“On October 30, cardinal Mindszenty was released (…). Nagy’s government announced free elections. Colonel Maleter placed his troops at the government’s disposal."
[Translation from Portuguese] in Martin Gilbert's “História do Século XX”
Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 ends on this very October 30. However, this was not the end of the history of the Hungarian revolution. A huge soviet contingent crossed the Hungarian border on November 1st, heading towards Budapest. Imre Nagy appointed a new government and withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Colonel Pál Méter was promoted to General and became Defense Minister. Barricades were built across the city and people were ready to fight. And the fight did occur. To no avail. The soviet forces controlled Budapest. Méter and Nagy were detained and later executed, in 1958.
During the revolution “over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed, and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees” (in Wikipedia). János Kádár, the new head of state, would remain in office for the next 30 years, almost until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Digging in my books, I found some information on the positioning of East and West.
Western leaders seemed not to be prepared for an internal popular movement of this magnitude. As Henry Kissinger writes, in his book Diplomacy, where there is a whole chapter on these events - “Hungary – Upheaval in the Empire”-, despite all the american rhetoric on “liberation”, such an explosion has not been anticipated. Even when workers and students were fighting soviet tanks on the streets, Washington kept silent. The appeal to the UN Security Council had no practical effect, as by the time a resolution was to be voted, the soviet tanks ruled over Budapest. And the Realpolitik imposed itself: pushing forward the right principles could have pushed the two blocks into war, even into a nuclear one.
To better understand the mind set of the Soviet side, and the impact of those events in the following decades, it is worthwhile to read William Taubman’s Gorbachev biography.
By the time of the Revolution, Yuri Andropov, who later supported the ascendant path of Gorbachev, was the Soviet Ambassador in Budapest.
Andropov, who asked for the intervention forwarding images of hanged Hungarian communists, developed what some call “the Hungarian complex”, a fear that up warding revolutions would lead to popular governments. But he knew that, unlike the official version, the uprising was not instigated by foreigners, but a genuine rise of the people, and the proletariat, against the regime. And that is the reason why he supported downward controlled reforms, to defuse potential rebellions.
Almost thirty years later, by the mid-1980’s, Gorbachev told the Politburo “the methods used in Czechoslovakia and Hungary are no longer good; they will not work”, stating for the first time that military force would not be used to keep control over Eastern Europe.
Furthermore, he really did not consider most of the leaders of Eastern European countries as equals and fit for modern diplomacy, with the exceptions of Jaruzelski, in Poland, and Kádár, already ill, in Hungary. But the message was not clearly conveyed, and the leaders in satellite countries still assumed that the Soviet Union would intervene to keep them in power, whenever necessary.
On the other side of the curtain, the West reamined sceptical of Gorbachev’s real intentions.
Source: Hungarian State Security Archieves
I had little knowledge on the Hugarian revolution and its impact, before starting the project. Not much more than a diffused idea of street battles, with ordinary people on side, and tanks on the other. After all, the post-WWII history of Eastern Europe was not a subject in history classes, when I was growing up, and ordinary mentions were more frequent to Dubcék and the Prague Spring of 1968.
Furthermore, for some time, I had been more drawn into the history of the open battles of WWII, in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, even when following the Cold War politics of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, punctuated, among others, by the Olympic Games boycotts in 1980 (Moscow) and 1984 (Los Angeles).
More vivid memories come from the late 1980’s, with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This has been much more than a game experience, as it became a real learning experience, not only of the events of the Hungarian Revolution, but also on the lines and knots that keep the History web together, linking past, present, and future.
The international scene is now quite different from the times where the War was Cold, the Curtain was made of Iron, and Berlin was divided by the Wall, somewhat now limiting direct external interventions.
However, there has been no shortage of internal conflicts, in recent years, with people taking to the streets, tanks being deployed to city centres, and military intervening, such as in Iran (2009), Egypt (2011), Ukraine (2013), Belarus (2020), Myanmar (2021), to name just a few.
Furthermore, Poland and Hungary, now Members of the European Union, are again aligned, but for unfortunate reasons: they have been under severe scrutiny and Article 7 procedures of the Treaty have been initiated against both countries (in 2017 and 2018), meaning they are at clear risk of a serious breach of the values upon the EU is founded.
History is always in the making!
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