
...It was, at any rate, a well-documented choice...
...Sheer chaos thus threatened the country, and it is not possible to say what would have happened had not the Soviet Union, after once evacuating Budapest, sent back its tanks and lent its backing to the attempt to construct a new Communist government under the leadership of Janos Kadar...
...And so on...
...12th, 1957) represents more than this distate...
...Bevan in Tribune thought so too...
...For by recognizing in Hungary the image of international socialism, of anti-cold war socialism, might Western socialists not have found it again in themselves...
...In this confusion there was opportunity for many discontented groups to set up local and provisional governments of their own...
...it would be a serious mistake to regard events in Poland as evidence of the disintegration of the Soviet European bloc...
...Emphasis added...
...To find that alternative ought to be a socialist task...
...Whatever the merits of this solution—and it has many—it would obviously be upset by the appearance in Eastern Europe of governments upon which Russia could not depend...
...The one thing their revolution did not deserve was to have been mourned before it was celebrated...
...Throughout the coun try they were aroused to action...
...Intellectuals, he wrote, "who staked everything on the Russian alliance now feel that their faith in the Soviet Union has been miraculously justified" [i.e., by the Twentieth Congress...
...The problem must be approached from another angle also...
...The large number of socialist intellectuals and journalists traveling in Eastern Europe during the spring and summer of last year anticipated only the "normal," i.e., guided and controlled, process of "democratization...
...See also "Communications," page 202...
...Russia exists (surely) and her government calls itself socialist...
...If the Socialist International, freeing itself at last from NATO, had called immediately to fellow socialists in Asia and Africa, might they not at least have called into question their national impotence...
...The first thing that was surely required was the simple act of recognition...
...When the first revolutionary demonstration came—at Poznan— these leftists in Britain tried uncomfortably to accept both of the explana tions which immediately were offered: "foreign intervention" and a "determination to win.., greater freedom...
...The Poles by their nerve in council, the Hungarians, by their courage in battle, have won the right to talk to Russia on equal terms...
...The university towns were centers of anti-government agitation...
...Among the latter—so many of whom have rejected one side in the cold war only to attempt a difficult halfembrace in the other—reactions have been more varied...
...Was sorrow the full extent of socialist duty toward the street fighters of Budapest...
...For a big power agreement, under present conditions, is unlikely to be more than a freezing of the cold war...
...But Hun gary brought nothing remotely similar...
...British socialist leaders have persistently urged the neutralization of Germany in order to encourage this benevolence, to relax "Russian fears of European hostility," so that Russian leaders would be readier to "permit an increasing measure of independence to the states of Eastern Europe...
...Nor does it follow that the long term interests of all of us would be served by such disintegration...
...Any sort of apologetic connection with the monolith seems to hold this danger...
...But as it turns out the second is more relevant, for it allows us to see precisely what many British leftists found objectionable about Hungary...
...Here was "unnatural" destalinization, heroic and doomed...
...Had the Russians stood aside, Cole went on, he could not think that "the Hungarian people would have been in a position freely and democratically to decide their own destiny...
...No sooner had the revolution begun, Cole wrote, than "certain reactionary elements...
...When they were able the following week to report, not savage repression, but sudden and exhilarating victory, they did so happily...
...The public knew what was happening and at no stage did their feelings get out of hand...
...Is it merely the cold war which keeps them apart...
...Yet its moral indignation a week later at the Russian intervention only served to hide a lack of genuine sympathy with the Hungarian revolution...
...Hungary was a "tragedy" because it challenged the somber reality of cold war politics...
...The news from Poland could scarcely be better, he wrote on October 26th: "Destalinization is taking its natural course...
...The words were intended to describe the French political scene, where the cry "Algeria...
...It was as if the whole thing had been a sad mistake—and just when all had been going so well...
...No friend of Poland would attempt to encourage her to do more than assert her own way in friendship with the Soviet Union...
...Communism is too firmly established and the influence of Russia too great to allow that to happen...
...Some of these were "no doubt inspired by high ideals of freedom and democracy, but others appear to have been almost openly Fascist and determined to undo the entire revolution that had dethroned the previously dominant power...
...Equipped with their ready acknowledgment of, and their understanding for, "socialist" Russia, these British leftists have proceeded to a solution of European problems which is again a tribute to the Practical Mind...
...It is a lamentable fact that the rising of Poznan comes at a time when there is real prospect of an improvement of conditions throughout the Soviet world...
...Or rather, with regard to Eastern Europe, it depends upon holding any "third force" movement within very precise limits, limits which could only be drawn by Moscow's benevolence...
...It was established by a socialist revolution and proceeded to nationalize the means of production...
...And it is the only foundation upon which a new program for socialist activity in Europe might be built...
...The first was the easiest: "it is morally wrong to impose a regime by external force...
...The workers' council were "local and uncoordinated, and there was behind them no unifying force armed with a clearly conceived plan of action...
...They printed leaflets, held protest meetings, organized marches in London...
...The workers of Poznan, Aneurin Bevan wrote in the left socialist weekly Tribune, "must have been brought to a frenzy of desperation...
...If only Russia would democratize gradually yet never lose control...
...1984 will never happen...
...It was, one socialist said, the inevitable reaction of impotence...
...is very nearly incomprehensible") , of embarrassment ("the Hungarian regime under Rakosi was evidently a most unpleasant state of tyranny") , and of mental torment...
...But the final condition for the success of the New Statesman's effort at comprehension has been—it is usually so—a sacrifice of principle: "That much has been done sadly amiss in the Soviet Union I entirely agree," G. D. H. Cole wrote in the July 7th, 1956 issue, "but it is surely nonsense to suggest that the Soviet worker does not enjoy in most matters—for example in educational and social opportunity— an immensely enlarged freedom, which does not lose its value because it does not extend to politics—however deplorable such a restriction may be...
...two qualities making only for tragedy...
...He ventured to think, however, that Khrushchev's speech might make it more difficult to secure party discipline...
...1-) But even when these reactions were accompanied by sorrow at the "tragedy," or indignation at the repression, they hardly seem an adequate response to the men of Budapest...
...This "positive role" is apparently not one of opposition to the totalitarian monolith and its supporters...
...The image invoked was that of Nenni and Togliatti, and the reason suggested was the "positive role which Socialists can play in breaking up the Communist monolith...
...Was there nothing to be done...
...In effect the plan not only ignores the possibility of a "third force" in Europe, similar to that which has grown up in Asia, but it depends upon the failure of such a development...
...Aneurin Bevan, Tribune, Nov...
...His opinion is worth quoting at length...
...Because free elections were not a practical possibility...
...No wonder that the British left was almost as frightened by the collapse of Communism in Hungary as the Communists were...
...Similarly John Freeman reported an interview with local party leaders in Budapest (NS&N, July 7, 1956) . He did not doubt, he wrote, the truth of their statements that workers felt "respect for Rakosi and solidarity with the central leadership...
...And once that faith has been commonly affirmed, vacillations amidst disorder and "tragedy" must be boldly challenged...
...It cannot be said that the editors of The New Statesman (far less those of Tribune) do not know the character of the Russian empire, or at any rate, that they did not quickly learn that much of the Hungarian lesson...
...But the irony of the Polish advertisement would have been lost on him...
...The acceptance of Russian Communism into the world of Western Social-Democracy has been one of the more astonishing achievements of a certain kind of practical English mind —or at any rate of one example of that mind: The New Statesman and Nation...
...The new force to which the Hungarian people—so briefly and bravely—gave testimony has never entered into British calculations...
...They gave no hint of, because they were blind to, the violence to come...
...Insofar as it agrees to this, Western socialism demonstrates its own moral failure...
...t The three quotes are from the New Statesman and Nation...
...Those Laborites who have "responsibly" accepted the "necessity" of a garrisoned West greeted the Hungarian revolution simply as another cold war victory...
...But that prospect—undoubtedly real— lay precisely with the workers of Poznan...
...The spirit cannot be subdued...
...They seem no less true of England, and that despite the innocence of the Labor Party with regard to Suez and Cyprus, and despite the persistent effort here to define and articulate a "socialist foreign policy...
...Yet he did not feel at one with them...
...Bevan was here playing the New Statesman's "positive role...
...They have argued for a negotiated detente between East and West, accompanied by a simple division of the continent into spheres of influence so firmly recognized as not to require defense (with Germany neutralized, since it could belong to neither sphere without ruining the detente...
...Who can tell them now that they should have worked within it, effected a "gradual transition" to something or other...
...It marks a return to the pre-Hungary New Statesman position, which combined a running apologetic for Russian imperialism with an attempt to play the game of realpolitik...
...26th, "must make strenuous efforts to re-establish order...
...it was never recognized by the main bodies of insurgents...
...Why this is so is a question we must attempt to answer...
...The new authorities in Budapest, Tribune wrote on Oct...
...But the reverse of this encouragement to relaxation must be discouragement to revolution...
...But not enough British leftists nor even some of its own people spoke as clearly as, in this instance, Tribune...
...In the latter case the effects of the cold war polarity have been all too obvious...
...Since the Twentieth Congress this attitude has taken the definite form of attempts to re-establish "conversation" between socialists and Communists...
Vol. 4 • April 1957 • No. 2
