Created in December 1922 and dissolved in December 1991, the Soviet Union – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – was a federation of fifteen republics ruled centrally from Moscow by the Marxist–Leninist Communist Party.* After WWII, a number of East European countries, pleased to be liberated from the Nazis by the Soviet Army, formed their own Marxist– Leninist Communist parties, but they soon fell into the clutches of Stalinist-controlled bodies and became subservient to Moscow. The West called these nations the ‘satellite’ countries.† Failure by their governments to kowtow to the wishes of Moscow could be costly, as several of them discovered over the years.

It is difficult, after the passage of over half a century, to comprehend how sovereign nations in Eastern Europe allowed themselves to be controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Yet the satellite countries, and Communist regimes that governed them, were utterly subservient to the Politburo. Their leaders were appointed on the recommendation of the Politburo. Although the parliaments of the satellite countries did not, legally, have to accept these ‘recommendations’, the consequences of not accepting them could be disastrous.

In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia there were individual politicians, intellectuals, workers’ leaders, teachers and students who did kick against the pricks. These dissidents’ cause was boosted when they learned that parts of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech had proposed some relaxation of Moscow’s dogmatic central control. They could now think out loud and even discuss the possibility of alternative policies, provided they were intended to support and further the aims of Communism.

Polish Communists took the lead in this refreshing development, pressing for the reinstatement of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a fervent party member who, in 1948, had opposed the introduction of collectivised farming and strict adherence to other policies laid down by the party’s Central Committee in Moscow. He was removed from his position of First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party and placed under house arrest.

The movement to reinstate Gomulka led to a revolt by workers at the Poznan Stalin Works – a locomotive manufacturing plant – on 23 June 1956 in which at least seventy-three people died after the confused and inept intervention of the Poznan civil and military authorities. This revolt prompted further development of Polish national Communism with the dismissal of some Stalinist elements in the government, the mushrooming of workers’ councils, the reassessment of the Polish government’s relationship with Moscow and finally, in August, the reinstatement of Gomulka.

These developments were watched closely in Hungary, particularly by members of the Petöfi Circle who, in a similar manner, sought to assert their sovereignty. The circle supported the establishment of a new Communist government, independent of Moscow, under Imre Nagy.‡

The leadership in Moscow were ambivalent towards Nagy. There was no doubt about his Communist credentials, for he had spent fourteen years (1930–44) in Moscow, during which time he was involved with agricultural research and also served as an NKVD informant. He returned to Hungary in 1944 and became Minister of Agriculture. Many Soviet officials considered him a relatively harmless lightweight, while others expressed concern over his anti-collectivisation – and therefore anti-Soviet – stance on agriculture.

Ivan Serov closely monitored events in Hungary with the benefit of a continuous stream of intelligence from the KGB’s agents. The (mostly overt) intelligence provided by Ambassador Yuri Andropov and his team was supplemented by reports from undercover agents in Budapest and across the country about the secret plans of anti-Soviet groups and individuals.

Serov had already made up his mind about Nagy. In July 1956 – a month after the Poznan revolt in Poland and three months before the Hungarian Revolution – he wrote that ‘the young people of the Petöfi Circle say they are also communists but they do not want to copy Russian methods’. They wished – he wrote – to be led by Imre Nagy, just as the Hungarians were led by Lajos Kossuth against the Austrians and Russians in 1848.§ Serov’s knowledge and understanding of what motivated Nagy’s supporters belied the claims by many in Moscow that Serov was an uneducated oaf.

The Hungarian leader, Mátyás Rákosi, was a staunch Stalinist; a man after Serov’s own heart. In the years 1948–56 he had purged about 350,000 Hungarian officials and intellectuals. On 30 May 1949 he ordered the arrest of Foreign Minister Lászlo Rajk, whom he saw as a threat to his own leadership: falsely accusing him of supporting the Yugoslavian leader, Marshal Tito. Rajk was found guilty and executed. Rákosi later admitted he had been wrong.

In fact, Rákosi had been so zealous that, in June 1953, Moscow reprimanded him for excessive persecution and for grossly increasing the size of the Hungarian Army. He was then forced by Moscow to share government leadership with the liberal Communist Imre Nagy, who was appointed Prime Minister.

But Nagy went too far in resisting land reform, even encouraging farmers to leave the collective farms. He was strongly censured in April 1955 and when he refused to recant he was dismissed as Prime Minister, leaving Rákosi back in sole charge. This made Nagy something of a hero in a nation that felt an historic antipathy to Russia. Rákosi, who referred to himself as Stalin’s best Hungarian disciple, was extremely unpopular.

Khrushchev and senior members of the Politburo made the mistake of thinking they could control events in Hungary by manoeuvring and manipulating senior politicians, as exemplified by the dismissal of Nagy. The Soviets did not realise, until it was too late, that politicians appointed from Moscow were not the force behind the forthcoming counter-revolution. It came from the grass roots.

By early 1956, peaceful demonstrations against Rákosi increased in frequency and attracted ever-larger crowds. Lászlo Rajk, who had been executed under Rákosi in 1949, was rehabilitated on 28 March 1956. This had profound consequences for Rákosi, undermining his authority, and telegraphing in the rubric of Soviet rehabilitations and condemnations that he was out of favour.

Telegrams from Soviet Ambassador Andropov and from Soviet Embassy Third Secretary Vladimir Kryuchkov (both of them KGB officers) multiplied as Rákosi’s ability to govern waned. Andropov – himself a hard-liner – recommended that Rákosi should be replaced by the strict disciplinarian Ernö Gerö, who had been an active NKVD agent during the twenty-odd years he spent in the Soviet Union between the two world wars.

Gerö took office as First Secretary of the Hungarian Workers’ Party (MDP) on 18 July. András Hegedüs was appointed Prime Minister. Rákosi was exiled to the Soviet Union and never returned to Hungary.

Ernö Gerö’s appointment was ill-conceived, as the Kremlin readily admitted some weeks later. Either János Kádár or Imre Nagy, both of whom attracted some measure of support from the Hungarian populace, would have made better candidates, if only because their appointment would have pacified the demonstrators and possibly prevented revolution.

After Gerö’s appointment, Serov’s undercover agents reported hearing many conversations among teachers, intellectuals and underground organisations, all concluding that Gerö would not last long as leader. Moscow would then have no other hard-liner to lead Hungary on their behalf.

On 6 October a crowd of more than 100,000 attended a service for the reburial of Rajk’s body. This was the watershed for the events of the following four weeks.

Nagy’s qualities and beliefs were similar to Rajk’s, so it was inevitable that Rajk’s rehabilitation and reburial would herald Nagy’s readmission to the MDP and, consequently, his ability to participate in high-level political power. He was formally reinstated in the MDP on 13 October.

The Petöfi Circle met virtually every day during the first three weeks of October, debating economic and political solutions to Hungary’s many problems. This culminated in a peaceful demonstration by 10,000 students on 23 October demanding, among other things, the dismissal of Gerö, the return of Imre Nagy, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, and true political independence from Moscow.

That evening, Gerö made a radio speech condemning the demonstration and stressing Hungarian friendship with the Soviet Union: sentiments that could only serve to enrage the demonstrating students.

Observing the growing unrest after his speech, Gerö consulted senior members of the MDP and then made a telephone call to the Soviet military attaché in Budapest asking for Soviet military assistance to break up any future demonstrations. The military attaché spoke to Ambassador Andropov who asked the leader of the Soviet Army’s Special Corps in Hungary, Pyotr Laschenko, to intervene. Laschenko said he could only do so on orders from the Soviet Politburo. The Politburo insisted it could not authorise intervention without a formal request from the Hungarian leadership. Andropov phoned Khrushchev and Khrushchev phoned Gerö asking him to submit a written request. Gerö replied there was no time for such bureaucratic niceties.

This merry-go-round resulted in the Politburo convening late on the evening of 23 October. They authorised Minister of Defence Marshal Zhukov to mobilise five divisions of the Soviet Army. Khrushchev immediately dispatched First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and Politburo member Mikhail Suslov to Budapest.

Ivan Serov also went to Budapest, probably at his own insistence. It was not in his nature simply to analyse the intelligence he received and send reports and recommendations to the Kremlin: he wanted to have a stronger, and active, influence over events. He was appalled by evidence that certain members of the Politburo wanted to take a soft line on Hungary and was determined to enshrine a policy of painful repercussions for everyone who opposed, or even questioned, the Soviet Communist Party’s line.

An all-night meeting of the Central Committee of the MDP led to an early morning (24 October) announcement that Imre Nagy was to replace András Hegedüs as Prime Minister, but that Gerö would remain First Secretary of the MDP.

There was a peaceful demonstration by 25,000 Hungarians outside the parliament building on the morning of 25 October. They were calling for Gerö’s resignation.

At about eleven o’clock members of the ÁVH (Hungarian State Security: the secret police agency) opened fire on the demonstrators. The shooting continued for close to twenty minutes and resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 demonstrators. That day became known as ‘Bloody Thursday’.

Mikoyan and Suslov immediately castigated Gerö for the inflammatory speech he had made on the evening of 23 October and instructed him to resign. János Kádár replaced him as First Secretary of the MDP.

The same day, Nagy promised to disband the hated ÁVH and replace it with a regular civilian police force. Two days later he started to restructure the government. Within a week he had formed a new coalition, including members of the Smallholders’ Party, the National Peasant Party and the Social Democratic Party, as well as the Communist Party.

In the days following Bloody Thursday, bands of Hungarian insurgents carried out violent acts against Communist targets and particularly against members of the ÁVH. It was ÁVH members, after all, who had killed the peaceful demonstrators. In one particularly nasty instance, they hanged some members of the ÁVH outside the Communist Party committee building in Budapest. There were reports of lynchings elsewhere in Budapest and throughout Hungary, while insurgents were claimed to have stormed prisons, releasing scores of inmates.

Andropov and other Soviet Embassy staff and their families witnessed some of the hangings. Andropov’s wife was physically ill and required hospital treatment to deal with the trauma. This had a profound influence on Andropov and Third Secretary Vladimir Kryuchkov, both of whom adopted a lifelong policy of supporting immediate and decisive action against any signs of insurrection in Soviet and satellite countries.

A ceasefire ordered by Nagy on 28 October was only partially successful. Its purpose was not just to stem the violence; Nagy saw it as an essential precursor to opening negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.

Nagy’s tolerant disposition led to confusion. He was opening doors for non-Communist political and religious organisations while at the same time trying to develop an independent (non-Soviet) Communist government. New or resurrected political organisations each had their own, often conflicting, agendas which they publicised on radio and in print. Some of these – particularly the radio broadcasts – criticised Nagy and Kádár for their links to Communism.

Sittings of Nagy’s new all-party government were chaotic. The chamber was packed with delegates all clamouring for attention, while members of the public milled around in hallways. In Moscow, the Politburo decided it would be better to accept the creation of Nagy’s unity government than to risk a bloodbath and the total alienation of the Hungarian people. On 30 October they agreed to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, but that decision was reversed the next day when Khrushchev argued, in effect, that Hungary would be lost to the West if Soviet troops did not move in to restore order. Mikoyan, Marshal Zhukov and others continued to support troop withdrawal, but they were outvoted.

At this time, Britain and France were heavily engaged in the Suez Canal crisis, which seriously reduced the possibility of Western military intervention in Hungary.

Serov had set his own agenda. Throughout the week since his arrival in Budapest he had sent graphic descriptions of the fast-moving scene to Khrushchev. These cables were not designed to tell Khrushchev what he wanted to hear; nor were they replicating the content of Ambassador Andropov’s diplomatic communications. They were slanted to highlight evidence supporting the need to come down hard on the perpetrators of acts of violence and subversion against the ‘legitimate’ rule of the Communist government; that is, the government installed by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee.

On 27 October, for example, Serov reported that proclamations were appearing around Budapest declaring Imre Nagy a traitor. Hungarian activists were also, he claimed, proposing Béla Kováks (a non-Communist and former general secretary of the Independent Smallholders’ Party) as Prime Minister.

On 29 October he reported:

The situation in several cities can be characterised in the following way: the population has been mobilised against the Communists. In several regions the armed people search in the apartments of Communists and shoot them. In the factory town of Csepel (near Budapest) there were eighteen Communists killed. The bandits check the buses travelling between cities; prominent Communists are pulled out and shot.||

These telegrams gave Khrushchev a clear warning that even the acceptance of the Nagy government – as the only alternative to Soviet invasion – was not going to work.

Soon after Moscow’s initial decision on 30 October to withdraw Soviet troops, Nagy received reports that although the troops were withdrawing from Budapest, more were crossing the borders from other Soviet satellite countries into Hungary and massing beyond the capital.

Nagy confronted Ambassador Andropov, who at first tried to deny it and then made excuses about the extra troops being required to ensure a safe withdrawal in the light of possible attacks by insurgents.

The influx of troops infuriated Nagy and he was moved to a fateful decision. On 1 November he withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and declared it a neutral country. He sought help from the United Nations by appealing to the Security Council. The majority of the council voted to debate the Hungarian crisis, but the Soviet Union, one of the five permanent members of the council empowered with a right of veto, opposed the resolution. Hungary was on its own.

The Politburo’s decision on 31 October to send troops into Hungary to restore order was kept secret from Nagy. As far as he was aware, the Soviet troops would be withdrawn in accordance with an agreement to be negotiated by a mixed commission led on the Hungarian side by Pál Maléter.

However, also on 1 November – the same day that Nagy withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and declared it neutral – a Politburo inner circle group secretly flew János Kádár to Moscow with a view to grooming him for the leadership of a new, pro-Soviet post-invasion government. Kádár was accompanied by Ferenc Münnich, the Minister for Internal Affairs in Nagy’s short-lived administration.

Nagy wanted Poland to host the mixed commission negotiations between Hungary and the Soviet Union over the withdrawal of Soviet troops. That, however, would have taken control of the situation away from Serov, who used all of his skills to persuade Nagy that it would be quicker and easier to arrange for the negotiations to take place at the Soviet Military Command at Tököl on Csepel Island, at the southern edge of Budapest. This was vital to the overall outcome of the cunning deception, and to Serov’s specific role in it.

Early negotiations seemed to have made good progress and the mixed commission agreed to reconvene at Tököl at 10 p.m. on 3 November.

Nagy was aware of the continuing movement of Soviet troops just outside the Hungarian borders but could only rely on the result of the negotiations to prevent an invasion and to have existing troops in Hungary removed. It would have been futile to disrupt the negotiations and make separate attempts to remove the troops by force.

At midnight on 3 November Serov himself entered the room where Pál Maléter’s Hungarian delegation were in deep negotiation with the three generals of the Soviet delegation. He told the surprised group – the Soviet generals had been under the impression that the negotiations were genuine all along – that there would be no agreement concerning the withdrawal of troops. The Soviet troops already in Hungary would be reinforced by as many additional troops as were required to restore law and order, or obedience, in Hungary.

Five hours later, Ferenc Münnich announced the establishment of a new Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, to be led by Kádár. It would initially be based in Szolnok, about fifty-five miles (ninety kilometres) south-east of Budapest.

Nagy knew, then, that he had been betrayed and, together with a dozen or more of his closest supporters and their families, sought refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest.

In the early hours of 4 November twelve divisions of Soviet tanks and troops crossed the borders into Hungary to join forces with the five divisions already there and set about destroying all opposition to Soviet control.

The Hungarian Army had been under orders from Nagy not to fight the Soviet Army during the so-called negotiations. They were now permitted to fight. The overpowering Soviet force took eight days – five days longer than they expected – to overcome Hungarian resistance. The Hungarians suffered some 2,500 dead with a further 20,000 wounded. The Soviet Army emerged with fewer casualties: 670 dead and 1,500 injured.

Support for Nagy and condemnation of Soviet actions by the Western powers was understated, even muted.

Mass arrests and denunciations continued for several months under Serov’s local direction. This caused some consternation in Moscow and, at one point, the Ministry of Internal Affairs complained to Khrushchev that the KGB were going too far with their policy of arresting on vague charges and little evidence. Serov responded to Khrushchev:

He went on to say:

Khrushchev and his Politburo colleagues were unhappy about Yugoslavia giving asylum to Nagy and his followers. In practice, it put President Tito of Yugoslavia in a difficult position: he did not wish to be seen yielding to pressure from Moscow but neither did he wish to be seen supporting an ‘enemy’ of the Soviet Union.

As living conditions in the Yugoslav Embassy for the thirty or so people in the Nagy group (supporters and their families) were becoming unbearable, it was agreed that they would move out to some Yugoslav diplomatic apartments on 22 November. The bus to be used for the move had a Russian driver. When the party boarded the bus a Yugoslav diplomat and the Yugoslav military attaché joined them to ensure that the passengers arrived safely at their new homes. But an uninvited Soviet official also boarded. The driver stopped the bus after it rounded the first corner and the Soviet official demanded that the diplomat and the military attaché leave it. The bus was then driven to the KGB compound in Mátyásföld and then on to the Romanian Embassy where the party were granted ‘asylum’.

The next day, they were flown to Romania where they lived in secluded, guarded accommodation for nearly six months. Throughout Nagy’s asylum in both the Yugoslav Embassy and in Romania, he was asked on numerous occasions to resign as Prime Minister and to declare that he accepted the Kádár government as legitimate. He always refused.

On 14 April 1957 Nagy was arrested and sent back to Budapest to stand trial. The question of his trial and execution (which was by now a foregone conclusion) became a political hot potato in a series of difficult situations that arose between the Soviet Union, Poland and Yugoslavia.

Nagy was eventually executed by hanging on 16 June 1958 after a secret trial.

Whatever one’s views about Serov’s devotion to the legacy of Stalin and Stalinism it is difficult to argue against the quality of his work and his achievements in Hungary in October and November 1956. In a practical sense he, probably more than anyone else, was responsible for bringing Hungary safely back into the fold after Imre Nagy had all but freed it from Soviet domination.

Serov did it, first of all, by getting himself into the centre of the action in Budapest. Then he sent carefully and expertly drafted telegrams back to Moscow; telegrams that persuaded Khrushchev that the only solution to the crisis was to send in large numbers of tanks and troops to retake Hungary by force. Having established that position, he deceived Nagy into believing that he could negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Throughout his time in Budapest he demanded tough action by his KGB officers against any and all people who might be insurgents.

One consequence of Serov’s time in Hungary was his meeting and becoming friends with two kindred spirits at the Soviet Embassy in Budapest: Ambassador Yuri Andropov and Third Secretary Vladimir Kryuchkov, both of whom would eventually become, in turn, the chairman of the KGB. Andropov went on to become the leader of the Soviet Union. In June 1989 Kryuchkov did everything in his power to prevent the rehabilitation of Imre Nagy by sending a dossier of incriminating KGB documents, both genuine and bogus, to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.††

Kryuchkov was a leading member of the August 1991 coup that temporarily ousted Gorbachev from power, leading to Boris Yeltsin’s dramatic if not always coherent defence of democracy, and the eventual dissolution of the USSR itself.

Before Serov returned from Budapest to Moscow, he relived his glory days with SMERSH in Poland and East Germany at the end of WWII: he set about organising a new internal security organisation for Hungary and left recommendations for the reorganisation of the police force.

* The fifteen republics were: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. From the international perspective, there were doubts as to whether the last three (the Baltic States) were legally part of the Soviet Union.

† The Communist-ruled satellite countries were: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania and East Germany.

‡ The Petöfi Circle was an organisation of mostly young intellectuals led by István Lakatos, a non-party member and poet. It was established in 1954 by members of the Hungarian National Museum.

§ See Johanna Granville, ‘Chapter 1’, The First Domino (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2004) p. 4.

See Johanna Granville, ‘Chapter 6’, The First Domino (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2004) p. 175.

|| See Johanna Granville, ‘Chapter 3’, The First Domino (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2004) p. 88.

** See Johanna Granville, ‘Chapter 5’, The First Domino (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2004) p. 151.

†† On Friday 16 June 1989, several hundred thousand Hungarians gathered in Heroes’ Square in Budapest to witness the ceremonial reburial of Nagy and several other leaders of the 1956 revolt who had been tried and executed in 1958.