5. Road to Freedom (1956- ) The 20th Party Congress 55-World Labor's Response 55-Response in the Soviet Orbit 57-Poznan 58-The Poznan Trials 60-Poland's October Days 61-The Hungarian Revolution 63-The Future of Soviet Labor 70
5. Road to Freedom (1956- ) "Socialism and Communism have nothing in common." —Socialist International, April 1956. "No Bread Without Freedom, No Freedom Without Bread." —Warsaw students,...
...But the fight for freedom in Hungary went on...
...At 8:13 a.m., the Government radio announced that the Central Committee had named Imre Nagy Premier to replace Hegedus...
...The Centra] Committee Plenum met again for 14 hours and rejected the Soviet demands...
...On June 29, Radio Warsaw said that 38 had been killed and 270 wounded.* Premier Cyrankiewicz blamed the bloodshed on "provocateurs and imperialist agents" who had taken advantage of labor's legitimate grievances...
...The next morning, Saturday, October 20, the Soviet delegation left for Moscow...
...Hickman estimated the number of demonstrators at 30,000...
...It elected a new Politburo, eliminating Rokossovsky, and unanimously chose Gomulka as First Secretary...
...Aneurin Bevan, who had visited the USSR in 1954, wrote: "Much has been said in Russia about the Communist party functionaries who were murdered by Stalin...
...Outside Budapest, the Soviet air force dropped incendiary bombs on workers' installations, while new Soviet motorized units entered Hungary from Czechoslovakia...
...Workers now fought their way into a machine-gun depot at Fot, while Hungarian soldiers, joining the revolution, captured the Red Star printing plant from the AVH...
...Factories have truly and irrevocably come into the hands of the workers...
...Ochab admitted that Poland's Six Year Plan had not only failed to produce enough coal and food, but also had fallen 50 per cent short of its goal for real wages...
...That day, Maurice Vuithier of the Red Cross reported that in Budapest "we did not see smoke from a single factory chimney...
...The most cruel kind of capitalism did not exploit us in the way we were exploited during the last eight years...
...Kadar ordered all workers' councils dissolved and threatened summary execution for the possession of weapons...
...Troops were gathered around...
...Warsaw students, October 1956...
...From Stalino (population: 600,000) Hangen reported: "Jerry-built miners' hovels look as if they could hardly last the winter...
...That makes it all the worse for them when they come up against something like the Budapest uprising...
...When the trials opened on September 27, correspondents from 12 non-Communist Western newspapers and agencies were permitted to attend, together with three Western jurists (Professor Alfred Fernand of Montpellier University in France, Jules Wolff of the Belgian Society for the Rights of Man, and Frederick Elwyn Jones, British Labor MP...
...The following day, Sunday, October 21, workers of 10 major Warsaw factories went to work, prepared to resist any "Stalinist provocation...
...Kossuth Prize-winner Lajos Mesterhazy called the Party slogan of "collective leadership" a fraud...
...The student demonstration had begun in front of the Polish Embassy, to voice solidarity with Warsaw's defiance of Khrushchev...
...Nepakarat, organ of the Free Hungarian Trade Unions, declared: "As of today we are no longer the tool of a colonialism disguised as socialism, not a figure on the chessboard of one conqueror or another...
...Anti-aircraft guns took up positions on the main city squares...
...When Khrushchev announced that Rokossovsky's troops as well as Soviet units in Silesia were moving on Warsaw, Ochab said: "If you do not stop them immediately, we will walk out of here and break off all contact...
...While the talks were going on, however, security police confiscated duplicating machines used to publish the workers' views...
...A man's suit of good quality cosle 1,500 rubles...
...Still others, killed without cause, have not been exonerated, nor has restitution been made to their families...
...Khrushchev and Bulganin received the Labor Committee's letter during a visit to London...
...Meanwhile, from Miskolc came reports that the workers' council there, joining forces with local partisans and aided by some Soviet soldiers, had gained control of the city...
...Although the court repeatedly cut short defense efforts to link the actions of the young men in the dock with the steelworkers' strike, the trials were relatively fair...
...Peasants Istvan Bibo and Ferenc Farkas...
...They let a score of the demonstrators climb on their tanks and drove them to Parliament Square...
...Although the police released 69 of the 200 labor leaders arrested in Budapest, outside the capital there were new repressions against the workers' councils...
...By this time, however, the majority of workers had shifted their strategy from armed insurrection to strikes, sit-down strikes and partisan warfare...
...Budapest's reaction to the Kadar regime was summarized in this poster: "Nine million Fascist counter-revolutionaries, all former factory owners, bankers, cardinals, remain hidden in the country...
...As announced on November 3, this government included Social Democrats Anna Kethly, Gyula Kelemen and Jozsef Fischer: Small Farmers Tildy, Kovacs and Istvan Szabo...
...Everybody was standing bareheaded and singing...
...Khrushchev ascribed the purge of Old Bolsheviks, the use of torture to obtain false confessions, the deportation of whole nationality groups and similar acts to Stalin's "cult of the individual...
...In the industrial Wola district of Warsaw, metal workers demanded the dismissal of Rokossovsky as Polish Defense Minister and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland...
...They carried in front of them a large Polish flag...
...An officer pointed his pistol at the soldier and killed him...
...Do you mean as long as you are in power...
...Meanwhile, 5,000 students and young workers at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute cheered demands for greater political freedom...
...He said "the police looked on disinterestedly, as did many of the ordinary soldiers, some of whom turned their weapons over to the uprisers...
...and Nagy, Geza Losonczy and Kadar of the Communists...
...On Monday, October 22, meetings took place throughout Poland...
...Let us protect our liberty and build a neutral and free Hungary...
...Justice to the survivors demands their immediate release...
...Attacking the "reactionaries" of the regime, the new union leaders urged groups of writers to visit the factories to carry their demands to the workers...
...Three were charged with the death of a security police official...
...on December 12, the same demand came from the steelworkers' union in Poznan...
...The working class," Gomulka said, "has had to pay for a bad economic policy...
...the right to negotiate freely for higher wages, a five-day week, fewer hours, and overtime at enhanced rates for all work outside the five-day week of reasonable hours...
...Then they destroyed the radio jamming station...
...Meanwhile, revolutionaries controlled most of western Hungary, as well as cities like Pecs and Miskolc, in the south and east...
...At one stage they were even crawling over the great glass-domed roof prying off panes of glass and pushing their heads through the apertures made to hear what was going on below...
...About the workers who went to jail because they clocked in late at the factory...
...What emerged in the courtroom was an indictment of the conditions that produced the Poznan revolt: ?On the third day, 22- year-old Janusz Suwart was denounced by the prosecutor for a previous theft conviction...
...More portentous, perhaps, were the first reverberations of the Hungarian uprising in the Soviet Union itself...
...When a delegation sent upstairs failed to return, workers and students pressed into the building...
...Five days after the second Soviet intervention, fighting was still raging in Budapest, Pecs, Dunapentele, Kalocsa, Gyor, Kecskemet and Komlo—despite the assault of an estimated 15 Soviet divisions, including 4,000 tanks...
...At Writers' Union meetings on March 30 and April 3, Sandor Nagy of Szeged demanded that collective farms be replaced by cooperatives on the Danish model...
...I was told it was 'We want bread!' . . By mid-day there were tanks in front of the National Bank of Poland...
...If the King's police had won the battle," said Hejmowski, "the prosecutor of that time would have dragged these young people into court and called them hooligans and criminal elements...
...The strikers also took over the city hall...
...Socialist Gyula Kelemen said: "Hundreds of thousands of organized workers, who suffered the bitterness of oppression, are today rebuilding the Social Democratic party...
...This correspondent saw the Soviet soldiers there laughing and waving to the crowd of hundreds that had collected...
...Using data furnished him by the director of the Soviet Institute of Statistics, Philip found that Soviet real wages were less than half those of French workers...
...On Friday morning, October 26, Radio Budapest declared that Premier Nagy "agreed with every point" of the Miskolc workers...
...As it did, Poles in Stettin, Lublin and other cities demonstrated for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary...
...On the other hand, the Congress's promises to labor were not met...
...But overnight, also, workers in the industrial suburbs of Ujpest and Kipest voted to join the revolutionary forces in the capital...
...He said that there were no Social Democrats in Russia and that he had no influence on the Communist regimes of Central Europe...
...Turning to the Poznan revolt, he declared: "The working class recently gave a painful lesson to the Party leadership and the Government...
...Despite these admissions, Soviet Premier Bulganin told a plenary session of the Polish Central Committee the next day that the Poznan revolt was the work of "imperialist agents" and warned against too rapid "democratization...
...After the meeting, the Poles told their story to foreign newspapermen, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times...
...the writers rejected by a vote of 100-to-3 the Party candidate for secretary of their union...
...About the farmers turned out of their homes for eating food which was earmarked for state delivery...
...new relations with the USSR on the basis of equality...
...Noting that court officials' salaries were three times his own, Kulas said this was a case of "the rich trying the poor...
...At 3 p.m., Gero went on the air...
...For nearly forty years of exploitation had taught them the truth that Lenin understood in 1905 and betrayed in 1917: "He who wishes to proceed to Socialism by any path other than political democracy must inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in the political and economic sense...
...At the Congress, Khrushchev promised to raise the wages of lowest-paid workers,* and two months later the Soviet Government repealed the 1940 law providing criminal penalties for workers who quit their jobs...
...Meanwhile, Pravda attacked Polish freedom of the press, singling out articles by Zigmunt Florczak and Jerzy Putrament...
...Heinz Brestel, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent, reported: "At noon, military help was requested...
...improvements of industrial safety and hygiene conditions...
...And now we are more oppressed than ever...
...Nor can we forget that Socialists are denied all political rights in the countries of the Soviet bloc and that many are still in prison whose only crime was to believe that there are more roads to Socialism than one...
...Even the workers of the Government news agency walked out...
...Cooperation with those circles of the Socialist movement which have views on the forms of transition to socialism differing from ours is also possible and essential...
...These fellows have a conscience...
...Other speakers attacked "Stalinists and dogmatists" and urged the removal of Rakosi...
...All factories and offices to start work on November 5 as usual . the population strictly to refrain from demonstrations and gatherings in case of firing at Soviet soldiers, and at any citizen, the Soviet armed forces will fire back with all weapons at their disposal...
...In the Polish student paper, Po Prostu, young Jan Stanislawski asked: "What about the Central Committee...
...The attempt to win the Party new support at home and abroad included these moves: ?Soviet labor was told that the work-week would shortly be cut to 46 hours...
...They thought there were 800,000 Communists in Hungary but they could barely find 20,000 to defend the Communist regime...
...But since the Revolution was won, they are national heroes, and their picture has become the symbol of revolution...
...stabilization of norms...
...A Hungarian reporter described what happened: "In this city of 1.5 million, the only living people in the battered, rubble-strewn streets were the police and Russian soldiers...
...But on August 1 a resolution of the Polish Central Committee pledged pay increases of 7 million zlotys...
...Szabad Nep replied to Pravda the next day...
...Be certain that we shall not rest until full justice has been done...
...this figure wan revised upward to 53 killed and over 400 wounded...
...The unions' program included the right to strike, workers' control of industry, substantial wage rises for low-paid workers, a spartan wage ceiling, decentralization of planning, and "a general end to production norms with the exception of factories where workers or workers' councils desire their maintenance...
...The Congress also urged democratic socialists abroad to join in a "united front" with the Communist movement...
...Prace of Bratislava reported (April 24) that "some of the miners of Ostrava have recently made use of their right to criticize in order to make unfounded and unjustified claims to excessive wage increases...
...Ochab warned him: "Don't think you can keep us here and start a pusch outside...
...Early in March, students in Tiflis demonstrated against the regime...
...In Pecs, the Soviet military commander ordered: "The Revolutionary National Committees to disband . the population to hand in all weapons to the military command, in the building of the former security police...
...Khrushchev rejected it, and denounced Social Democrats as "enemies of the working class...
...The revolutionary people of Pest and Buda want freedom—freedom for the people, a life without overbearing, without despotism and terror, more bread and national independence...
...We believe in the rights of man, they mock them...
...Over the weekend, the spotlight shifted from Poznan to Warsaw...
...The next day, Tuesday, October 23, Budapest was bathed in sunshine...
...Secretary Khrushchev promised a 42-hour week in 1957 and a 40-hour week by 1960...
...A few minutes later, the Soviet command announced the formation of a new "government" composed of six Communists, headed by Kadar...
...Davies said that the strikers' slogans included "We Want Freedom...
...When we satisfied ourselves that reason and justice were on the side of the revolution, we got arms and joined up with the workers...
...This, then, was how Soviet workers lived in 1956, fortieth year of Bolshevik rule...
...But, sooner or later, follow it they would...
...That estimate was made by Indian diplomats on the scene in a report to their government...
...If this keeps up," declared the Budapest Council, "the end will be a general strike, bloodshed and a new national tragedy...
...The Hungarian Revolution: The Hungarian revolt which erupted immediately after Poland rebuffed Khrushchev had been brewing for many months...
...It was the workers who started the actual armed insurrection," a member of the Revolutionary Committee of University Students told U.S...
...On November 23, also, came news that Imre Nagy, who had left the Yugoslav Embassy the night before with a promise of safe conduct from Kadar, had been kidnaped by Soviet security troops...
...At this point, Edward Ochab announced that Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kagnnovich had arrived from Moscow...
...On October 30, too, an amnesty was proclaimed for all who had participated in the revolution, and Nepszara...
...Next they attacked the prison, burned a file on political prisoners...
...the defendants received relatively short prison terms, but their lawyers said they would appeal...
...On the night of June 28, the Polish news agency attributed the workers' revolt to "imperialist agents and the reactionary underground...
...When the Kremlin began publicly "rehabilitating" purged Communists, a group of American labor and Socialist leaders wrote to Khrushchev and Bulganin (April 18) : "We want to remind you of the fate of those labor and Socialist leaders . . still imprisoned without cause in the Soviet Union, the countries of Central-Eastern Europe and China...
...On October 6, the bodies of Laszlo Rajk and other Hungarian leaders purged in 1949 were given honorary re-burial in Budapest...
...On Monday, December 10, the Budapest Council called for a 48-hour general strike to begin at midnight...
...Earlier, foreign diplomats reported, workers of Moscow's Kaganovich Bail-Bearing Plant had staged a sit-down strike in protest against revised work norms...
...We reaffirm that without freedom there can be no Socialism...
...and "Down with the Dictatorship...
...The Poznan Trials: On September 26, the local Gazeta Poznanska said that none of the steelworkers would be prosecuted?criminals" only would be tried...
...Political prisoners and forced laborers were being liberated throughout the country...
...On December 3, after the Council's demand for an independent labor newspaper had been rejected, workers went out on the streets and burned copies of the Government paper...
...Appeals for open and fair trials for the Poznan workers were sent by the German Social Democratic party, the French Socialist party, and other labor and socialist organizations throughout the world...
...The strike, nevertheless, was totally effective in Budapest, Pecs, Debrecen, Szolnok and other cities...
...The executive committee asks workers, including organized workers, that wherever they disagree with the composition of factory committees they should hold new trade-union elections on the basis of real trade-union democracy...
...They were chanting something...
...One group, including workers with ladders, cables and acetylene torches, dismantled the 26-foot-high bronze statue of Stalin...
...At 4 a.m...
...The regime's newspaper admitted: "The labor movement has never seen such a strike...
...Where they are in power, they have distorted every freedom, every right of the workers, every political gain and every human value which Socialists have won in a struggle lasting generations...
...Machine guns were brought up against the demonstrators...
...Meanwhile, however, 50 British Labor MPs had appealed to Warsaw for "generous restraint in dealing with workers and citizens of Poznan...
...They shouted they did not want to fire on unarmed Hungarian workers...
...Gordon Cruikshank of the London Communist Daily Worker attended it: "For six hours I sat in the immense Warsaw Polytechnic Hall...
...Pecs radio to the south announced the organization of a "revolutionary council of the province of Baranja...
...then, joined by 800 Army officers, they moved across the Danube, bearing Hungarian and Polish flags, to assemble before the statue of General Josef Bem, a Polish hero of Hungary's 1848 revolution...
...The last stronghold of the demonstrators, a radio station used for jamming foreign broadcasts, was reduced at 7 a.m...
...Writer Alexei Pludek said: "Young people will not be prompted to self-sacrifice by a high functionary who with the money of the working class buys a villa in Prague, a country house and a private automobile in addition to Government cars—especially if he fortifies that villa and surrounds it with armed men, possibly to protect himself against the working class...
...fighting was also reported in Debrecen, Szolnok and Szeged...
...Facts revealed so far by the investigation commission . . . show that the basis for the bloody riots was the dissatisfaction of the workers...
...The rally approved a resolution calling for "the principle of openness in political life, workers' self-government and other steps leading to the removal of Stalinism from the economic and political life of our country...
...revision of norms...
...The first shots were fired shortly after...
...The threat was decisive...
...At the same time, the rector of Moscow University denied widespread rumors that 100 students had been expelled for political protests, but admitted that university students "would like more information" on the Hungarian situation...
...On November 23, workers' leaflets instructed the people of Budapest to remain indoors from 2 to 3 p.m...
...In mid-December, Leningrad Pravda said that university students were "discussing problems that are not to be discussed" and demanding "re-evaluation of values...
...On April 7, the Council of the Socialist International declared: "Socialism and Communism have nothing in common...
...We know the terrifying consequences of all forms of the personality cult . . thoughtless servility . the persecution of criticism, the whitewashing of liars . the crushing of human rights and law...
...In all-night meetings, the students, joined by young workers, framed 22 demands, including free, secret elections, recognition of labor's right to strike, and withdrawal of Soviet troops...
...according to Stalin, Yaroshonko had urged that cousumer needs be the basis of economic planning...
...Elsewhere, trolley cars were overturned to block the movement of Soviet tanks...
...On July 8, Warsaw removed two ministers who had negotiated with the Poznan delegation on the eve of the revolt...
...The clergy officiated...
...On returning to Moscow, Khrushchev, echoed by Pravda, condemned Labor's "vile questions...
...Complete amnesty for Hungarians who have participated in the revolution...
...Shortly before 3 p.m., the youth had massed in front of a statue of Petofi...
...The streets of Budapest are filled with a new wind of greater freedom...
...In eight weeks, the Hungarian Revolution and Soviet intervention had cost the lives of an estimated 25,000 Hungarians and 7,000 Soviet soldiers...
...In industrial Miskolc, the radio broadcast the demands of the Workers Council: "1...
...The neighbors never liked us because they knew our father was a Communist and worked for the police before he was arrested...
...It is time now to say something about the millions of common folk who suffered in less dramatic ways...
...The Hungarian Government has started negotiations with regard to the withdrawal of Soviet forces stationed in Hungary...
...The fountain is at one corner of the street, and it is there that the housewives go to fetch water...
...More than 125,000 Hungarians had fled to neighboring Austria...
...Novotny revealed on June 12 that 235 Party organizations, representing 15,000 members (principally in the Prague area), had officially petitioned for an extraordinary Party Congress to elect a new Central Committee...
...On Septenther 8, 1956, minimum wage in Industry of 300-350 rubles a month was derreed, offective in l957...
...I'll tell you why I did it," shouted Suwart...
...On October 18, the paper said that such a trial would "inevitably demonstrate the political responsibility of Matyas Rakosi...
...In Wroclaw, thousands of workers and students chanted: "Rokossovsky, go home...
...For five days, bombs exploded, machine guns sowed death...
...Supported by Aneurin Bevan and others, Gaitskell raised the question of Socialists in the Soviet orbit imprisoned, as he put it, for no other crime than that they held the same views as British Laborites...
...The Central Committee admitted that Poznan had "caused a profound shock in the entire Party, the working class and the nation...
...The 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party (February 12-25, 1956) was the most eventful since the 10th Congress in 1921, when Lenin proclaimed the New Economic Policy in the midst of the Kronstadt revolt...
...The workers, however, tightened their ranks...
...Their main strongholds are the aristocratic residential districts of Csepel and Ujpest...
...Over the weekend, students at Pecs, in south Hungary, joined those of Budapest and Szeged in an ultimatum to the regime...
...As a result, the worker perpetually feels a Damocles' sword suspended over his head—the threat of increased norms...
...A week later, Mihaly Farkas, secret-police chief who had helped prepare the Rajk trial, was arrested...
...We believe in democracy, they don't...
...That won't be long...
...They themselves were at last asking the questions put by Tom O'Brien of the British Trades Union Congress on the eve of the Poznan strike: "When will the Russian trade unions be given the right to strike without let or hindrance...
...After turning down labor's demands one by one, Kadar shifted to ultimatums for unconditional surrender...
...Attached to the letter were lists of Socialists and trade unionists who had been arrested or had vanished in the Soviet orbit...
...But Hegedus remained First Deputy Premier, and Gero Party Secretary...
...At one Leningrad college, a discussion ended by the students staging a demonstration in which they carried a picture of Gomulka...
...The vast crowd grew to tens of thousands...
...Voices have been heard," admitted Czech Party Secretary Antonin Novotny, "calling, under the pretext of 'freedom,' for a return of pre-February [1948] conditions...
...The same day, eleven leading writers, including Ignazio Silone and Andre Philip of the Labor Committee to Release Imprisoned Trade Unionists and Democratic Socialists, called for worldwide labor action in support of the Poznan workers...
...The miners at Pecs and Dorog, and the workers of Ujpest and Csepel, however, resisted firmly...
...The next day (Thursday, October 25), according to eye-witness John MacCormac of the New York Times: "The crews of three Soviet tanks began to fraternize with the insurgents shortly before noon in front of the Astoria Hotel...
...But only a minute later from a few blocks in the distance he heard a violent cannonade and saw at the end of the street another Soviet tank firing in the direction of the crowd...
...A flag was put over the dead man...
...The placards of student demonstrators proclaimed: "No Bread Without Freedom, No Freedom Without Bread...
...What has been going on in Budapest," it declared, "was no adventure and it did not fail at all...
...This revolution has also made the liberation of the trade-union movement possible, so that, independent of all Party and Government influence, the trade unions can indeed become a militant and consistent organization representing the interests of the workers...
...trade unions that "truly represent the interests of the Hungarian working class...
...Today, in our opinion, the prospect of changing this situation is opening up...
...But all through November 1, 2 and 3, new Soviet forces were pouring into Hungary, occupying key points and ringing cities, airports and other key installations...
...on June 29...
...This afternoon a vast youth demonstration took place...
...According to his dispatches, Khrushchev called Gomulka a "traitor," and tried to dictate a new Politburo loyal to Moscow—with Rokossovsky included...
...According to Davies, when demonstrators asked one tank commander whether he was a true Pole, he replied in strong affirmative gestures, then turned his guns against the security building...
...On the other were 25,000 students and nearly 200,000 workers pouring in from outlying districts...
...In Hungary, the writers' rebellion which had begun in 1955 was intensified...
...An article in Cracow's Zycie Literackie turned directly to the condition of Polish workers: "Nobody is willing to work hard for small wages...
...During the night, workers remained at the Zeran auto plant and other Warsaw factories—armed...
...So there was no place to turn...
...They called us cowards and opportunists because we hesitated at first before joining them on the barricades...
...A meeting of the Writers Union nine days later elected Hay its vice-president and named other rebels to high posts...
...Response in the Soviet Orbit: The 20th Congress also brought immediate repercussions in the USSR, where Khrushchev's speech was read to special Party meetings...
...These changes had caused the strike at the Kaganovich Plant...
...At a dinner at the House of Commons on the night of April 23, British Labor party leader Hugh Gaitskell personally confronted Khrushchev with the same issue...
...According to the Government's own figures, the Soviet worker had less meat, milk and eggs on his table than in 1913...
...from 12:30 to 4:30 a.m., it was off the air...
...and higher family allowances for low-paid workers...
...Kadar promised to negotiate with the leaders of the Budapest Central Workers' Council...
...His sister screamed from a spectators' seat: "Our father died fighting for Poland in 1939...
...to demonstrate solidarity with the strike...
...The petition was rejected...
...Then the officers gave orders to shoot...
...the new Social Democratic newspaper, urged that political asylum be extended to "Soviet soldiers who had come over to the people...
...The rebels had at this time about 4,000 small arms...
...Hetfoi Hirlap, a new student paper, declared: "In the trial of Farkas we must impeach the policy of dictatorship...
...Stanislaw Hejmowski, defending another group, reminded the court of Delacroix's painting of the French Revolution as a young woman on the barricades, youths with pistols and rifle by her side...
...When Ekaterina Furtseva, secretary of the Moscow city Party organization, lectured them on discipline, a worker in the back of the hall shouted: "And how much money do you make...
...He refused to fire his gun...
...Khrushchev himself told us that 80 per cent of village houses have neither electricity, running water nor modern sanitation...
...When Rakosi's representative said that the works of writers friendly to Rajk "will never be published," Aczel snapped back: "What do you mean, never...
...Budapest radio, now controlled by Kadar's regime, admitted on November 10 that three-quarters of the telegraph and telephone workers, 4,000 of the 7,000 railroad-car factory workers, 2,000 of the 2,800 Ikarus auto workers, and 3,500 of the 4,000 workers at the Gottwald machine plant were out on strike...
...The Party and our workers have been warned and they are ready...
...At 11 p.m., the radio stopped broadcasting news...
...However, nobody in Poland has ever said these words...
...yet there were even attempts to smuggle them into Party ranks...
...That evening, Gomulka spoke to the Party Central Committee...
...Next a Politburo member proposed the election of Gomulka as First Secretary and the formation of a new Politburo, excluding Marshal Rokossovsky...
...Poland's October Days: At 10 a.m...
...They have to fire into the masses...
...In one forced-labor mine camp, according to Karoly Molnar, a liberated political prisoner, "the prisoners heard about the revolution of Hungarian youth on October 23 and decided to register their sympathy by launching a hunger strike...
...The dooren indieated that more than 8 million Soviat wage-earuars-a sisth of the total-had bren receiving monthly wages averaging 200-260 rubles...
...AVH men (security police) opened fire, but an Army unit on the scene distributed weapons to the demonstrators...
...The steelworkers sent a 27-man delegation to Warsaw and warned Government officials that, unless they obtained redress, they would march...
...That day, a Pravda article declared: "The anti-popular adventure in Hungary failed...
...The Future of Soviet Labor: As news of the Hungarian Revolution spread, Soviet students and workers began to challenge the Kremlin's interpretation of it...
...To whom is it responsible...
...That morning, too, students and young workers staged another giant rally...
...By December, this appeal had been joined by 440 labor leaders from 65 countries, who formed the Labor Committee to Release Imprisoned Trade Unionists and Democratic Socialists (see pp...
...A sharp, ill-tempered note was discernible in the tone which students and workers at some institutions adopted in voicing grievances...
...On July 6, Trybana Ludu admitted that the blame for Poznan rested with the Communist party and its trade unions...
...Returning from a visit to the USSR, French Socialist party secretary Pierre Commin declared: "We bad the feeling that the Revolution had not been carried out in order to benefit man and enhance his dignity, but that it had succeeded in reducing man to the role of a tool...
...They have to stand against history...
...At Csepel, 28,000 workers surrounded the factory gates to bar the entry of Soviet infantry...
...On November 11, when the first widespread deportations of Hungarian youth were reported, the Budapest Central Workers' Council, gradually emerging as the main spokesman for the workers, demanded that they cease...
...reported Radio Budapest, "this is how Budapest today celebrates a new Ides of March...
...At 10 p.m., workers and students massed in front of Szabad Nep demanded that the paper publish their appeal for a general strike...
...A meeting attended by representatives of workers' councils from Pecs, Dorog, Tokod, Tatabanya, Tata and Miskolc voted to continue striking "until the last Soviet division has left Hungary...
...The 38,000 workers of Csepel continued armed resistance until November 14...
...This cannot go on any longer...
...The delegates returned to Poznan on June 27...
...both had "lost every contact with the workers...
...A few weeks later, the same periodical printed a Hungarian translation of Adam Wazyk's Polish "Poem for Adults...
...A month later, a 6,000-word editorial in Pravda denounced "rotten elements"* within the Soviet Party who were making "slanderous speeches" that were "directed against the Party's policy and its Leninist foundations...
...reporter Edmond Taylor...
...When will the Russian trade unions be given the right to decide policy without orders from the Communist party...
...At the second trial, 19-year-old Janusz Kulas said he had joined the demonstration because he had learned in school that workers should struggle to improve their living conditions...
...The publication of Khrushchev's "secret speech" brought vigorous labor reaction...
...We believe the time has come to right these wrongs...
...On July 20, Party Secretary Edward Ochab told the Central Committee that "the soullessness of the authorities" was the chief cause of the Poznan strike...
...At five minutes to 3, the windows opened and people sang the national anthem...
...About the many who must have suffered nervous or physical collapse through overwork, known as 'fulfilling the norm.' " In Italy, Pietro Nenni wrote in Avanti: "The whole problem of Soviet society, the whole problem of the people's democracies that have followed in the footsteps of Soviet society, is reduced to the necessity for internal democratization, for the circulation of ideas—in a word, for political liberty...
...As long as these are not fulfilled, the people of Borsod County and Greater Miskolc will strike...
...National flags, young people with rosetles of the national colors singing the Kossuth song, the Marseillaise and the Internationale...
...Sandor Lukacsi branded as "hypocrisy" Party leader Rakosi's "rehabilitation" of the purged Laszlo Rajk...
...He ridiculed boasts of industrial output, noting that in the mines overtime work had accounted for two-thirds of the rise during the Six Year Plan: "The system of work on Sundays was introduced, and this could not but ruin the health and strength of the miners...
...It is our turn now to defend our factories, if need be with arms, and the magnificent achievements of our national revolution...
...At the same time, armed gangs . attacked the building of the Military Prosecutor's office, the jail, the broadcasting station, and attempted to seize the railway station, bank and post office...
...Speakers at lectures on the international question," reported the Moscow correspondent of the New Statesman and Nation on November 24, "were bombarded with questions about Hungary...
...According to other British witnesses, there was sporadic fighting in the city throughout the night of June 28-29, with fighter aircraft flying low dropping flares...
...The angry mob tore branches from the trees and rushed against the military, shouting their demand for freedom...
...Although the June 27 meeting of the Petofi Circle had forced Rakosi's resignation as Party Secretary on July 18, the Central Committee (in a meeting attended by Soviet spokesmen Mikoyan and Suslov) named Rakosi's intimate associate, Erno Gero...
...Down with the Soviet Occupation...
...workers' control of industry...
...At the same time, Radio Warsaw announced that in the preceding three weeks the Polish people had contributed four million zlotys for a memorial to the Warsaw uprising of 1944...
...That afternoon, thousands of students gathered at the Budapest School of Architecture and the University of Economics...
...On one side," said journalist Leslie Bain, "were 70 Soviet tanks, 50 armored cars, and small arms and automatic weapons...
...Nagy later promised that he would open negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops as soon as order was restored...
...All [the Party] had to do was say to the workers: Comrades, we will put an end to this continuous increase of norms...
...It isn't only that they have to shoot down unarmed women and children...
...These tendencies became apparent outside the Party...
...But in 1956, too, the classic weapons of democratic revolution were seized by the new generation of workers in Poland and Hungary, and young Soviet workers knew it...
...the paper was out of action a day and a half...
...The Plenum's first act was to restore Wladyslaw Gomulka and three of his associates to the Central Committee...
...The students now demanded complete freedom of speech and press, free elections, abolition of the death penalty, revision of industrial norms and peasant delivery quotas, release of political prisoners and withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary...
...In the week preceding the Plenum, the full force of public opinion had been thrown behind the Party group advocating "democratization.'' That week, the Central Council of Trade Unions had voted directives for workers' participation in factory management...
...In Magyarovar, Hungarian soldiers joining the workers and students overpowered AVH men who had fired on peaceful demonstrators...
...Others lifted him and carried the body before them as they surged forward...
...In Gyor, the revolutionary Workers Council had already obtained the peaceful withdrawal of the local Soviet garrison to a nearby forest...
...On Monday, October 22, the Petofi Circle and the Writers Union cabled congratulations to Poland on the victory over Moscow...
...The] workers, misled by provocateurs, laid down their tools on Thursday morning and went into the streets of the city...
...On the ninth day, 19-year-old Wladyslaw Caczkowski broke down on the stand while reporting how he had been beaten by the police after he voluntarily surrendered...
...The buildings of the Municipal People's Council and of the Provincial Party Committee were attacked...
...On Tuesday, October 30, Nagy announced the end of the one-party system, promised free elections and the immediate formation of a new government representing all parties...
...From the strategic Donets Basin, whose workers were among the highest-paid in the USSR, Welles Hangen of the New York Times reported: "Passing through such coal-mining towns as Makeyevka, Zugres, Chistyakovo, Krasny Luch and Uspenska, one sees a seemingly endless succession of squalid hovels and shanties...
...The next day, the new executive committee of the Free Hungarian Trade Union Federation (reorganized "with the inclusion of old and formerly imprisoned representatives of the workers' movement") issued this appeal: "Workers, Hungarian toilers...
...The Central Council of Hungarian Trade Unions now recommended that "Hungarian trade unions should function as they did before 1948 . . change their names and henceforth be called Free Hungarian Trade Unions...
...Outside Budapest, workers fought the AVH at the Tatabanya and Salgotarjan magnesium mines...
...Fleeing demonstrators clamored in front of foreign legations, shouting: "The workers are being murdered...
...They locked their arms and began to march against the soldiers...
...On Saturday, October 27, Nagy reshuffled the Government to include two noted non-Communists: Small Farmer leaders Zoltan Tildy, former President of the Republic, and Bela Kovacs, who had spent nine years in Communist jails...
...On Sunday, October 28, Premier Nagy, responding to the demands of revolutionary councils in Miskolc, Pecs, Debrecen, Szeged, Gyor, Szolnok and other cities, announced that "the Hungarian Government has come to an agreement with the Soviet Government whereby Soviet forces shall withdraw immediately from Budapest...
...Gero's broadcast infuriated the demonstrators...
...At 4 a.m...
...Other tanks could be heard rumbling in the distance...
...In September, the Soviet Government revealed that only 55 per cent of the new housing promised for the year would be built...
...The first two trials lasted less than a fortnight...
...Furthermore, Philip reported, "whereas in 1929 the USSR possessed one cow for every five inhabitants, in 1955 it had only one for every nine...
...The Polish Party chiefs met with the Soviet delegation at the Belvedere Palace for six hours...
...We saw crowds of workmen," said Kenneth G. Treherne of London, "apparently steelworkers, in overalls, marching in an orderly manner through the streets...
...Another nine went on trial the same day for taking part in the attack on security police headquarters...
...Socialism can only be achieved through democracy...
...When seizing the weapon of strike and going out to demonstrate in the streets . .the Poznan workers shouted in a powerful voice: Enough...
...On several occasions, their repetition of the official version angered the public so much that foreign students present were called on to answer, a role many of them undertook with zest...
...On July 3, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions appealed to the International Labor Office to act in behalf of the Poznan workers...
...Our mother was killed in 1942...
...The workers' council at Csepel immediately announced that the strike would continue until they were released...
...As the deadline for the 48-hour work stoppage approached, security police arrested Sandor Racz and Sandor Bari, chairman and deputy chairman of the Budapest Central Workers' Council...
...The regime raised pension payments, abolished high-school and college tuition fees, and pledged 205 million square meters of new housing space by 1960...
...At closed sessions of the Congress (February 24-25), the Party Secretary read a detailed exposure of terrorist policies pursued by the Soviet regime between 1934 and 1953...
...The causes of the Poznan tragedy and of the profound dissatisfaction of the entire working class are to be found in ourselves, in the leadership of the Party, in the Government...
...73-83...
...Meanwhile, workers battled AVH and Soviet Army units at the Csepel Island iron and steel works (the nation's largest industrial combine), the Ganz shipyards, the Szikra printing works, the Rada Utca metal pipe plant, the Ikarus car factory and the Gottwald electric power plant...
...Most dwellings are of white-washed mud brick or rickety wood, with an outhouse in the back yard...
...Now we must think of the universal human being...
...Next day, 15,000 Budapest women marched in a silent, three-hour demonstration, carrying flowers to the tomb of Hungary's Unknown Soldier...
...Heading the list were 153 Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and free trade-union leaders...
...The Communists have merely perverted the very idea of Socialism...
...No one could say precisely when the workers of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev would follow the example of Pilsen, Berlin, Vorkuta, Poznan and Budapest...
...He told the court his father was a veteran Communist who fell into disfavor...
...According to reliable sources, the discontent of rank-and-file Party members at being kept in the dark was reflected in the results of elections to Party committees and bureaus held at local branches on the eve of the November 7 holidays...
...the return of Imre Nagy...
...Meanwhile, demonstrators at the Kossuth Radio station asked that their demands be broadcast...
...The workers, however, continued to strike as arrests persisted...
...Outside the Soviet metropolis, Philip reported...
...It warned that those responsible "will be punished with the full severity of the law...
...During the night, Gero and Premier Andras Hegedus called on the Soviet Army, which then had two divisions in Hungary, to suppress the uprising...
...Meanwhile, new wage regulations raised piecework norms and eliminated various premiums and bonuses that had cushioned workers against the speed-up...
...Suddenly T.34 tanks and armored cars rolled through the streets toward the market square and closed all the main traffic arteries...
...Later that week, 94 other Poznan demonstrators were released from prison and the indictments against them quashed...
...on Wednesday, October 24, Soviet forces entered Budapest...
...Meanwhile, Czechoslovak workers and students were demanding their rights...
...The new Defense Minister was Pal Maleter, an anti-Nazi partisan attached to Soviet forces during World War 11, who had led the defense of the Killian Barracks against Soviet tank attack in the first week of the Budapest uprising...
...It also demanded official recognition of the workers' councils throughout Hungary, the right to publish an independent newspaper, and immediate negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops...
...He called the students' and workers' demonstrations a "reactionary provocation," and said "enemies of our people" were spreading "the poison of chauvinism...
...But he also warned that any individual "who dares to raise his arm against the people's rule must realize that the people's rule will chop off that arm in the interest of the working class...
...on Friday, October 19, the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist party opened at Warsaw's Council of Ministers Building amid mounting demands for basic changes by workers, students and writers...
...They had placards, too...
...On November 16, Kadar promised that the deportations would be stopped and that the Soviet Army would gradually withdraw from Hungary after order was restored...
...In Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, writers and students refused to accept Stalin as the scapegoat for past Communist crimes...
...Poverty made me steal...
...At another point Khrushchev spoke angrily for more than an hour, demanding capitulation...
...A month later, Gyula Hay wrote in Irodalmi Ujsag (May 5) : "A new spirit, a new tone, a new style must appear in all aspects of life...
...We owe it to your youth, workers and army that the factories and workshops have truly become ours...
...Before the Central Committee voted, Ochab said, it should talk with the Soviet leaders...
...the second declared: "We gave them only as much socialist democracy as could be squeezed from three handkerchiefs...
...The first victim lay dead on the cobblestones...
...During the day, Premier Nagy sought refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy...
...It was the psychological shock of seeing a whole nation rise up against them as one man...
...On July 17...
...The miraculous revolution of youth and working people who have participated in the fighting has turned into a revolution of the entire Hungarian people...
...London's New Statesman and Nation asked: "Is it too much now to suggest that Soviet Communists should go hack and examine the debates which took place, first in the days when Lenin was creating the Bolshevik party, and then, after the Revolution, when he was creating the Soviet state...
...on Sunday morning, November 4, Soviet tanks and jet bombers attacked Budapest and other revolutionary strongholds...
...Fortunately, there are still six real Hungarians left who have built a government to save the country...
...Cruikshank said the main demands of the meeting were "democratization of all aspects of life," friendship with the USSR "but on equal terms," an end to secret government, and workers' control of industry...
...We Demand Lower Prices and Higher Wages...
...It] could only operate in conditions of suppression of criticism and police terror...
...Later that week, security police began arresting leaders of workers' councils throughout Hungary...
...Morgan Phillips, Labor party secretary and President of the Socialist International, tendered a list of Socialist prisoners...
...The same day, Borba, official paper of the Yugoslav Communist party, charged that the Poznan revolt was incited by "reactionary and destructive" forces...
...In a third trial, a week later, ten young workers were charged with attacking tanks, ransacking the radio jamming station, breaking open the jails to release prisoners and destroy records, and disarming soldiers and militiamen...
...World Labor's Response: Before the text of Khrushchev's "secret speech'' was published, democratic labor firmly rejected his bid for a united front...
...Leaflets issued by a new Provisional Revolutionary Government and Defense Committee said: "We solemnly swear over the bodies of our martyrs that the cause of Hungarian independence and freedom will conquer...
...With railway workers in the forefront of the revolution, there were reports that Soviet crews, brought from Russia to man the lines, had refused to act as strike-breakers...
...Andre Philip, a French Socialist and professor of political economy at Lyons University, summarized his impressions of Moscow in 1956: "In the middle there are great avenues with luxurious hotels, but all around there is a network of unpaved streets with wooden shacks, roofed with metal sheets...
...Florczak had written: "The universal proletarian is an obsolete concept...
...Thus, thirty-five years after the Petrograd and Kronstadt uprisings against Lenin, a new generation of Soviet workers and students had begun to assert itself...
...Dery said: "It is high time that an end be made to the present regime of gendarmes and bureaucrats...
...Turn back from the false road...
...Long live free Poland...
...Gomulka replied: "Now I will speak—but to the nation...
...The revelations of the crimes of the Stalin era made at the 20th Party Congress had swept away many cobwebs...
...Few organized groups were sent to the ceremony, but more than 200,000 citizens marched past the coffins in a massive demonstration against the regime...
...The first speaker accused the Party of treating the people "like children or enemies...
...We shall never be slaves," they chanted, echoing Petofi's 1848 ode...
...The immediate issue in the Stalin Works was wages...
...Student leader "Istvan B." told Edmond Taylor: "Every third tank that was engaged against us in Budapest was put out of action but that was not what defeated them...
...A new Hungarian government...
...Meanwhile, Soviet soldiers were beginning to join the revolution...
...Dr...
...What had happened, according to MacCormac and others, was that "a group of political policemen drawn up at one end of the square had begun to shoot at the demonstrators and that the Russians, believing they were the target, had themselves opened fire...
...the judges announced they would pass sentence on Monday, October 22...
...The Central Workers' Council demanded his release and reinstatement as Premier...
...The aim of the Poznan workers," Cyrankiewicz conceded, "was to present their case, and that was their right...
...It must be 70 yards long by 50 yards wide and is encircled by four tiers of balconies, and every inch of space in the hall and on the balconies was crammed with people...
...On July 2, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party attributed the Poznan workers' revolt to "American monopolist capital...
...Rokossovsky departed "on leave" for the USSR, where he soon became a Soviet Deputy Defense Minister...
...The 20th Congress made broad promises to Soviet labor, appealed to democratic socialists for "unity of the working class," and confessed numerous crimes committed under Stalin's leadership...
...and Tamas Aczel demanded the immediate resignation of Rakosi...
...Most of the defendants were in their late teens or early twenties...
...At a meeting of the Czechoslovak Youth League (April 27), students demanded freedom of the press, uncensored publication of all speeches at the United Nations, and the public re-trial of all political cases...
...Many of the Soviet officers were very upset and tried to apologize for what they were doing, saying they had been misled by reports about fascist counter-revolutionaries and so on...
...We demand that the Soviet Army leave the country immediately...
...We are the wives of the workers who have been killed," they told Soviet soldiers surrounding the monument...
...Women or children carry in water from roadside pumps by balancing two buckets attached to a bent pole slung over their backs...
...The radio announced, early that day, that Erno Gero, who with Janos Kadar and other Party leaders had just returned from Yugoslavia, would address the nation that night...
...By September 8. Gyula Hay in trodnlmi Ujsng was demanding "the most complete, the most unrestricted freedom that is possible between men who live within one society . freedom to tell the truth, to criticize anyone or anything to believe in Almighty Cod and to deny God to think in a non-Marnist way to find the living standard low to find unjust something that is still considered officially as just...
...The right of workers to strike...
...Women and children fled...
...An eye-witness, Francis G. Hickman, editor of the Memphis Cotton Trade Journal, reported that the Poznan workers "were intent on first capturing the secret police headquarters, which they set on fire...
...The second victim was a Polish soldier...
...That day, Khrushchev telephoned Gomulka from Moscow, and promised that Soviet troops would return to their bases...
...The strike began in the Stalin Locomotive Works during an International Trade Fair...
...At three minutes after noon, the Government radio announced that Gero had been dismissed and replaced as Party Secretary by Kadar...
...Nagy also pledged new housing, revision of norms and wages, abolition of the AVH, and reconstitution of the armed forces from units of the regular army and the armed revolutionary groups...
...President Peter Veres read the Writers Union's demands: free, secret elections...
...Demands for the return of Nagy and the withdrawal of Soviet forces were also voiced by the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals...
...Revolutionary railway workers battled for control of the capital's east and west terminals...
...Poznan: On June 28, a day after the Petofi Circle meeting in Budapest, the workers of Poznan, Poland's fourth largest city, went out on strike...
...freedom for individual farming...
...and the Zeran auto workers union condemned Soviet intervention in the revolution that had exploded in Hungary...
...Sidewalks in Stalino are a thing of the future...
...The writers soon returned to the attack...
...Writer Tibor Dery appealed to the audience to carry the sentiments of the meeting to the country...
...A Czechoslovak writers' congress in Prague (April 22-29) heard writers identify themselves with the exploited...
...Amoug them was the Moscow economist L. D. Yaroshenko, whom Stalin had also assailed in his last published work...
...As Soviet and Hungarian security police continued to ignore the promises made to the workers, another general strike was called for November 21 and 22...
...Fighting at the radio station went on...
...At Stettin, polytechnic, agricultural and medical students voted demands for "a guarantee of full independence of the Sejm, the courts and the prosecutor's offices, as well as . . an end to the practice of lifelong appointments in the Government and Party...
...A Sejm subcommittee had drafted a new election law, promising a secret ballot and some choice of candidates...
...Everyone, however, seemed quite happy...
...Here is Radio Warsaw's account of what happened next: "The city of Poznan on Thursday, June 28, became a place of considerable disturbances and riots...
...Robert Davies, Laborite city councilor of Cambridge, and three other members of a British economic delegation witnessed fraternization between troops and workers...
...Putrament had written: "The economic system that has been compulsory with us up to now has failed unquestionably and irrevocably...
...Testimony in the third trial was concluded on Thursday afternoon, October 18...
...It did not pay [workers] to work faster and produce more because then the norms would be raised, and they would receive lower wages for their increased effort...
...On June 30, Radio Warsaw said: "Today the burial of the victims of the fascist provocation took place in Poznan...
...Justice to the dead demands the clearing of their names...
...The Belvedere Palace session broke up just before 6 p.m., and deliberations continued at the Council of Ministers Building at night...
...In Lodz, 6,000 textile workers threatened to strike unless Soviet troops, still reported to be "on maneuvers," were pulled back to their barracks...
...On Friday, October 19, the same day Khrushchev flew to Warsaw, 3,000 students at Budapest and Szeged universities voted to leave the Young Communist League and form an independent student organization...
...to succeed him and condemned "rightist elements grouped around Imre Nagy...
...At the same time, the Poznan district court freed three defendants, ordered a new trial for five others, and announced that the verdicts in the two previous trials would be revised...
...Khrushchev said: "In many countries the working class has been split for many years...
...On the night of June 27, more than 6,000 writers, students and Budapest citizens attended a nine-hour meeting of the Petofi Circle, a discussion club organized by the Young Communist League and named after a poet-hero of Hungary's 1848 Revolution...
...At first there were only thousands but they were joined by young workers, passersby, soldiers, old people, secondary-school students and motorists...
...The Party turned against us...
...At midnight, the revolutionaries also occupied the Szabad Nep building...
...Representatives of the Party and Government took part in the ceremony, in addition to the relatives of those killed...
...On Thursday, November 1, amid reports that new Soviet divisions were moving into the country, Nagy proclaimed Hungary's neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact linking Soviet-orbit armies, and appealed to the United Nations for protection...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
