That, certainly, is how Soviet leaders saw the matter. Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov and three other senior figures flew to Warsaw on October 19th, intending to block Gomułka’s appointment, forbid the ouster of Rokossowski and restore order in Poland. To ensure that their intentions were clear, Khrushchev simultaneously instructed a brigade of Soviet tanks to move towards Warsaw. But in heated discussions with Gomułka himself, conducted in part on the airport tarmac, Khrushchev concluded that Soviet interests in Poland might be best served by accepting the new situation in the Polish Party, rather than forcing matters to a head and almost certainly provoking violent confrontations. Gomułka, in return, assured the Russians that he could restore control and had no intention of abandoning power, taking Poland out of the Warsaw Pact, or demanding that Soviet troops leave his country.
Considering the disproportion in power between Khrushchev and Gomułka, the new Polish leader’s success in averting a catastrophe for his country was remarkable. But Khrushchev had read his interlocutor well—as he explained to the Soviet Politburo upon his return to Moscow the following day, the Soviet Ambassador in Warsaw, Ponomarenko, had been ‘grossly mistaken in his assessment of Gomułka’. The price of Communist control in Poland might be some personnel changes and liberalization of public life, but Gomułka was a sound Party man and had no intention of abandoning power to the streets or to the Party’s opponents. He was also a realist: if
he
could not calm Poland’s turbulence, the alternative was the Red Army. De-Stalinization, as Gomułka appreciated, did not mean that Khrushchev planned to relinquish any of the Soviet Union’s territorial influence or political monopoly.
The ‘Polish October’, then, had a fortuitously benign outcome—few at the time knew just how close Warsaw had come to a second Soviet occupation. In Hungary, however, things were to take a different turn. This was not immediately obvious. As early as July 1953 the Hungarian Stalinist leadership had been replaced (at Moscow’s initiative) with a reform-minded Communist, Imre Nagy. Nagy, like Gomułka, had been purged and imprisoned in earlier days and thus carried little responsibility for the season of terror and misgovernment through which his country had just passed; indeed, his first act as Party leader was to present, with Beria’s backing, a programme of liberalizations. Internment and labor camps were to be closed, peasants were to be permitted to leave kolkhozes if they wished. In general agriculture was to get more encouragement, and unrealistic industrial targets were abandoned: in the characteristically veiled language of a confidential Hungarian Party resolution of June 28th 1953, ‘[t]he false economic policy revealed a certain boastfulness as well as risk-taking, in so far as the forced development of heavy industry presupposed resources and raw materials that were in part just not available.’
Nagy was certainly not a conventional option, from Moscow’s point of view. In September 1949 he had been critical of the ultra-Stalinist line of Mátyás Rákosi and was one of only two Hungarian Politburo members who had opposed the execution of László Rajk. This, together with his criticisms of rural collectivization, had led to his expulsion from the Party leadership and a public ‘self-criticism’, in which Nagy conceded his ‘opportunist attitude’ and his failure to stay close to the Party line. But he was nonetheless a logical choice, once the time came to make changes in a country whose political elite, like its economy, had been ravaged by Stalinist excesses. Under Rákosi some 480 public figures had been executed between 1948 and 1953—not including Rajk and other Communist victims; and over 150,000 people (in a population of less than 9 million) had been imprisoned in those same years.
Nagy remained in office until the spring of 1955. At that time Rákosi and other Hungarian Party stalwarts, who had been working to undermine their troublesome colleague ever since his return to office, succeeded in convincing Moscow that he could not be counted on to maintain firm control, at a moment when the Soviet Union was facing the threat of an expanded NATO and neighboring Austria was about to become an independent, neutral state. The Soviet Central Committee duly condemned Nagy’s ‘rightist deviations’, he was removed from office (and later expelled from the Party), and Rákosi and his friends returned to power in Budapest. This retreat from reform, just eight months before Khrushchev’s speech, illustrates in anticipation how little the Soviet leader planned, when dismantling Stalin’s reputation, to disrupt the smooth exercise of Communist power.
For a year or so the unofficial ‘Nagy group’ in the Hungarian Party functioned as a sort of informal ‘reform’ opposition, the first such in post-war Communism. Meanwhile, it was Rákosi’s turn to attract the unfavorable attention of Moscow. Khrushchev, as we have seen, was keen to rebuild Soviet links to Yugoslavia. But in the course of the anti-Tito hysteria of earlier days Rákosi had played a particularly prominent role. It was not by chance that the accusation of ‘Tito-ism’ had figured so prominently in the Hungarian show trials, above all in the trial of Rajk himself—the Hungarian Party had been assigned the role of prosecutor in these developments and the Party’s leadership had carried out their task with enthusiasm.
Rákosi, then, was becoming an embarrassment, an anachronistic impediment to Soviet projects. With high-level Soviet-Yugoslav negotiations taking place in Moscow in June 1956, it seemed unnecessarily provocative to maintain in power in Budapest an unreconstructed Stalinist so closely associated with the bad old days—the more so as his past record and present intransigence were beginning to provoke public protests in Hungary. Despite Rákosi’s best efforts—in March 1956 he contributed to the Hungarian newspaper
Szabad Nép
an enthusiastic denunciation of Beria and his Hungarian police lieutenant Gábor Péter, closely echoing Khrushchev’s denunciation of the ‘personality cult’ and celebrating the ‘unmasking’ of such men for their criminal persecution of the innocent—his time was past. On July 17th 1956 Anastas Mikoyan flew into Budapest and unceremoniously removed Rákosi from office, for the last time.
In Rákosi’s place the Soviets promoted Ernö Gerö, another Hungarian of impeccably Stalinist pedigree. This proved a mistake; Gerö could neither lead change nor suppress it. On October 6th, as a gesture to Belgrade especially, the authorities in Budapest permitted the public reburial of László Rajk and his fellow show-trial victims. Béla Szász, one of the survivors of the Rajk trial, spoke at the graveside:
Executed as a result of trumped up charges, László Rajk’s remains rested for seven years in an unmarked grave. Yet his death has become a warning signal for the Hungarian people and for the whole world. For the hundreds of thouands who pass by this coffin desire to honor not only the dead man; it is their passionate hope and their firm resolve to bury an entire epoch. The lawlessness, arbitrariness and moral decay of those shameless years must be buried forever; and the danger posed by Hungarian practitioners of rule by force and of the personality cult must be banned forever.
There was a certain irony in the sympathy now aroused by the fate of Rajk, a man who had himself sent so many innocent (non-Communist) victims to the gallows. But ironic or not, the reburial of Rajk provided the spark that was to ignite the Hungarian revolution.
On October 16th 1956, university students in the provincial city of Szeged organized themselves into a ‘League of Hungarian Students’, independent of the official Communist student organizations. Within a week, student organizations had sprung up all across the country, culminating on October 22nd with a ‘Sixteen Point’ manifesto formulated by the students of the Technical University in Budapest itself. The student demands encompassed industrial and agrarian reforms, greater democracy and the right to free speech, and an end to the manifold petty restrictions and regulations of life under Communist rule. But they also included, more ominously, the desire to see Imre Nagy installed as prime minister, Rákosi and his colleagues tried for their crimes, and Soviet troops withdrawn from their country.
The following day, October 23rd, students began to assemble in Budapest’s Parliament Square to demonstrate in support of their demands. The regime was at a loss how to respond: Gerö first prohibited and then permitted the demonstration. After it went ahead that same afternoon, Gerö proceeded to denounce the meeting and its organizers in a speech broadcast by Hungarian radio that evening. An hour later enraged demonstrators tore down the statue of Stalin in the center of the city, Soviet troops entered Budapest to attack the crowds, and the Hungarian Central Committee met through the night. The following morning, at 8.13 a.m., it was announced that Imre Nagy had been installed as Prime Minister of Hungary.
If the Party leaders hoped that the return of Nagy would put an end to the revolution, they miscalculated badly. Nagy himself was certainly keen enough to restore order: he declared martial law within an hour of assuming power. In talks with Suslov and Mikoyan (who arrived by plane from Moscow that same day), he and the other members of the new Hungarian leadership insisted on the need to negotiate with the demonstrators. As the Russians reported back to a special meeting of the Soviet Party Presidium on October 26th, János Kádár
112
had explained to them that it was possible and important to distinguish between the loyal masses, who had been alienated from the Party by its past mistakes, and the armed counter-revolutionaries whom the Nagy government hoped to isolate.
Kádár’s distinction may have convinced some of the Soviet leaders, but it did not reflect Hungarian reality. Student organizations, workers’ councils and revolutionary ‘national committees’ were spontaneously forming all over the country. Clashes between police and demonstrators provoked counter-attacks and lynchings. Against the advice of some of its members, the Hungarian Party leadership initially refused to recognize the uprising as a democratic revolution, insisting instead on regarding it as a ‘counterrevolution’, and thereby missing the occasion to co-opt it. Only on October 28th, nearly a week after the initial demonstrations, did Nagy go on the radio to propose a truce in the armed clashes, acknowledge the legitimacy and revolutionary character of recent protests, promise to abolish the despisedSecret Police, and announce the impending departure of Soviet troops from Budapest.
The Soviet leadership, whatever their doubts, had decided to endorse the new approach of the Hungarian leader. Suslov, reporting back on the day of Nagy’s radio address, presented the new concessions as the price to be paid for bringing the mass movement under Party control. But events in Hungary were outpacing Moscow’s calculations. Two days later, on October 30th, following attacks on the Communist Party’s Budapest headquarters and the death of twenty-four of the building’s defenders, Imre Nagy again went on Hungarian radio. This time he announced that his government would henceforth be based ‘on democratic cooperation between the coalition parties, reborn in 1945.’ In other words, Nagy was forming a multi-party government. Far from confronting the opposition, Nagy was now basing his authority increasingly on the popular movement itself. In his final sentence, celebrating a ‘free, democratic and independent’ Hungary, he even omitted, for the first time, the discredited adjective ‘socialist’. And he appealed publicly to Moscow ‘to begin the withdrawal of Soviet troops’, from Budapest and the rest of Hungary as well.
Nagy’s gamble—his sincere belief that he could restore order in Hungary, and thus stave off the unspoken threat of Soviet intervention—was supported by the other Communists in his Cabinet. But he had relinquished the initiative. Popular insurrectionary committees, political parties and newspapers had sprung up all over the country. Anti-Russian sentiment was everywhere, with frequent references to the Imperial Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1848-49. And, most important of all, the Soviet leaders were losing confidence in him. By the time Nagy announced, on the afternoon of October 31st, that he was beginning negotiations to secure Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, his fate was probably sealed.
Khrushchev and his colleagues had always taken the view that, in Hungary—as earlier in Poland—they would have to intervene if the ‘counterrevolution’ got out of control. But they appear to have been initially reluctant to pursue this option. As late as October 31st the Presidium of the Central Committee put out a statement declaring its willingness ‘to enter into the appropriate negotiations’ with the Hungarian leadership regarding the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungarian territory. But even as they made this concession they were getting reports of student demonstrations in Timişoara (Romania) and of ‘hostile sentiments’ among Bulgarian intellectuals sympathetic to the Hungarian revolutionaries. This was beginning to sound like the start of the contamination effect that the Soviet leaders had long feared, and it prompted them to adopt a new approach.
Accordingly, the day after it had promised to negotiate troop withdrawals, the Soviet Presidium was advised by Khrushchev that this was now out of the question. ‘The imperialists’ would interpret such a withdrawal as evidence of Soviet weakness. On the contrary, the USSR would now have ‘to take the initiative in restoring order in Hungary’. Soviet army divisions in Romania and Ukraine were duly ordered to move towards the Hungarian border. On learning of this, the Hungarian Prime Minister summoned the Soviet Ambassador (Yuri Andropov) and informed him that in protest against the renewed Soviet troop movements, Hungary was unilaterally renouncing its membership in the Warsaw Pact. That evening, at 7.50 p.m. on November 1st, Nagy announced on the radio that Hungary was henceforth a neutral country and asked that the UN recognize its new status. This declaration was widely approved in the country; the Workers’ Councils of Budapest, who had been on strike since the revolt began, responded by calling for a return to work. Nagy had finally won over most of those in Hungary who had been suspicious of his intentions.