19

OPERATION WHIRLWIND

Budapest was like a nail being driven into my head.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

At nine o’clock on the morning of Thursday 1 November 1956, members of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council gathered in the Cabinet Room, in the West Wing of the White House, to discuss the fast-moving international situation. Just twenty minutes earlier, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had confidently assured the president that the Hungarian crisis had ‘largely resolved itself’ and recommended switching attention to the Middle East.¹ The decision seemed sensible enough: over the past few days, the US government had received a flurry of encouraging updates on Hungary. The previous morning Spencer Barnes, the chargé d’affaires in Budapest, had reported that ‘personal observations’ together with ‘newspaper stories and radio content tend to confirm complete Soviet troop withdrawals’. It was, he declared, ‘virtually certain’ that the Hungarian revolution was ‘now a fact of history’.² As the meeting began, the CIA’s Allen Dulles could not contain his excitement, exclaiming that what had happened in Hungary was little short of ‘a miracle’.³

Dulles’s elation was more than matched on the streets of Budapest, where many Hungarians were jubilant at news that Soviet troops would be withdrawing from the country. The faces of the country’s ‘freedom fighters’ were, Time magazine explained, ‘lit with a kind of ecstasy’.⁴ On the afternoon of 31 October, Imre Nagy had told the crowds outside parliament that ‘the revolution of which you were the heroes has been won! . . . We are living in the first days of our sovereignty and independence.’⁵ Over the next few days Hungarians embraced their newfound freedoms enthusiastically. Political parties, representing all shades of opinion, ‘sprang up in a ferment of discussion and organization’. Dozens of new newspapers appeared on the streets – run by independent editors, and featuring ‘clashes of opinion, full-blooded polemics, [and] hard-hitting commentaries’, they were a world away from the drab and dreary news-sheets that had characterised the Stalinist era.6 But, amidst the elation, more circumspect voices could be heard. Many workers’ councils and revolutionary committees, for instance, refused to call off their strikes or lay down their arms until Soviet troops had completed their withdrawal; others declared that they would judge the government on its ‘deeds’ rather than its words, and wait ‘to see what happens’. According to Sir Leslie Fry, the British ambassador, ‘the spirit of Budapest’ was one of ‘cautious expectancy, with no (repeat no) dropping of guard’.⁷ Such caution proved well judged.

On the morning of 31 October, members of the Presidium gathered in their meeting room on the second floor of the Senate building – a neoclassical structure famed for its green dome, oval hallways and magnificent internal courtyards, which stands in the northern part of the Kremlin, adjacent to Red Square. Nikita Khrushchev was, as usual, seated in a leather chair at the head of a long, rectangular table topped with baize. The Soviet leader had barely slept for days – Budapest was, he said, ‘like a nail being driven into my head’. Now he told his colleagues that they should ‘re-examine’ their earlier assessment and ‘not withdraw our troops from Hungary’. Instead, the Soviet Union should ‘take the initiative in restoring order’. The comrades agreed, and Marshal Zhukov, the defence minister, was immediately authorised to ‘prepare a plan of measures’.⁸

What lay behind this dramatic U-turn? For one thing, the Soviet leadership had become convinced that the situation was careering out of control. On 30 October, Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov had warned their Presidium colleagues that the ‘political situation in the country and in Budapest is not getting better; it is getting worse’. The MDP was in a state of collapse, ‘hooligan elements’ had become ‘more insolent’, factories and public transportation lay idle, and ‘students and other resistance elements’ had begun to seize control of vital institutions, including radio stations and newspaper printing plants.9 These fears were exacerbated that evening when Khrushchev and his colleagues learned of the appalling violence that had taken place outside the headquarters of the Budapest Communist Party: twenty-three ÁVH officers had been lynched, and Imre Mez, the well-respected Budapest Party secretary (and supporter of Nagy’s government) fatally wounded.¹⁰ Life magazine’s John Sadovy, who witnessed the dreadful scenes, described how half a dozen young officers – one of whom struck him as ‘very good looking’ – emerged from the building. The men begged for mercy as their shoulder boards were unceremoniously ripped from their uniforms. Suddenly, one of the officers slumped, shot at point-blank range. Within moments, the entire party ‘went down like corn that had been cut . . . When they were on the ground the rebels were still loading lead into them.’ Sadovy explained how ‘tears started to come down my cheeks. I had spent three years in the war, but nothing I saw then could compare with the horror of this.’ The horror, though, was not quite finished: finally, the bleeding corpse of a high-ranking ÁVH officer was strung up from a tree by its feet and spat upon. As Sadovy made his way back through the park, he ‘saw women looking for their men among the bodies on the ground. I sat down on a tree trunk. My knees were beginning to give in, as if I was carrying a weight I couldn’t carry any more.’¹¹

For Moscow, this atrocity was evidence that things had gone ‘too far’. With their faith in Nagy’s ability to restore order shaken, they concluded that socialism in Hungary was in danger of being ‘strangled’.¹² (The violence also had a transformative effect on Mao: having previously counselled that ‘the working class of Hungary’ should be allowed to ‘regain control of the situation’, he now urged the Soviets to crack down hard.13)

The Kremlin also feared that the instability in Hungary was threatening to spill over into the rest of its Eastern European empire.¹⁴ In the GDR, for instance, the authorities worried over ‘anti-government protests’ among students, intellectuals and workers; there were reports of unrest in Czechoslovakia, and the Bulgarian security services warned that journalists, intellectuals and even many Party members admired the ‘bravery of the Hungarian . . . people’ and looked forward ‘with great happiness for such events to occur in our country’.¹⁵ Romania, whose Communist regime was repressive even by the standards of the Soviet bloc, had particular reason to be fearful, given the country’s significant ethnic Hungarian minority. There were small demonstrations in the capital, Bucharest, as well as in the provincial centres of Iai and Cluj, but the most significant protests took place in the western city of Timioara, whose population of 140,000 included thirty thousand ethnic Hungarians.¹⁶ On the afternoon of Tuesday 30 October, two thousand students gathered in the dining hall of the Polytechnic Institute for a mass meeting. Soon they were shouting ‘Hands off Hungary!’ and ‘What are the Russians doing with our uranium and oil?’ and calling for the withdrawal of the Red Army from Romania. During the debate, troops from the feared Securi-tate sealed off the campus and, when the meeting ended at 8 p.m., arrested the most prominent student leaders. The next day eight hundred students, marching seven abreast and shouting ‘We want our colleagues!’ set off towards the cathedral. As they crossed over the Bega canal, they were ambushed by bayonet-wielding troops, who arrested the demonstrators en masse and loaded them into waiting trucks. More than two dozen students would serve jail sentences of between three and eight years for ‘sedition against the popular regime’, and a further eighty were expelled. The crackdown in Timioara, along with a tightening of security and the granting of minor concessions across the country, forestalled a nationwide revolution.17

Finally, Moscow was concerned about the international ramifications of the Hungarian revolution. Amid signs that Hungary might seek to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev fretted about ‘capitalists on the frontier of the Soviet Union’. Such a setback would only be magnified by what Moscow believed to be an imminent victory for the ‘imperialists’ in Egypt, where early reports indicated major military successes for the British and the French. As Khrushchev explained during the Presidium meeting of 31 October, ‘if we depart from Hungary, it will give a great boost to the Americans, English, and French – the imperialists. They will perceive it as a weakness on our part and will go on the offensive . . . To Egypt they will then add Hungary.’ The Suez crisis was not, in the final analysis, the decisive factor in Soviet policy-making. But the diversion of the world’s attention to the Middle East, and the divisions in the Western alliance, certainly presented the Soviet leadership with an opportune moment to strike.¹⁸

When Anastas Mikoyan returned to Moscow on the evening of 31 October and learned of the decision to invade, he was beside himself. He begged Khrushchev to reconsider, warning that the intervention would be a ‘terrible mistake’ that would ‘undermine the reputation of our state and our party’. Early the next morning, as Khrushchev walked from his Lenin Hills dacha to the enormous black ZIS-110 limousine that was waiting for him, Mikoyan (who lived next door) accosted the first secretary once again, warning that ‘if blood is shed, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself’. (Khrushchev believed he was hinting at suicide, Mikoyan later insisted he was simply threatening to resign.) But the decision stood: ‘We have to act’, explained Khrushchev. ‘We have no other course.’¹⁹

Word of Soviet troop movements reached Budapest as early as 31 October. Indeed, Imre Nagy later claimed that, just hours before addressing the crowds on Kossuth Square, he had received reports of pontoon bridges being installed on the Upper Tisza River and motorised units, tanks and artillery ‘streaming into the interior’.20 That same day, Radio Free Miskolc broadcast claims that Soviet anti-aircraft units, tanks and troops were entering the country. By 1 November, with talk of troops massing along the Hungarian frontier and widespread rumours that Soviet forces were digging in on the outskirts of Budapest, the jubilation of earlier days gave way to anxiety. Everyone was now asking if the Red Army was poised to return.²¹

Nagy and his allies pressed Yuri Andropov repeatedly about the reported troop movements, but the Soviet ambassador’s evasions only deepened their suspicions. Nagy had, on 31 October, formally requested negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from ‘the entire territory of Hungary’.²² Now, faced with an ever more desperate situation, he decided on a final roll of the dice. At 7.50 p.m., Hungarian radio broadcast a message in which Nagy declared Hungary’s neutrality and expressed the country’s desire to ‘live in true friendship with its neighbours, the Soviet Union, and all the peoples of the world’, outside of any ‘power bloc’.²³ He also appealed to the United Nations secretary general for help in ‘defending the country’s neutrality’.²⁴

The UN gambit was never likely to yield meaningful results. The USSR, like the other permanent members, possessed a Security Council veto and although resolutions could be passed by a simple majority vote in the General Assembly, they were non-binding. Divisions among the Western powers further stymied Hungarian hopes. When Britain and France attempted to refer the Hungarian question to the General Assembly, for example, they did so – in part – to deflect criticism over their own military intervention in Egypt. John Foster Dulles, who actually blocked this move, was contemptuous: ‘they want the limelight off them. I think it’s a mockery for them to come in, with bombs falling over Egypt, and denounce the Soviet Union . . . I want no part of it.’ The Americans relented only after the Soviet invasion had begun. But while the resolutions passed by the General Assembly on 4 and 9 November condemned the Soviet Union and called for it to withdraw its troops, it amounted to little more than whistling in the wind.25

Even as it was moving thousands of troops, tanks and artillery into Hungary, Moscow kept up the pretence that a negotiated solution was possible. On the afternoon of 3 November, senior Red Army officers even arrived at the parliament to discuss troop withdrawals. The talks appeared to go well, and it was decided to reconvene later that evening at Soviet army headquarters in Tököl, on the outskirts of Budapest. The Hungarians, though, had walked into a trap. Just before midnight a dozen Soviet police, under the personal command of the KGB’s Ivan Serov, burst into the room armed with sub-machine guns and placed the Hungarian military delegation, including the recently appointed defence minister, Pál Maléter, under arrest.²⁶

At 4 a.m. on Sunday 4 November, Marshal Ivan Konev, the supreme commander of Soviet forces in Hungary, issued the codeword, ‘Thunder-444’, that unleashed Operation Whirlwind. The Soviet Union deployed sixty thousand troops, thousands of tanks and armoured units and two air force divisions in a decisive display of force, much of it concentrated on Budapest.²⁷ At 5.20 a.m., with Soviet tanks rumbling through the capital, Radio Free Kossuth broadcast a final, desperate message from Imre Nagy. Speaking live from the Parliament building, with the sound of gunfire crackling in the background, the prime minister explained: ‘In the early hours of this morning, Soviet troops launched an attack against our capital city with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legal democratic Hungarian Government. Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place. I inform the people of the country and the world . . . of this.’²⁸ There followed repeated appeals to Soviet troops to refrain from firing on civilians. At 8.10 a.m., the station went off air, to the sound of a woman exclaiming, ‘Help Hungary. . . Help, help, help.’ A Vienna monitoring station picked up the final appeal made from the last rebel-held radio station that afternoon: ‘Civilised people of the world. On the watchtower of 1,000-year-old Hungary the last flames begin to go out. Soviet tanks and guns are roaring over Hungarian soil . . . Save Our Souls.’29

At day’s end the Soviet defence minister, Marshal Zhukov, updated the Central Committee. Red Army units had, he said, ‘mastered the most stubborn points of the reaction in the provinces’ – including Gyr, Miskolc and Debrecen – while radio stations, military facilities and other key sites had been occupied. In Budapest, strategic positions including bridges and major buildings had been secured and, with the exception of ‘one large hotbed of resistance’ around the Corvin Cinema, the ‘resistance of the insurgents’ had been broken.³⁰ Zhukov’s report was slightly optimistic – fierce fighting continued in Kispest and Csepel Island for several days, while the factory workers of Dunapentele, an industrial town forty miles south of the capital, held out until 11 November. But, seventy-two hours after the Soviet assault had begun, the revolution had, to all intents and purposes, been crushed.³¹

Imre Nagy knew that there was no hope of repelling the invasion. To minimise loss of life and to protect the country’s infrastructure and resources, he declined to order Hungarian troops into combat. The result was that as Operation Whirlwind unfolded, the bulk of Hungary’s armed forces remained in their barracks, where they were quickly overpowered and disarmed by Soviet troops. Some soldiers did take up arms – most famously the Budapest unit led by General Béla Király, the army’s commander-in-chief – but the majority of the resistance came from some fifteen thousand rebels, mainly students and young factory workers.³²

The fighting was brutal. Writing in the French daily France-soir, Michel Gordey described how, in the early hours of 4 November, the horizon was lit up with ‘sinister flames’ and for three hours the ‘ground shook’ as ‘one explosion followed upon the other’.33 The streets of Budapest were filled with Soviet tanks, artillery fire rained down from the hills above Buda and jet fighters, swooping low over the city, strafed rebel positions. The Kilián Barracks, Corvin Cinema and other rebel strongholds were subjected to savage assaults, but everywhere resistance was met with massive force.³⁴ Gordey described how:

The tanks, in a roar of thunder, bore down upon the houses from which shots were being fired, pointing their guns first at the ground floor, then at the first floor, the second, and the third. Six, eight, ten cannon shots . . . The houses were blown apart and crumbled; the inhabitants were either killed, or lay wounded on the ground.³⁵

The Daily Worker’s Peter Fryer, one of a number of journalists holed up in the British Embassy, explained how ‘for four days and nights Budapest was under continuous bombardment. I saw a once lovely city battered, bludgeoned, smashed and bled into submission.’³⁶ Some of the city’s most beautiful buildings suffered major damage, while others were looted.³⁷ In some areas of the capital, the streets were littered with bodies.³⁸ Many of the dead and injured were civilians who had been caught up in the violence, and some of the Soviet firing was indiscriminate – trained ‘on lighted windows by night, at any gathering of persons in the street, and even on bread queues’. A number of churches and hospitals, including a children’s clinic, were destroyed.³⁹

In all, an area of about two square miles in Pest was utterly devastated by the fighting, as were many of Buda’s neighbourhoods. The streets, which had been ploughed up by Soviet tanks, were ‘strewn with the detritus of a bloody war: rubble, glass and bricks, spent cartridges and shell-cases’. Virtually every house along some of the city’s main thoroughfares had been destroyed, many apartment blocks had been reduced to ‘complete ruins’, and ‘in building after building’ there were ‘gaping shell holes like eye sockets’.40 There was a heavy price, too, in terms of blood: an estimated 2,700 Hungarians lost their lives (1,500 of them civilians) during the fighting, with a further 20,000 injured; Soviet casualties were reported as 720 killed and 1,540 wounded.⁴¹

With the armed resistance crushed, the Kremlin installed a ‘Revolutionary Worker and Peasant Government’ headed by János Kádár and Ferenc Münnich. The two men, who had served in Nagy’s short-lived administration, had been spirited out of Hungary on the evening of 1 November aboard a military aircraft and flown to Moscow for discussions with Soviet leaders. During these talks, Kádár agreed that it would be unconscionable to ‘surrender a socialist country to counter-revolution’ and claimed that ‘hour by hour’ the situation in Hungary was ‘moving rightward’, but he also warned that the use of military force would be ‘destructive’. It would, he said, ‘erode the morale’ of Hungarian Communists to ‘zero’ and undermine Communist authority throughout the Eastern Bloc. In the end, he put his doubts to one side, justifying the invasion as a fight against fascism. Once the uprising was crushed, he led efforts to pacify the country and re-establish the one-party state.⁴²

Although the fight against the Red Army was soon lost, Hungarians were reluctant to abandon their revolution. Posters ridiculing the country’s new leader soon appeared all over Budapest. One read:

Wanted: Premier for Hungary. Qualifications: no sincere conviction, no backbone; ability to read and write not required, but must be able to sign documents drawn up by others. Applications should be addressed to Messrs Khrushchev and Bulganin.⁴³

There was, though, nothing satirical about the waves of strikes and worker unrest that now hit the country, organised by the workers’ councils. These bodies, which had not been cowed by the Soviet invasion, continued to press for the withdrawal of foreign troops and the establishment of a free press, and now demanded an amnesty for all those involved in the uprising. Many ordinary Hungarians also made their feelings clear. On 23 November, between two and three in the afternoon, Budapest’s citizens marked the one-month anniversary of the revolution by abandoning the city’s streets. In the view of Sir Leslie Fry, ‘no manifestation of a people’s solidarity could have been more complete or more impressive: the city was seemingly deserted and traffic (apart from strong Russian military patrols) was at a standstill. At the end of the hour’s silence, many people came back into the streets with their tricolours and sang their national anthem at the Russian soldiers.’44 Two weeks later, in defiance of an official ban on protests, several thousand ‘black-clad women’ – many carrying little shopping bundles of bread, cabbages and onions, others shouting, ‘We shall never be slaves’ – converged on Heroes’ Square to mourn the dead. A few of the women were permitted to place flowers on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier but ‘when others pressed forward’ Soviet troops fired into the air, dispersing the crowd.⁴⁵

Initially, Kádár adopted a conciliatory approach. Arriving back in Budapest on 7 November, he announced substantial wage increases, the abolition of an unpopular tax and the restoration of 15 March as a national holiday honouring the revolution of 1848. He also recognised the workers’ councils as ‘organs of worker self-governance in the factories’ (while denying them any broader political role) and engaged in negotiations with the recently formed Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest (KMT).⁴⁶ This was, though, an attempt to buy time. By the end of November the Kádár regime was bearing down on ‘troublemakers’. After learning that a number of miners had been killed while protesting in Salgótarján, the KMT called a nationwide forty-eight-hour strike, which drew broad support. The government now struck a decisive blow: the KMT’s leaders and other workers’ council officials were arrested, restrictive new measures were imposed, a wave of reprisals was launched and in some factories Soviet troops were deployed to maintain order.47

As Kádár tightened his grip – setting up new security organs and ‘people’s courts’, banning organisations and shutting down newspapers – prominent revolutionaries, student leaders and intellectuals were rounded up and thrown into prison.⁴⁸ Imre Nagy, granted asylum in the Yugoslav Embassy, was persuaded to leave after being promised amnesty. He was arrested immediately and later deported to Romania. Following a secret trial, Nagy, General Pál Maléter and the revolutionary journalist Miklós Gimes were hanged on 16 June 1958 and buried, face down and wrapped in tar paper, in an unmarked grave.⁴⁹ In all, twenty-two thousand people were jailed, hundreds executed and scores deported to prison camps inside the Soviet Union for their role in the revolution. Tens of thousands more were dismissed from their jobs, struggled to find work or faced harassment and police surveillance.⁵⁰ Meanwhile more than 150,000 Hungarians – many of them young, intelligent and ambitious – fled the country during the final, desperate weeks of 1956 (sparking an unprecedented international effort to assist them: the United States and Canada took sixty-eight thousand, the UK twenty-one thousand, and France, Germany and Australia more than ten thousand each).⁵¹

The events in Hungary transfixed the world. From the Vatican, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical expressing the ‘most bitter sorrow’ at news of the Soviet attack on Hungary, whose citizens had, he claimed, ‘yearned for a just freedom with all their hearts’.⁵² From New York, the editors of Time chose the ‘Hungarian Freedom Fighter’ as the magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’. Lauding the revolutionaries for having ‘fought for their country’s freedom’ against what they characterised as ‘the most brutal tyranny on earth’, they declared that ‘history’s greatest despotism’ had been ‘shaken’ to its foundations, and history made to ‘leap forward in 1956’.53

The Soviet invasion of 4 November also precipitated an outpouring of public sympathy across the globe. There were protests as far afield as Australia, Angola and Argentina.⁵⁴ In New York, ten thousand walked up Fifth Avenue on 4 November in a ‘Death March’ replete with pallbearers and a symbolic coffin, to honour Hungary’s fallen. Three days later, a similar number rallied at Madison Square Garden, chanting ‘We want action!’⁵⁵ In Europe, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Paris, Rome, Brussels, West Berlin and other cities to condemn the Soviets and proclaim solidarity with Hungary.⁵⁶ In Copenhagen, a crowd of three thousand turned their backs on the Soviet Embassy; in Salzburg, thousands of high-school and college students marched silently through the city.⁵⁷ In Berne protesters hurled stones and burned a Soviet flag and demonstrators in Reykjavik pelted the Soviet Embassy with mud and vegetables.⁵⁸ In Luxembourg, on the evening of 6 November, a crowd of two thousand, carrying torches and placards that read ‘Long live Hungary!’ and ‘Down with the Butchers of Budapest’, marched to the Soviet Embassy. Around 7 p.m., a small group broke into the embassy grounds, tore down the Soviet flag and cut the electricity supply, whereupon angry crowds swarmed into the building, smashing windows, furniture, chandeliers and official cars, before order was restored. Although the government issued a formal apology, public opinion appeared ‘basically unrepentant’.⁵⁹

In Britain, Anglo-Soviet cultural events were cancelled or postponed; a flurry of resolutions emanated from local Labour Party branches, trade unions, universities and churches; Liverpool’s dock workers refused to load rubber and other cargoes bound for the Soviet Union.⁶⁰ In Leeds, several hundred undergraduates marched through the city wearing black armbands. Some Britons were apparently eager to take on the Red Army. The ‘British Universities Volunteer Force’ even made plans to parachute students into Hungary, and a young woman working at a travel agency in York explained that she was ‘a crack shot’ and ‘prepared to pay her own fare’. Most, though, adopted a more mundane approach – raising money for the humanitarian aid effort, donating food, blankets and clothes, and providing bedding, crockery, furniture and hospitality for Hungarian refugees. Alderman John Gilles Shield offered up Donnington Hall in Leicestershire for 150 Hungarian children, while a building firm in Wolverhampton provided a new semi-detached house rent-free.61 ‘Not since the Spanish [Civil] War’, thundered Kingsley Martin from the pages of the New Statesman, ‘has England seen so popular a revulsion of feeling as over the Hungarian tragedy.’⁶² However, much of this anger – certainly at the official level – proved transitory: by the following spring, the diplomatic breach between Moscow and London had been restored, and an extensive programme of cultural, academic and professional exchanges had been resumed.⁶³

The bitter conflict between Hungary and the USSR also spilled over into the Melbourne Olympics, which became one of the most controversial Games of the modern era. In what was the first politically motivated boycott of an Olympic Games, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain all withdrew in protest at Soviet actions (Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq also withdrew in protest at Suez, while China refused to participate after Taiwan was permitted to compete). For their part, the Hungarians, who had left for Australia before the Soviet invasion, insisted that a flag featuring the national coat of arms, rather than the Communist one, be flown at the athletes’ village. Then, on 6 December, they took on the USSR in an ill-tempered water polo semi-final, played before a partisan crowd whose strong Hungarian contingent erupted in loud chants of ‘Hajrá Magyarok!’ (‘Go Hungarians!’) Towards the end of the match, with the Hungarians winning 4–0, Valentin Prokopov struck Ervin Zádo in the face, leaving him dazed and with a nasty gash above the eye. As he exited the pool with blood dripping from the wound, the crowd appeared ready to riot: the police quickly intervened and the match was abandoned. The Hungarians, who were awarded the victory, went on to win gold the following day. When the games were over, almost half of the country’s Olympians decided not to return home.64

The Hungarian people may have won much of the world’s admiration, but what they desperately wanted was military support. Although President Eisenhower praised the courage and commitment of the revolutionaries, there was never any prospect of him despatching American troops.⁶⁵ Indeed, he was so concerned that the Soviets would be ‘tempted to resort to very extreme measures and even to precipitate global war’ that he authorised John Foster Dulles to make it clear that the United States did not view the satellite countries as ‘potential military allies’ – a signal to Moscow that the US had no intention of intervening.⁶⁶ In his memoirs, Ike explained that, given the geopolitical realities, ‘we could do nothing. Sending United States troops alone into Hungary through hostile or neutral territory would have involved us in general war.’ Meanwhile, if the UN had somehow managed to circumvent a Soviet veto to authorise the use of force, then the result might have been nuclear war. America then, did ‘the only thing it could: We readied ourselves in every possible way to help the refugees fleeing from the criminal actions of the Soviets, and did everything possible to condemn the aggression.’⁶⁷

Millions of Hungarians, though, felt betrayed. After all, the Eisenhower administration had talked publicly about ‘liberating’ the ‘captive peoples’ of Eastern Europe, and during the uprising Radio Free Europe had actively encouraged the Hungarians, providing advice on anti-tank warfare and lauding the ‘freedom fighters’. Some broadcasts had even hinted at Western support – if only the Hungarians could hold out for a few more days.68 It was little wonder that those listening, or who heard about the broadcasts second-hand, believed that help from America and her allies was imminent. When it never arrived, many felt badly let down, while others chided themselves for their naïveté.⁶⁹

On the evening of 24 October, as the first stages of the Hungarian revolution were unfolding, John Foster Dulles had worried ‘that it will be said that here are the great moments and when they came and these fellows were ready to stand up and die, we were caught napping and doing nothing’.⁷⁰ His fears were well placed. The Hungarian uprising cruelly exposed the flaws in the Eisenhower administration’s goal of ending Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. As the political scientist Charles Gati has pointed out, despite all the talk about ‘liberating’ the satellites and ‘rolling back’ Soviet influence, when the ‘moment of truth’ arrived ‘there were no plans whatever on the shelves, no diplomatic initiatives had been prepared, and of course no consideration was given to any form of military assistance . . . In the end, the White House had little to say and nothing to offer.’⁷¹ All the Americans could do was seek solace in the fact that, by intervening so brutally, the Soviets had damaged Communism’s international appeal.⁷² As a New York Times editorial put it, ‘The Hungarians have put a brand upon communism as a philosophy of life and government from which it can never recover.’⁷³

In the event, Communism’s romantic, revolutionary appeal would receive an unexpected boost from a rebellion that broke out just a few dozen miles off the Florida coast.

CAPTION:

Fidel Castro (top centre) and his compañeros in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba.

Credit: Gilberto Ante