In Europe (89 page)

‘In 1963 I asked Gomulka to release me from servitude. I went to school and studied mathematics and history, I've been a normal citizen for almost forty years now. My faith has changed to doubt. Let me tell you, my friend, politics is hard work. You must have a feeling for it, you must have a taste for it. I did it for years, but in the long run I don't really belong to that species.

‘When I was party overseer in Wroclaw, I used to spend whole evenings talking to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who became the first non-communist prime minister of Poland forty years later, the first one in an Eastern Bloc
country. He was a Catholic journalist and politician at the time, but we understood each other very well. He taught me that the word “religion” comes from “religio”, which means “to be attached”. You are religious if you feel attached, to the world, to people, to God. “You can't always believe,” he said. “But you can be bonded.”

‘I'm in my eighties now, and I've been an atheist all my life. But St Francis has always been very close to my heart. And he says the same thing: “That tree is my friend, that little dog is my friend.”

‘It's hard to understand everything that happens in your life. Sometimes my little dog understands better than I do.’

THE GRASS HAS BEEN MOWED. THE TREES ARE FULL OF RED APPLES.
A man and a woman trudge along the road carrying pitchforks. Beside the houses lie the piles of logs, neatly stacked for the winter, heavy with the scent of resin. On a hillside two men are ploughing; one of them is sitting on a bright red tractor, the other one is guiding the plough.

At the campsite where I am staying, close to the brand-spanking-new customs house on the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, almost everyone has left. The last few employees sit in the canteen at night, watching television. There's a film on: a girl is seduced by a fat old man, she goes with him to bars where the patrons speak only English, a former boyfriend tries to talk sense into her, she laughs in his face, the old man cheats on her and she becomes increasingly addicted to the foreigners’ lifestyle, until the ex-boyfriend …

Outside you hear only the crickets, the brook, an owl …

Budapest, after all this, is wild, footloose, careless, full of holes and dents and honking cars, not a museum or a display case but a living city. In Buda the cranes swing back and forth, in Pest one hears the chipping and chiselling of the stonemasons: like everywhere else in Central Europe, the building and the painting is going on here as though half a century must be made up for in five years.

The Monument to the Martyrs, the falling figure with which the Hungarian communists would later commemorate the 1956 uprising, has vanished from the city centre. The marble stairs lead nowhere. The former party headquarters has been taken over by the socialists, the building still hums with spirited discussions, with the sound of typing
and the murmur of meetings. The monument itself has been moved to the edge of town, to the place where statues from the olden days are sent to die, a walled place of exile specially built to house the former communist memorials. And there they are, indeed: the comrades joining hands, the leaders with spectacles and briefcases, the soldiers with flags and pistols, all those popularly edifying mothers, children, tractors, flowers and flames. At least half the statues have their hands raised to the sky: in this sad compound, a muffled ‘hurrah’ is always present in the background. It is not all ugly, by no means, some of the monuments are absolutely lovely, it's just that they bear the wrong names, the wrong slogans and the wrong symbols.

No one in Hungary saw 1956 coming. The little square where the young upstarts first gathered lies in the space between two highways along the Danube and is dominated by a statue of the revolutionary hero of 1848, the poet Sándor Petófi. The lawn at his feet is the perfect place for spontaneous, hit-and-run demonstrations, and that was their only intention on 23 October, 1956. Hungary, just like Poland, needed more freedom, and in the previous months a few hundred students had been meeting regularly in the university auditorium to talk. Now they had decided to organise a demonstration. But to everyone's surprise, huge crowds of young people from all over the city joined the usual group of students. They waved Polish and Hungarian flags, shouted ‘Long live the young people of Poland!’ and ‘We believe in Imre Nagy!’ The streets of Budapest were filled with a spirit of revival and adventure. Even students from the staunchly communist Lenin Institute came to the gathering, carrying red banners and a portrait of Lenin.

Rarely has a mass meeting got out of hand the way this one did. Soldiers from the barracks across the way unexpectedly joined the students. Because it was closing time at the factories, masses of workers came along as well. None of it had been planned. ‘To Stalin!’ someone shouted, and those who followed spent hours working with blowtorches, cables and a truck to topple the giant statue. ‘To the radio station!’ someone else cried, and the broadcasting centre was surrounded by thousands of people and finally occupied. The first shots rang out. In
ten hours the clock advanced from 1848 to 1956, that's how fast things went in Budapest.

In European history, 1956 was a pivotal year. It was the year of Khrushchev's Stalin speech, the year of open discussion in the Eastern Bloc, of unrest in Poland.

It was the year of the Suez Crisis, the fiasco for the British and the French who had worked with the Israelis on a joint colonial expedition against Egypt to secure passage through the Suez Canal, and who withdrew with their tails between their legs when the Americans threatened to cut their funding and undermine the British currency.

1956 was the also the year in which three pretty Muslim girls carried out the first attacks on the Milk-Bar, the Caféteria and the offices of Air France in Algiers, dragging France into a humiliating war in which more than half a million Frenchmen finally took part. It was the year in which Indonesia cut final ties with the Netherlands, in which the British sent the Greek-Cypriot leader Makarios into exile, in which the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro landed in Cuba to start a revolution. It was the year of the fairy-tale marriage between Prince Rainier of Monaco and the American film star Grace Kelly, and of Elvis Presley's breakthrough with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. And it was, above all, the year of the Hungarian uprising.

The images went all over the world, and for as long as the Cold War lasted the Hungarian rebellion was the symbol of the spirit of freedom against communist oppression. The truth was, as usual, much more complicated. After Stalin's fall from grace, the position of Hungarian leader Mátyás Rákosi, an old-school Stalinist, soon became untenable. He was replaced by an interim pope, but the man the Hungarians were really waiting for was the former president, Imre Nagy. ‘Uncle Imre’ was cut from the same cloth as Gomulka: a communist, a humanist and a patriot. He had actually taken part in the Russian Revolution and the civil war and had occupied a top position in the Comintern in Moscow for fifteen years. But all that work on behalf of the party had not, as his biographer Miklos Moln puts it, ‘succeeded in deadening the human essence within him, party politics did not make him forget “the ideal”.’ Yet he was also a loner, and a doubter. He lacked Gomulka's feeling for the masses, his toughness and vigour.

The Hungarian Revolution began in the central hall of Budapest's Technical University. From 1955, it was the site of increasingly frank discussions on all manner of political issues, and the movement gained momentum after Khrushchev's speech on Stalin. Some of the students devoured the works of Western writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, others experimented with modern music and painting. In spring 1956, László Rajk was posthumously rehabilitated. In September, the first issue of a new, fiercely oppositionist weekly,
Hétfõi Hírlap
(Monday News) appeared, which the Hungarians fairly tore from the news-stands. On Sunday, 6 October, Rajk was solemnly reinterred. What was intended as an intimate gathering developed into a spontaneous tumult in which 200,000 Hungarians took part. As one of the early dissenters later recalled: ‘That was the moment we all realised that our protest was not simply an affair for a few communist intellectuals. Everyone, it seemed, was turning against the government in the same way.’

In October, after Rajk's funeral and the successful rebellion in Poland, the students’ demands grew increasingly specific: democratic reforms had to be implemented in Hungary as well. Gomulka was their hero and Imre Nagy could play the same role in Hungary, although Nagy himself was not too enthusiastic about this. A demonstration was scheduled for Tuesday, 23 October, to underscore their ‘sixteen points’; the loyal party man Nagy was vehemently opposed. Later in the week, a huge conference was to be held, a kind of broad national debate about their demands. An armed rebellion was the furthest thing from their minds.

It was only on the evening of 23 October, when things truly got out of hand, that Nagy let himself be convinced by the Politburo to address the huge crowd in front of parliament. ‘Comrades!’ he began. ‘We are no longer comrades!’ the crowd roared back. The next morning he spoke of ‘hostile elements’ who had turned against the popular democracy. One week later he declared that the Hungarian people, by means of ‘a heroic struggle’, had achieved a centuries-old dream: independence and neutrality. He had become, despite himself, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution.

Later interviews showed that many students were deeply shocked by the way ‘their’ demonstration had degenerated into an uprising by roaming crowds ‘who acted like idiots’, incapable of ‘putting on the brakes
themselves’. Most of them realised from the start that this was bound to go wrong.

By the end of the week, fewer and fewer revolutionary students were to be found among those fighting in the streets. Most of the combatants were working youths, hoodlums and vandals, tough kids from the poorest neighbourhoods of Budapest. A Hungarian doctor, who treated many of the wounded, said later: ‘There were many fighters who … had never even heard of Gomulka, and who, when asked why they were risking their lives, answered by saying, “Well, what good is living for 600 forints a month?”’ One of the rebellious students said later: ‘It's painful to admit, but it's true: they were the real heroes.’

On Wednesday morning, 24 October, long columns of rapidly assembled Soviet troops came rolling into the city. Barricades were thrown up, the tanks could go no further, and skirmishes broke out here and there. Regular discussions also arose between the tank crews and Hungarian civilians. More than once during those first days, a Russian commander announced that he had been sent to free the city from ‘fascist bandits’ but that he had absolutely no intention of firing on these peaceful crowds. Such declarations were greeted with loud cheers, the Russians were embraced, Hungarian flags were spread across the tanks. One Hungarian tank commander, the former communist partisan Pál Maléter, who had been ordered to use his five tanks to break through to a prison besieged by the crowd, openly took sides with the people and let the prisoners go free; he became one of the great leaders of the Hungarian revolt.

When several other such instances of fraternisation took place around the Astoria Hotel, the rumour started that the Soviet troops had taken sides with the revolution as well. But a wild shoot-out in front of parliament, probably instigated by the Hungarian secret police, soon put an end to any such illusions. Everywhere in the city after that, tanks were attacked with Molotov cocktails and the brashest among the young rioters even climbed onto them and tossed grenades straight down the turrets.

When Noel Barber, correspondent for the
Daily Mail
, drove into the city on Friday, 26 October, he saw torn-up streets and burned-out cars everywhere.‘Even before I reached the Duna Hotel, I counted the carcasses
of at least forty Soviet tanks … At the corner of Stalin Avenue … two monster Russian T-54 tanks lumbered past, dragging bodies behind them, a warning to all Hungarians of what happened to the fighters. In another street, three bodies were strung up in a tree, the necks at ungainly angles, looking not so much like bodies, more like effigies.’

The day before, Imre Nagy had been appointed prime minister of Hungary with Moscow's approval. Khrushchev's wager was that things would then go more or less the way they had in Poland: Nagy's popularity would soon stifle the uprising, the communist regime would remain firmly in place. But there was one important difference: Hungary was not Poland. Where Gomulka stopped, Nagy continued: he let himself be carried away by the mood in the streets, in his speeches he demanded neutral status for Hungary and called for withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Meanwhile the rebellion spread across the country, prisons were stormed, factories were shut down by strikes, there was fighting everywhere.

On Tuesday, 30 October, after a shooting incident, an angry crowd besieged the main headquarters of the Communist Party. The army was called in, but the tank crews turned their guns and began firing on the party offices instead. When party secretary Imre Mezó stepped outside waving a white flag, he was shot down. Then the building was stormed. In the crowd that day was György Konrád, twenty-three at the time and just finished at university. He told me how he saw secret police officers hung up by their feet. ‘They had probably been tortured beforehand, because they were no longer wearing shirts. The people spat on them. An older man in an expensive-looking coat said: “Shame on you, the Russians have done a great deal for all of you.” He was hanged as well. The scene made me very uneasy.’

Later, rumours began circulating about secret prison cells beneath the square, and people even claimed to have heard the sounds of tapping. Excavating machines were brought in and a huge hole was dug in the middle of the square. The crowd watched breathlessly. No one seemed to have the slightest idea that anything else was going on in the world around them.

In Moscow, however, as we now know, there was a strong inclination to let Hungary go. The Russians’ greatest fear was that the revolt would
spread to Bucharest, Prague and Berlin. ‘Budapest was an enormous headache,’ Khrushchev wrote later. He told the Politburo: ‘There are two paths: a military path of occupation, and a path of peace; the withdrawal of troops, negotiations.’ Marshal Zhukov – in his brief role as minister of defence at the time – advocated withdrawing all troops from Hungary. Central-committee member Yekaterina Furtseva said this was a lesson in military politics for the Soviet Union: ‘We must look for different kinds of relationships with the popular democracies.’