Revolution!
The Hungarian uprising 50 years later; how it changed the Cold War
While food shortages and state-sponsored violence alone were enough to push the Hungarians to violence, westerners looked also to themselves. "Feelings of collective western guilt developed," says A. Ross Johnson, a historian and former executive with Radio Free Europe, "along with a search for scapegoats." Chief among them was RFE itself. One of the most successful of the psychological warfare operations, the CIA-funded network did much to keep hope alive behind the Iron Curtain. According to refugees' surveys, up to 80 percent of the Hungarian population regularly listened to it despite Soviet jamming. Yet, regrettably, says Johnson, the network relied heavily on fiercely anti-Communist westerners and like-minded ÃÂÃÂÃÂémigrÃÂÃÂÃÂés who sometimes spoke to their compatriots in overly militant tones. "Oversight, in the case of Hungary," he says, "was poor."
Later investigations of RFE scripts during the revolution stopped short of finding that RFE had incited the revolt, but the broadcasts clearly encouraged the doomed fighters. Bela Kiraly, the commander of the revolutionary forces, remembers an RFE announcer appealing to him by name as he was fleeing the country with his remaining troops. "Bela Kiraly, you are the hope of a free Hungary," the voice said, recalls the 94-year-old general. "The broadcast told me to fight to the death." The broadcasts even went so far as to imply that western aid might be forthcoming, when, in fact, none was ever contemplated.
Bomb-making 101. The reckless tone of the broadcasts suggests that RFE didn't fully appreciate its power. Near the peak of the revolt on October 28, for instance, a "military history" program described how Soviet tanks could best be attacked with Molotov cocktails. "All one needed for this was a wine bottle of 1 liter filled with gasoline to which was added a few crumbs of yellow phosphor and then sealed it tightly." A secret memo, written a month after the revolt had been crushed, concluded: "The propaganda arts of subtlety, insinuation, implication, and understatement were too infrequently used by [RFE's Hungarian desk]."
As that broadcast was being beamed to Hungary, the Soviet leadership was in a critical meeting in Moscow to determine how to resolve the crisis. Historians have long thought the Soviets had never considered anything but a military solution to the uprising. But, according to newly released minutes kept by one of the participants, the Soviets had originally agreed to settle the crisis peacefully with Nagy and to negotiate troop removal at a later date. It was Khrushchev who unexpectedly reversed course, ordering that the uprising be immediately crushed. "We should ... not withdraw our troops from Hungary and Budapest," he told the Soviet leadership. "We should take the initiative in restoring order in Hungary. If we depart ... it will give a great boost to the Americans, English, and French-the imperialists. ... To Egypt, they will then add Hungary. We have no other choice."
Why the sudden change? Was it the shocking photographs of revolutionaries lynching Communists in Budapest? Or was it western aggression in the Middle East? The previous day, the Israeli Army had invaded the Sinai, and a day later, the British and French had bombed Egypt, hoping to force the country to reopen the recently nationalized Suez Canal. As the Suez crisis unfolded, Moscow-and the world-assumed, wrongly, that the Americans would back the British and the French. Csaba Bekes, head of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, says that the Suez crisis was important but not ultimately responsible for the Soviet decision to crush the uprising. "[The Soviets] would never have allowed what the revolutionaries were seeking: a neutral Hungary, free of Russian troops, with some measure of self-determination; it simply wasn't something the Soviet Union would have consented to without a war."
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