The Hungarian Revolution 1956 - part 2

HUNGARY 1956 - Part 2

IN THE PERIOD from 23 October to the first announced withdrawal of Soviet troops the Hungarian working class had shown enormous strengths and a capacity for revol­utionary struggle. Its councils and militia controlled the major industrial centres. It’s fighting spirit and its efforts at fraternisation had undermined the morale of the Soviet troops. Yet the mobilis­ations of the Hungarian working class were not without their fatal weaknesses.

The councils had the potential to become organs of direct working class power. Yet they concerned themselves with local and factory matters and ceded central power to Imre Nagy. Also, the fraternisation never succeeded in bringing whole units of the Soviet armed forces over to the side of the insurrection. Neither did it win Soviet soldiers to a fight to form their own soldiers' councils. The failure to achieve these things seriously weakened the vital struggle to internationalise the Hungarian political revolution via the ranks of the Soviet army.

It is not to belittle the heroism of the Hungarian working class to argue that its fundamental weakness was its lack of a revolu­tionary party. Only such a party could have led the challenge for workers' power.

"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!"

In general, at this time, militants either proposed the idea of parties as being divisive, or had illusions in one or another of the 1945 governmental parties, or favoured a coalition of such parties. Against these tendencies revolutionary Marxists fighting for political revolution would have fought for the councils to centralise their forces and for a government that was directly accountable to those councils.

Such a call would have mobilised serious support amongst sections of the council militants. For examine Kiss, President of the Miskolc Workers' Council, condemned the role of the newly organised political parties and demanded on 2 November that:

November that:

"The Government shall propose the formation of a national revolutionary council, to be supported by the departmental workers' councils of Budapest and composed of democratically elected delegates. At the same time they shall pronounce the dissolution of the National Assembly. (Quoted in Budapest 1956, M Molner)

In the vital stages of the revolution such voices were in a minority in the leadership of the councils. The key task was to win that minority to the fight for political revolution and to organise them into a revolutionary party.

The initial stance of the councils handed Nagy and remnants of the old parties' leaderships all the political initiative. This was to prove fatal for the course of the Hungarian political revolution.

In an immediate sense the very leaders drawn into the Nagy coalition did not demand the restoration of capitalism. On day release from his sanatorium, small holders leader, Kovacs, declared that

"No one must dream of going back to the world of counts, bankers and capitalists that world is definitely over."

And while he suggested that the party programmes were now outdated he refrained from any alternative. For the social democrats Anna Kethly made a similar declaration against the restoration of the old order:

"Freed from one prison, let it not allow the country to become a prison of another colour. Let it watch over the factories, the mines and the land, which must remain in the hands of the people."

The National Peasants Party - which was to rename itself the Petofi many cadrised activists who had historically been prepared to work with the CP.

Yet in offering the leaders of these partly reconstituted parties a governmental majority Nagy was certainly creating a potential rallying point for capitalist restoration. The Small holders were a traditionally rightist party based on the richer peasants. The social democrats used the freedom delivered to them by the political revolutionary crisis to dispatch Kethly to Vienna to discuss with the leaders of the Second International. Whatever its orientation to the poorer peasants, the Petofi Party soon announced that it

"Believes in private property and advocates free production and marketing" (Quoted in The Hungarian Revolution, MJ Lasky, p218).

In the medium and longer term each of these party leaderships would have used their power to dismantle the monopoly of foreign trade and the planning mechanisms in the direction of restoring capitalism for Nagy, Lukacs and co. this was a lesser evil compared with the proletarian political revolution. The trajectory of these rightist Stalinists confirmed Trotsky's analysis of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Hungarian leadership shared the characteristic Trotsky had identified in the Soviet bureaucracy - namely a tendency to fragment under pressure, with sections of it willing to:

". . . overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism." (The Transitional Programme)

But many of the Stalinists who connived in the coalition project as an expedient means of robbing the workers of political power - Kadar for example - was also to accuse the Hungarian revolutionaries of having become the tools of counter-revolution. They were to order the slaughter of thousands of Hungarian workers on this pretext.

Jubilant and thankful ideologists of capitalism were luck to seize on every meagre piece of evidence offered up by the Stalinists to prove their own version of the story that the Hungarian revolution was a capitalist, pro-Western revolution.

THE FORCES OF REACTION

Reactionaries old take advantage of the revolutionary crisis to show their faces once again. In Clyur, one Somogyvari argued for the formation of a separate government which, with him at its head, would wage a Christian crusade against the USSR. Workers from the railway wagon works ran him out of town. In Budapest the anti-communist journalists far more than he did the Hungarian workers. There is no evidence that any real delegates ever attended his Council but the Kadar regime was to hold him up as evidence of the mounting threat of counter-revolution. The old Fascist Arrow Cross did make some re-appearance most notably in Gyor which was near to exile organisations over the Austrian border. There are no substantiated accounts of the Arrow Cross playing an organised or systematic role in events. A meeting on 1 November in Buda­pest which was called to reconstitute the Arrow Cross seems to have been poorly attended and chaotic.

However ex-Arrow Cross members do seem to have played a role in the slaughter of Communist Party officials at their Budapest HQ on 30 October. Along with lumpens and criminals they killed over 25 communists and AVH conscripts and savagely mutilated their bodies. The political revolution had as one of its tasks the brutal suppression of all such reactionary forces. The Hungarian workers were more than capable of fulfilling this task. Fascists got short shrift from the workers.

The activities and slogans of the reactionary forces must not be confused with the seemingly nationalist slogans advanced at the earliest stages of the revolution by the workers. The initial slogans of the October fighting were not consciously those of political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The revolution tended to express itself in the language of destroying the symbols of Soviet sponsored power and of national independence.

The historic gain of nationalised industry had not been the work of the workers themselves but rather that of a regime which stamped out every manifestation of proletarian democracy. The collective farms appeared to the majority of peasants as an alien imposition. Given that the red stars and the hammers and sickles that accompanied these gains were seen as symbols of Hungary's national oppression, it is little wonder that the early revolt often expressed itself simply in terms of removing such symbols.

It would have been impossible to eject otherwise in a world where 'socialism' meant both the expropriation of the old owners and the imposition of a local Stalinist variant of the oppressive Russian bureaucracy.

However the political drift of the major workers' organisations was not in the direction of unleashing capitalist counter-revolution. They initially saw themselves as pressure points on Nagy. All the major councils were so content with the Nagy government and with promises of Soviet troop withdrawal that they called for a return to work from 5 November.

THE STALINISTS FIGHT BACK

The Hungarian workers had been lulled into a sense of false confidence. By the first days of November Soviet troops had left the major industrial centres for their barracks. Most organisations were now prepared to back Nagy's coalition government. Janos Kadar announced on 1 November that the old Hungarian Communist Party had been dissolved and that a new Hungarian Socialist Workers Party was to be formed, purged of the most hated Stalinists. He announced his full backing for Nagy and the revolution:

"In a glorious uprising the people have overthrown the Rakosi regime. It has won for our country the freedom and independence without which there can be no socialism."

Of the insurgents he declared:

"We are proud of you, for you took your proper place in the armed uprising. You were imbued with true patriotism and loyalty towards socialism."

However there was mounting evidence of fresh Soviet troops entering Hungary despite explicit denials of this by Ambassador Andropov. On 1 November the Nagy government publicly protested at the troop movements and repeated its demand for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. It also announced that it was renouncing the Warsaw pact which the Soviet bureaucracy was using as their pretext for positioning their troops. It declared that, like Austria, Hungary was now 'neutral'.

These were dramatic steps for a Stalinist to take. Neutrality had been mooted by Soviet leaders as a model for central Europe beyond their "buffer zone". The idea did not fall from the sky and had been accepted as a status for Austria in 1955. However for a Communist Party led government to declare itself neutral between imperialism and the USSR was evidence of its rightist course, a course that was being backed by the social democrats.

A proletarian political revolution would, quite justifiably, break with the Warsaw Pact which is an instrument of political repression. It licences the Kremlin bureaucracy to trample on proletarian democracy anywhere in its sphere of influence. But the political revolution would commit itself from the outset to defending all the workers' states against imperialism failure to do so would always cut the ground under attempts to internationalise the political revolution. In a purely 'national' or 'neutral' guise the proletarian uprising of a small individual state is rendered powerless to effectively neutralise the superior military might of the Soviet armed forces.

With tragic but typical naivety the Nagy government reached for the United Nations as the means of defending itself, asking the next General Assembly to debate 'Hungarian neutrality'. At the same time it announced itself prepared to negotiate a troop withdrawal and nominated a commission led by Pal Maleter to carry out the preparations. At a time when the armed working class, fighting under the banner of internationalism, was the only means of defence against the USSR, Nagy chose the path of neutralism and appeals to the United Nations.

The Soviet bureaucracy had made all its preparations for a second attack. On 2 November key Stalinist 'supporters' of Nagy Kadar and Munnich - slipped away in secret. On 3 November Maleter started negotiations with his Soviet counterparts. Agreement was reached immediately that all Soviet troops would withdraw with military honours. Only the date of departure was left to be negotiated over dinner at the Soviet HQ.

At 11:00 pm Maleter phoned to say the negotiations were going well. After that contact with him was broken. At dawn on the 4 November a fresh wave of Soviet troops went into all the major industrial centres. Kadar and Munnich announced that they had formed a 'Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government' and that "acting in the interest of our people, working class and country" they had:

"requested the Soviet Army Command to help our nation smash the sinister forces of reaction and restore order and calm in the country."

Nagy took cover in the Yugoslav embassy urging the workers not to resist this new onslaught. The much vaunted leaders of the coalition parties were nowhere to be seen. Yet the workers replied again with a general strike and organised military resistance. The second phase of the Hungarian revolution had begun. The workers, arms in hand, now confronted the invasion of a new wave of Soviet troops who had not been affected by the previous efforts at fraternisation.

At the head of the bogus 'workers and peasants government' were key Stalinist figures who had remained in Nagy's government - Horvath, Munnich, Apro, Kossa and Kadar himself. In giving time to Nagy, the workers had also been giving time to their future executioners. Kadar now denounced the workers' rising as a fascist inspired counter-revolution that, with the help of fraternal troops, they were suppressing in order to save socialist Hungary!

The clique around Kadar cut no ice with the Hungarian workers.

THE REVOLUTION DROWNED IN BLOOD

Posters at the giant Csepel works replied defiantly:

"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!"

and:

"The general strike is a weapon which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us Fascists." (quoted in Lasky op.cit.)

Radio Rajk announced on 5 November:

"Comrades! The place of every true Hungarian Communist today is on the barricades."

Attacked from all sides by Soviet troops and aircraft the Dunapentele workers' council announced:

"Dunapentele is the leading socialist town In Hungary. In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands... The population of the town is under arms. . . they will not give in because they have erected the factories and homes of the town with their own hands . . . the workers will defend the town against fascism - but also against the Soviet troops." (Quoted in B Lomax, Hungary 1956)

The Soviet troops met the fiercest resistance in the proletarian strongholds of Hungary. It was iron and steel towns like Miskole and Dunapentele, as well as mining areas like Borsod, Pees, Dorog and Tatabanya that held out the longest. It took the Soviet armed forces three days to take the centre of Budapest, and it was not until 10 November that Soviet troops could be fully deployed against the capital's proletarian bastion of Csepel. Even when the Soviet troops had crushed the insurrection a total general strike continued against the occupation and its 'workers and peasants government'.

During the initial days of the second invasion workers' councils coordinated the defence of the factories on a local basis. It was not until after most of the fighting had subsided that delegates assembled to form a Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest. Its leading figure was a pre-war social democrat turned Communist

Party member in 1945 - Sandor Hall.

The initial intention of Bali and his supporters was that the Council should be a representative negotiating force for the working class, forcing maximum concessions from the Kadar regime. The general strike was seen as the most violent means of securing such concessions. Accordingly the Council's first meeting drew up a list of demands and sent a delegation to press those demands on Kadar.

THE POLITICS OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS

The politics of the leaders of the Hungarian workers in this period were highly contradictory. A political programme was adopted at the 12 November meeting. It came from the pen of Istvan Bibo a member of the peasant Petofi Party and one time member of Nagy's cabinet. It gives a sharp insight into the pressures towards the restoration of capitalism that the Nagy coalition would inevitably have come under.

It called for a multi-party system, for the restoration of the Nagy government and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary which, in turn, would leave the Warsaw Pact. While calling for "legislation to secure the existence of socialism and protection of communists", it also called for freedom of private ownership in land. While it defended social ownership of the banks, mines and large enterprises it argued for the remaining factories to be taken into common ownership through workers' management, workers' shareholdership and a profit-sharing system.

As immediate demands the Council informed Kadar that it negotiated on behalf of the workers and took upon itself the right to call strikes. It protested at the reappearance of armed AVH units and demanded the reinstatement of Nagy, an amnesty, the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections. The majority of the Council were for parleying with Kadar to restore Nagy to power from his bolt hole in the Yugoslav embassy. Only a minority agreed with the view expressed at the time by the Council's President Sandor Racz:

"We do not need the cabinet. We are and will be the leaders of Hungary."

Kadar played for time, stringing the Council leaders along for rounds of negotiations. He informed the first Council delegation:

"We want a multi-party system in and an honest election. . . We (communists) might be thoroughly beaten in the elections, but if we take on an election challenge the. Communist Party may regain its strength and obtain the confidence of the working masses." (Quoted from the Party paper, Nepszabadsag 15 November, In Lasky op.cit.)

But in the meantime, in exchange for such assurances, the workers' leaders were urged by Kadar to call off the General Strike and use any influence they had to urge Nagy to leave the Yugoslav embassy in order to negotiate.

While the Central Workers Council was formally adopting resolutions in favour of parliamentary democratic forms and a mixed economy there was a vital aspect of their politics, standing in potential contradiction to these bourgeois democratic illusions that a revolutionary Trotskyist party would have sought to relate to and extend. The front line role of the workers and their councils convinced proletarians and non-proletarians alike that the working class was the leading force in the Hungarian revolution.

"The general strike is a weapon which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us fascists"

In the first phase of resistance it was common to read declarations from the workers announcing that the factories were theirs while the government or 'nation' should be ruled by others. But faced with the second invasion the workers' leaders saw themselves as representatives of the proletariat negotiating with an alien government. In mid-November the duplicity of Kadar and his negotiators concentrated the minds of many more militants on the question of fighting for an alternative governmental power.

In early and mid November there was a clear situation of dual power in Hungary. No tram could run and no factory could open without the say so of the workers' councils. The Stalinists recognised this fact. Kadar regularly negotiated with council leaders. The Soviet High Command issued those same leaders with the right to carry arms and break the curfew. The Soviet Command even sent an observing liaison officer to the Budapest Council meetings.

There were, however, three key preconditions for resolving this dual power through a victory of workers' power over the Stalinist armed forces. First, a party was needed to lead the fight for such a resolution to the crisis. Secondly, the councils would have to centralise their forces into a clear and open governmental alternative. Last, but by no means least, that governmental challenge would have to project itself into an international struggle to spread the political revolution.

Despite the absence of a revolutionary party the councils did, hesitatingly and belatedly, move in the direction of centralising their power and challenging the governmental power of Kadar. On 19 November the Budapest Workers' Council called for all provincial councils to elect dele­gates to a Workers' Parliament due to meet on 21 November.

It proposed the formation of a permanent Workers' Parliament of 156 delegates from the provinces and some of the larger factories. In turn this was to elect a 30 strong executive from its ranks and co-opt 20 individuals from the parties, the armed forces, the police and the intellectuals. It did lay down that only parties accepting socialism could be admitted into the executive. The Soviet High Command and Janos Kadar acted quickly to smash this challenge. On 21 November Soviet troops ringed the stadium where the Workers' Parliament was due to meet.

In order to remove a symbol rather than a vital force Imre Nagy and his supporters were issued with safe conduct passes from the Yugoslav embassy on the 22 November. On leaving their sanctuary they were duly arrested and immediately departed to Romania. They were later to be hanged.

On the 25 November the workers' council leaders were offered a conference in the Parliament building with the leading Hungarian Stalinists in the government. At the conference the working class was attacked for being 'confused' and the council leaders for having nothing to do with the working class. 'Workers and Peasants' Minister Marrsan rounded on the delegates who defended the actions of the Hungarian workers:

"You Russians! To think you can give us a lecture us! You call yourselves proles! But what have you in common with the workers?" (Quoted in Lomax op.cit.)

Thus spoke satrap who, now afford to publicly vent his fury against the insubordination of the working class and its delegates against the bureaucratic regime of which he was a well paid agent!

Such rude treatment at the hands of the Kadar government hardened the stance of the council leaders at a time when the Government and the Soviet troops obviously had the upper hand on the streets. The council leaders pressed ahead with their plans to create a National Workers' Parliament which was to meet until the 23 October 1957 (the anniversary of the first fighting in Budapest) when free national elections were to be held. for well on a year the workers' council delegates were to assume national authority until elections took place.

The Budapest Council took this stance when the balance of forces was already strongly against the workers. Their plans were not to come to fruition; but a revolutionary party would have had to take a stance on such proposals at whatever stage they were advanced in a political revolutionary crisis. It would have supported the formation of a government responsible to the councils. It would have opposed the eventual ceding of power from the councils to a parliamentary body.

Given that the workers' illusions in parliamentary democracy had been strengthened as a direct result. of Stalinist tyranny, and that workers therefore still called for parliamentary elections, revolu­tionaries would have fought for any election to be held under the direct scrutiny of the councils themselves and with the exclusion of all parties that did not support those councils. Should the scheduled National Assembly have met it would have been faced with the choice of ratifying the Central Workers' Council as the source of power or of being sent packing as soon as possible.

The best elements of the Hungarian proletariat had, Unfortunately, attempted to pose a council based government far too late in the struggle. The all encompassing repression meant that it was difficult for these self same leaders to envisage any form of resistance in favour of their new project beyond silent demonstrations that turned Budapest into a ghost town, or symbolic demonstrations of wreath-bearing women.

"In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands"

Despite the more militant political stance of the Budapest Council leaders the attempt to pose a form of workers' government as an alternative to the Kadar government came far too late. On 9 December the government arrested as many council leaders as it could. The workers of the Beloiannis factory protected Bali and Racz from arrest. But these two accepted an offer on 11 December to leave the factory in order to meet Kadar. They were arrested in the Parliament building.

Despite a short lived renewed general strike against the arrests the Stalinist regime of Kadar was now firmly in the saddle. It cracked down with special courts, and extended the death penalty to those who struck or even incited others to strike. In the face of such victorious, barbaric reaction and with its principal leaders in

gaol the workers' movement came 10 terms with its defeat. The Central Workers' Council now called for passive resistance; on 15 January 1957 it issued a final appeal to the Hungarian workers:

"Because of the terror, however, and the death penalty even for distributing leaflets, the Council exhorts the workers to spread all news concerning the underground by word of mouth. Sabotage and passive resistance are the order of the day."

WAS VICTORY POSSIBLE?

BEYOND A SHADOW of a doubt the Hungarian revolution had the potential to develop Into a successful proletarian political revolution against bureaucratic rule. The workers' councils and workers' militia were the embryonic organs of a healthy workers' state where bureaucratic tyranny would have been replaced by proletarian democracy and the planned economy reorganised under the democratic management of the workers.

Under the impact of the revolt the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus fragmented. Major sections of the party, particularly at a rank and file level, went over to the side of the Insurgents. But the core of the bureaucracy remained - of necessity - intransigently opposed to proletarian democracy in all its forms. One wing - around Nagy - offered the working class the road of a popular front coalition built from above to derail the struggle for workers power. The other prepared to drown the revolution in proletarian blood. Once again Stalinism showed its predominantly counter-revolutionary nature. The hopes of the leaders of degenerate Trotskyism at the time (Pablo and Mandel) in a "progressive" wing of the bureaucracy were shown to be illusory. While the bureaucracy will always fragment, no wing of It can ever be a substitute for direct organs of working class power or the revolutionary party.

That the Hungarian workers were defeated does not mean that all such revolts against bureaucratic rule are doomed. Neither does it mean that the working class should forsake the goal of political revolution In search of a reformist co-existence with the bureaucracy - what Kuron calls his 'self-limiting revolution'. What it does mean is that in the absence of a revolutionary leadership the spontaneous energy of the working class is not in itself sufficient to take power into the hands of the workers.

A revolutionary leadership would have battled in the often politically confused Hungarian working class for the councils to constitute themselves as the basis of power and ensure that the government was directly and immediately accountable to them. Against those who saw it as simply a national revolt, or who put their trust in the United Nations, a revolutionary party would have fought to internationalise the political revolution, spreading it both to the USSR via the Soviet army and to the other degenerate workers' states, without that internationalisation all the odds were stacked against the Hungarian workers achieving victory. The struggles of the Hungarian working class thirty years ago prove both the need for, and the possibility of, the political revolutionary overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. They show all too clearly as well that the working class needs an International revolutionary party if it is not to be crushed by the forces of Stalinist reaction.

Post Script

The collapse of the Stalinist states in 1990-92 saw the destruction of the bureaucratically centrally planned economies and the restoration of capitalism in all of them barring North Korea and Cuba. This collapse had a profound effect on world politics and the state of the working class movement. No longer could workers parties look to a really existing socialism abroad, no longer were national liberation movements like the PLO and Vietcong, funded by the Stalinist regimes, no longer was over a third of the world's territory excluded from capitalist exploitation. For a period during the 1990s, as capitalism was being restored and while the working class movement was in full retreat, there was a period that could be described as a counter-revolutionary one, the forces of reaction were triumphant, the capitalists proclaimed the end of "history." The class struggle was over and the capitalists had won. Or so the story went.

But with the revival of the world economy from the mid-1990s, as globalisation injected new dynamism into world capitalism, the working class began to recover, albeit hesitantly, falteringly with often only small steps forward. The PR-N believe that this transition from the defeats of the 1990s towards a new revival of working class confidence and struggle still characterises the period today - hence we describe it as a transitional period. The working class has still not recovered from the defeats of the 1970s/80s but has only begun to recover its confidence. The growth and expansion of world capitalism is manifest, with the development of whole new powers like China and India and the recovery of the former workers states as their economies have begun to function as capitalist ones. It is nonsense today to speak of a period of "stagnation" or even a "tendency towards stagnation" in the world economy, in fact to do so, wilfully ignores the effects of capitalist restoration and gives credence to those leftists who asserted their was no fundamental difference between the centrally planned economies of the former Stalinist states and capitalism itself. A mistake which world capitalism had no intention of making.

We can continue to take inspiration from the struggle of Hungarian workers against the Stalinist bureaucracy, while recognising that in general, that is yesterday's fight, with Stalinism destroyed as material block to the class struggle, the initial effects have been to profoundly set back the working class struggle, but ultimately, without this bulwark of counter-revolution, when capitalism does re-enter a period of crisis, the working class movement will be able to rebuild itself far more easily and strongly than before.

Thu 05, October 2006 @ 18:00