HUNGARY: Painful Memories Arise, 50 Years Later

By Zoltán Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Oct 23 2006 (IPS) - Fifty years after a spontaneous student demonstration against the communist regime sparked what came to be known as the last armed revolution in Europe, Hungary confronts traces of an old divide.

The discomfort marked events to recall that revolution 50 years back that was crushed by Soviet armed intervention. Thousands of civilians loss their lives, an estimated 200,000 sought exile in the West..

On Oct. 23 1956 a group of about 50,000 students demonstrated to express solidarity with anti-Soviet demonstrations in Poland and to demand political reforms. Many others joined the students. The message became clear when angry crowds toppled a statue of Stalin.

Demonstrators then moved to the Hungarian Radio headquarters to have their demands read, but secret police agents fired into the crowd, and violence escalated.

Edit was among the students who demonstrated. “I remember being in a crowd when a truck filled with youngsters gesticulating nervously approached us,” she told IPS. “They started screaming (that) they are massacring the students at the radio, that we have to defend ourselves, we need to get weapons.”

A day later, popular armed revolt spread throughout the country, aimed against the secret police and Russian soldiers stationed in Hungary. Many communists and soldiers joined the revolutionaries.

Reform-minded communist Imre Nagy was named prime minister that day of a multi-party government, and he announced plans to hold free elections and to open up the economy.

Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union at the time, initially opposed intervention as it had been his de-Stalinisation policies that encouraged reforms in the near abroad, but pressure from Soviet hardliners led to a change of heart.

Most observers agree that the turning point was Hungary’s announcement that it was embracing neutrality and retracting from the Warsaw Pact, a move that the Soviets feared could encourage other communist states to break away from the Warsaw Pact of Soviet allies.

On Nov. 4 Soviet tanks entered Hungary, crushed the revolution and took Imre Nagy to Moscow, where he was later executed.

Russia, through former President Boris Yeltsin, has apologised for the events, taking distance from the Soviet Union’s actions. That, and time, has brought some peace with Russia.

“Relations with Russia are good, our problem was with the Soviet Union, and the Russians nowadays take distance from them,” Szabolcs Szerdahelyi, president of the non-governmental organisation Deport-56 that tracked the events and their aftermath told IPS..

Some anti-Russian feelings persist in sections of the population, but many are also disappointed over the West’s inaction at the time, and its moves to nurture fake hopes among Hungarians.

“As was confirmed by various documents, America did not and was not planning to support us, while at the same time Radio Free Europe was radicalising the uprising by encouraging Hungarians to stay on the streets,” Szerdahelyi said.

Szerdahelyi says the United States, at the time busy with the Suez Canal crisis, may have had its reasons for not intervening, “such as avoiding a World War III.” But he says that at least “an apology by the U.S. President for America’s failure to assist Hungary was expected.”

Hungary’s failed revolution was through the following decades described in official discourse as a “counter-revolution”. In Western communist parties there was serious dissent how to interpret the Hungarian revolt.

The events have left a legacy of division. Left and right are still incapable of holding celebrations together. Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom warned in an address to the nation that “the memory of 1956 cannot rest on two traditions which are contradictory and mutually exclusive.”

The Hungarian left sees the revolution as an attempt to reform socialism, whereas for the right the date marks yet another struggle in Hungarian history to achieve independence and freedom.

Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány has been under attack from the right after one of his private speeches was leaked to the press. In it, he admitted having lied about the state of the economy to obtain re-election.

The speech caused furore, and Budapest witnessed the worst riots since 1956, but Gyurcsány won a confidence vote in Parliament and retained his seat..

The square in front of the Hungarian parliament, where official ceremonies with many high-ranking international figures took place, has seen daily demonstrations by protesters from the right over recent weeks to demand resignation of the Prime Minister.