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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 23, 1956
Budapest, Hungary
70 years ago
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the nationwide uprising against the communist government and Soviet domination that began with a student demonstration in Budapest on October 23.
On the afternoon of October 23, 1956, some twenty thousand students and workers marched through Budapest to the statue of Józef Bem, a Polish general who had fought for Hungary in 1848, to show solidarity with reformers in Poland. They carried a list of sixteen demands, among them the withdrawal of Soviet troops, free elections, a free press, and the return of the reformist communist Imre Nagy as prime minister. By evening the crowd had grown to around two hundred thousand and filled the square in front of Parliament.
That night events ran out of anyone's control. One crowd pulled down the giant bronze statue of Stalin near the city park, leaving only his boots on the pedestal. Another went to the state radio building to demand that the sixteen points be broadcast. The secret police guarding the building opened fire. Hungarian soldiers sent to restore order handed their weapons to the demonstrators or joined them. By morning Budapest was in armed revolt, and the insurgents were cutting the communist emblem out of the center of the national flag.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Imre Nagy, the reform communist who became prime minister during the uprising, declared Hungary neutral, and was executed in 1958 for his part in it.
Hungary had spent the previous eight years under one of the harshest regimes in the Soviet bloc, led by Mátyás Rákosi, who proudly called himself Stalin's best pupil. Hundreds of thousands had passed through prisons and internment camps. Stalin's death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing him in early 1956 loosened the system just enough for people to start saying aloud what they thought. The party brought Nagy back as prime minister on October 24, hoping he could calm the streets. Instead, over the following week, he moved with them: abolishing the one-party system, forming a coalition government, and negotiating the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Budapest. For a few days the revolution appeared to have won.
On November 1, as reports came in of fresh Soviet divisions crossing the border, Nagy announced that Hungary was leaving the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the United Nations to guarantee its neutrality. The Kremlin had already decided. The Western powers were consumed by the Suez crisis, which had erupted in the same week, and the United States made it clear it would not risk war over Hungary, despite years of broadcasts on Radio Free Europe that many Hungarians had taken as a promise of help. Before dawn on November 4, Soviet tanks and troops attacked Budapest in overwhelming force.
Organized resistance lasted about a week, fought by workers and teenagers with rifles and petrol bombs. Some twenty-five hundred Hungarians and seven hundred Soviet soldiers were killed. About two hundred thousand people, two percent of the population, fled across the Austrian border. A new government under Janos Kadar imprisoned thousands and executed several hundred. Nagy, lured out of the Yugoslav embassy with a promise of safe conduct, was tried in secret and hanged on June 16, 1958. On the same date in 1989 he was reburied with honors before an immense crowd, and on October 23 of that year Hungary was proclaimed a democratic republic. The date is now a national holiday.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The revolution destroyed the moral standing of Soviet communism in the West. The sight of tanks firing on workers in the name of a workers' state led to mass resignations from Western communist parties and ended many intellectuals' sympathy for Moscow.
It defined the limits of the Cold War. American inaction showed that the West would not intervene militarily inside the Soviet sphere, whatever its rhetoric about liberation. That unwritten rule held through the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and until 1989.
Its memory helped bring down the system three decades later. The reburial of Imre Nagy in June 1989 became a turning point in Hungary's peaceful transition, and Hungary's opening of its border that summer began the unraveling of the Iron Curtain.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 23, 1956, a student march in Budapest turned by nightfall into a revolution. For twelve days Hungarians governed themselves and believed the world would help. It did not, and on November 4 the tanks came back. Seventy years on, the day the uprising began is the national holiday of a free Hungary.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years.”
— Albert Camus, 'The Blood of the Hungarians,' 1957
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the toppling of Stalin's statue, Imre Nagy, the Soviet invasion of November 4, and the uprising's long afterlife?
