The Rise and Fall of Communism

15 Revisionism and Revolution in Eastern Europe

So long as Stalin was alive, he had been the ultimate arbiter on relations between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He also had a large say on the speed of the changes introduced from above in the East European countries. The main exception to that rule was, of course, Yugoslavia where the strong domestic position of Tito’s Communists had enabled them to defy the Soviet leadership. The Albanian Communist Party had also come to power without significant help from the Soviet army, but during Stalin’s lifetime that did not lead to clashes between Tirana and Moscow. In the time and places with which this chapter is concerned – Eastern Europe in the post-Stalin years up to the mid-1960s – that harmony was to disappear. The Albanian break with Moscow was linked to the much more important Sino-Soviet dispute which got under way in the late 1950s and became an open split in the 1960s. That momentous rupture is, however, discussed in Chapter 17, which focuses on political and ideological change in China.

In countries where local Communists’ hold on power was much less secure than in Yugoslavia or Albania (not to speak of China), open defiance by them of the Soviet Union was not an option. Weakness, however, could also be turned to advantage by a determined East European Communist politician seeking to acquire or retain a position of supreme power. If he could portray himself as the one person who was either tough enough or, alternatively, popular enough to be able to keep his country in line, this counted for much with the ultimate overseers in Moscow. The very fragility of the relationship between local Communists and their own society could become a bargaining chip vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the hands of a shrewd operator. Thus, Walter Ulbricht survived a period of diminishing trust from Moscow by demonstrating that he could maintain the Communists’ grip on power in East Germany. In Poland, Władysław Gomuka fell into a somewhat different category. While no Communist in Poland came close to gaining widespread popularity, Gomuka for a time was by a large margin the least unpopular of the country’s Communist politicians. He was seen by Poles in the 1950s as a patriot; they overlooked then the fact that he was also a Leninist. In September 1948 he had been replaced as general secretary of the party by Bolesław Bierut. He was arrested in July 1951, though never brought to trial. Released from prison in 1954, Gomuka was not re-admitted to the Communist party until August 1956. Two months later he had become the leader of Poland’s Communists as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP).

To have been imprisoned in the Stalin period was a point in Gomuka’s favour with the Polish population and even with many rank-and-file party members. After much hesitation, the Soviet leadership went along with the sudden return to power of such a popular Communist. It turned out to be a worthwhile gamble. Although Gomuka was never a mere puppet, he became a sufficiently reliable leader from Moscow’s standpoint. In Poland, as throughout most of Eastern Europe, local Communists could not have remained in power for long without the ultimate backing – by force, if need be – of the Soviet Union. However, they had some leeway to manoeuvre between Moscow and their own populations. Direct rule of the countries of Eastern Europe by Russians was out of the question, not least in a country such as Poland where there was a long tradition of Russo-Polish hostility. It was also unthinkable on ideological grounds. There had to be at least a minority within the society – preferably, of course, a majority of the working class – who had discerned the ‘laws of history’ and were ready to build ‘socialism’ of a Communist type.

German and Czech Worker Resistance

Beria, however, had not been alone in considering the possibility of a united Germany that would not be a threat to the Soviet Union but which would, in Soviet terms, be a ‘bourgeois democratic’ rather than ‘socialist’ state. Malenkov was at various times accused not only by Bulganin but also by Khrushchev and his allies of having been unsound on the German question. Even if Beria and Malenkov took the lead, though, in considering a bold change in policy towards Germany, new evidence suggests that, for a short time, a majority of the leadership had been prepared to go along with the idea of a united Germany. Beria, as head of the secret police, was better informed about the growing tensions within East German society than other members of the party Presidium, whereas Malenkov was simply sceptical about the feasibility of sustaining a divided Germany indefinitely. They were influential initially, but the mood in the whole Soviet leadership hardened after the arrest of Beria and, more especially, after the uprising that occurred in Germany on 17 June. Malenkov’s position also changed in the light of that event.

Among Malenkov’s papers which have come to light in recent years is one drafted in late May or early June 1953 in which he said it was ‘profoundly mistaken’ to believe that Germany could remain divided over the long term. He stated that its unification would be possible only on the basis of its becoming a ‘bourgeois-democratic republic’.² However, when Malenkov gave a report to the Central Committee plenary session on 2 July, convened to discredit Beria, the tone was very different and was one of support for the existing East German state.³ Khrushchev and his allies had an interest in damning Beria and, later, Malenkov on policy grounds and not only for their role in repression, since the latter sphere was one in which their own pasts were open to question. The views attributed exclusively to Beria and Malenkov were, however, more generally, if briefly, held. Malenkov’s earlier paper, taking a soft line on the German question, was prepared for a meeting with the East German leadership on 2 June 1953, in which Ulbricht and his colleagues were criticized for the harshness of the policy they had been pursuing. Since the document was designed for an inter-party meeting, it required the assent of the Soviet party Presidium. Thus, prior to the popular uprising in East Germany in mid-June 1953, the top Soviet leadership as a whole had endorsed such judgements in Malenkov’s paper as ‘Germany’s unity and its transformation into a democratic and peaceful state’ being ‘the most important prerequisite’ and ‘one of the essential guarantees’ for maintaining peace in Europe and beyond.⁴

What emerges from the archival evidence is a contradiction between two different notions of a future Germany, both of them desirable from the standpoint of the Soviet Union. The problem for the Soviet leaders was that they were mutually incompatible. On the one hand, there was the Soviet desire to build a strong Communist system in East Germany. On the other, there was the idea that a united Germany, which would remain disarmed and non-aligned, would best serve Soviet security interests. Between Stalin’s death and the East German uprising a few months later, discussion around these issues took place in the Soviet leadership, but after the latter event, the emphasis was very much on ‘building socialism’ in East Germany.⁵ This was accompanied by a desire to ensure that West Germany (the Federal Republic) would not become part of a military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. Since the goals, however, could not be reconciled, pursuit of the first of them led to the Federal Republic of Germany becoming in 1955 a member of NATO.

Events in Germany itself in 1953 played a decisive role in reinforcing the preference for strengthening the GDR as a Communist state. Stalin’s death had raised hopes in the minds of the German population of some relaxation on the part of their hard-line regime. The idea, however, of a ‘new course’, leading to greater reconciliation with the population, emanated from Moscow, not from Ulbricht. Quite independently of any policy preferences of Beria and Malenkov, members of the Soviet Control Commission in East Germany reported to Malenkov in May 1953 that the German Communists were underestimating ‘the political significance of the populace’s departure from the GDR to West Germany’. The document found in Malenkov’s papers, prepared for the meeting with Ulbricht on 2 June, contained the stark statement: ‘The analysis of the internal political and economic situation in the GDR, the facts of the mass flight of the population of East Germany to West Germany (about 500 thousand have already fled!) shows conclusively that we are really heading at full steam – not towards socialism, however, but towards an internal disaster. We are obliged to soberly face the truth and to recognize that without the presence of Soviet troops the existing regime in the GDR is unstable.’⁶ Part of the problem, according to the Soviet Control Commission in Germany, was the harshness with which ‘basically correct’ decisions were being implemented. They noted numerous cases of ‘incorrect arrests’ and of ‘unlawful and groundless searches in apartments and offices’. They recommended freeing many people who had been convicted for Nazi crimes, saying that an amnesty should enable between 15,000 and 17,000 people to be released from prison.⁷

Ulbricht was highly sceptical of the softer line, and in fact, work norms were made tougher in the GDR. More work, in other words, was demanded for the same pay. In response to popular discontent, the GDR leadership adopted on 11 June 1953 their own version of a ‘new course’, with some economic concessions, but they did not rescind the higher work norms. Building workers in East Berlin went on strike on 17 June and they were soon joined by workers in many other localities. Within a matter of hours, over half a million people were involved in the strikes and demonstrations, and the demands quickly escalated from complaints about work norms to a call for free elections. Soviet tanks, however, moved in. Dozens of the demonstrators were killed, many were arrested and there were subsequent executions. By 19 June the uprising was over.⁸ The response was characteristic of Communist leaderships when faced by serious working-class opposition – economic concessions, but a hard line, including the use of whatever force was necessary, to preserve the existing power structure. In East Germany there was subsequently a greater effort than hitherto to make basic foodstuffs, housing and utilities available at affordable prices through the use of subsidies.⁹ A distinctive feature of the Communist regime in the GDR in the 1950s was the possibility for people to vote with their feet – to move to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) by going from East to West Berlin. That option was eventually cut off with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. However, the GDR leadership always had another difficulty peculiar to their state: its nationals could compare their standard of living with that of their fellow Germans in the FRG. This did not, following the June 1953 unrest, lead to political relaxation, but it did stimulate an attempt at economic amelioration, including now a retreat from the higher work norms.

Two weeks prior to the uprising in Berlin, workers had taken to the streets in the western Bohemian town of Plze – better known as Pilsen, not least for its beer, outside the Czech Republic. Although they were much less of a headache for the new Soviet leadership, since they were on a smaller scale and the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was in a much stronger position than its East German counterpart, the fact that it was workers opposing the Communist authorities at the beginning of June 1953 alarmed the Communist rulers in Prague. Those who took part in this rebellion were not armed, but some of the young workers acquired knuckledusters. Among the seventy or so people who were quite seriously injured, a majority were secret policemen or members of the local workers’ militia. Some of the latter, as well as army units stationed locally, refused orders to fire on the demonstrators, and the revolt was crushed only when special police units from the Ministry of the Interior and a contingent of the workers’ militia from Prague were sent to the scene.

The cause of the unrest had been a currency reform which wiped out people’s savings. Very quickly, however, the slogans became anti-Communist, pro-Beneš (although he had been dead already for five years), and pro-American (Pilsen was in a part of the Czech lands which had been liberated at the end of the Second World War not by the Soviet army but by the Americans). No one was killed, but particularly unpopular local Communists were beaten up, and busts of Stalin and Gottwald were thrown out of windows of official buildings which the demonstrators had stormed. Although prison sentences were imposed on many of the participants, the punishment was not so draconian as to draw undue attention to the events, which were a significant embarrassment to the Communist Party. This was, after all, a working-class revolt in a state in which the workers had supposedly become the ruling class. The secretariat of the party’s Central Committee in Prague came up with the convenient formula that the rebels ‘were not workers but bourgeois elements dressed up in overalls’.¹⁰

The ‘new course’ in East European policy immediately following Stalin’s death was associated with Beria, in particular, and with Malenkov. The fact that it appeared to have contributed to serious trouble in East Germany led to a more cautious Soviet approach and made Beria and, later Malenkov, convenient political scapegoats for the policy failures. (Both of them, especially Beria, were guilty many times over of conspiracy to murder innocent Soviet citizens, so the attempt to ameliorate conditions in east-central Europe might, more reasonably, have been regarded as mitigating factors, however inadequate, to be counted against their long list of real and atrocious offences.) The fundamental problem for the Soviet leadership was the gap between their demands and aspirations and those of a majority of the people in East Europe living under Communist rule. The way in which they tried to square the circle was, in some of the more difficult cases – notably Poland and Hungary – to place a wager on leaders who had a degree of popularity in their own societies and to count on them being sufficiently loyal followers of whatever line was emanating from Moscow. In East Germany, however, after some dithering in 1953, they opted for short-and medium-term stability by supporting successive leaders who were not even the most acceptable Communists in the eyes of their fellow citizens – Walter Ulbricht and his successor, Erich Honecker. In the long run it was to become clear that such a regime could collapse as quickly as one in which a softer line had been pursued.

Change in Poland and Hungary

Communist rule brought about changes in the societies of Eastern Europe that had longer-term unintended consequences as well as short-term intended outcomes. Especially important were the growth of urbanization and, still more, of education. Thus, even one of the most trenchant, and erudite, of Polish philosophical critics of Communism (and, more generally, of Marxism), Leszek Kołakowski, wrote: ‘In the Stalinist years the state was quite generous in subsidizing culture, so that a good deal of rubbish was produced but also much work of permanent value. The general standard of education and access to universities soon rose considerably as compared with before the war.’¹¹ Kołakowski is also probably correct in suggesting that the Soviet-imposed orthodoxy did less damage in Poland than elsewhere in Eastern Europe because of the deep-rooted Polish distrust of everything emanating from Russia. Partly as a result, ‘cultural Stalinism in Poland was comparatively short-lived’, purges in institutions of higher education were less drastic than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and fewer books were removed from library access.¹²

The extension of education – and, in particular, the rapid widening of opportunities to enter higher educational institutions – was not, though, a specifically Polish feature. It was a more general achievement of Communism. It was one, however, which did much more to undermine than to sustain Communist systems. That became especially clear in the long term – with the Soviet Union the most important case – but even in the short run students could, in some instances, make life very difficult for Communist leaders. In Hungary, as the author of a lively history of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 has observed: ‘To the Communists’ credit they had made big strides in education, raising literacy standards in the countryside and massively increasing the number of places at colleges and universities for children of peasants and workers.’¹³ Yet the same students, whose heads had been stuffed full of Marxist-Leninist ideology as well as more useful knowledge in the course of their university studies, were in the vanguard of resistance to Communist misrule as early as 1956.¹⁴

The years between the death of Stalin and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech were a time of reassessment for a number of those who had earlier enthusiastically embarked on what they perceived as ‘building socialism’ in Eastern Europe. While the tempo of change was to increase in 1956, there were important developments earlier than that in Poland and Hungary. A plenary session of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist party (PUWP) in January 1955 went further in criticism of Stalinism than any party other than the Yugoslavs had gone up to that point. Unofficial critics were still more outspoken, and in the course of the year the boundaries of permissible debate were extended. The Poles and Hungarians, with their large Western diasporas, were – next to the East Germans – the peoples least cut off from information about Western democracies. Like others in east-central Europe, they also listened to broadcasts by fellow nationals emanating from Western Europe. In the Polish case an important role was played at this time by a lieutenant-colonel in the Communist security police, Józef wiat lo, who defected from Poland in December 1953 and, in broadcasts from Radio Free Europe in Munich which he began the following year, provided accurate information on, for example, the barbaric methods used to convict innocent people.¹⁵

In both Poland and Hungary the mid-1950s were, briefly, a period of classical ‘revisionism’ inasmuch as, following the death of Stalin, members of the party who had been enthusiastic about building socialism, but were disillusioned with what had been constructed thus far, began to voice criticism of the way Communist doctrine was being interpreted. Since anti-Communism had been dealt with ruthlessly, and non-party members had no opportunity to contribute to political discourse, members of Communist parties – arguing with each other on the basis of different understandings of Marxism and Leninism – became the main dissenting voices. Later, most East European Communist intellectuals were to move beyond revisionism, no longer believing that Marxism-Leninism, even when stripped of its Stalinist excrescences, remained the best way of understanding the world. In the mid-1950s, however, they were still convinced that there was something worth reviving or revising. A generation later a majority of them saw Communism as a body of doctrine which was fundamentally flawed and a set of institutions fit only for dismantling.

Those party members in the 1950s who were beginning to have doubts were more readily influenced by people who were arguing from within Marxism than by overt anti-Communists. Thus, for example, the renowned Hungarian economist János Kornai has said that in the period between 1953 and 1955 he was much influenced by Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Stalin and by the writings of the Yugoslav Edvard Kardelj, who argued that the Stalinist model of economic management led to bureaucratic centralism.¹⁶ As Kornai put it: ‘I was still half or three-quarters a Communist at the time. The works that affect a person most strongly in the state of mind I was then in are not ones diametrically opposed to the views held hitherto by the doubter – that is, not attacking the Communist Party from without.’¹⁷ Some of the most innovative economic thinking, while remaining within the bounds of revisionism, emanated from Poland, with Oskar Lange and Wodzimierz Brus among the most prominent theorists. Their arguments for a form of ‘market socialism’ were also to influence Communist reformers elsewhere at a time when the ideas of orthodox Western economists were still taboo.¹⁸ Transnational influences within east-central Europe took many different forms. Thus, unrest and open defiance of the authorities in Poland in 1956 was a stimulus to protest in Hungary which eventually took a more dramatic turn. There were also, however, the less politically overt, but in the long run important, influences of party intellectuals in one Communist country on their counterparts in another.

In Hungary, revisionist thinking had been given a boost by Moscow’s insistence in mid-June 1953 that Mátyás Rákosi give up the prime ministership. He was allowed to remain party leader, but a much more reformist Communist, Imre Nagy, became prime minister. Nagy pursued a ‘new course’ with an enthusiasm and measure of popularity which increased the hostility to him of Rákosi and the Communist old guard, although Nagy, too, was a ‘Muscovite’. He had spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the war years. The declining power of Malenkov within the Soviet leadership over the next two years made it easier for Rákosi to strike back at Nagy. In 1955, the same year in which Malenkov lost his chairmanship of the Council of Ministers, Nagy was dismissed as prime minister in Hungary. Indeed, Malenkov, conscious of his weakening position, himself criticized Nagy at a Kremlin meeting in January of that year at which the Hungarian prime minister was given an extremely uncomfortable time by the whole Soviet leadership. Malenkov accused Nagy of economic incompetence and, worse, of ‘bourgeois nationalism’.¹⁹ Once it was clear that Nagy no longer had highly placed supporters in Moscow, Rákosi, who had never been reconciled to his own de facto demotion, was free to strike, and he lost little time in doing so. Nagy was accused, at a Central Committee in March, of ‘rightist deviation’, removed from the headship of the government and from the Politburo a month later, and expelled from the Communist Party by the end of 1955.

There were, then, revisionist stirrings in Eastern Europe before 1956, as well as workers’ revolts such as that in Czechoslovakia in 1953. The uprising in East Germany in the same year involved a great many workers, but it brought together different social groups. Declassified Stasi records show that intellectuals, especially students, were arrested in disproportionately large numbers in relation to their percentage of the population. In 1956, however, protest involved workers and intellectuals together, opposing the authorities over a longer period, thereby turning a problem into a crisis for the Soviet leadership. And the impetus to events with a revolutionary dimension in Communist Europe came – as it was to come also in the late 1980s – from Moscow. The leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union played a decisive role not only in the development of Communist rule in Eastern Europe but also, as will be shown in Part 5 of this book, in its demise. Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 made life vastly more difficult for East European Communist leaders who had prided themselves on following closely in Stalin’s footsteps. Thus, the First Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi, rejoiced in the title of ‘Stalin’s best pupil’ (or, slightly more modestly, ‘Comrade Stalin’s best Hungarian disciple’),²⁰ a slogan which accompanied his unprepossessing features on placards and posters.²¹ (Rákosi’s nickname, quite widely used behind his back in Hungary, was ‘Arsehead’.)²²

For more idealistic members of Communist parties, for whom life under Communism had been far removed from what they had envisaged, Khrushchev’s speech was both a spur to self-questioning and an impetus to reform within their own societies. The leaderships of the East European countries had been put in an awkward position not only by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU but by Khrushchev’s reconciliation with Tito. Along with Bulganin, Khrushchev came to Belgrade in May 1955 and apologized for Soviet mistakes in the relationship with Yugoslavia. He got off to a bad start by placing all the blame for ostracizing Yugoslavia on Beria rather than Stalin, a position the Yugoslavs greeted with frank incredulity. However, the visit ended with the Soviet visitors accepting Tito’s basic conditions for a joint communiqué stating that ‘different forms of Socialist development are solely the concern of the individual countries’. Tito was insistent that the negotiations were between independent states, not between ruling Communist parties. For the same reason he was adamant that Bulganin, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, not Khrushchev as party leader, must sign the communiqué.²³ A number of notable East European Communists, especially from the ranks of those who had remained in their own countries rather than spending years in the Soviet Union, had been either imprisoned or executed as alleged Titoists at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Thus the revelation that Tito was, once again, a comrade rather than a renegade was a severe embarrassment for Eastern Europe’s unreconstructed Stalinists. The corollary was that reconciliation with Yugoslavia gave encouragement to reform-minded, or ‘revisionist’, Communists in other parts of East Europe.

Poland in 1956

The repercussions of these developments, and especially of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, were felt, to a greater or lesser degree, in every Communist state, but in none more so than Poland and Hungary. The Polish Communist leader Bierut died just a fortnight after Khrushchev’s bombshell at the Twentieth Congress – probably of a heart attack, although there were suggestions of suicide.²⁴ He was succeeded as general secretary by Edward Ochab, who at one time had been close to Gomuka and who was to attempt to steer a middle course between the ‘national Communists’, on the one hand, and the hard-liners, on the other. The liberalization from above was accompanied by radicalization from below. The weekly Po Prostu (Quite Simply) was an especially important forum not only for the expression of critical views but as the initiator of discussion clubs for young intellectuals throughout the country.²⁵ Khrushchev’s secret speech led to a wave of debate and questioning within the Polish Communist party, as well as to the release of tens of thousands of prisoners in 1956, of whom some 9,000 had been jailed for political reasons.²⁶ The first serious manifestation of working-class protest came in late June 1956, when factory workers in Poznań demonstrated to demand higher wages. A peaceful demonstration turned into a full-scale uprising, involving more than half the population of Poznán. Communist party offices were set on fire. Following two days of clashes between the demonstrators (with factory workers in the vanguard) and the Polish army and security forces, at least seventy-four people were dead and hundreds wounded.²⁷ The Soviet as well as the Polish leadership were seriously worried by the growing unrest.

Four months later, what became known as the ‘Polish October’ saw a groundswell of support for the return of Gomuka. Public opinion, given the crisis within the ruling party, had a huge impact. At the beginning of October, Gomuka returned to the Politburo, and by 19 October he was once again First Secretary of the Polish Communist party. The Soviet leadership were concerned both by the fact that Gomuka had been swept to power independently of them and by the evidence that anti-Soviet sentiment had played a significant part in swelling his support. Soviet troops, already in Poland, were brought closer to Warsaw to put pressure on the new Polish leadership. Yet Gomuka was able to get his way on a number of issues on which he was at odds with Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership. Thus, the Russified Pole Konstantin Rokossowski (in the Polish spelling of his name) had been minister of defence since 1949, and Gomuka insisted on his removal.²⁸ As Marshal Rokossovsky, he had been one of the heroes of the Red Army in the Second World War, although (as noted in Chapter 8) he had been in a Soviet prison on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Khrushchev, who had a high regard for Rokossovsky, only reluctantly acceded to Gomuka’s demand. However, a combination of massive popular pressure in Poland and a growing, and potentially more severe, crisis in Hungary led Khrushchev to seek a more general compromise solution to the Polish impasse.

In a number of Polish cities on 22 October there were pro-Gomuka rallies, involving in each case as many as 100,000 people. Two days later, around half a million people demonstrated in Warsaw. Khrushchev noted at a meeting of the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party held on 24 October that there was no shortage of reasons for embarking on armed conflict in Poland. He prudently added, however, that ‘finding a way to end such a conflict later on would be very hard’.²⁹ One important reassurance Gomuka offered the Soviet leaders was that Poland would remain a loyal member of the international Communist movement and, most specifically, of the Warsaw Pact. In retrospect, the somewhat reluctant Soviet endorsement of the Poles’ choice of Gomuka bought them a lot of time. In the long run it produced more disillusionment in Poland than in the Soviet Union. Reflecting years later on the decisions made in those days, Khrushchev was able to say of Gomuka: ‘Here was a man who had come to power on the crest of an anti-Soviet wave, yet who could now speak forcefully about the need to preserve Poland’s friendly relations with Soviet Russia and the Soviet Communist Party. Perhaps I didn’t appreciate this fact right at that moment, but I came to appreciate it afterwards.’³⁰ Radical Polish critics of the system came to the same conclusion as Khrushchev. Unlike him, of course, instead of rejoicing in Gomuka’s trajectory, they deplored it. Thus the philosopher Kołakowski wrote:

The Russian leaders, at first highly mistrustful, decided in the end – quite rightly, as it turned out – that although Gomuka had taken over without Kremlin sanction he would not prove too disobedient, and that invasion would be a greater risk. The ‘Polish October’, as it was called, far from ushering in a period of social and cultural renewal or ‘liberalization’, stood for the gradual extinction of all such attempts. In 1956 Poland was, relatively speaking, a country of free speech and free criticism, not because the government had planned it so but because they had lost control of the situation. The October events started a process of reversal, and the margin of freedom which still remained grew less year by year.³¹

Hungary in 1956

Whereas in Poland the turmoil stopped short of either revolution or armed conflict, events in Hungary took a different course. Hungary also had a relatively popular Communist who had been banished from the leadership and likewise expelled from the Communist Party in the person of Imre Nagy, who had been appreciated as a reformer during his prime ministership of 1953–55. In other respects, Nagy’s past fitted much less well with the idea of a ‘national Communist’, especially when compared with the record of Gomuka as a resistance leader of Poland’s home Communists during World War Two. Nagy, in contrast, not only spent many years in the Soviet Union but he was also, while there, an active informer for the NKVD, denouncing to the authorities a number of other Hungarian exiles. When he volunteered in 1941 to join the Red Army, he was placed in a special NKVD unit.³² When all allowances are made for the fact that Nagy’s own life was in danger in the Soviet Union, not least because of his known preference for the relatively gradualist approach favoured by Bukharin (who perished in the Great Purge), this was an unpropitious background for someone who showed great courage in the last two years of his life and who was to become a hero to anti-Communist Hungarians.³³

Under Soviet pressure, Rákosi was obliged to give up the leadership of the Hungarian party in July 1956. The person who conveyed the message was the Kremlin’s leading troubleshooter, Anastas Mikoyan, on a mission to Budapest. Mikoyan had a friendly meeting during that visit with János Kádár who, as noted in Chapter 12, had been released from prison in the summer of 1954. Kádár may have been coming under scrutiny as a possible future leader of the Hungarian Communist party. In fact, however, Rákosi’s immediate successor, Ern Ger, was a Communist in the same mould as himself – a Stalinist who had spent years in Moscow. He was also of Jewish origin, though the Soviet leadership believed that the disproportionately strong representation of Jews at the top of the Hungarian hierarchy made it harder for the Communists to win more widespread support from the society. Nevertheless, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Hungarian party, Mikoyan, as Moscow’s envoy, eventually spoke in favour of Ger, who was duly appointed. (Later, Khrushchev acknowledged that this was an error, saying at a meeting of the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party on 3 November 1956, at which Kádár was present: ‘Mikoyan and I made a mistake when we proposed Ger instead of Kádár. We were taken in by Ger.’)³⁴ Mikoyan, however, surprised the July meeting in Budapest by speaking also in favour of reinstating Imre Nagy’s party membership.³⁵ In a report to the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikoyan said that it had been a mistake all along to expel Nagy from the party, ‘even though he deserved it with his behaviour’. Had he remained, however, he would been bound by party discipline. Although Mikoyan was not ruling out the possibility that Nagy might play some future part in the Hungarian leadership, in his half-hour speech to the Central Committee of the Hungarian party, he observed that Nagy must distance himself from the ‘anti-party group’ which surrounded him.³⁶

Mikoyan was the most flexible member of the Soviet top leadership team and the only one who consistently opposed Soviet military interven tion in Hungary. He was also readier than Rákosi to accept relatively free discussion among Hungarian intellectuals. The equivalent of the discussion clubs fostered by Po Prostu in Poland consisted in Hungary of the writers and journalists who had attached themselves to the ‘Petfi Circle’, named after the national poet who helped inspire the Hungarian revolution of 1848 against their Austrian overlords. That organization had been created by the Communist party’s youth movement as a way of allowing intellectuals to let off steam. It began as a body seeking incremental change, but the tone of its proceedings became increasingly radical.³⁷ Most of the speakers were thinking in terms of a reformed Communism, and one of their calls (in advance of the same suggestion coming from Mikoyan) was for the readmission of Nagy to the party. They were reformers, not revolutionaries, in the spring and summer of 1956, but by the autumn many of them were moving rapidly in a revolutionary direction. The developing freedom of speech owed much to the influence of the de-Stalinization Khrushchev had accelerated with his Twentieth Party Congress speech.

In Hungary, as in Poland, October was the month in which political tensions came to a head. The reburial of László Rajk gave huge impetus to the movement for change. Rajk, as Minister of the Interior, had been no liberal, but his arrest and execution had turned him into a martyr and the leading Hungarian victim of Stalinist oppression. With Tito once again accepted as a comrade within the international Communist movement, those such as Rajk who had been condemned for their supposed Titoist sympathies had to be rehabilitated. At the reburial, Rajk’s widow, Júlia, holding close their seven-year-old son, stood next to Imre Nagy, who assured those around him that ‘soon it will be Stalinism that will finally be buried’.³⁸ For 100,000 Hungarians who lined the streets of Budapest, that was the minimum they hoped for. The reburial of Rajk had been officially approved by the Hungarian authorities, in contrast to the demonstration by some 500 students shouting anti-Communist slogans which followed it. That was broken up by the police. Ger, who had been out of the country at the time, later acknowledged to the Soviet ambassador, Yury Andropov, that Rajk’s reburial had ‘dealt a massive blow to the Party leadership’, even though their ‘authority was not all that high to begin with’.³⁹ One day later, Nagy was readmitted to the party. A more prominent personality than Kádár, he seemed to represent the best hope for stabilization on the basis of reform.

Events took another course. Five thousand students gathered at the Budapest Technological University on 22 October and produced what amounted to a revolutionary manifesto. It consisted of sixteen points. The very first on the list was the demand that all Soviet troops leave Hungarian soil immediately. The demands included a call not for a multi-party system but rather for election of Communist party (Hungarian Workers’ Party, as it was called at that time) officials by secret ballot of all party members. The third point read: ‘A new Government must be constituted under the direction of Comrade Imre Nagy; all the criminal leaders of the Stalin – Rákosi era must be immediately relieved of their duties.’ The authors of the manifesto declared their solidarity ‘with the workers and students of Warsaw and Poland in their movement towards national independence’ and called for ‘complete recognition of freedom of opinion and expression’ and ‘of freedom of the press and radio’.⁴⁰ The next day the students demanded that their sixteen-point manifesto be broadcast on Hungarian radio. The director of the Budapest radio station tried to trick them into thinking this was being done. A woman announcer, in what purported to be the broadcast, read through the list of points, which were heard by the students listening through loudspeakers outside the radio building. In the meantime, however, people at home were hearing music from their radios. The subterfuge backfired, for when those in the crowd realized this had been an attempt to fool them, they laid siege to the building.⁴¹

On that same day, 23 October, the gigantic statue of Stalin in central Budapest was toppled, to the cheers of tens of thousands of Hungarians. By midnight on the 23rd, Nagy had been appointed prime minister. Ger agreed to this reluctantly, on the instructions of Khrushchev. Nagy was told that he should sign a formal invitation to the Soviet leadership to send troops to restore order in Hungary. This he refused to do, although he did sign a declaration of martial law which authorized Hungarian forces to impose curfews and to resort, if need be, to summary executions.⁴² There were many Soviet troops and tanks already in Hungary, and in the early hours of 24 October, 6,000 soldiers and 700 tanks entered Budapest. In the fighting which broke out, the Hungarian forces were divided. A Hungarian army colonel, Pál Maléter, whose charismatic presence owed something to his immense height, joined the rebels. Before long Nagy’s position evolved from that of Communist reformer with ties to Moscow to leader of the Hungarian resistance to foreign domination. On 3 November, with fighting taking place between Hungarian insurgents and Soviet troops, who by now were being massively reinforced, Maléter was appointed Minister of Defence in a freshly formed coalition government which included members of the refounded Social Democratic Party and the Smallholders’ Party. The Stalinists were all excluded. The government included János Kádár, who had been appointed First Secretary of the Communist party, in succession to the discredited Ger, on 25 October. It was yet another indication, though, of how much had changed that prime minister Nagy, not party chief Kádár, was regarded even by the Central Committee of the party as the leader of Hungary during those days of revolutionary turmoil.⁴³

Mikoyan and Suslov attended the meeting of the Hungarian Politburo which chose Kádár. They sent a four-page telegram to the leadership in Moscow late that night on the day’s happenings – including the violent clashes involving Soviet tanks and Hungarian insurgents – and, though acknowledging that the situation in Budapest had become ‘more complicated’, they seemed content with the removal of Ger and the promotion to the party leadership of Kádár. However, Mikoyan and Suslov had argued against those in the Hungarian leadership who had called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and they believed that their objections had been endorsed by Nagy, Kádár and the Hungarian Politburo as a whole. As an anguished postscript to their message to Moscow, they added that they had just received (late at night) a translation of what Nagy had said in a radio broadcast that evening: in contradiction ‘to what was decided in the Politburo’, Nagy had declared that the Hungarian government would take the initiative in holding discussions with the Soviet Union on the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from Hungary.⁴⁴

Mikoyan and Suslov approved the creation of a coalition government, even though this meant a definite retreat from previous Soviet positions. On 30 October, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in Moscow had also opted for a peaceful resolution of the crisis. However, events in Hungary continued to spiral out of their control. This included the lynchings of particularly hated Communists, mainly secret policemen, on the streets of Budapest – spontaneous actions by a minority within the Hungarian resistance which were deplored by Nagy. News of their comrades hanging from trees and lampposts not only helped to produce a change of mind in Moscow but also engendered a change of mood among Communist leaders in countries to which the Soviet leadership could not dictate. Tito and Mao eventually endorsed the use of massive force to crush the uprising.⁴⁵ Both the Yugoslavs and the Chinese had been in favour of the Polish and Hungarian Communists being allowed to resolve their own difficulties. They had supported the appointment of Gomuka and of a Hungarian counterpart. Tito, for example, had urged the replacement of Ger by Kádár, and his opinion almost certainly influenced the Soviet leadership at that time. The Yugoslavs also believed that a much earlier retreat from Stalinist policies, combined with the removal of leaders of the type of Rákosi and Ger, could have prevented matters reaching the point of crisis. Yet the Yugoslav and also the Chinese leaders remained Communists orthodox enough to be unwilling to see ‘counterrevolution’ prevail in any country which had already, in their terms, become socialist.

The Soviet leadership as late as 30 October took a decision that they would be willing to withdraw their troops from Hungary ‘provided that the Nagy government succeeded in (1) consolidating the situation while maintaining the socialist system and (2) preserving membership in the Soviet bloc’.⁴⁶ The Soviet leadership were united in insisting that a Communist system must be preserved in Hungary, but quite deeply divided in the last days of October 1956 on the tactical means to that end. There was some criticism in the Soviet Presidium, when Hungary was debated on 26 and 28 October, of Mikoyan and Suslov for making too many concessions. Molotov, Voroshilov and Bulganin were among those taking a hard line. Perhaps surprisingly, Marshal Zhukov was the first to press for more ‘political flexibility’.⁴⁷ Events in Hungary on 30 October, the very day on which the Soviet leadership had agreed upon a conditional withdrawal of Soviet troops, led them the following day to reverse that decision. It was on 31 October that the decision was taken to use overwhelming military force to put an end to the ‘counterrevolutionary’ turmoil. As already noted, the Nagy government had been reorganized on a multi-party basis on 30 October, but on the same day unrest had increased, and among those killed in an act of mob violence was the first secretary of the Budapest city committee, Imre Mez (who was actually a Nagy supporter).⁴⁸ This last development, as well as the lynchings that day of Hungarian secret policemen, had a profound effect on Communist leaderships throughout the region. These latest events intensified their already acute concern, especially in Romania and Czechoslovakia, where the Hungarian minorities in Transylvania (part of Romania) and Slovakia had been in contact with their fellow nationals in Hungary.⁴⁹ The Soviet leadership now feared that the Hungarian infection could travel across Eastern Europe and the entire bloc might be affected.

Having changed their position on intervention, Khrushchev and Malenkov braved atrocious flying conditions to visit Tito in his island home of Brioni on 2 November to inform him that the Soviet Union was going to deploy massive force in Hungary. Among the reasons they gave were the lynchings of Communists there; Nagy’s declaration after fighting had begun in Budapest that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and was declaring neutrality; and the argument that if Hungary were lost to the ‘socialist camp’, this would be a massive gift to hard-line Stalinists in the Soviet Union.⁵⁰ (Nagy had first spoken in public on 31 October of Hungary leaving the Warsaw Pact, but of doing so after patient discussions with the Soviet Union.)⁵¹ Khrushchev also referred in his talks with Tito to the advantage of crushing the Hungarian uprising at a time when the British and French, in collusion with Israel, had embarked on an attack on Egypt in response to President Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. In the words of the Yugoslav ambassador to Moscow, who was at the Brioni meeting:

Khrushchev said that British and French aggressive pressure on Egypt provided a favourable moment for a further intervention by Soviet troops. It would help the Russians. There would be confusion and uproar in the West and the United Nations, but it would be less at a time when Britain, France, and Israel were waging a war against Egypt. ‘They are bogged down there, and we are stuck in Hungary’, Khrushchev said.⁵²

Thus, by the end of October 1956 the Soviet leadership had decided firmly on the use of overwhelming military force to ensure that Hungary remained Communist and a member of the Warsaw Pact. Even without the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt, they would have reached that decision. However, the foolhardy Suez escapade meant that there was a far from exclusive international focus on the crushing of the Hungarian insurgents. Israel had sent its forces into Egypt on 29 October, and the following day the British and French governments sent an ultimatum to Egypt and Israel, demanding that they cease their hostilities and ensure freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal. The two Western governments had, however, acted dishonestly, colluding in advance with Israel and then, in the words of a retired senior British diplomat, claiming ‘the right to intervene to stop what we had conspired to start’.⁵³ The Suez adventure, doomed to ignominious failure from the outset, was opposed by the Eisenhower administration in the United States, and it vied with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution for the attention both of the USA and of the United Nations.⁵⁴ Indeed, between 1 and 3 November 1956, President Eisenhower’s attention was focused on the Middle East crisis, for he knew that the United States could play a more decisive role there than in Hungary.⁵⁵

Kádár, during his brief period as a member of Nagy’s coalition government, in a broadcast in Budapest on 1 November referred to ‘our glorious revolution’. On that same day he voted in favour of declaring Hungary’s neutrality, having already supported the re-establishment of a multi-party system.⁵⁶ He had come to be seen, however, by a part of the leadership in Moscow as the best hope for achieving some kind of reconciliation with the Hungarian population after the ‘counterrevolutionary’ uprising had been suppressed. It was an important consideration also that he had already been chosen in Hungary to be leader of the country’s Communist party. Notwithstanding Kádár’s support thus far for the policies of the Nagy government, there was hope in Moscow that he could be turned round. And indeed, on the evening of the same day on which he voted for neutrality, Kádár prepared to change sides. Along with a harder-line colleague, Ferenc Münnich, who was the favourite not only of Molotov and the more Stalinist members of the Soviet Presidium to become Hungary’s leader, but initially also of Khrushchev, Kádár allowed himself to be taken to a Soviet air base and flown to Moscow. Once there, he did not renounce all his previous views. He told a meeting of Soviet leaders (not including Khrushchev, who was touring Eastern Europe, gathering the political support of other Communist leaders for the impending surge of Soviet forces to put an end to Hungarian resistance) that continued Soviet support for the wrong people in the Hungarian leadership – in particular, Rákosi and Ger – had been ‘the source of many mistakes’. Rákosi simply had to say: ‘this is the opinion of the Soviet comrades’ and everyone in the Hungarian leadership would fall silent.⁵⁷ Soviet Ambassador Yury Andropov has sometimes been given credit for spotting early on that Kádár could be the salvation of the Communist cause. But though the two men were to establish a strong political and personal relationship, which lasted to the end of Andropov’s life, Andropov supported hard-liners in Budapest in 1956. In late April of that year, Andropov had called for greater Soviet support for Rákosi to prevent any more ‘major concessions to rightist and demagogic elements’.⁵⁸ He had met Kádár only once before their fateful encounter on the evening of 1 November at a Soviet air base to the south of Budapest, when he told him that the Soviet leadership wished to speak to him in Moscow.⁵⁹

As the Hungarian situation, in Soviet eyes, went from bad to worse in the second half of 1956, opinion within the Presidium of the CPSU became more volatile. Mikoyan, though, was alone in continuing to believe, after all his colleagues in the Soviet party leadership had given up any such hope, that a government led by Nagy could avoid the need for invasion. Even after the Soviet party Presidium had taken the decision to use massive force to put an end to the uprising in Hungary, Mikoyan, on his return to Moscow at the beginning of November, still expressed opposition to a military solution, urging that more time be granted to elaborate a political compromise. Khrushchev, however, told him that the decision had been taken and there would be no going back on it.⁶⁰ Mikoyan briefly contemplated resignation, but in fact remained in the Soviet top leadership team for another decade. Suslov, who had been in Budapest with him, fully agreed with the decision to invade.

Mikoyan observed the norms of collective responsibility and party unity in public, but the contemporary minutes of CPSU Presidium meetings, which became available only after the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, substantiate the fact that he consistently sought alternatives to the bloodshed which ensued.⁶¹ Even in 1956 this required political courage, albeit not the suicidal courage which would have attended opposition to Stalin on such an issue. Mikoyan attended Politburo meetings (the Presidium of the Central Committee being the Politburo under another name) over a period of forty years, from the time he became a candidate member in 1926 to his retirement from high politics in 1966. He had known personally every Soviet leader from Lenin to Brezhnev (who succeeded Khrushchev as party chief in 1964). His legendary status as the ultimate survivor was captured by a Soviet joke from the later Khrushchev years. The Presidium members emerged from a meeting, so the story went, into a torrential rainstorm. The only person with an umbrella was Mikoyan. He handed it to Khrushchev, saying: ‘You take it. I can dodge between the raindrops.’

The transcripts of the meetings which Kádár and Münnich had with the Soviet leadership on 2 and 3 November throw a somewhat different light on Kádár’s actions during those early November days from what was for long assumed. He did not travel to Moscow aware that he would be chosen as Hungarian leader or knowing that a new influx of Soviet troops was imminent. In fact, he spoke in Moscow of the inadvisability of an invasion and openly admitted that he was among those who had voted within the government for Hungary’s neutrality. He also told members of the Soviet party Presidium that the intelligentsia in Hungary supported Nagy. Kádár favoured renaming the Hungarian party (in fact it was changed from the Hungarian Workers’ Party to the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) and said it was important that a successor to Nagy not be a marionette. Moreover, Stalinists such as Rákosi and Ger should not be included in the Hungarian government.⁶² Thus, though Kádár was to be regarded, following his return to Budapest, as a quisling, even at the outset he was not, as he put it, a marionette.

Nevertheless, Kádár did return to Hungary as Moscow’s man, though there were serious doubts within the Soviet leadership about the wisdom of their choice. Kádár’s own rationalization of the betrayal of his Hungarian colleagues was that he favoured reform but not a return to capitalism or ‘bourgeois democracy’, and, in face of the opposite danger from his standpoint, he wished to prevent the return to the Hungarian leadership of the Rákosi group. Because the Hungarian uprising had destroyed the authority of the Communist party, Kádár was installed as head of the Soviet-engineered government (with the emphasis initially on the government, rather than the party). Once a majority of the Soviet leadership were persuaded that he stood the best chance of making a reimposition of Communist rule palatable to Hungarians, Kádár was given some leeway over the composition of the new government. Rákosi had apparently been led to believe by his allies in the Soviet Union that he and other Hungarian Stalinist refugees would play a leading role in the Soviet-imposed (for a second time) Hungarian regime, but Khrushchev and the dominant group in the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee had no intention of allowing that.⁶³ The new ruling group of Hungary was announced as a ‘Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government’. Kádár’s power was far from supreme, for it was his deputy, Münnich, who was to be in control of the armed forces and the security police.⁶⁴ Münnich, furthermore, had longstanding links with Soviet military intelligence.⁶⁵

Molotov was distinctly unhappy about the choice of Kádár. He voiced his fears at a Presidium meeting on 4 November, after Kádár and Münnich had returned to Budapest, saying that they had brought to power someone who would take Hungary down a Yugoslav road. He observed also that Kádár’s reference to the ‘Rákosi clique’ was dangerous. Even Shepilov, who was not an ally of Molotov, expressed his concern about this precedent, remarking: ‘Tomorrow it will be the “Ulbricht clique”.’⁶⁶ There were still doubts about Kádár in the Soviet leadership throughout the following year. These were shared by Khrushchev, who noted that he ‘made a number of trips to Hungary in 1957’,⁶⁷ and at that time:

My own hopes rested with Munnich. I thought I could deal with him better than with Kadar. Munnich was a cunning and battered old wolf who had been through the Hungarian revolution with Bela Kun. He’d lived in the Soviet Union for a long time, and I thought he was better prepared than anyone else to handle the problems which were still facing Hungary.⁶⁸

The Hungarian revolution was brutally suppressed by Soviet troops with Kádár’s acquiescence. The process took only four days. Although many people had been killed earlier in the clashes with Soviet tanks, most of the 2,500 Hungarian deaths occurred between 4 and 7 November 1956. Almost 20,000 were sufficiently seriously wounded to be hospitalized. On the Soviet side, over 700 were killed or ‘disappeared’ and 1,450 were wounded. Over the next few years more than 100,000 people were arrested on ‘counterrevolutionary’ charges and almost 26,000 imprisoned. At least 300 people, and possibly as many as 600, were executed.⁶⁹ Following the Soviet invasion, some 211,000 people fled from Hungary to the West, of whom around 45,000 in due course returned.⁷⁰ Among those executed were Nagy and the colonel who became minister of defence in Nagy’s short-lived government, Pál Maléter. Nagy had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, a reflection of the ambivalence of the Yugoslavs concerning the Soviet onslaught. On the one hand, Tito did not wish to see capitalism restored in Hungary. On the other, he did not want to see Soviet hegemony reinforced in Eastern Europe.

When Nagy, having been assured he would be unharmed, left the embassy on 23 November, he was arrested and taken to Romania. The Yugoslavs protested and argued that he should either live in freedom in Hungary or be allowed to emigrate to Yugoslavia. That was acceptable neither to Kádár nor Khrushchev. The Romanian Communist leader, Gheorghiu-Dej, was the earliest to indicate that Nagy’s lease on life would be a short one. He was firmly in favour of handing back Nagy to ‘the Hungarian comrades’ as soon as they had consolidated power, adding that he was sure that Nagy would ‘be hanged for his crime – not by the neck, but by the tongue’.⁷¹ The only point of any validity made by the ghoulish Dej was that Tito had a more indulgent attitude towards Nagy than towards the dissident views of his former close comrade-in-arms, Milovan Djilas, who by that time had been imprisoned in Yugoslavia. Nagy was kept under house arrest in Romania until 1958, when he was tried in Budapest, sentenced to death, and hanged (by the neck) on 16 June. Maléter and the writer Miklós Gimes were hanged that same day. It was widely assumed that the death sentences were carried out on Soviet insistence, but this was not so. Kádár himself supported these extreme measures. He resented the fact that Nagy had not resigned his prime ministership after the Soviet invasion, thus making his own task of convincing Hungarians that he was their legitimate head of government all the harder. He apparently believed that as long as Nagy was alive, he would be a dangerous rival, given that he had come to symbolize Hungarian patriotism and the desire for independence. In his trial, Nagy refused to ask for clemency, not acknowledging the competence of the court. When he was addressed as the ‘former’ prime minister, he insisted that he was ‘still’ the head of the legitimate government. In his last statement to the court, Nagy said: ‘If my life is needed to prove that not all Communists are enemies of the people, I gladly make the sacrifice. I know that there will one day be another Nagy trial, which will rehabilitate me. I also know I will have a reburial. I only fear that the funeral oration will be delivered by those who betrayed me.’⁷² The last recorded words of Maléter were: ‘Long live independent and socialist Hungary.’⁷³

The Lessons and Legacy of 1956

The Hungarian revolution was anti-Soviet but not anti-socialist. It became a national – indeed, nationalist – movement, but its leaders were members of the Communist party. There was, however, widespread opposition to the kind of Soviet-style Communist system which had been constructed under the leadership of Rákosi. Out of a Hungarian population of some ten million people, approximately 15,000 took up arms against the Soviet forces. Hundreds of thousands, though, had taken part in peaceful demonstrations, such as the reburial of Rajk. When the Soviet invasion came, the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian population supported those who, heavily outarmed and outnumbered, were resisting them.⁷⁴ Contrary to Soviet propaganda at the time, no Western ‘imperialists’ were in Hungary fomenting revolution–‘counterrevolution’ in Soviet parlance. Indeed, the rhetoric of the Eisenhower administration (especially of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) was shown to be just that. Talk of ‘rollback of Communism’ and ‘freeing the Captive Nations’ was evidently geared more to domestic American politics than to the real world of international relations.⁷⁵ Neither the United States nor, still less, any other Western power was going to go to war to end the de facto division of Europe which they had accepted at the end of World War Two.

The one partial exception to the lack of Western intervention in support of the Hungarian uprising was Radio Free Europe (RFE). Its broadcasts to the populations of Communist East Europe (which were usually jammed but not wholly successfully) varied from one country to another. Some of the Hungarian exiles who addressed their compatriots from the Radio Free Europe station in Munich were more inflammatory than, for example, their Polish counterparts.⁷⁶ This meant, though, that in October and November 1956, the Hungarian RFE broadcasts were more of a hindrance than a help to those in Hungary who were attempting to carve out greater independence while taking account of the bounds of possibility at that time in that place. The broadcasts made little or no distinction between Rákosi and Nagy, some of them calling for the overthrow of the latter at a time when it was almost certainly in the interest of Hungarians to rally behind him. The radio analysts also misjudged the balance of forces within Hungarian society. Whereas students, workers and intellectuals (including, not least, Communist intellectuals) were in the forefront of the resistance, the RFE broadcasters placed their hopes on the Catholic Church and the peasantry.⁷⁷ However, while there was fierce fighting on the streets of Budapest, life went on more or less normally in the countryside, and the Church was not the force it had been in the past or that it remained in Poland. The Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty had been condemned to life imprisonment in a show trial in January 1949. He was released from prison during the revolutionary turmoil of October 1956 and broadcast a stirring speech on 3 November, in which, however, he did not distinguish the government of Nagy from that of its Communist predecessors. Although his supposed incitement of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ was later blamed for provoking the Soviet invasion, it played no part in Kremlin thinking. The decision to intervene with overwhelming force had already been taken three days earlier.⁷⁸ *

The broadcasts of Radio Free Europe helped to foster the illusion among some of those who had taken up small arms against Soviet tanks that the might of the United States stood behind their insurgency, leading them to believe that they would receive American military assistance (even though RFE did not explicitly say this). One result of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution was to make foreign broadcasters, and Radio Free Europe (which was paid for by the American taxpayer) specifically, more careful about raising unwarranted hopes. Over many subsequent years that radio station and others – including, not least, the BBC – were to play important roles as purveyors of accurate information concerning events in Eastern Europe and developments in the outside world. After 1956, however, Radio Free Europe endeavoured not to encourage unrealistic expectations and avoided anything remotely resembling a call to arms.

One of the lessons which reformers in Eastern Europe drew from the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution was the importance of pledging loyalty to the Warsaw Pact. Thus, Czech reformist Communists in 1968 believed that the big mistake of Nagy and his colleagues had been to declare neutrality and the intention, accordingly, of withdrawing from the military alliance with the Soviet Union. Reasonable though the supposition was that this had been the last straw for the Soviet leadership in 1956, the stated intention of remaining within the Warsaw Pact was not, as it turned out, enough to save Czechoslovakia from its own Soviet military intervention twelve years later. The ‘Prague Spring’ will be discussed in Chapter 19, but a more general point is that all such Soviet crackdowns – whether in Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968–had the immediate effect of strengthening hard-line forces throughout Communist Europe, including Russia.

In October 1956 the neo-Stalinist or, at best, conservative Communist leaders of East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Albania (Walter Ulbricht, Todor Zhivkov, Antonín Novotný, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Enver Hoxha) all supported, in private as well as in public, the Soviet intervention in Hungary. In Poland, Gomuka was privately opposed to the Soviet invasion (in contrast with the attitude he took to Czechoslovakia in 1968), but he did not voice any public criticism of the Soviet actions in Budapest. Although there were great historical and cultural differences among all of these countries, systemic similarities generally prevailed. That is to say, the essential features of the Communist system remained firmly in place, and the way these internal structures operated had much in common from one country to another. That changed in 1968 with the culmination of the reform movement within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but reverted back after the ‘Prague Spring’ was forcibly ended. In terms of its immediate goals, the Soviet military intervention in Hungary was a success. Soviet hegemony within the bloc was maintained and a surface stability was secured. That situation lasted in Eastern Europe, albeit with several serious interruptions, for more than a generation. Invading a ‘socialist’ ally had, however, costs as well as benefits for the Kremlin. Coming on top of Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Party Congress, the invasion of Hungary looked to many outside observers like a return to Stalinism and led to a massive loss of membership by Western Communist parties. The Scottish nationalist poet Hugh McDiarmid was very much the idiosyncratic exception to the rule in choosing the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising as his moment to rejoin the Communist Party of Great Britain. This was especially ironic since Hungary, as well as Poland, had just shown what a potent threat to Communism a strong sense of national identity could be.

In Hungary itself the renamed ruling party had to be rebuilt almost from scratch and more than 8,000 officers were forced to leave the Hungarian armed forces at the end of 1956 and in 1957.⁸⁰ The Soviet Union lost support not only in Western Europe and North America, where in most countries that support was not high to begin with, but also in Asia. Later, Soviet relations with Third World countries improved, but at the time some of their erstwhile friends regarded the invasion of Hungary as at least as much an act of imperialist aggression as the Anglo-French attack on Egypt.⁸¹ Within Eastern Europe resistance developed from the end of the 1950s onwards in both Albania and Romania to Soviet aims of greater integration under Russian leadership. However, there was no trace of revisionism in either country. They were to become (Romania later than Albania) the two most oppressive Communist states in Eastern Europe. Proceeding with their peculiar forms of nationalist Communism, the Albanians formed an alliance with China, while the Romanian Communists maintained a somewhat uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union.

The Bulgarians and (until 1968) the Czechs were the most obedient members of the Soviet bloc. The development hardest to predict from the vantage point of October – November 1956 was the subsequent political course of Poland and Hungary. Gomuka was a strong personality, anti-Stalinist inasmuch as he had been a victim of Stalinism, but far from a liberal. He was a firm believer in the dominant role of the Communist party and in a centrally planned economic system. Before the end of the 1950s, the hopes that had been placed in him by many Poles in 1956 had largely vanished.⁸² The radical reform they expected had not materialized, nor did it emerge in the 1960s, although, partly as a result of the authority of the Catholic Church, the Communists were far less dominant within Polish society than they were in most of the countries of Eastern Europe.

In Hungary, the last years of the 1950s were a time of severe repression. The immediate aftermath of the suppression of the 1956 revolution was just as bad as most Hungarians feared it would be. Few leaders, at the beginning of their period of office, could have been more despised by a majority of their fellow countrymen than János Kádár. But whereas Gomuka returned to office on the crest of high expectations, and disappointed them, Kádár began, as head of a Soviet-imposed government, with dismally low expectations and confounded them many times over. Until 1958 he was both prime minister and party first secretary, but he ceded the premiership to Münnich in January of that year.⁸³ In the meantime, the normal order of precedence in a Communist system had been restored. It became clear in the course of 1957 that the party leadership was the top job. From the early 1960s onwards, a cautious relaxation got under way in Hungary. By the mid-1960s, serious economic reform was being discussed, and an actual economic reform – the New Economic Mechanism (NEM)–was implemented from 1968. Living standards improved substantially, and there was a gradual liberalization of cultural life. Kádár wielded great power, but showed no interest in the trappings of power. He lived modestly, and there was no hint of a personality cult. Yet it is remarkable that shortly after his death on 6 July 1989, three-quarters of Hungarians polled in a survey agreed with the statement that ‘with his passing Hungarian political life has lost one of its greatest figures’.⁸⁴ In late 1999, in a vote for the greatest Hungarians of the millennium, Kádár occupied third place. He was the only one of the three to have lived in the twentieth century, and so by implication was the greatest Hungarian of his epoch.⁸⁵ There is no necessity to agree with such assessments, but how such a turnaround in perceptions occurred – how such a gloomy and guilt-ridden man came to be admired as a consummate politician – is a topic to which I return in Chapter 26.