Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (65 page)

The same evening that Nagy made his historic announcement, János Kádár was secretly spirited away to Moscow, where Khrushchev convinced him of the need to form a new government in Budapest, with Soviet backing. The Red Army would come in and restore order in any case; the only question was which Hungarians would have the honour of collaborating with them. Any reluctance that Kádár may have felt about betraying Nagy and his fellow Hungarians was overcome by Khrushchev’s insistence that the Soviets now knew they had made a mistake when they installed Gerö in July. That error would not be repeated once order was restored in Budapest. Khrushchev then set off for Bucharest to meet Romanian, Bulgarian and Czech leaders and coordinate plans for intervention in Hungary (a lower-level delegation had met Polish leaders the previous day). Meanwhile Nagy continued to protest against the increased Soviet military activity; and on November 2nd he asked UN Secretary-General Dag Hammerskjöld to mediate between Hungary and the USSR, and seek Western recognition of Hungary’s neutrality.

The following day, November 3rd, the Nagy government opened (or thought it was opening) negotiations with the Soviet military authorities about the withdrawal of troops. But when the Hungarian negotiating team returned that evening to Soviet army headquarters at Tököl, in Hungary, they were immediately arrested. Shortly afterwards, at 4 a.m. on the morning of November 4th, Soviet tanks attacked Budapest, followed an hour later by a broadcast from Soviet-occupied eastern Hungary announcing the replacement of Imre Nagy by a new government. In response, Nagy himself made a final radio address to the Hungarian people, calling for resistance against the invader. Then he and his closest colleagues took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, where they were granted asylum.

The military outcome was never in question: despite intense resistance, Soviet forces took Budapest within seventy-two hours, and the government of János Kádár was sworn in on November 7th. Some Workers’ Councils survived for another month—Kádár preferring not to attack them directly—and sporadic strikes lasted into 1957: according to a confidential report submitted to the Soviet Central Committee on November 22nd 1956, Hungary’s coalmines had been reduced to working at 10 percent of capacity. But within a month the new authorities felt confident enough to take the initiative. On January 5th, the death penalty was established for ‘provocation to strike’ and repression began in earnest. In addition to around 2,700 Hungarians who died in the course of the fighting a further 341 were tried and executed in the years that followed (the last death sentence was carried out in 1961). Altogether, some 22,000 Hungarians were sentenced to prison (many for five years or more) for their role in the ‘counter revolution’. A further 13,000 were sent to internment camps and many more were dismissed from their jobs or placed under close surveillance until a general amnesty was declared in March 1963.

An estimated 200,000 people—over 2 percent of the population—fled Hungary in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation, most of them young and many from the educated professional élite of Budapest and the urbanized west of the country. They settled in the US (which took in some 80,000 Hungarian refugees), Austria, Britain, West Germany, Switzerland, France and many other places. For a while the fate of Nagy and his colleagues remained uncertain. After spending nearly three weeks in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest they were tricked into leaving on November 22nd, immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities, and abducted to prison in Romania.

It took Kádár many months to decide what to do with his erstwhile friends and comrades. Most of the reprisals against young workers and soldiers who had taken part in street fighting were kept as quiet as possible, to avoid arousing international protest; even so there were international demands for clemency in the case of a number of prominent figures, such as the writers József Gáli and Gyula Obersovszky. The fate of Nagy himself was an especially sensitive issue. In April 1957 Kádár and his colleagues decided to return Nagy and his ‘accomplices’ to Hungary to face trial, but the proceedings themselves were delayed until June 1958, and even then they were held in strict secrecy. On June 15th 1958, the accused were all found guilty of fomenting counter-revolution, and variously sentenced to death or long prison terms. The writers István Bibó and Árpád Göncz (future president of post-Communist Hungary) received life sentences. Two others—József Szilágyi and Géza Lozonczy—were killed in prison before their trial began. Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter and Miklós Gimes were executed at dawn on June 16th 1958.

The Hungarian uprising, a brief and hopeless revolt in a small outpost of the Soviet empire, had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. In the first place, it was an object lesson for Western diplomats. Until then the United States, while officially acknowledging the impossibility of detaching Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, continued to encourage the ‘spirit of resistance’ there. Covert actions and diplomatic support were directed, in the words of National Security Council Policy paper No. 174 (December 1953) to ‘fostering conditions which would make possible the liberation of the satellites at a favorable moment in the future.’

But, as a later confidential policy document, drawn up in July 1956 to take account of that year’s upheavals, was to emphasize, ‘the United States is not prepared to resort to war to eliminate Soviet domination of the satellites’ (NSC5608/1 ‘U.S. Policy toward the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe’).

Indeed, ever since the repression of the Berlin revolt in 1953, the State Department had concluded that the Soviet Union was, for the foreseeable future, in unshakeable control of its ‘zone’. ‘Non-intervention’ was the West’s
only
strategy for Eastern Europe. But the Hungarian rebels could not know this. Many of them sincerely hoped for Western assistance, encouraged by the uncompromising tone of American public rhetoric and by emissions from Radio Free Europe, whose émigré broadcasters encouraged Hungarians to take up arms and promised imminent foreign support. When no such backing was forthcoming, the defeated rebels were understandably embittered and disillusioned.

Even if Western governments had wished to do more, the circumstances of the moment were highly unpropitious. On the very day that the Hungarian revolt broke out, representatives of France and Britain were at Sèvres, in secret talks with the Israelis. France in particular was pre-occupied with its North African problems: as Christian Pineau, the Foreign Minister, explained on October 27th in a highly confidential memo to France’s representative on the UN Security Council, ‘It is essential that the draft resolution which will be put to the Security Council on the Hungarian question should not contain any disposition which may disturb our action in Algeria . . . We are particularly against the formation of a committee of inquiry. ’ The British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Eden in a similar vein four days later, in response to a suggestion from the British Ambassador to Moscow that London appeal directly to the Soviet leadership to desist from intervention in Hungary: ‘I do not myself think that this is a moment for such a message.’

As Khrushchev had explained to his Central Committee Presidium colleagues on October 28th, ‘the English and French are in a real mess in Egypt’.
¹¹³
As for Eisenhower, he was in the final week of an election campaign—the day of his re-election saw some of the heaviest fighting in Budapest. His National Security Council did not even discuss Hungary until three days after the Soviet invasion; they had been slow to take the full measure of Nagy’s actions, notably his abandonment of one-party rule, in a country of little significance for US grand strategy (the recent crisis in Poland had received far more attention in Washington). And when Hungary did appear on the NSC agenda, at a meeting on November 8th, the general consensus—from Eisenhower down—was that it was all the fault of the French and British. If they hadn’t invaded Egypt, the Soviet Union would not have had the cover to move against Hungary. The Eisenhower Administration had a clean conscience.

Soviet leaders, then, saw their advantage and seized it. In Communist eyes the real threat posed by Nagy was neither his liberalization of the economy nor the relaxation of censorship. Even the Hungarian declaration of neutrality, though it was regarded in Moscow as ‘provocative’, was not the occasion for Nagy’s downfall. What the Kremlin could not condone was the Hungarian Party’s abandonment of a monopoly of power, the ‘leading role of the Party’ (something Gomułka, in Poland, had taken care never to allow). Such a departure from Soviet practice was the thin edge of a democratic wedge that would spell doom for Communist parties everywhere. That is why the Communist leaders in every other satellite state went along so readily with Khrushchev’s decision to depose Nagy. When the Czechoslovak Politburo met on November 2nd and expressed its willingness to make an active contribution to ‘maintaining with every necessary measure the people’s democracy in Hungary’, the sentiment was unquestionably genuine and heartfelt.
¹¹⁴

Even Tito eventually conceded that the breakdown of Party control in Hungary, and the collapse of the state security apparatus, set a dangerous example. The Yugoslav leader had initially welcomed the changes in Hungary as further evidence of de-Stalinization. But by the end of October the course of events in Budapest was changing his mind—Hungary’s proximity to Yugoslavia, the presence of a large Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina region of his country, and the consequent risks of contagion were very much on his mind. When Khrushchev and Malenkov took the trouble, on November 2nd, to fly to Tito’s Adriatic island retreat and brief him on the coming invasion, Tito proved anxious but understanding. His main concern was that the puppet government to be installed in Hungary not include Rákosi and other unreconstructed Stalinists. On this score Khrushchev was happy to reassure him.

Khrushchev was distinctly less pleased when, just two days later, Tito granted asylum to Nagy, fifteen members of his government, and their families. The Yugoslav decision appears to have been made in the heat of the Hungarian crisis, and on the assumption that the Russians had no interest in making martyrs. But when the Soviet leaders expressed their displeasure, and especially following the abduction of Nagy and the others upon their departure from the Yugoslav Embassy with a promise of safe conduct from Kádár himself, Tito was placed in an uncomfortable position. In public the Yugoslav leader continued to express approval of Kádár’s new government; but unofficially he made no effort to hide his displeasure at the course of events.

The precedent of unconstrained Soviet interference in the affairs of a fraternal Communist state was not calculated to endear the Soviet leadership to the Yugoslavs. Relations between Moscow and Belgrade deteriorated once more, and the Yugoslav regime initiated overtures to the West and the non-aligned countries of Asia. Tito’s response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary was thus mixed. Like the Soviet leaders he was relieved at the restoration of Communist order; but the way in which it had been accomplished set a dangerous precedent and left a bad taste.

Elsewhere the response was altogether less ambivalent. Khrushchev’s secret speech, once it leaked out in the West, had marked the end of a certain Communist faith. But it also allowed for the possibility of post-Stalinist reform and renewal, and by sacrificing Stalin himself in order to preserve the illusion of Leninist revolutionary purity, Khrushchev had offered Party members and fellow-traveling progressives a myth to which they could cling. But the desperate street fighting in Budapest dispelled any illusions about this new, ‘reformed’ Soviet model. Once again, Communist authority had been unambiguously revealed to rest on nothing more than the barrel of a tank. The rest was dialectics. Western Communist parties started to hemorrhage. By the Italian Communist Party’s own count, some 400,000 members left between 1955 and 1957. As Togliatti had explained to the Soviet leaders at the height of the Hungarian crisis, ‘Hungarian events have developed in a way that renders our clarifying action in the party very difficult, it also makes it difficult to obtain consensus in favor of the leadership.’

In Italy, as in France, Britain and elsewhere, it was younger, educated Party members who left in droves.
¹¹⁵
Like non-Communist intellectuals of the Left, they had been attracted both to the promise of post-Stalin reforms in the USSR
and
to the Hungarian revolution itself, with its workers’ councils, student initiatives and the suggestion that even a ruling Soviet-bloc Party could adapt and welcome new directions. Hannah Arendt, for one, thought it was the rise of the councils (rather than Nagy’s restoration of political parties) that signified a genuine upsurge of democracy against dictatorship, of freedom against tyranny. Finally, as it seemed, it might be possible to speak of Communism and freedom in the same breath. As Jorge Semprun, then a young Spanish Communist working clandestinely in Paris, would later express it, ‘The secret speech released us; it gave us at least the chance to be freed from . . . the sleep of reason.’ After the invasion of Hungary, that moment of hope was gone.

A few Western observers tried to justify Soviet intervention, or at least explain it, by accepting the official Communist claim that Imre Nagy had led—or been swept up in—a
counter
-revolution: Sartre characteristically insisted that the Hungarianuprising had been marked by a ‘rightist spirit’. But whatever the motives of the insurgents in Budapest and elsewhere—and these were far more varied than was clear at the time—it was not the Hungarians’ revolt but rather the Soviet repression which made the greater impression on foreign observers. Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution. For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered.