The Hungarian Revolution 1956 - Part 1

October 2006 is the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian 1956 uprising. Here we reproduce an article originally written for the 30th anniversary of that great revolt, by Dave Hughes a founder member of Workers Power who died in 1991.

IN OCTOBER and November of 1956 the workers and students of Hungary took up arms against two successive waves of Soviet military intervention. They toppled a hated Stalinist government. They created workers' and revolutionary councils that became the real power in every factory and mine and most localities. Only after at least 20,000 had been killed and after the aerial bombardment of its major proletarian strongholds was the Hungarian revolution eventually drowned in blood.

The Hungarian uprising of 1956 contained the potential for the revolutionary destruct ion of Stalinism both within Hungary and beyond its borders. It opened the prospect of destroying the political rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy and replacing it with the direct political rule of the revolutionary proletariat.

Despite the ceaseless torrent of lies and slanders poured forth by international Stalinism the Hungarian workers were neither agents of the restoration of capitalism nor the dupes of such agents. They were in their overwhelming majority determined to achieve two things. They wished to defend the socialised and planned economy against the restora­tion of the capitalists and landlords, and they were determined to destroy the filthy tyranny that denied the proletariat the slightest democracy, subjecting it to a caste of highly privileged and upstart bureaucrats.

The tragedy of the Hungarian revolution was that the workers were unable to create in the time available - a leadership and a programme of action that could establish a government and the armed forces necessary to defend Hungary's political revolution and to extend it to the rest of Eastern Europe and the USSR. That the potential for this existed is clear from every serious study or eyewitness account of the events of 1956.

The falsity of the Stalinists' slanders breaks out of the vast majority of workers' statements in this period:

"Soviet soldiers! We the workers from the railroad factory in Gyor inform you that in our democratic state workers are the guardians of the socialist achievements. That means with all their might, they are speaking out against returning factories and banks to the capitalists. At the same time we are against any Rakosite - Stalinist restoration." (Quoted in M.J. Lasky (ed) The Hungarian Revolution p 211)

The death of Stalin in March 1953 served to destabilise the whole political system he had ruled over in the USSR and in the 'People's Democracies of Eastern Europe. In the highest ranks of the Kremlin there was a murderous struggle for power which, although eventually won by Khruschev, extended over several years. Berea, Khruschev, Malenkov and their rival cliques too their battle for power onto the terrain of international politics.

As part of this factional struggle Khruschev was obliged to denounce 'the crimes of Stalin'. In fact he carefully restricted himself to revealing the dictators' crimes against the bureaucracy itself. The political opponents of Stalin against whom the mass terror was unleashed - were not rehabilitated. In a laughable standing on its head of the personality cult, the slaughter and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands was passed of as the result of the evil genius or paranoia of one man. Promises were made to relax the police terror regime, to open the labour camps and improve living standards.

A ferment of revolt seethed through the whole Stalinist system. In the slave labour mines of Vorkuta there was a strike in the summer of 1953. In June 1951 strikes spread from East Berlin to all the major industrial centres of East Germany. The general strike was put down by Soviet troops. There were major strikes in Pilzen in Czechoslovakia and at the giant Matyas Rakosi iron and steel plant in Csepel - the industrial centre of Budapest.

Stalin's death, the gang warfare in the Kremlin and proletarian resistance provoked a political crisis in the ranks of Hungarian Stalinism. Since 1948 the 'Hungarian Stalin' - Matyas Rakosi - had set course to industrialise Hungary at break-neck speed along the lines pioneered by the USSR in the 1930s. Workers living standards were driven down. The peasantry were driven at gunpoint into collective farms. Political repression was probably more severe then anywhere else in Eastern Europe with the apparatus of repression being in the hands of an extremely privileged uniformed security force - the AVH. Rankers in the AVH received at least three times the average industrial wage; officers received twelve times that wage. In addition the newly established Hungarian People's Democracy was obliged to pay massive reparations to the USSR for the war that the Horthy regime had waged alongside Hitler. In 1948 25.4% of Hungarian national expenditure went on reparations. That figure dropped to 10% in 1949.

Little wonder then that the Rakosi regime was amongst the most hated by its own people in Eastern Europe. Fully aware of this and fearful of the consequences, the Kremlin and Malenkov in particular - moved to improve the image of the regime in 1953.

Rakosi had to stay as Party Secretary, but there was to be a new Prime Minister in the person of Imre Nagy who was given the green light to inaugurate a 'New Course' in Hungary.

 

NAGY'S NEW COURSE

Given his role in 1956 and his popularity with large sections of workers and with oppositional intellectuals in the party it is necessary to characterise Nagy's politics. By training Nagy was an old Stalinist. He had spent 15 years of his life as a Comintern functionary in the USSR. On Stalin's death he delivered the standard eulogy to Stalin as 'the great leader of humanity'.

However within the spectrum of Stalinist politics Nagy was also decidedly a Rightist. His 'New Course' was aimed at achieving a slower pace of transition along the lines of Russia's New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920's. He attacked the politics of the Rakosi era for having more in common with the programme of the Left Opposition than with the actions of Stalin during the NEP. He was an ardent devotee of the Popular Front alliance that the Hungarian CP had maintained with peasant, social democratic and outright reactionary parties from 1944 to 1948. To that end he attempted to breathe life into the corpse of the still existent Peoples Patriotic front, attempting to turn it into a mass organisation. Nagy talked openly of Hungary as having its own national road to socialism and mused in 1955 on:

“the possibility of neutralizing Hungary on the Austrian pattern.”

Nagy stands in the tradition of Hungarian and Rightist strands within Stalinism. More recently the model for his policy was Tito. However during his time in power writers and journalists were less restricted by censorship, real wages were increased, peasants were freed to leave collective farms and the grossest trappings of Rakosi's dictatorship were scrapped.

If this alone was not sufficient to give Nagy a degree of popularity his ousting from power by a resurgent Rakosi in January 1955, and his subsequent expulsion from the Central Committee and Party, served to provide him with the mantle of the courageous foe of the workers' and intellectuals' of number one enemy Matyas Rakosi. This explains why throughout 1955 and 1956 most oppositional currents in Hungary looked initially to Imre Nagy for political leadership.

Despite his best intentions Rakosi found that he was not able to turn the clock back to the political norms of his old regime. In May J 955 Khruschev travelled to Yugoslavia to embrace and rehabilitate Tito. This immediately opened once again the cases of those thousand who had perished as the 'Tito-ite Fascists' in the various 'Peoples Democracies'.

In Hungary it reopened the case of Lazlo Rajk, a prominent party leader who was shot after 'confessing' that he was an imperialist agent. The grisly story behind this was that Rajk had bravely resisted repeated torture; refusing to confess, until none other than Janos Kadar (now Thatcher's favourite 'communist') went to see him and pleaded with him to confess to save hundreds of other lives and offered him a deal - secret exile in the USSR. The confession having been made the Stalinist gangsters kept their word as only they know how to!

In February 1956 however the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) heard the most detailed denunciations of Stalin that Khruschev had delivered. Of necessity this fortified all opponents of the various 'little Stalins' who had ruled in Eastern Europe. Opposition to Rakosi continued within the lower ranks of the Party. In 1956 members of the Communist Party's Youth organisation (DISZ) reactivated a discussion circle established in 1954 under the name of the Hungarian national democratic poet of 1840 - Petofi.

The leaders of the Petofi circle included pre-war and war time CP members as well as young party intellectuals such a Balazs Nagy who was deputy secretary of its provisional bureau. (In exile Balazs Nagy was later to become better know in Trotskyist circles as Michel Varga.)

In June 1956 the Petofi circle held a series of meetings attended by thousands which heard Julia Rajk demand the full and wholehearted. rehabilitation of her husband and which endorsed a programme primarily demanding the freedom of the Press and the return to power or Nagy. Rakosi ordered the Petofi circle to be closed and seems to have been prepared for a new wave of arrests.

 

Workers On the Move

 

The workers of the People's Democracies were to prevent him. The indignation of the Hungarian proletariat was about to boil over. In June and July there were a series of strikes in Csepel and Greater Budapest. Workers were reported to be expressing their hatred of privileged bureaucrats by openly spitting at their limousines in the street. On the 28th July in Poland, the workers of Poznan struck demonstrated and were brutally fired on by the internal security forces that killed 54 and wounded at least 300. In the aftermath the oppositional Stalinist Gomulka rode to power promising reforms and a break with the methods of the past.

Both incensed and terrified, Rakosi fulminated against the meetings of the Petofi circle as being "Hungary's Poznan" but he was unable to stop them. Neither were his Kremlin patrons convinced that he was any longer able to hold the line for the bureaucracy. In July the Soviet leader Mikoyan visited Budapest and engineered the resignation of Rakosi, but foolishly installed as his replacement one of Rakosi's most trusted clique members, Frno Gero.

Squeezed between the restive workers, the Kremlin's desire for a less harsh face for Hungarian Stalinism and the Nagyite intellectual opposition the Hungarian bureaucracy began to crack under the strain. Sharp criticism of Party policy and demands for change became increasingly vocal in the Party cells in the working class districts. .

The Party press became increasingly open and - within its own terms - critical. On 6 October over 200,000 people attended the public reburial of Rajk in Budapest. Students with red flags and national banners first raised a slogan that was to be heard much more frequently in the weeks ahead:

"We won't stop halfway, Stalinism must be destroyed."

Destabilisation and disorientation in the Stalinist ranks first opened the road for the student youth to organise. In mid-October student youth in Szeged demanded the right to form their own organisation independent of party control. They also struck against the compulsory learning of the Russian language. The students of Budapest's Technological University followed suit by calling a demonstration for 23 October in solidarity with Poland, where Gomulka was now firmly in power and had faced down Kremlin pressure.

The 23 October demonstration was the spark that lit the Hungarian revolution. The authorities were not strong enough to ban it. Instead they asked the Party members of the Petofi circle to lead the demonstration the Stalinist Antal Apro begged wartime CP militant Tancss to assist him:

"You must lead the demonstrators . . . and save the situation." (Ralazs Nagy: quoted in The Truth About The Nagy Affair 1959)

At this time the Petofi circle, composed as it was of critical Stalinists, was indeed very anxious to avoid any serious confrontation with the regime. As Balazs Nagy put it later:

"At this time, and subsequently also, the Petofi circle curbed rather than encouraged the movement, considering that the hastening of events could lead to a catastrophe."

The demonstration had an extraordinary flavour. Its members sang the Marseillaise, the Kossuth national song and the Internationale. Participants from the Party school marched with enormous portraits of Lenin and Marx. The major slogans of the day were for "Nagy to power, Rakosi to the Danube" and for Soviet troops to go home.

As they became more emboldened, demonstrators pulled down red stars from the top of public buildings and ripped out the People's Democracy emblems from the centre of the Hungarian national flag. Eventually, welding workers hauled down a giant statue of Stalin and dragged it round the city behind a dustcart, eventually leaving its head outside the national theatre inscribed with the internationally understood W.C. As workers left factory shifts and joined the demonstration its ranks spread throughout the city. Troops joined the crowds and, in many cases, distributed arms.

On day one of the Hungarian revolution the demonstrators wrapped themselves in national colours. This was denounced over the radio by Party chief Gero, as the demonstrators took the streets of Budapest, Gero declared on the radio:

"We condemn those who wish to spread the poison of chauvinism among our youth and have used the democratic freedom assured to the working people by the state to organise a demonstration of a nationalist character." (Quoted in M Molnar: Budapest1956)

The Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest and declared martial law. On the other it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed he dutifully attempted to do just that by supporting martial law, calling for order and promising, in reply, a return to his 1953 policies. Meanwhile groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.

Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 26 October virtually all work had stopped. Moreover these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine and also the link up of those councils into regional revolutionary committees in major industrial centres such as Gyor and Miskolc.

 

THE FIRST SHOTS

 

In its turn Gero's attack served to render the crowds more angry and increase their resolve to hear their demands and arguments broadcast by the radio station. The first serious fighting took place at the radio station where AVH guards opened fire on demonstrators who returned fire from arms provided by fraternising Hungarian troops.

In general the political horizons of the increasingly proletarian demonstration were fixed on the return to power of Imre Nagy. He had refused an invitation to attend the demonstration and only belatedly agreed to address the thousands who had marched to Parliament Square calling for him to take power. His initial speech to the crowd showed just how alien his bureaucratic outlook was from that of the students and workers:

"It is by negotiation in the bosom of the Party and by the discussion of problems that we will travel the road that leads toward the settlement of our conflicts. We want to safeguard constitutional order and discipline. The government will not delay in arriving at its decisions." (Quoted in I Merray: 13 Days That Shook The Kremlin)

Yet one such speech was not sufficient to disabuse the masses of their illusions in Nagy.

Faced with a massive demonstration, active fraternisation between workers and soldiers and armed clashes with the AVH the Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest und declared martial law. On the other it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed he dutifully attempted to do just that by supporting martial law, calling for order and promising, in reply, a return to his 1953 policies. Meanwhile groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.

Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 20 October virtually all work had stopped. Moreover these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine and also the link up of the foremost councils into regional revolutionary committees in major industrial centres such as Gyor and Miskolc.

The impact of the upheaval on the bureaucracy, the security forces and the ranks of the Communist Party was immediate. In general the officers of the hated AVH attempted to defend themselves and their barracks from the insurgents with the utmost brutality. Most dramatically at Moson magyarovar the AVH let loose a hail of machine gun bullets at an unarmed and peaceful demonstration killing around one hundred.

For the British CP's Daily Worker correspondent Peter Fryer it was a shattering experience to see the dead and the mourners on his arrival across the Austrian frontier:

"After eleven years of 'Peoples Democracy' it had come to this: that the security police was so remote from the people, so alien to them, so vicious and so brutal that It turned its weapons on a defenceless crowd and murdered the people who were supposed to be masters of their own country." (P Fryer: Hungarian Tragedy)

Little wonder then that insurgent workers showed the least mercy for the AVH officers and in most towns had to fight a bloody battle with them. In Miskolc, for example, the AVH attacked a proletarian crowd on 26 October. The local police handed their weapons to insurgent miners who finished off the AVH chief and the officers. In many cases the workers made a strict distinction between the AVH officers and the younger rank and filers who were shown more mercy.

In many instances the more hated Party officials in the localities simply disappeared or hid. However Party members also played a leading role in the uprising itself at every level. In the factories and mines CP workers were active in initiating workers' councils. The leading figure in the Budapest workers' council movement - Sandor Bali - had been a Party member since 1945. In proletarian Miskolc and the surrounding Borsod county, CP militants played a leading role in organising the workers' councils and in framing their demands. By 27 October the Trade Union Council called on all workers to elect councils that would take over the tasks of management.

In addition there were several instances of individual members from the highest ranks of the bureaucracy going directly and actively over to the side of those who were doing battle with the Soviet troops. Pal Maleter is the best known example. An army major and CP member since 1945, Maleter proudly sported a Soviet military decoration he received in 1944. On 24 October he was ordered to capture the Kilian barracks which was holding out against Soviet tanks. He described the events on Radio Budapest:

"When I got there I discovered that the fighters for freedom were not bandits but loyal children of the Hungarian people. I therefore informed the Ministry of Defence that I was joining the insurgents."

Yet Maleter always insisted that his struggle was for socialism. He told foreign correspondents:

"If we get rid of the Russians don't think we're going back to the old days. And if there's people who do want to go back, we'll see."

Reassuringly clutching his revolver he added:

"We don't mean to go back to capitalism. We want socialism in Hungary."

While the proletarian base of the party and certain elements of its apparatus went over to the insurrection its leading circles sought desperately to diffuse the crisis and restabilise bureaucratic rule. In late October, as workers' councils mushroomed and the security forces melted away, this was a task they attempted to do behind Soviet tanks. However the Nagy government was to find it impossible to restore an order to its liking so long as it was shielded by Soviet troops. And in turn those very Soviet troops were proving unreliable in this task.

 

FRATERNISATION WITH SOVIET TROOPS

 

Initially the Soviet troops believed, to some extent, that they were being sent in to fight fascists. This meant that fraternisation by workers and students was capable of having a devastating effect on Soviet troop morale. A worker recounted to Time magazine a typical instance of fraternisation:

"Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone."

The workers proceeded to explain who they really were at which point the Soviet troops began to fraternize, with their captain throwing down his hat and affirming that the Kremlin leaders:

"Bulganin and Khruschev would rape their own mothers." (Quoted By Lasky: p 103)

 

Gyor and Miskolc radios - in the hands of their revolutionary committees - broadcast messages of solidarity to the Soviet troops. Miskolc declared:

"Our people did not revolt against you, but for the achievement of legal demands. Our interests are Identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better socialist life." (ibid p116)

In Gyor the Soviet commander even went on the air to declare:

"We will not interfere with your national political affairs... I think that the rising of the Hungarian people against the oppressive leaders is just." (ibid p112)

The authorities had to act to prevent the spread of fraternisation. On the 25 October Soviet tanks accompanied a jubilant crowd to a demonstration in Parliament Square. That demonstration was fired on from the surrounding rooftops; Soviet tanks returned the fire. When the firing stopped, according to Bill Lomax, over 100 were fired including Soviet troops. Either the AVH or crack Soviet security units had taken the action to stop the drift towards fraternisation. In fact fighting between the two sides became far more severe as a result of the slaughter - which both Hungarian workers and Soviet soldiers saw as the others' responsibility.

The wave of fraternisation showed that the political revolution - whilst necessarily raising certain legitimate national grievances held the potential for becoming international and indeed internationalist by spreading to the Soviet Armed Forces. The bloody outcome of the Hungarian revolution underlines just how vital that internationalism is if the political revolution is not, to be crushed in national isolation.

Despite this enormous potential the actual politics of the workers' movement in the last days of October were those of sceptical Nagyism. The complete inadequacy of these politics was to be tragically revealed. In most areas the workers' councils busied themselves with local or factory problems involved in maintaining the general strike and gave different forms of critical support to Nagy. The leaders of the councils saw them as potential organs of management in the plants. They saw their com­mittees as potential alternative local government but blindly ceded central political power to Nagy.

This was well expressed recently by a Budapest Workers Council Militant in Sandor Racz who explained that it wasn't until moves were made against Nagy by Kadar that council activists began to think about national politics or governmental power as a question that concerned them directly:

"Up till then we hadn't intervened in politics, because we trusted Imre Nagy. We saw him as the political guarantee of the revolution." (Interview from Beszelo No 7: In Labour Focus Summer 1984)

This meant that while the councils pressed demands on Nagy - most importantly for Soviet withdrawal, a new government, the right to strike and an amnesty (the 4 point programme of Miskolc in the first days of the revolution) - and while the councils maintained the strike action until they thought they had wrung serious concessions from Nagy, they remained hidebound by a variety of syndicalism that saw the factories as the property of the workers and the government as the property of the national politicians. Thus a decisive struggle for workers power, at a time when Soviet troops were in many instances unwilling to fight and when the Nagy government was very weak indeed, was excluded from the agenda. There was in fact an acute crisis of leadership in the Hungarian revolution.

How did Nagy use the political initiative that the workers movement ceded to him? Initially the authority of his government barely ran beyond the ministry buildings in Rudapest. Cast in his Stalinist mould there was no question of him conceiving of the workers' councils as an alternative base of power.

The history of Stalinism shows it to be resolutely opposed to all manifestations of healthy workers' democracy, so much so that it will always ally itself with reactionary and bourgeois forces in order to subvert and destroy the potential organs of a healthy workers state.

The form that alliance took in Hungary during and after the war (in common with other People’s Democracies) was a coalition with bourgeois parties within which the Stalinists would keep a hold on the organs of security and repression. Nagy's means of defusing the political revolutionary crisis was to attempt to piece such a coalition together once again.

 

NAGY'S COALITION GOVERNMENT

 

On 27 October Nagy announced the formation of a new coalition government including representatives of the historic Smallholders' Party and the National Peasants' Party. Two points must be underlined about this move. Firstly those parties barely existed except as motley collections of ex-party leaders. Secondly, if we look at the demands being voiced in Miskolc and Gyor, while it was the case that some ex-Social Democrats were joining in the fray, calls for a coalition government or for parliamentary type elections were rarely posed in the initial documents of struggle. It was in fact those around Nagy who reached for the old parties and the trappings of a coalition with the ex-leaders of the bourgeois parties. This was a trusted tactic for deflecting the working class from the fight for its own political power.

In turn, as the old parties were reconstituted from the top downwards, and as horse trading for office recommenced, so the call for genuine free elections was increasingly raised from within the workers' councils. After all the Stalinists had maintained the charade of parliamentarism, without the substance of a multiplicity of competing parties. Stalinism could never pose the political alternative to parliament of genuine soviet power.

The workers' movement posed the potential of workers' council power. Its predominant demands included the public trial of the most murderous bureaucrats of the Rakosi regime, the replacement of those responsible for faults in the planned economy, the publication and revision of foreign trade agreements as well as wage rises and management rights for workers' councils. Nagy and co tried to divert this movement into the channels of a bogus popular front coalition. In that coalition key figures of the old Stalinist apparatus - Apro, Munich, Horvath and Kossa - were to keep their positions. And they were to use those positions to murderous effect later.

Many of the Stalinists around Nagy were resigned to a very significant Rightist retreat as the road out of the crisis and a means of aborting the political revolution. The literary theorist Georg Lukacs was Minister of Popular Culture in the Nagy government. Vikor Woroszylski, a Polish CP journalist from Nowa Kultura, describes a conversation he had with Lukacs at the time. He reports Lukacs as saying:

"Communism in Hungary has been totally disgraced. . . The working class will prefer to follow the Social Democrats. In free elections the Communists will obtain five per cent of the vote, ten per cent at the most. It is possible that they won't be in government that they will go into opposition. But the party will continue to exist; it will save the idea; it will be an intellectual centre and after some years or decades from now, who knows. (Quoted in Lasky: op cit p 159)

As the political organs of a healthy workers' state were making their appearance throughout Hungary our Marxist philosopher preferred saving the 'idea' of being an opposition in a bourgeois parliament. And what idea did he want to save? The idea that he and his bureaucratic centre could get their hands back on power one day, once the political revolution of the Hungarian workers had exhausted itself.

Playing on the political weaknesses of the spontaneous workers' movement Nagy was able to temporarily regain some of the political initiative. On 28 October he requested a Soviet troop withdrawal from Hungary and an immediate cease fire. He announced the dissolution of the AVH. On 30 October he announced the recreation of the 1945 coalition by inviting the Social Democrats to dele­gate a minister even though that party had not yet effectively re-formed itself at a national level. The Minister of the Interior was Ferenc Munnich - one time Ambassador to Moscow of Rakosi's regime. At the same time Soviet troops left the major industrial centres of Hungary.

The troop withdrawals were negotiated by the Soviet Ambassador, one Yuri Andropov. He had good reason to pull back the troops since they had been infected with many of the liberatory slogans of the Hungarian revolution. At the very same time he liaised with Khruschev to organise the entry of fresh Soviet troops into Hungary. While Nagy's new popular front coalition was holding back the workers from a decisive show down with Stalinism, the Kremlin was preparing a deadly second strike.

For Part Two click here

For an analysis of how capitalism was restored in Hungary click here

Thu 05, October 2006 @ 17:58