Hungarian Revolution-Three Years Later
LASKY, MELVIN J.
Hungarian Revolution Three Years Later 'Causes that seem lost are often retvon in other ways' By Melvin J. Lasky What phrase, in the age of Marx, Spengler and Toynbee, is so popular and so...
...In Hungary, the popular mass movement against Soviet imperialism made a radical, open, historic break...
...Under the leadership of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a kind of Machiavellian palace intrigue had been executed, and although some liberalization of political, economic and cultural life did result, it was (and remains today) a precarious balance of contradictory forces which remain hidden and camouflaged...
...millions of people had come out onto the streets of all the cities and towns in a spontaneous demonstration against the Communist regime...
...I recall the look on Jean-Paul Sartre's face in Paris when Hungary happened and the television camera recorded that memorable expression of horror and disenchantment...
...For now, what has been won is an unforgettable and incontrovertible "lesson of history...
...I felt more and more with the years after '45 that "bourgeois democracy" was not a thing of the past and that the Bolshevik Revolution did not represent "the inevitable progressive step forward of humanity...
...With the rebellion in East Germany in June 1953, I began to feel that it might even be justified to suspect that Communism was a "reactionary relic of the past" and the "logic of events" would one day pass it by...
...In East Berlin and East Germany three years earlier, there had not really been a revolution, nor even an uprising...
...In fact, what no one had dared to believe had actually come to pass: A modern totalitarian regime had been overthrown by a revolution out of the 19th century, with its rifles and barricades and singing masses marching with flags in narrow streets...
...Imre Nagy—one of those rare, strange birds, a popular, much-loved Communist leader—was Prime Minister in Budapest...
...we have won...
...What happened in Hungary in 1956 remains one of the most extraordinary and instructive chapters in modern history...
...For a while, for a brief last week in October, all went well, all seemed successful...
...In Poland in 1956, except for the early flare-up in Poz-nan, what look place is referred to as "a renaissance" or "a thaw" or "'a springtime...
...Are there not "Hungarian echoes" when one thinks of Kerala and Tibet, or the "Hundred Flowers" in China, or of Boris Pasternak in Moscow...
...Hungarian Revolution Three Years Later 'Causes that seem lost are often retvon in other ways' By Melvin J. Lasky What phrase, in the age of Marx, Spengler and Toynbee, is so popular and so deceptive as "the lessons of history...
...ment of yesterday...
...World politics took a dramatic turn, and things appear in a different perspective...
...The Russians were promising to withdraw their troops and allow Hungary to "develop along its own national road to Socialism...
...I remember for years in postwar Berlin arguing in the passionate East-West debates on the meaning of Communism...
...But one man's lesson has always been another man's question-mark, one man's meaning another man's nonsense...
...This was not a "Western prejudice," nor a vestigial fragMelvin J. Lasky, co-editor of Encounter magazine, edited the White Book, The Hungarian Revolution...
...Neither I nor...
...The workers were beginning to have a say in the management of industrial relations...
...I shall never forget watching the young Hungarian revolutionaries on captured tanks, waving their flags and crying out, "We have won...
...The memorable events of 1956 in Hungary, so glorious, so tragic, are something else again...
...It took on the classic pattern of a colonial revolution for liberation...
...Whether wisely or no, the people stormed out of their houses, full of anger, full of hope...
...I believe, anybody else can look at what is happening in our time in the same way again...
...With the Berlin blockade and the magnificent morale of the people behind the Western effort, it began to become clearer that "freedom" was not the forlorn ideal of a handful of intellectuals, but a popular and dynamic thing...
...But there was hardly a shot fired...
...But the tragic story is well-known, and the point of this anniversary is "not to weep but to understand...
...there was no real fighting, and no violence (except in Soviet reprisal...
...The "masses" wanted individual rights and longed for a democratic way of life...
...For history knows many unhappy endings...
...Dialecticians have even learned to read ingenious anagrams into the handwriting on historic walls...
...A few days later, after the brutal Russian intervention on Sunday, November 4, they had lost...
...Who has not heard the call to "face up to events," to "grasp the meaning of the past," to observe "the handwriting on the wall...
...Yet causes which seem lost are often rewon in other ways, in other times...
...For was this not that stormy popular rebellion of the poor and exploited of which the romantic Karl Marx had dreamed...
...How rich in irony history is...
...the farmers were beginning to renew their interest in cultivating their native soil...
...The people of Europe wanted liberty...
...The days of the Hungarian Revolution not only "shook the world": They changed men's minds and illuminated new contemporary meanings...
...Writers and journalists and teachers were aglow with the longed-for opportunity to write and speak the truth as they saw it...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 40
