by Tony Judt
An estimated 200,000 people—over 2 percent of the population—fled Hungary in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation, most of them young and many from the educated professional élite of Budapest and the urbanized west of the country. They settled in the US (which took in some 80,000 Hungarian refugees), Austria, Britain, West Germany, Switzerland, France and many other places. For a while the fate of Nagy and his colleagues remained uncertain. After spending nearly three weeks in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest they were tricked into leaving on November 22nd, immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities, and abducted to prison in Romania.
It took Kádár many months to decide what to do with his erstwhile friends and comrades. Most of the reprisals against young workers and soldiers who had taken part in street fighting were kept as quiet as possible, to avoid arousing international protest; even so there were international demands for clemency in the case of a number of prominent figures, such as the writers József Gáli and Gyula Obersovszky. The fate of Nagy himself was an especially sensitive issue. In April 1957 Kádár and his colleagues decided to return Nagy and his ‘accomplices’ to Hungary to face trial, but the proceedings themselves were delayed until June 1958, and even then they were held in strict secrecy. On June 15th 1958, the accused were all found guilty of fomenting counter-revolution, and variously sentenced to death or long prison terms. The writers István Bibó and Árpád Göncz (future president of post-Communist Hungary) received life sentences. Two others—József Szilágyi and Géza Lozonczy—were killed in prison before their trial began. Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter and Miklós Gimes were executed at dawn on June 16th 1958.
The Hungarian uprising, a brief and hopeless revolt in a small outpost of the Soviet empire, had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. In the first place, it was an object lesson for Western diplomats. Until then the United States, while officially acknowledging the impossibility of detaching Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, continued to encourage the ‘spirit of resistance’ there. Covert actions and diplomatic support were directed, in the words of National Security Council Policy paper No. 174 (December 1953) to ‘fostering conditions which would make possible the liberation of the satellites at a favorable moment in the future.’
But, as a later confidential policy document, drawn up in July 1956 to take account of that year’s upheavals, was to emphasize, ‘the United States is not prepared to resort to war to eliminate Soviet domination of the satellites’ (NSC5608/1 ‘U.S. Policy toward the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe’).
Indeed, ever since the repression of the Berlin revolt in 1953, the State Department had concluded that the Soviet Union was, for the foreseeable future, in unshakeable control of its ‘zone’. ‘Non-intervention’ was the West’s only strategy for Eastern Europe. But the Hungarian rebels could not know this. Many of them sincerely hoped for Western assistance, encouraged by the uncompromising tone of American public rhetoric and by emissions from Radio Free Europe, whose émigré broadcasters encouraged Hungarians to take up arms and promised imminent foreign support. When no such backing was forthcoming, the defeated rebels were understandably embittered and disillusioned.
Even if Western governments had wished to do more, the circumstances of the moment were highly unpropitious. On the very day that the Hungarian revolt broke out, representatives of France and Britain were at Sèvres, in secret talks with the Israelis. France in particular was pre-occupied with its North African problems: as Christian Pineau, the Foreign Minister, explained on October 27th in a highly confidential memo to France’s representative on the UN Security Council, ‘It is essential that the draft resolution which will be put to the Security Council on the Hungarian question should not contain any disposition which may disturb our action in Algeria . . . We are particularly against the formation of a committee of inquiry. ’ The British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Eden in a similar vein four days later, in response to a suggestion from the British Ambassador to Moscow that London appeal directly to the Soviet leadership to desist from intervention in Hungary: ‘I do not myself think that this is a moment for such a message.’
As Khrushchev had explained to his Central Committee Presidium colleagues on October 28th, ‘the English and French are in a real mess in Egypt’.113 As for Eisenhower, he was in the final week of an election campaign—the day of his re-election saw some of the heaviest fighting in Budapest. His National Security Council did not even discuss Hungary until three days after the Soviet invasion; they had been slow to take the full measure of Nagy’s actions, notably his abandonment of one-party rule, in a country of little significance for US grand strategy (the recent crisis in Poland had received far more attention in Washington). And when Hungary did appear on the NSC agenda, at a meeting on November 8th, the general consensus—from Eisenhower down—was that it was all the fault of the French and British. If they hadn’t invaded Egypt, the Soviet Union would not have had the cover to move against Hungary. The Eisenhower Administration had a clean conscience.
Soviet leaders, then, saw their advantage and seized it. In Communist eyes the real threat posed by Nagy was neither his liberalization of the economy nor the relaxation of censorship. Even the Hungarian declaration of neutrality, though it was regarded in Moscow as ‘provocative’, was not the occasion for Nagy’s downfall. What the Kremlin could not condone was the Hungarian Party’s abandonment of a monopoly of power, the ‘leading role of the Party’ (something Gomułka, in Poland, had taken care never to allow). Such a departure from Soviet practice was the thin edge of a democratic wedge that would spell doom for Communist parties everywhere. That is why the Communist leaders in every other satellite state went along so readily with Khrushchev’s decision to depose Nagy. When the Czechoslovak Politburo met on November 2nd and expressed its willingness to make an active contribution to ‘maintaining with every necessary measure the people’s democracy in Hungary’, the sentiment was unquestionably genuine and heartfelt.114
Even Tito eventually conceded that the breakdown of Party control in Hungary, and the collapse of the state security apparatus, set a dangerous example. The Yugoslav leader had initially welcomed the changes in Hungary as further evidence of de-Stalinization. But by the end of October the course of events in Budapest was changing his mind—Hungary’s proximity to Yugoslavia, the presence of a large Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina region of his country, and the consequent risks of contagion were very much on his mind. When Khrushchev and Malenkov took the trouble, on November 2nd, to fly to Tito’s Adriatic island retreat and brief him on the coming invasion, Tito proved anxious but understanding. His main concern was that the puppet government to be installed in Hungary not include Rákosi and other unreconstructed Stalinists. On this score Khrushchev was happy to reassure him.
Khrushchev was distinctly less pleased when, just two days later, Tito granted asylum to Nagy, fifteen members of his government, and their families. The Yugoslav decision appears to have been made in the heat of the Hungarian crisis, and on the assumption that the Russians had no interest in making martyrs. But when the Soviet leaders expressed their displeasure, and especially following the abduction of Nagy and the others upon their departure from the Yugoslav Embassy with a promise of safe conduct from Kádár himself, Tito was placed in an uncomfortable position. In public the Yugoslav leader continued to express approval of Kádár’s new government; but unofficially he made no effort to hide his displeasure at the course of events.
The precedent of unconstrained Soviet interference in the affairs of a fraternal Communist state was not calculated to endear the Soviet leadership to the Yugoslavs. Relations between Moscow and Belgrade deteriorated once more, and the Yugoslav regime initiated overtures to the West and the non-aligned countries of Asia. Tito’s response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary was thus mixed. Like the Soviet leaders he was relieved at the restoration of Communist order; but the way in which it had been accomplished set a dangerous precedent and l
eft a bad taste.
Elsewhere the response was altogether less ambivalent. Khrushchev’s secret speech, once it leaked out in the West, had marked the end of a certain Communist faith. But it also allowed for the possibility of post-Stalinist reform and renewal, and by sacrificing Stalin himself in order to preserve the illusion of Leninist revolutionary purity, Khrushchev had offered Party members and fellow-traveling progressives a myth to which they could cling. But the desperate street fighting in Budapest dispelled any illusions about this new, ‘reformed’ Soviet model. Once again, Communist authority had been unambiguously revealed to rest on nothing more than the barrel of a tank. The rest was dialectics. Western Communist parties started to hemorrhage. By the Italian Communist Party’s own count, some 400,000 members left between 1955 and 1957. As Togliatti had explained to the Soviet leaders at the height of the Hungarian crisis, ‘Hungarian events have developed in a way that renders our clarifying action in the party very difficult, it also makes it difficult to obtain consensus in favor of the leadership.’
In Italy, as in France, Britain and elsewhere, it was younger, educated Party members who left in droves.115 Like non-Communist intellectuals of the Left, they had been attracted both to the promise of post-Stalin reforms in the USSR and to the Hungarian revolution itself, with its workers’ councils, student initiatives and the suggestion that even a ruling Soviet-bloc Party could adapt and welcome new directions. Hannah Arendt, for one, thought it was the rise of the councils (rather than Nagy’s restoration of political parties) that signified a genuine upsurge of democracy against dictatorship, of freedom against tyranny. Finally, as it seemed, it might be possible to speak of Communism and freedom in the same breath. As Jorge Semprun, then a young Spanish Communist working clandestinely in Paris, would later express it, ‘The secret speech released us; it gave us at least the chance to be freed from . . . the sleep of reason.’ After the invasion of Hungary, that moment of hope was gone.
A few Western observers tried to justify Soviet intervention, or at least explain it, by accepting the official Communist claim that Imre Nagy had led—or been swept up in—a counter-revolution: Sartre characteristically insisted that the Hungarianuprising had been marked by a ‘rightist spirit’. But whatever the motives of the insurgents in Budapest and elsewhere—and these were far more varied than was clear at the time—it was not the Hungarians’ revolt but rather the Soviet repression which made the greater impression on foreign observers. Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution. For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered.
In a memorandum dated September 8th 1957, the Hungarian writer István Bibo observed that ‘in crushing the Hungarian revolution, the USSR has struck a severe, maybe mortal blow at “fellow-traveler” movements (Peace, Women, Youth, Students, Intellectuals, etc) that contributed to Communism’s strength.’ His insight proved perceptive. Shorn of the curious magnetism of Stalinist terror, and revealed in Budapest in all its armored mediocrity, Soviet Communism lost its charm for most Western sympathizers and admirers. Seeking to escape the ‘stink of Stalinism’, ex-Communists like the French poet Claude Roy turned ‘our nostrils towards other horizons’. After 1956, the secrets of History were no longer to be found in the grim factories and dysfunctional kolkhozes of the People’s Democracies but in other, more exotic realms. A shrinking minority of unreconstructed apologists for Leninism clung to the past; but from Berlin to Paris a new generation of Western progressives sought solace and example outside of Europe altogether, in the aspirations and upheavals of what was not yet called the ‘Third World’.
Illusions were shattered in Eastern Europe too. As a British diplomat in Budapest reported on October 31st, at the height of the first round of fighting: ‘It is nothing short of a miracle that the Hungarian people should have withstood and turned back this diabolical onslaught. They will never forget nor forgive.’ But it was not only the Hungarians who would take to heart the message of the Soviet tanks. Romanian students demonstrated in support of their Hungarian neighbors; East German intellectuals were arrested and put on trial for criticizing Soviet actions; in the USSR it was the events of 1956 that tore the veil from the eyes of hitherto committed Communists like the young Leonid Pliushch. A new generation of intellectual dissidents, men like Paul Goma in Romania or Wolfgang Harich in the GDR, was born in the rubble of Budapest.
The difference in Eastern Europe, of course, was that the disillusioned subjects of a discredited regime could hardly turn their faces to distant lands, or rekindle their revolutionary faith in the glow of far-off peasant revolts. They were perforce obliged to live in and with the Communist regimes whose promises they no longer believed. East Europeans experienced the events of 1956 as a distillation of cumulative disappointments. Their expectations of Communism, briefly renewed with the promise of de-Stalinization, were extinguished; but so were their hopes of Western succor. Whereas Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, or the hesitant moves to rehabilitate show-trial victims, had suggested up until then that Communism might yet contain within itself the seeds of renewal and liberation, after Hungary the dominant sentiment was one of cynical resignation.
This was not without its benefits. Precisely because the populations of Communist Eastern Europe were now quiescent, and the order of things restored, the Khrushchev-era Soviet leadership came in time to allow a limited degree of local liberalization—ironically enough, in Hungary above all. There, in the wake of his punitive retaliation against the insurgents of 1956 and their sympathizers, Kádár established the model ‘post-political’ Communist state. In return for their unquestioning acceptance of the Party’s monopoly of power and authority, Hungarians were allowed a strictly limited but genuine degree of freedom to produce and consume. It was not asked of anyone that they believe in the Communist Party, much less its leaders; merely that they abstain from the least manifestation of opposition. Their silence would be read as tacit consent.
The resulting ‘goulash Communism’ secured the stability of Hungary; and the memory of Hungary ensured the stability of the rest of the Bloc, at least for the next decade. But this came at a cost. For most people living under Communism, the ‘Socialist’ system had lost whatever radical, forward-looking, utopian promise once attached to it, and which had been part of its appeal—especially to the young—as recently as the early fifties. It was now just a way of life to be endured. That did not mean it could not last a very long time—few after 1956 anticipated an early end to the Soviet system of rule. Indeed, there had been rather more optimism on that score before the events of that year. But after November 1956 the Communist states of Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union itself, began their descent into a decades-long twilight of stagnation, corruption and cynicism.
The Soviets too would pay a price for this—in many ways, 1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs. As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.’
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The Age of Affluence
‘Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good’.
Harold Macmillan, July 20th 1957
‘Admass is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity,
plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure
advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural
democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man’.
J. B. Priestley
‘Look at these people! Primitives!’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘Lucania.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Down at the bottom!’
Rocco and His Brothers, dir. Luchino Visconti (1960)