As long as we direct our criticism against individuals instead of investigating whether the mistakes spring from the very system, from the very ideology, we can achieve nothing more than to exchange evil for a lesser evil. I trust we will get rid of our current leaders. All I fear is that the limping race-horses will be followed by limping donkeys …. We must seek in our socialist system the mistakes which not only permit our leaders to misuse their power, but which also render us incapable of dealing with each other with the humanity we deserve. The mistakes in question are structural mistakes that curtail, to an entirely unnecessary degree, the individual’s rights and that, again, increase his burdens.31
Like their Polish peers, Hungarian intellectuals decided that freedom was a universal concept that could not be limited by selfish class restrictions.
The party dogma, according to which all moral concepts had to be interpreted in the light of the interests of the working class as designated by the communist apparatus, was flatly rejected as a fraud. The principle of party-mindedness (partiinost), long held to be unquestionable, was exposed in its naked reality as a form of enslavement of the mind and an anesthetizing of the critical faculty of the intellectual. Thus, another former Stalinist writer, Gyula Hay, spelled out the intelligentsia’s longing for total cultural and political freedom:
Well, let us get it over quickly. We are talking about the full freedom of literature …. The writer, like anybody else, should be allowed to tell the truth without restrictions; to criticize everybody and everything; to be sad, to be in love, to think of death … to believe or disbelieve in the omnipotence of God; to doubt the accuracy of certain statistics; to think in a non-Marxist way; to dislike certain leaders; to consider low the living standard of the people.32
The thrust of the reform movement was toward the democratization of the communist party’s structure, the launching of economic reforms that would include rapid decentralization, political liberalization, and cultural and personal freedom.
As the challenge from the revisionist circles grew more powerful, the Stalinists at the top of the party reacted erratically. They were dismayed at the new Soviet line and did not know how to deal with it. Rakosi and his associates were political dinosaurs, relics of the Stalinist age whose mindset could not grasp the need for relaxation. For them, the critical intellectuals were subversive elements ready to dismantle the existing system and restore capitalism. In March 1956, under enormous pressure from below, Rakosi had to give in and approve of Laszlo Rajk’s rehabilitation. From that moment on, his fate was sealed. Since he had been the chief engineer of the show trial, he could not outlive politically the movement for historical reparation. In the summer of 1956, when Rakosi desperately tried to launch a new campaign against an alleged “conspiracy led by Imre Nagy,” the Soviets decided to use their leverage and oust the increasingly embarassing Stalinist despot.
Rakosi’s replacement was a most unfortunate one: The new party leader, Ernö Gerö, had been Rakosi’s second in command and could lay no claim to political innocence during those times of merciless settling of accounts. Seeking to broaden and strengthen his power base by incorporating a number of committed communists who had been jailed during the Stalinist terror, Gerö rehabilitated Janos Kadar, a former Politburo member and Minister of the Interior. He also went out of his way to warm up relations with Yugoslavia, hoping that Tito’s endorsement would improve his image in Hungary. Those were, however, spasmodic gestures on the part of a political group that had lost any legitimacy. The Gerö leadership was challenged by the whole Hungarian society. Despite Gerö’s panicky appeals, the communist party failed to mobilize a powerful response to the mounting unrest.
The party actually had become a political corpse whose function had been to serve as a mere transmission belt for the capricious decisions of the ruling group. Far from encouraging the moral autonomy of the party members, the Rakosi—Gerö team had completely annihilated personal will and had maintained its dictatorship primarily with the help of the secret police. Confronted with the popular wrath, even the secret police failed to stand up to significant resistance and collapsed, together with the communist bureaucracy. As Gerö could offer no more than outrageous vindictive speeches, there was no doubt that his leadership represented in fact Rakosism without Rakosi. As for Nagy and his group, their main problem stemmed from their hesitation to renounce utterly their loyalty to the party. For them, the Stalin myth had been demolished, but not the romantic vision of the party as a heroic community endowed by history with a predestined liberating role. In October 1956 Nagy was reinstated in the party, but Gerö refused to appoint him as Prime Minister.
On October 23 hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets of Budapest demanding the establishment of a state of law, the punishment of Rakosi and his gang, the reappointment of Imre Nagy as Prime Minister, the disbandment of the secret police, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops stationed in Hungary. That revolutionary movement had both a political and a national character. Frightened by the irresistible growth of the popular insurrection, Gerö asked for Soviet help and proclaimed a state of emergency. Inaugurating a pattern to be followed by other beleaguered communist leaders confronted with popular uprisings, he delivered a provocative broadcast address, labeling the revolt as a “counterrevolution.” Following Gerö’s order, police shot at the peaceful demonstrators. At that moment the long-dormant Central Committee ousted Gerö, and a new leadership that included both Nagy and Kadar was elected. Once sworn in as Prime Minister, Nagy announced a program of democratization. A brief intervention on October 24 notwithstanding, the Soviet troops maintained a “wait and see” attitude. The Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, Yury Andropov, reassured Nagy that his government would not interfere in that country’s internal affairs. What had started as a spontaneous mass revolt evolved into a popular revolution. Imre Nagy, the committed communist, discovered that the people wanted to dismantle the communist system completely and establish a genuine pluralistic regime. In factories revolutionary councils were formed as a form of direct democracy. To his credit, Nagy managed to sense the pulse of the historical developments in his country and embraced the popular demands for the complete overthrow of the Stalinist system. Nagy’s awakening was catalyzed by the inner dynamics of the revolutionary process, the pressures exerted by members of his group, and his realization of the duplicity of the Soviet attitude toward the changes in Hungary. Thus, one could say that Imre Nagy started as a reformer and ended up as a revolutionary. He went far beyond the logic of intrasystemic change and joined the momentum of an antisystemic movement that rapidly swept away the whole edifice of bureaucratic socialism.
Prompted by the irresistible movement from below, Nagy decided to broaden the base of his government by accepting the principle of political pluralism. By the end of October 1956 Hungary had ceased to resemble a people’s democracy and was moving fast toward a multiparty system. Faced with this challenge coming from one of its former satellites, the Soviet Union issued a declaration on October 30 in which it solemnly proclaimed its commitment to the principles of full equality in relations between Moscow and the states of the so-called socialist family. Recognizing that violations of those principles had taken place in the past, the Kremlin promised to respect the national sovereignty of the East European countries. Lulled by those soothing Soviet pledges, Nagy underestimated Moscow’s determination to preserve the communist regime in Hungary. The limits of Soviet tolerance were tested several days later. Soviet troops directly intervened to overthrow the legal Nagy government and to smash the Hungarian resistance movement.
The second Soviet intervention was brought on by Nagy’s decision to embark on the multiparty system and by the formation of a “military-revolutionary council” to lead the Hungarian armed forces. Threatened with the complete loss of influence in Hungary and noticing the inglorious collapse of the Hungarian communist party, the Kremlin decided to intervene directly and to restore bureaucratic-authoritarian order. O
n October 31 Nagy announced negotiations for Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. On November 1 Hungary proclaimed its neutrality. That set it on a course that could be followed by other satellites and had the potential to destroy the Soviet alliance system. Both internally and externally, the Hungarian revolution demolished the institutional framework of the people’s democracy system. Irritated by this unprecedented defiance and influenced by the hard-liners within the world communist movement, principally China’s Mao Zedong, the Soviet leadership decided to put an end to the Hungarian pluralist experiment. Janos Kadar disappeared from Budapest. Later Kadar would announce from a Soviet-controlled radio station the creation of a “revolutionary government of the workers and peasants.” On November 4 Soviet troops attacked garrisons and military units loyal to the Nagy government. Nagy and his closest associates took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy and, following Kadar’s promises that no revenge would be organized against them, accepted the political asylum granted to the them by the Romanian government. What happened in fact was that in Romania the leaders of the Nagy government were subjected to continuous interrogations by Soviet secret police officers helped by Hungarian-speaking Romanian party officials. In June 1958 a pseudo-trial took place in Budapest. Imre Nagy and several of his allies were sentenced to death and executed.
The meaning of Nagy’s attempt to reconcile socialism with democracy cannot be exaggerated: In its consistency and temerity, Nagy’s radical reformism went beyond the limited logic of national communism as tested by Tito in Yugoslavia. After all, for all his staunch criticism of Stalin’s dictatorial methods, Tito had never tolerated full dissent in his own country, let alone the emergence of a multiparty system. For the national communists like Tito and Gomulka, the issue was to preserve their domestic autonomy and, in the Yugoslav case, a relatively large margin of initiative in foreign policy. National communism, as Milovan Djilas has often said, remains essentially communist, although of a less absolutist stripe.33 It became increasingly clear to Nagy that the humanization of the system required the end of the communist party’s illegitimate claim to monopolistic power. There was in Imre Nagy’s personality a tragic dimension stemming from a tension between his commitment to democratic values on the one hand and his failure to recognize the cynicism of Soviet international behavior on the other. Nagy naively trusted the Soviet leaders and took their promises at face value. He was, however, too much a moral individual to renege on his pledges to the Hungarian nation and accept what Gomulka accepted in Poland: the deliberate curtailment of the revolutionary movement, its manipulation and eventual asphyxiation. The Hungarian uprising against the logic of capitulation to foreign diktat was enhanced by Nagy’s decision to side with the victims rather than support the executioners for reasons of party discipline or merely for personal survival. The glorious lesson of the Hungarian democratic revolution was indeed that it was possible for a mass movement inspired by humanistic ideals to overthrow a despised tyranny and to achieve a genuine breakthrough in the suffocating totalitarian universe. During the ten sublime days of the Budapest uprising, the legacy of Yalta had been fundamentally shattered. In the words of Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller:
In a world where superpowers cynically collaborated, in which radical causes betrayed so often their original aims, where movements with an emancipating message degenerated into various sorts of conservative and fundamentalist tyrannies, the Hungarian October, with the outlines of its socialist (because radically democratic and self-created) “new republic,” emerges unspoiled and promising; a cause capable of instilling moral and social self-confidence in a nation desperately needing it.34
Indeed, the crushed revolution, with its unfulfilled dreams of national liberation and political emancipation, continued to haunt the collective psyche of Hungarians for decades.
Despite Kadar’s first forcible, later more benign pacification, and despite his achievement of turning Hungary into the “most joyful barrack of the socialist camp,” the principle of an impure Realpolitik could not triumph over the national search for historical truth. The blatant lies on which the Kadar regime was founded, the allegations about the existence of a “counterrevolutionary conspiracy” fomented by Imre Nagy and his comrades, could only backfire. Instead of erasing the memory of the heroic moments of the insurrection, the Kadar propaganda fostered nostalgia for (and even a kind of idealization of) Nagy’s pluralist experiment and enhanced the general admiration for the politician who chose martyrdom over collaborationism.
Nagy’s sacrifice foreshadowed a new approach to postcommunist politics. His refutation of the intrigue-ridden world of the communist bureaucracy, combined with his confidence in society’s right to self-government, helped Nagy to break with the Jacobin and Bolshevik despotic paternalism and to recognize the legitimacy of civic rebellions against the terrorist status quo. In so doing, he inaugurated a political tradition of opposition that was based on nonviolence, civic dignity, and moral responsibility. Nagy’s gesture of defiance to the limited Khrushchevite de-Stalinization and his belief that it was possible to overturn the unjust established order were bound to inspire future generations of dissidents in the whole Soviet bloc. The lesson of the Hungarian Revolution taught the whole communist world. Feher and Heller luminously pointed out: “The Hungarian revolution was the first to assault the unjust and oppressive world-system created by the signatories to the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. It was the Hungarian revolution that taught the lesson, after too long a period of belief to the contrary, that a totalitarian regime can be toppled from within.”35
Unlike Imre Nagy, who believed in the sovereignty of the people, Janos Kadar preferred to yield to imperial logic and to obey Khrushchev’s orders. For a number of years, he became the most hated man in Hungary. With his collusion, if not his direct supervision, Nagy and his comrades were executed in June 1958. Later, when the Soviets themselves would soften their line and Khrushchev would come under Mao’s fire for “revisionism,” Kadar was allowed to slow the pace of vengeful terror. In the meantime, tens of thousands had been executed, jailed, and deported. Hundreds of thousands had been forced into exile. As a consequence of the massacre engineered by Kadar and his fellow collaborationists, Hungary’s intelligentsia was bled white. For years, Hungary’s greatest Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukacs, who had served as Minister of Culture in Nagy’s first revolutionary government, was unable to publish his works and was denounced by party hacks as a dangerous revisionist. The writers and activists involved in the Petöfi Circle either emigrated or were sentenced to prison terms.
The crushing of the Hungarian Revolution showed that by 1956 the established spheres of influence, as sanctioned by the agreements at the end of World War II, continued to exist. The Soviet Union retained the role of a guardian of orthodoxy within the Eastern bloc and made sure that heresies similar to Nagy’s would not affect the other satellite countries. In the documents of the world communist conclave that took place in Moscow in November 1957, revisionism and national communism were branded as the most deleterious deviations from true Marxism-Leninism. The publication in 1958 of the Program of the Communist League of Yugoslavia offered dogmatics like Romania’s Gheorghiu-Dej and East Germany’s Ulbricht an opportunity to renew their attacks on Tito and Titoism. The Soviets made sure that their domination, both ideologically and militarily, would be preserved against all odds. To maintain the unity of the bloc against the national-communist temptation, Moscow was ready to suffer international opprobrium. As for Tito, after initially expressing support for Imre Nagy, he changed his attitude under relentless Soviet pressure. The Yugoslav leader did not want to be isolated again, so he accepted the Soviet allegations about the danger of a counterrevolution in Hungary. He even called the Nagy government “premature” and eventually decided to endorse the Kadar regime.
The Hungarian Revolution revealed the character of Khrushchevism as a strategy of limited reforms from above and unambiguously demonstrated the imperialist nature of Soviet dominat
ion over Eastern Europe. Within this Soviet internal empire, Khrushchev did not allow any development of autonomous movements in republics like the Baltic states, Moldavia, or the Ukraine. On the contrary, under his reign Stalin’s program of Russification continued unabated. Externally, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution was proof of the hypocrisy of the Soviet leadership’s claim of having renounced Stalinist methods in their dealings with the satellite countries. As for the rulers in the other communist states, they applauded the crushing of the revolution and the 1958 verdict against Nagy and his associates. Even Gomulka, who from his own experience should have known better, described the Soviet intervention in Hungary as “a correct and necessary action.”36 In all Eastern Europe a new ideological tightening took place. The Stalinist forces reorganized themselves to eliminate their liberal opponents. In East Germany, for instance, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was forced to emigrate after a vicious campaign was unleashed against him. Wolfgang Harich, a young professor of Marxism who had written a program for the democratization of the country, was arrested. The party’s theoretical journals emphasized the need to intensify the struggle against “bourgeois ideology and revisionism.” East Germany’s intellectuals found themselves increasingly alienated from the dogmatic power. In the words of the poet Gerhard Zwerenz:
The times are morose
Writers are silent
From fear
And critics lecture
At command
And there is a literature
Which no one believes
But fees are paid.37
In Czechoslovakia, where the economy was more prosperous than in the other Eastern-bloc countries, the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution reassured the neo-Stalinists, headed by Gottwald’s successor, Antonin Novotny, that there was no danger of a Soviet push for further liberalization. An abrupt stop was put to the process of political rehabilitations initiated after the Twentieth CPSU Congress. In 1958, during the antirevisionist campaign, and two years after the official dissolution of the Cominform, an international journal expressing the shared views of the world communist movement was established in Prague with the name Problems of Peace and Socialism (the English-language version bore the name World Marxist Review).38
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