Today is the fiftieth birthday of the Hungarian revolution. And as thousands of anti-government protestors marched in Budapest, police fired rubber bullets on them.
In 1956 Hungarians were hopelessly outnumbered when they revolted against Soviet rule. For twelve days they celebrated, burning communist books, dragging Stalin’s bronze body parts through the streets, forming an ad hoc skeletal government, thinking they had succeeded, and that surely help was on the way from western cold war warriors.
Since the end of WWII, the Soviets had looted Hungary brutally. The uprising came in a year of pressure for more freedom and a better life, one without food shortages.
On 22 October 1956, the students at Budapest’s Technical University issued a manifesto of Sixteen Points… in which they demanded increased freedoms and substantial changes in the government. They also organized a protest march to the Parliament for the following day.
On 23 October, a Tuesday, the peaceful march of several hundred thousand people ended in a blood bath. When the crowd reached the National Radio Building, where the students had gathered to read their newly drafted manifesto, the AVH began to fire [Kalishnikov bullets] into the crowd. Over one hundred people were killed, and many more were injured.
The massacre on 23 October marked the beginning of a veritable civil war. Hungarian citizens were enraged. Within a very short time they somehow obtained weapons and ammunition – and the battles between the “revolutionaries” and the AVH raged. The fighting spread to other parts of Budapest, and then to the countryside. Gero [general secretary of the communist party], calling the freedom fighters a “mob” in a speech, brought in the Hungarian People’s Army. When Hungarian General Pal Maleter and others realized the nature of the uprising, they refused to act and, instead, joined the revolutionaries.
A family friend in London told me his story:
He had inherited the title of “count,” and lived with his divorced mother. When the Soviets took over Hungary he was still a teenager. They arrested him as a “class enemy,” and by 1956 he had been in prison some ten years. Prisons were opened during the uprising and he escaped. He and his mother and younger half-brother walked all the way to Germany, where they found friends who helped them settle in Europe.
Were the Hungarians misled into thinking the United States would come to their aid? Radio Free Europe broadcast encouragement, tactical advice, and implications of aid if the Hungarians established a central military command. President Eisenhower said “I feel with the Hungarian people.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had said (before 1953) “To all those suffering under Communist slavery, to the timid and intimidated peoples of the world, let us say this: you can count upon us.”
No country interfered when Soviet tanks moved in to crush the uprising. Ike and Dulles were busy with the Suez Canal crisis.
It was bloody. Among the dead were 2,500 revolutionaries and more than 700 Soviet soldiers. Of the 26,000 Hungarians arrested, 1,200 were executed.
You would think we’d have learned something. While America is not obliged to save all the oppressed peoples in the world, it should deal with them honestly. Yet, we reneged on promises to help the Cubans and the Kurds. Genocide in Africa continued as we intervened in Iraq.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the socialist-led government of Hungary faces a new generation. In September protesters began demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Gyurcsany. As was discovered via a recording, he admitted he lied “morning and evening” about the dismal economy. Violence begot violence from the Hungarian police. Teargas. Water cannon. Rubber bullets. No serious injuries — yet.
And you know what? Without those clashes, memories of the Hungarian Revolution would barely have made the back page, next to the obituaries.
