Twelve Days that Shook the World

By Manuel Ballagas. 

This was no Velvet Revolution. Actually, it turned out to be a very bloody one. In about 12 days, more than 3,000 people had perished, 200,000 had fled as refugees, and one of Central Europe’s most lively capitals was in ruins. Yet the Hungarian Revolution, 53 years ago, caught the United States and other Western countries off guard as did the fall of the Berlin Wall decades later, in 1989. 

“A miracle has occurred in Budapest that has belied our past views that a popular revolt in the face of modern weapons is an utter impossibility. The impossible has happened,” said Allen Dulles, CIA Director at the time. 

Indeed, a miracle. Journalists, statesmen and diplomats could not anticipate the courageous uprising that began with a massive but peaceful student demonstration in Budapest, on October 23, 1956, only to quickly become the strongest challenge the Soviet Union ever had to face from any country caught in its grip. To be fair, neither could any of the Stalinist bosses that had ruled Hungary since the end of World War II, and even the Soviets. 

Yet the warning signs had been there for quite a while, for any curious observer to see, behind the calm façade of the People’s Hungarian Republic. 

Intellectuals and students had been engaging for years in strong, subterranean debates over Hungary’s future, workers -even if strictly controlled by government-run trade unions- often aired their discontent with the heavy production quotas imposed on them from above, and dissenting voices were being heard even within the Communist Party, whose ranks had been decimated by the Soviet-style purges that took place in the early 50’s. 

Both the press and intelligence reports at the time had taken the Hungarian people’s acquiescence for granted, even as conditions deteriorated and dissent spread in the country. So the explosion of events that followed that fateful student demonstration outside the Parliament building in downtown Budapest came as a shocking surprise –or a miracle- to all. 

“Liberal” communists –notably, Imre Nagy, who became Prime Minister during the short-lived revolution- struggled to steer the spontaneous revolt on a reformist course. But as he stood to speak in a second demonstration, and he addressed the people as “comrades”, Nagy should have realized how futile his attempts at moderation were, when the masses quickly retorted, “We are not comrades!” 

Certainly, Nagy and other leaders at the time failed to fathom the basic thirst that lay at the core of the Hungarian revolutionaries’ demands. While they seemed content with liquidating the remnants of the Stalinist apparatus and bringing some semblance of independence and free market to the country, they ignored their own people’s overwhelming clamor for freedom and the end of Communist rule. This mistake proved to be fatal. 

Freedom of speech, freedom to worship and to travel; to engage in business and to elect a government that would not oppress them but represent them –such were the ideals that pushed thousands of Hungarians, some barely in their teens, to take up arms against one of the world’s most powerful armies. Perhaps a better connect with their leadership –or indeed, better leaders- could have achieved a different outcome. But other hurdles existed. 

For all their Cold War rhetoric, the US and its Western allies were reluctant to engage in any act that would mean pushing back the post-war European borders, as dictated in Yalta. The stakes were apparently too high in such a game, and the Suez Canal crisis was absorbing most of the world powers’ attention at the time. Even at the United Nations the events in Hungary were overshadowed by the prospects of a war involving Egypt, France, Great Britain and Israel in the Middle East. 

The Hungarians and their hesitant leaders were left, thus, at the mercy of a treacherous Soviet invasion. Incited by Radio Free Europe broadcasts, the freedom fighters resisted with the few weapons they had, but were crushed ruthlessly by Russian soldiers and tanks after November 3. The Soviets then installed a puppet regime whose head, Janos Kadar, had been a member of Nagy’s cabinet barely days before, and who ruled Hungary for many years to come. 

But the brutal suppression of revolt in Hungary did little to ward off the unrest that had taken hold in the Communist block, as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as well as the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981-1983, and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, clearly demonstrated. The thirst for freedom never died, and it was only partially quenched when the Soviet block ultimately collapsed. 

Thus, from a historical perspective, the Red Army only won a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets in Budapest. Freedom, it seems, is a basic human necessity, and those who cast their fate with servitude end up inevitably on the losing side.

Manuel Ballagas is a media consultant.

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