Revolution!
The Hungarian uprising 50 years later; how it changed the Cold War
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY-Mihaly Nagy is doing his best to impersonate Joseph Stalin-or, more precisely, a statue of the tyrannical Soviet leader. "It was tremendously tall-10 meters, at least," Nagy says, gesticulating excitedly. "There was an arm out. ... Some of us tried to cut it off at the legs." But the gargantuan effigy that had watched over City Park in Budapest for five years as a symbol of Soviet might proved almost as indomitable as the dictator himself. So the revolutionaries turned to oxyacetylene torches. "The whole thing came down and bounced," Nagy says, pitching forward. "And only those metal boots were left."
Fifty years ago this month, the toppling of Stalin's statue was the iconic moment in a revolution that captivated the world. The Hungarian uprising was the first serious revolt inside a Communist satellite country and a major turning point of the Cold War. When the Soviet Army brutally crushed the revolt, arresting tens of thousands and executing hundreds more, it came as a shock that forced the United States to abandon its goal of "rolling back" communism and to tone down its propaganda. Now, historians are taking a fresh look at this dark episode as declassified documents help explain what really happened and why.
Iron fist. In the early 1950s, the Cold War was in a deep freeze. In the wake of World War II, the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe through a series of puppet regimes, each run by its own "Little Stalin"-a petty tyrant installed by Moscow who adhered strictly to the party line. Hungary had one of the worst in Matyas Rakosi. He possessed an aptitude for two things: languages-he spoke 10-and running his state with an iron first. He nationalized industry and collectivized farms, all with the aid of his much-despised secret police. Those who resisted-thousands of them-were sent to re-education camps or deported east to the gulags. Even government service was no protection; Rakosi consolidated his power by purging rivals and allies alike. He once boasted that he dealt with his foes "like pieces of salami"-slicing them thin, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.
But with the death of Stalin in 1953, and subsequent revelations about his mass deportations and killings, Rakosi and many of his fellow tyrants quickly found their reputations as "Stalin's best pupils" more liability than asset. So the Kremlin removed Rakosi and replaced him with a more reform-minded Communist named Imre Nagy (no relation to Mihaly). Nagy, a onetime secret police informer in Moscow, relaxed farm collectivization, but by 1955, the country's economy was still such a shambles that the Soviets put Rakosi's hard-liners back in charge. Still, in a concession to liberalization, even the hard-liners allowed writers and intellectuals to begin openly discussing politics.
By the summer of 1956, these political debates were attracting thousands to Budapest's theaters, cafes, and public squares. The reformers had very likely been emboldened by news of the now famous "secret speech" that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had given a few months earlier. Denouncing Stalin before a stunned gathering of Communist leaders, Khrushchev said the late dictator "acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion." It was a staggering break from the previous 34 years in which Stalin's cult of personality had reigned supreme. And, though Khrushchev may have meant the speech for a domestic audience, its impact was felt most acutely in the satellites.
So when anti-Communist riots broke out that summer in the Polish city of Poznan, the tone of the debates in Budapest grew even more heated. The government tried to appease the demonstrators by "rehabilitating" former enemies of the state, but the concessions were not enough. By the fall, students were demanding 16 reforms-most of them seeking incremental changes to the existing Communist government but one of them calling for multiparty elections.
Deep freeze. On the eve of the uprising, the map of the world was hopelessly frozen into Soviet and western camps. Nevertheless, American policy under President Dwight Eisenhower was aimed at freeing Communist-ruled peoples, a goal that fed an extensive propaganda campaign. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued in the 1952 election that the Democrats'strategy of simply containing communism was a sign of weakness and should be replaced by a policy of "liberation." Dulles was also a strong proponent of brinksmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art," Dulles once said. "If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."
Yet when push came to shove-and the Soviets were exceptionally good at shoving-the United States was conspicuously, some would say shamefully, timid about fighting the battles it helped provoke. In Hungary, it provided neither arms nor troops nor financial aid, only humanitarian supplies. To have been more aggressive against the Communist enemy, the thinking went, would have been to invite a thermonuclear apocalypse.
Despite, or perhaps because of, those stakes, American leaders showed a startlingly cynical pragmatism when first faced with a series of small uprisings in East Berlin, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s-revolts for which U.S.propaganda was at least partly responsible. In July 1956, shortly before the Hungarian revolution began, CIA chief Allen Dulles shared that frank viewpoint with a colleague: "The horrible thing in that Czechoslovakian thing was that nobody got killed. I'd have felt much better about that, and the Czechoslovakian people would have stood much higher in the world's estimation, if there had been a thousand or 10 thousand people killed," he said, according to documents in historian David Barrett's recent book, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story From Truman to Kennedy. "You've got to take some risks," Dulles said, "and you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Surely the CIA director was not hoping for bloodshed; rather, he was bowing to a political reality that was widely shared among fervent anti-Communists in the government. That is, that any show of Communist force against "the captive peoples of Europe" would be a moral victory for the West. Indeed, newly released documents show that then Vice President Richard Nixon told a top-secret meeting of the National Security Council just nine days earlier that "it wouldn't be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of U.S. interest, if the Soviet iron fist were to come down again on the Soviet bloc."
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.
The frightened revolutionary hid behind his briefcase in the back seat as the car approached a roadblock of menacing tanks. The car slowed, but the Soviet soldiers waved them through. These guys didn't want to start World War III, Toth remembers thinking. As he had hoped, the Soviets hadn't known about the transmitter. "Run this tape on an endless loop," Toth said, thrusting the reel into a startled technician's hands. He remembers with a mischievous smile that it took the Soviets days to track down the source of the broadcasts and silence them.
But ultimately, of course, the Soviets and their tanks prevailed. The insurrection was fiercer and bloodier than the Soviets had ever imagined. Twelve days after the uprising started, 2,500 revolutionaries and more than 700 Soviet soldiers lay dead. Thousands more were wounded. And 26,000 Hungarians were arrested and 1,200 executed.
Yet it was not an uprising masterminded by the West, as Soviet propagandists would charge. On the contrary, says Victor Sebestyen in Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, "it was the least organized revolution in history. There were no leaders, no plans. Groups of armed men and women [most of them young] spontaneously formed in places that offered a vantage point to strike a swift blow, and then hide. Sometimes a group of a dozen or so would come together for one firefight; when that was over, they would split up and never see each other again."
Spy wars. Foreign observers trying to make sense of the revolt were caught totally unawares. A CIA postmortem on operations in Hungary, released to U.S. News under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the agency had but one agent fluent in Hungarian at the time and virtually no plans for dealing with outbreaks of violence. "At no time in the period 23 October-4 November, if one looks at the situation realistically, did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation," concludes the CIA report. The spy agency concluded that it had done a poor job evaluating revolutionaries like Imre Nagy, who had been loyal to the Kremlin but who became a revolutionary. Once again, the Americans had wrongly perceived that communism was a monolithic evil, when in fact, it was an ideology marked by significant differences within various Communist states.
Just because the United States did not send weapons, however, doesn't mean it wasn't encouraging a softer kind of revolution. Western psychological warfare was pervasive throughout the eastern bloc. "Operation Focus," for instance, used radio programs and leaflet-bearing balloons to keep the "captive populations" simmering with desire for regime change, rather than boiling over into violence. One newly disclosed scheme revealed in classified reports obtained by Gati involved chain letters mailed from Switzerland to Hungary; according to agency documents, they were "designed to encourage young Hungarians to leave the country, undermine confidence in the currency, and encourage peasants to hoard crops by forecasting hunger conditions." Leaflet balloons were also instrumental in carrying the text of Khrushchev's secret speech to the cloistered populations in the east.
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 ÃÂémigrÃÂés 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."
Time magazine named the Hungarian fighter the "Man of the Year" for 1956. Twelve months later, after the launch of Sputnik, they recognized Nikita Khrushchev, christened by the revolutionaries "the Butcher of Budapest." Such is the complex legacy of the 1956 revolution. Imre Nagy drew his last breath at the end of a noose in 1958 and was buried in an unmarked grave but was exhumed and reburied in a Budapest cemetery when communism collapsed. A statue of him now stands near the Parliament.
Hungarians, for their part, are still trying to understand the revolt. Both the left and the right claim that they are heirs of Imre Nagy, loyal Communist and reluctant reformer turned reluctant revolutionary. Meanwhile, veterans say, everyone claims to have been a fighter. Perhaps it's the photographs of Hungarian teens throwing Molotov cocktails onto Soviet tanks that cause many Hungarians to remember a David and Goliath tale. It would be an apt metaphor had the Soviets lost. "Hungarians," says author Michael Korda, who has chronicled his experience in the doomed revolt, "are connoisseurs of lost causes."
Eavesdropping. The ghosts of the revolt still haunt the streets of Budapest. Miklos Vasarhelyi, who had been the spokesman for the revolutionary government, took refuge in the Yugoslavian Embassy with Imre Nagy but was eventually sold out to Moscow. His daughter Julia spent two years in exile and found life dramatically different in Hungary when she returned. Under Janos Kadar, who ruled Hungary with a progressively more liberal hand until 1989, the family's phones were tapped and their rooms bugged. Newly released documents on the family only added to her disillusionment. "No one can understand what it is like to find out that 90 percent of the people you knew had informed on you to the secret police," she says, concluding, "There were only a few heroes from the revolution and plenty of Communists, especially afterwards."
After the revolution, 200,000 Hungarians fled to the United States. Hungary, now a democratic country of 10 million people, threw off the shackles of dictatorship with the other former satellites and has since joined the European Union. "America will always be glad that we opened our doors to Hungarians that were seeking freedom," said President George W. Bush on a recent state visit to Budapest. "Fifty years later, the sacrifice of the Hungarian people inspires all who love liberty."
Mihaly Nagy, meanwhile, has become something of an expert on the conflicting realities facing the revolution's veterans. Arrested for carrying a pistol during the uprising, he served more than three years in jail. But his sons, and Hungarians in general, he says, aren't very interested in hearing about his heroics anymore. When the Soviets loosened their control over Hungary, Nagy applied for a visa to travel to the United States. He swelled a bit with pride as he wrote "Yes" when the application asked if he'd ever been imprisoned. His application was rejected. After he explained his revolutionary background to a consulate official, the official said, "Just lie and say it never happened." He did. The visa was granted.
This story appears in the October 16, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.