The Political Climate of 1956:

...He thinks that people, even behind the Iron Curtain, even Communists, are people...

...with Yugoslavia...

...One of them exclaims: "We needed a belief, a creed which promised a new life for us...

...trapped in a gigantic quagmire of inefficiency, hypocrisy, suspicion, danger and pressure, they try to help themselves and—up to a point—each other as best they can...

...The fact that the Soviet Army stood by idly for almost a week while a democratic type of government was being formed is best explained by dissension in the Kremlin...

...Whether these people are the real pillars of hope is another question...

...According to Bain, things there are not really better than in other Communist countries, and the intellectuals, mainly the chief theoretician, Moshe Pijade, who died in Paris a few days after the Hungarian Revolt, are also treated with compassionate concern, especially where Bain detects some decent disillusionment among them...

...Throughout, Bain bitterly criticizes America's role in the events and flagellates everybody from the American legation in Budapest to Henry Cabot Lodge, John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Their immense gullibility, their desperate search for a "faith," their murky idealism in the bad sense of the word, i.e., their eternal preference for ideas over reality, certainly represent a basis for a new and dangerous "re-illusionment...

...He blames peasant non-participation primarily on alleged American support for former landowners and fascists who, he claims, the peasants thought would return with American assistance if the Revolt succeeded, and whom they feared more than the Kremlin...

...they consider it an insult if anyone presumes that it was not they, and they alone, who rose against their oppressors...

...It deals with Hungary before and during the 1956 revolt...

...Though Bain does not provide the answers, he provides some stimuli to new thinking...

...That's why we believed so thoroughly in Stalin and why everything is collapsing around us now that he has been exposed as a monster...

...He himself admits that Western military aid to the insurgents, even if it had wanted to give it, could not have been given because such aid would have violated Austrian neutrality and provoked reoccupation of that country by the Soviet Union...

...his report on the activities and ideas of workers, bureaucrats, intellectuals are in contrast to the two-dimensional cliches about life in a Communist satellite which so many Westerners clutch to their breasts without thinking, or perhaps with wishful thinking...

...This is not very probable, to say the least...

...Bain devotes two chapters to Yugoslavia without much transition or apparent reason, Yugoslavia, after all, not being a reluctant satellite...

...Although clearly partisan, his view merits attention because the West does show a tendency to sweep the problem of the satellites under the rug of political romanticism...

...Reviewed by Konrad Kellen Staff Member, Radio Free Europe TORTUOUSLY WRITTEN and poorly organized, The Reluctant Satellites by Leslie B. Bain is not a good book, but it is an interesting one...

...Communist intellectuals emerge as disillusioned men and women of dedication and good will who, therefore, deserve our understanding and support once disillusioned...

...It does not strike him that every one of these disillusioned Communist intellectuals and artists is absolutely bent on chasing the rainbow again and again...

...the West had failed us, the Germans and their Hungarian henchmen had been murdering us, and we turned to Stalin as our savior...

...One of his conclusions is that the West lost a great deal of prestige as a result of Hungary...

...But it is undeniable that they are very important and that we must therefore come to see them more clearly...

...Incidentally, it is sobering to note that, according to Bain, in the early days of the Revolt, the "workers and peasants," so stubbornly glorified by-East and West alike, would have little or nothing to do with it, except in the final stages, and even then the peasants remained difficult...

...It must have taken Nikita Khrushchev a while to overcome all opposition to the bloody course he selected...

...In reporting on the intellectuals, Bain reaches his main thesis: Only Communists can defeat the Communist oligarchy and free the peoples of Eastern Europe...

...The Party theoreticians see most of the unpleasant reality basically as scum on the wave of the future, though they feel bad about it...

...He bases this claim, inter alia, on the facts that on October 28 the Soviet Army ceased fighting and was ready to accede to Imre Nagy's demands, and that it returned and attacked Budapest only on November 4. I think Bain is wrong for several reasons...

...The section on the Hungarian Revolt, the longest part of the book, deals in great detail with what Bain calls the five phases of the events...

...The bitter charges leveled by Bain against Radio Free Europe and other Western radios for having misled the Hungarian people during the Revolt are unconvincingly documented...

...and in a very fragmentary way with the political climate in Poland before Gomulka came to power in 1956...

...The West may have lost some prestige, but its bloody actions cost the Soviet Union a great deal more—in the world and, particularly, "at home...

...Throughout, he insists that the Revolt could have succeeded if the West had not impaired it with poisonous and counter-productive propaganda, but had instead helped the revolutionaries...

...According to refugees, they did not feel misled, they felt let down...

...the dictatorships in the other satellites, and perhaps even in the Soviet Union, shaken and vacillating after the trauma of de-Stalinization, would have been endangered...

...But if the Hungarians did not rise because they expected help, they expected help once they had risen...

...Moreover, Hungarians who left Hungary after the Revolt have indignantly rejected this theory...

...Czeslaw Milosz' classic but little-known The Captive Mind deserves renewed study in this connection...

...As to what prompted the uprising, Bain vacillates between his well-documented claim that disillusioned Hungarian Communist leaders and intellectuals planned and sparked the uprising, and his insistence that the West, particularly such propaganda agencies as Radio Free Europe, incited it...

...He does not mention that one of the most powerful factors in the uprising was the limited gains which had just taken place in Poland...

...But Bain's views deserve consideration because he not only was there, but took a passionate part and had access to most of the important people...

...It is an interesting book because Bain refuses to simplify the complicated situation behind the Iron Curtain and because he is a man with challenging and strong opinions...

...No matter what the West had done short of war, the Soviets would, sooner or later, have been compelled to destroy the Nagy regime simply because it had crossed the line into non-Communist, multi-party government...

...In the first and best part of the book, Bain gives us glimpses into the life of pre-revolutionary Hungary...

...Without direct physical aid, how could the Nagy regime have held out...

...It never strikes Bain that in his endless conversations in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, not one single interlocutor ever reached the conclusion or even expressed the suspicion that the entire Communist-Marxist-Leninist system was simply inhuman, unworkable, immoral and suffocating...