Revolution!
The Hungarian uprising 50 years later; how it changed the Cold War
Nixon and Dulles would not have long to wait. On the afternoon of October 23, Mihaly Nagy left his job as a chemical technician at a Budapest porcelain factory to join a crowd of thousands in the Budapest City Park. An hour later, he and his fellow demonstrators would be dragging Stalin's bronze body parts through the streets. "In those days, we each had two faces: One face we wore on the outside for the state to see, and everyone knew it was a false face," Nagy says. "At the demonstration, we all saw that what the other man really had on his mind was exactly the same." Thousands of others were coming to the same realization as they cut the hated hammer and sickle from the Hungarian flag.
Reluctant rebel. That evening, in front of the Parliament building, 200,000 demonstrators began calling for Imre Nagy to return to lead the government. Imre Laszlo Toth, a leader of the revolution, remembers how the reluctant, bespectacled Nagy "looked like he had a gun at his back" when he finally came to a balcony to speak. "Comrades," Nagy began hesitantly. The incensed crowd shouted him down for using the Soviet term. "Fellow Hungarians ..." he corrected himself, appealing to nationalism more than communism in his futile calls for peace. Meanwhile, the hard-line Hungarian government took to the state-run radio station, branding the demonstrators hooligans and fascists.
The crowd had run out of patience. Just after Nagy's speech, thousands stormed the narrow cobblestone street leading to the radio station, demanding that their 16 Points be broadcast. In response, the secret police sprayed Kalashnikov bullets into the crowd. At that point, according to Toth, "we all said, 'That's enough.' And when 100,000 people think that at the same time, it's a revolution."
Charles Gati, the author of Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, was at the radio station on October 23 and watched the revolt unfold. "Witnessing the first shots at the radio station, I did not understand what was going on," says Gati, now a senior adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. "It took me another day or two to begin to sense something that was both curious and confusing: that the movement for the reform of the system was being pursued simultaneously with a revolution against it." Indeed, the revolt now seems far more complicated than a smothered struggle for democracy. In fact, only some of the participants were fighting for democracy; others simply wanted changes to the government already in place.
For 12 days, Hungarians fought the Soviets in ferocious street battles as Imre Nagy and the revolutionary government appealed for international assistance. But when Soviet tanks surrounded Budapest on November 4, even the most committed fighters knew that the end was near. Imre Nagy and his government fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy only moments before Toth arrived at Parliament. When Toth arrived, fellow revolutionaries gave him an audiotape of Nagy's final radio message. "In the early hours of the morning," Nagy announced, "the Soviet troops launched an attack against our capital city with the obvious intention of overthrowing the lawful, democratic Hungarian government. Our troops are fighting. The government is in its place." Toth knew that he had to get the message more widely broadcast. There was a secret government transmitter about 30 miles outside Budapest, capable of international broadcasts. But the Red Army had cut off all routes of escape. So his clever driver placed two small American flag pennants on the hood of the limo as they sped toward the Soviet lines, hoping to make it to the transmitter before the final assault began.
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