The political implications of this nonpolitical experience were clear even at the time. Jacek Fedorowicz, whose cabaret group Bim-Bom played in one of the theaters during the festival, remembered that “suddenly everything had became colorful, in a manner that was unbelievably unsocialist.”49 It was, he reckoned, “a propaganda mistake: without warning, they had let a crowd of multicolored outsiders into gray Warsaw.” A decade’s worth of anti-Western rhetoric was shown to be false: “Young people from the capitalist world were healthy and well-dressed, even though we’d been told that everything there is bad …”50
Spontaneity, the human quality most vigorously repressed by the communist regimes, suddenly flowered. To the horror of the festival organizers, Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and others from the communist bloc actively socialized with one another and with the more exotic visitors, not only in the streets but in private apartments all over the city. Romances, friendships, and drunken evenings unfolded in an uncontrolled and unmonitored manner. A student meeting at the library of the University of Warsaw developed into an argument when it turned out that not all of the French delegation were actually communists. For young communists such as Krzystof Pomian, this was the first experience of open public debate.51
Many officially planned events seemed somehow to go wrong too. At the old city Arsenal, young Polish artists put on a show dedicated, of course, to “peace.” But what attracted visitors and garnered attention was not the theme but the extraordinary variation in what was on display. There were many paintings executed in heavy paint and harsh colors. Brushwork was visible. Allegories were obscure. The images were different, unexpected—and abstract and avant-garde. It was the end of an era. After the Arsenal show socialist realism would vanish from the visual arts in Poland forever.
Spontaneity in art led to spontaneity in behavior. At times, crowds grew ugly. When the sound system broke down at one event, the rioting and anger were so great that the sound technicians had to escape to their van and drive quickly away.52 People complained loudly about the shortage of food, the poor quality of some of the duller events, and the propaganda emitted by the ubiquitous loudspeakers. “In Warsaw, one dances in the name of something, or against something,” one party writer had solemnly declared in his summary of the festival, a sentiment almost everybody else found annoying.53 There were many tedious performances, from stiff folk dancing to unsmiling waltzes, from which the crowds turned away in droves.
And yet—sometimes the crowds grew spontaneously joyous as well. At one point, the Bim-Bom cabaret group was supposed to have an official meeting with a Swiss delegation. But instead of a stiff exchange of greetings, moderated by a translator and presided over by a Union of Polish Youth official, someone began to play jazz. The young people started to dance. And this time, the cabaret artists and their new Swiss friends were dancing neither for something nor against something. They were dancing just for fun.54 At that moment—as they did the jitterbug to the jazz music, as they ignored the distressed officials, as they sang along to the songs and paid no attention to their surroundings—the totalitarian dream suddenly seemed far away.
In the summer of 1955, Union of Polish Youth members were slipping away from their dull rallies to dance with Mexican communists and French fellow travelers. By autumn, their Hungarian counterparts had begun to breathe life into their turgid League of Working Youth meetings too. These efforts had begun on a very small scale, when a group of young staff members at the Hungarian National Museum decided to organize a literary and political discussion group. They asked one of their friends, a poet named István Lakatos, to lead them. Lakatos opened the debates with a lecture on the Hungarian Enlightenment. He read from the works of Hungary’s most prominent Enlightenment poet, György Bessenyei. In conclusion, he called upon the group to endorse Enlightenment values, albeit 200 years late, and they decided there and then to form a society, the “Bessenyei Circle.”
It was a tiny, elite, and somewhat esoteric effort. But it was nevertheless a matter of concern for the League of Working Youth, for whom any spontaneously organized group was a threat. A few years earlier, they would have banned a group dedicated to Enlightenment values. But Stalin was dead, and angry debate about Nagy’s “New Course” was still raging. They decided to replace the group’s leaders and to channel their efforts toward more politically correct, contemporary topics. Fatally, they also decided to name the group after Sándor Petőfi, the young poet of the 1848 revolution, whom they thought more appropriate to a progressive society than the “bourgeois” Bessenyei. Thus was born the Petőfi Circle, a debating club whose ostensibly academic discussions quickly became open debates about censorship, socialist realism, and central planning. Initial discussion topics included the peasants’ revolt of 1514 (a pretext for a debate on agricultural policy) and an analysis of Hungarian historiography (a pretext for a debate about the falsification of history in communist textbooks).55 The choice of name quickly proved “double-edged,” as one Hungarian writer put it: Petőfi had been a revolutionary fighting for Hungarian independence and the group bearing his name soon felt empowered to become revolutionary too.56
Changes had been taking place in other regime institutions at the same time. At Szabad Nép, the communist party’s hitherto reliable newspaper, reporters had become restless. In October 1954, a group of them, sent to cover life in the country’s factories, returned wanting to write about faked production statistics, falling living standards, and workers who had been blackmailed into buying “peace bonds.” In a published article, they declared that “though the life of the workers has changed and improved a great deal in the last ten years, many of them still have serious problems. Many are still living in overcrowded and shabby apartments. Many have to think twice about buying their children a new pair of shoes or going to an occasional movie!” The following day, the reporters got the dreaded phone call from the Politburo member responsible for Szabad Nép: “What do you mean by this article? Do you think we will tolerate this agitation?” Instead of backing down, the editors held a three-day staff conference, at which one reporter after another stood up and called for honest reporting, supported Nagy’s reforms, and attacked senior party officials as well as their own editors. Several of these overly honest reporters lost their jobs, including Miklós Gimes, the son of Lily Hajdú-Gimes, the Freudian psychiatrist who had practiced in secret. But a precedent had been set.57
Meanwhile, the Hungarian Writers’ Association—the group responsible for imposing political correctness on Hungarian prose and poetry—also began to reexamine its previous views, to discuss taboos, and to welcome back its banned members. By the autumn of 1955 this formerly hard-line group even felt brave enough to issue a statement protesting against the dismissal of pro-Nagy editors from their posts, demanding “autonomy” for their association and objecting to the “anti-democratic methods which cripple our cultural life.”58
Most of these new or newly re-formed groups, clubs, and debating societies quickly came to be dominated by disillusioned young communists and former communists, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This was a generation that wasn’t supposed to be revolutionary—or rather counterrevolutionary—at all. Old enough to have been traumatized by war, young enough to have studied in communist institutions, many were products of the “social advance” promised by the communist system and many had already enjoyed rapid promotion and early success. Tamás Aczél, active in the Writers’ Association debates, had been named chief editor of the party’s publishing house at the age of twenty-nine, and by the age of thirty-one had received both the Stalin Prize and the prestigious Kossuth Prize for his work. Tibor Meráy, another Writers’ Association activist, had also received a Kossuth Prize, at the age of twenty-nine.59 István Eörsi, also an active member of the Petőfi Circle, had been a published poet from a very young age too.
At the same time, many in this generation had been personally affected by the destruction of civil society, the terror, and the purges tha
t had ended just a few years before. All of them knew what it meant to be forced to play the “reluctant collaborator.” Tibor Déry, one of the leaders of the new Writers’ Association, had watched as his once celebrated works of fiction had been attacked and barred from publication as insufficiently ideologically correct.60 Gábor Tánczos, the leader of the Petőfi Circle, had been an idealistic graduate of Györffy College, one of the Hungarian People’s Colleges, until its abrupt and brutal closing in 1949. Another People’s College graduate, Iván Vitányi—the music critic who had “brainwashed” himself after being expelled from the party in 1948—spoke about folk art and music at some of the early public meetings of the Petőfi Circle.61 One account describes the early meetings of the circle as “reunions” of activists from Nékosz, the People’s College movement, and Mefesz, the short-lived university students’ union that had been forcibly submerged into the League of Working Youth in 1950. At some of their early meetings they even sang songs together, just as in the old days.62
In particular, these young (or youngish) intellectuals were all deeply disturbed by what they now knew had been the unjust arrest, imprisonment, and torture of their colleagues. In 1954, Nagy had begun to rehabilitate political prisoners, and they were slowly trickling back to Budapest from prison, from Recsk, and from exile. Béla Kovács, the Smallholders’ Party leader, came back from the Soviet Union along with several colleagues in 1955.63 József Mindszenty was released from prison and placed under house arrest in a castle outside Budapest. Even Noel Field was rehabilitated that year. Aczél and Meráy have described the deep emotions many Hungarian writers felt when they encountered old friends who had been in prison, suffering, while they were penning socialist realist fiction and winning prizes: “They were ashamed of what they had written and of what they had not written. Now they looked with disgust upon the volumes that they had once upon a time caressed with their eyes—the volumes that had won them the recognition of Kossuth Prizes; and they had no other desire than to unwrite them.”64
At the same time, many were also seeking to justify themselves, to make up for the damage they had caused, and to put their left-wing projects back on track. But this was 1956, not 1989, and not everybody was yet convinced communism was doomed to fail. As Eörsi put it, “They wanted to rehabilitate, together with their own guilty person, the credibility and the good scientific reputation of Marxism too.”65 Many turned back to the original texts of Marxism for inspiration and instruction, in Poland as well as in Hungary. Karol Modzelewski, a student radical at the time—he was part of a group of activists who took over the Union of Polish Youth at the University of Warsaw in 1956—explains this dynamic very well: “We had learned that if a political system is bad, what should one do? Start a revolution. And we were taught, through all of those years, how to make a revolution … The workers should do it, with the help of the intellectuals who bring the revolutionary consciousness to the working classes.”66
Modzelewski and his colleagues soon began agitating in Polish factories, hoping to create a more equitable economic system, just as Marx had advised: “It was like a myth turning into real life.”67 Hungarian intellectuals had the same idea, and for the same reason. As Eörsi wrote later, “That is the common trap of all quasi-revolutionary systems: the people begin to take seriously the real message of the officially declared ideology and the nationalized heroes of the system.”68
Paradoxically, ties between workers and intellectuals were reinforced by their experience of mistreatment under communism. These two social groups had been the most heavily targeted and manipulated by communist propaganda in the previous decade, and as a result, they had the most profound sense of disjunction and disaffection. If anything, Hungarian workers were even angrier than Hungarian students and Hungarian intellectuals. While writers and journalists felt guilty, the workers felt betrayed. They had been promised the highest possible status in the “workers’ state,” and instead they had poor working conditions and low pay. In the immediate postwar period, they had directed their anger at state factory bosses. But now they were inclined to blame the state itself. Miners in the 1950s “denounced the system and grumbled that despite the difficulty of their work the pay was low,” while industry workers in general believed they were exploited by “a bloodsucking government.”69 Though Szabad Nép had been scared away from reporting too closely on factory life a year earlier, the previously moribund Writers’ Association magazine, Irodalmi Újság (Literary Gazette), now picked up this theme quite frequently, printing interviews and letters from workers, such as this one from a blacksmith:
How many times have I been obliged to accept the opinion of others, one which I perhaps don’t share. As that opinion changes, it’s demanded that mine change equally. And that makes me feel sick, sicker than if I’d been beaten. I’m a man, I too. I also have a head which I use to think. And I’m not a child. I’m an adult, who gives his soul, his heart, his youth and his energy for the construction of socialism … I do it willingly but I want to be considered like an adult who lives and knows how to think. I want to be able to speak my thoughts without having anything to fear—and I want to be heard as well …70
The Petőfi Circle meetings proved an excellent forum for interactions between the rejuvenated young intellectuals and their radicalized working-class counterparts. In the winter of 1955 the major Budapest factories began sending regular delegations to the meetings, and the demand for tickets soon exceeded supply, forcing the circle to meet at larger premises. The meetings were open and informal, even raucous at times, and they touched on issues of industrial and economic reform that were of interest to many. Still, they might well have become nothing but a forum for criticism and complaints, had greater events not intervened.
Unexpectedly, Khrushchev, now the general secretary of the Soviet communist party, was the man who pushed the students, the workers, and the Petőfi Circle participants much further and faster than they had ever expected to go. On February 24, 1956, with no forewarning, Khrushchev stood up in front of the Twentieth Party Congress and denounced “the cult of personality” that had surrounded the late Stalin:
It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years.71
This was Khrushchev’s famous “secret” speech—though thanks largely to the Soviet Union’s Eastern European friends, it did not remain secret for long. Polish officials leaked it to Israeli intelligence, which leaked it to the CIA, which handed it to The New York Times, which published it in June.72 But even before that, Eastern European communists were poring over it for clues to Khrushchev’s thinking. The Soviet leader had lauded Lenin, attacked Stalin, and deplored the arrests and murder of Soviet party members and military commanders during the purge years of the 1930s, but his mea culpa was not complete. He had not mentioned other arrests and other crimes such as the Ukrainian famine, for which he himself was partly responsible. He had not called for economic reforms or institutional reforms. He had certainly not apologized for anything the Soviet Union had done in Eastern Europe, and he offered no clear proposals for change.
Nevertheless, it was in Eastern Europe where the most dramatic reactions ensued. The speech literally killed Bierut. The Polish leader went to Moscow for the Twentieth Party Congress and—like Gottwald at Stalin’s funeral—died there of a stroke or a heart attack, presumably brought on by the shock. Lower down the hierarchy, many previously loyal party members were stunned. “People had trouble believing it,” remembered a Pole who was a junior army officer at the time. “The revelations about Generalissimo Stalin, leader of half the world … it was incredible.”73
Others were energized, even radicalized by the speech. At the end of May, a fe
w months after the Twentieth Party Congress, the Petőfi Circle organized an open public discussion titled “The Twentieth Soviet Party Congress and the Problems of Hungarian Political Economy.” Very quickly, that discussion turned into an “all-out denunciation of Rákosi’s megalomania; his policies of senseless industrial construction, forced industrialization, the proposed new Five-Year Plan and the lack of realism of his agricultural policy.”74 In early June, György Lukás, Hungary’s most famous Marxist philosopher, praised “independent thinking” and called for a “dialogue” between theologians and Marxists.
Two weeks later, a half-forgotten figure from the recent past stood up and gave the most devastating denunciation of all. On the evening of June 27, Júlia Rajk, aged forty-four and only six months out of prison, took the podium in a large, neoclassical meeting room in the very heart of Budapest. “I stand before you,” she told hundreds of members of the Petőfi Circle, “deeply moved after five years of prison and humiliation”:
Let me tell you this: as far as prisons are concerned, Horthy’s jails were far better, even for communists, than Rákosi’s prisons. Not only was my husband killed, but my little baby was torn from me … These criminals have not only murdered László Rajk. They have trampled underfoot all sentiment and honesty in this country. Murderers should not be criticized, they should be punished.75
The audience applauded, whistled, stamped its feet. A few nights later, another Petőfi Circle audience—by now expanded to 6,000 people, many standing outside on the street—gathered to discuss freedom of the press. They ended their meeting chanting, “Imre, Imre, Imre, Imre.” They were calling for the ousting of Rákosi—and the return of Imre Nagy.
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