The Red Flag: A History of Communism (62 page)

Hungary was less fortunate because the party was more divided. Hard-liners had more influence, convinced by the failures of 1919 that only harsh, Stalinist methods could break the reactionary classes. The reformist Communists, unlike their Polish comrades, therefore did not have the power to defuse popular discontent. Khrushchev forced Rákosi to resign in July 1956, but imposed another leader with hard-line connections, Ernö Gerö. Unrest continued, and on 23 October demonstrating workers raided the civil defence weapons stores in their factories. Gerö panicked, and Soviet troops were called in, which only stoked the unrest. The Communist power structure, highly divided, disintegrated within a few days; revolutionary committees and worker councils filled the vacuum. Gerö tried to recover the situation by appointing Nagy as Prime Minister but it was too late. Nagy could no more control the popular anger than Gerö; if he was to stay on the crest of the revolutionary wave he had to become ever more radical.

Delacroix would have recognized the Budapest of October 1956. As Miklós Molnár, a Communist and participant in the Hungarian Uprising, has written, this was ‘perhaps the last of the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Europe will probably never see again this familiar and romantic picture of the rebel, gun in hand, cries of freedom on his lips, fighting for something.’
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Hungary’s was a genuinely spontaneous, cross-class revolution; it included many different political strands, from radical left to radical right. There was no time to develop a coherent programme. Initially, the rebels had no plans to destroy one-party rule but only to modify it; to transform an austere, unforgiving and imperial socialism into a more humane and national one. The rebels’ first manifesto of 23 October even adopted the rhetoric of Leninism to condemn the current regime. Béla Kovács, a former chair of the old peasant Small-holder Party, urged that the changes of 1945–8 be preserved: ‘no one should dream of the old order. The world of counts, bankers and capitalists is gone for good; anyone who sees things now as if it were 1939 or 1945 is no authentic Smallholder.’
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Doubtless, had the insurgents actually formed a government, tensions between democratic socialists and nationalists would have surfaced rapidly.

The Hungarian events could not have been more painful for Khrushchev. ‘Budapest was like a nail in my head,’ he remembered.
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Intent on transforming Stalin’s empire into a fraternity of nations, he now had to make a stark choice between brutal imperialism and humiliating retreat. The choice was made all the more embarrassing because simultaneously the old colonial powers, Britain and France, were secretly helping Israel against Nasser in Egypt, in their ill-fated attempt to restore neo-imperial influence in the Middle East. On 30 October the Presidium took an extraordinary decision: to accept that Hungary could go its own way; they would rule out force, withdraw troops and negotiate.
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But this idealistic line lasted for precisely one day. As the Presidium met, violence on both sides in Hungary was escalating. Nagy could no longer channel popular resentment into reformist Communism and had bowed to popular pressure, calling for the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and the creation of a multi-party Popular Front government. From Moscow’s point of view there was now a real risk of revolutionary contagion. Disturbances broke out throughout the region, and Romania closed its border with Hungary as students from its Hungarian minority demonstrated in Transylvania. Khrushchev was terrified that the West would intervene; his whole reforming project would collapse and the Stalinist hard-liners would have been proved right.
According to one witness, Khrushchev told Tito that people would say ‘when Stalin was in command everybody obeyed and there were no big shocks, but that now, ever since
they
had come to power… Russia had suffered defeat and the loss of Hungary.’
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On 31 October, Khrushchev reversed his earlier decision. János Kádár, a reformist who had been imprisoned by the Stalinists, was taken to Moscow and persuaded to return to Hungary with Soviet tanks, on condition that there would be no return to the old order once the rebellion had been put down. On 4 November Warsaw Pact forces entered Hungary and Nagy fled to the Yugoslav embassy. Resistance was heavy. By the 7th – the thirty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution – Kádár had established his new regime after some 2,700 had died in the fighting. Repression was harsh. Twenty-two thousand were sentenced, 13,000 imprisoned, about 350 executed, most of them young workers. Some 200,000 managed to escape to the West.
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Nagy was not so lucky. He was tricked into leaving the Yugoslav embassy and arrested, imprisoned and finally executed in 1958.

Nineteen fifty-six devastated the reputation of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe; harsh repression of workers’ councils and revolutionary committees looked like counter-revolution, not progress. For many East Europeans, Russia and its satellites seemed the very reincarnation of the reactionary post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance.

Nineteen fifty-six was also damaging for Communism in Western Europe. Khrushchev looked like an ageing imperialist, not that different from the Socialist French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and his Conservative British counterpart Anthony Eden, who had invaded Egypt at the same time. The Hungarian invasion triggered mass defections in all parties. The Italian Communist Party lost 10 per cent of its membership and Eric Hobsbawm, who remained a Communist after 1956, remembered how difficult it was to deal with the reality of Soviet violence, both past and present. He and his fellow party members ‘lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown’:

The party that had the greatest difficulty, though, was the one most closely identified with High Stalinism – the French. Maurice Thorez did his best to limit the effect of the Secret Speech. He had, in fact, been shown it before it was delivered but kept its contents secret; when it was published five months later he even denied its authenticity. The French party was eventually forced to accept that Stalin had made errors, but insisted that he had also achieved much. The term ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’ was abandoned, redolent as it was of Stalin’s cult of personality, but Communist leaders supported the invasion of Hungary, precipitating the defection of Sartre and other intellectuals. The French party remained workerist, loyal to the USSR and relatively closed, though it did make some concessions, finally accepting that a ‘peaceful transition to socialism’ was possible. Thorez even moved towards a form of alliance with the Socialists, and on his death in 1964, Waldeck Rochet established a much more consensual leadership style. By 1968, the party’s membership was creeping up again, to 350,000.

Italy’s Togliatti, predictably, had a very different response to de-Stalinization. He welcomed Khrushchev’s speech, and indeed went further in his critique (though he still supported the Hungarian invasion). The Soviet model, he declared, was no longer to be obligatory; the Communist world should become ‘polycentric’ – allowing a number of diverse approaches to Communism. The denunciation of Stalin in 1956 weakened the hard-liners, but Togliatti now had to hold the ring between reformists surrounding Giorgio Amendola, who called for the party to forge alliances with the socialists, and a left-wing associated with Pietro Ingrao that favoured a more populist and radical politics. Both sides were demanding a more inclusive party, but this tension, between a more pragmatic, parliamentary road, and a more radical, participatory Marxism, was to divide the party for some time to come.

The party retained a large membership, and its culture remained vibrant and relatively inclusive at a local level. At its heart lay the ‘festival’
(
festa
). Initiated to finance and distribute the party newspaper,
L’Unità
, the
feste de l’Unità
were modelled on the church
feste
and competed with them, as a boastful Communist pamphlet from the Bologna region makes clear:

The Communist festivals were a mixture of community bonding, entertainment and politics, in that order. They would begin with a procession, the people bearing red flags and banners rather than statues of the Virgin. They would then enter the site of the
festa
, filled with propaganda stalls and posters on the struggle for justice, in Italy and internationally. But at its centre would be long tables laden with local food and drink, cooked by the comrades (both women and men). To add to the egalitarian atmosphere, party bosses would serve ordinary members at table.
⁴⁹

The
feste
reinforced the bonds of community, and Italian Communism was expert at making itself the centre of working-class and peasant neighbourhoods. In some areas, such as Emilia-Romagna in central Italy, a very high proportion of the adult population joined the party. This was far from the Leninist party – a vanguard committed to ideology and revolution. One joined the party to indicate broadly defined socialist values, and because your friends and neighbours were also members. The party might also be able to help out with housing and welfare. The Italian party had similarities with the nineteenth-century German Social Democrats: excluded from power at the top (though not in local councils), it abandoned revolutionary goals, and created its own cultural world.

Even so, from the 1950s economic change began to erode the party’s support, which had hitherto relied on traditional impoverished groups such as Central Italian sharecroppers.
⁵⁰
Its culture also came under assault from a new consumerism, and it did not always respond well to the challenge. Togliatti had concentrated on securing high cultural prestige and winning over intellectuals, and the Communists were less willing to make concessions to popular culture than their rival Catholics.
So, whilst they did organize a series of beauty contests for the coveted title of ‘Miss New Life’ (
Miss Vie Nuove
), their contest was less popular than the Church’s. Communist intellectuals were unable to hide their suspicion of consumerism and popular music, raging, for instance, against the music of Elvis Presley and the ‘hysteria and paroxism’ it allegedly caused.
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Despite the events of 1956, both the French and Italian Communist parties remained powerful political forces. In France, the mass of the membership seemed unperturbed by Hungary, and in Italy membership remained above 2 million for much of the Cold War era, with a youth wing of some 400,000. In the Eastern bloc, too, the violence of that year if anything stabilized politics, and led to a more viable
modus vivendi
between Communist regimes and society over the next decade. Most East European governments established a more liberal, less austere form of Communism from the late 1950s, and after a period of repression Hungary itself was to become one of the most relaxed countries in the bloc. For their part, potential rebels in Eastern Europe realized they had to make the best of the situation. American covert actions before 1956 had encouraged some to believe that they might intervene, but their refusal to do so in that year showed there was no real plan to ‘roll back’ Communism. The lake had refrozen and the cracks could no longer be seen, but the ice would never again be so thick.

Eastern Europe was the first region to be ‘stabilized’ after the revolutionary period that followed Stalin’s death. Yet it was some time before the turbulence in the USSR itself was to come to an end. The forces Khrushchev unleashed in Eastern Europe were so powerful he had to use violence to suppress them. But he had barely started his project to transform the Soviet Union.

On 13 May 1957, Khrushchev attended a day-long discussion of Soviet writing at the Writers’ Union – a sign of the extraordinary seriousness with which the party treated literature. A number of novels, including Vladimir Dudintsev’s
Not by Bread Alone
of 1956, had elicited vicious attacks from influential Stalinists. The writers listened in trepidation, not knowing which side the leader would take. They were to be disappointed. Khrushchev gave a typically rambling two-hour-long speech, which descended into farce when an elderly Armenian writer interrupted to complain about the shortage of meat in her homeland. Yet the message of the speech was clear: Dudintsev and other writers had been taking their criticism of Stalin too far. It was evident that Khrushchev had not read the book, but had been briefed on it by conservative advisers. Mikoian tried to convince him that Dudintsev was actually on Khrushchev’s side, but failed. He stuck to the view that the novel was slandering the Soviet system. But within two years he had changed his mind; though still critical of the novel, he now declared that it was, nevertheless, ideologically acceptable.
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