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Title: The Hungarian Tragedy
Author: Peter Fryer
Date: 1956
Language: en
Topics: council communism, workers’ control, libertarian communism
Source: https://marx.libcom.org/library/hungarian-tragedy-peter-fryer

Peter Fryer

The Hungarian Tragedy

‘A people which enslaves others forges its own chains’.

Karl Marx

‘The victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any

foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing’.

Frederick Engels

‘If Finland, if Poland, if the Ukraine break away from Russia, there is

nothing bad about that. Anyone who says there is, is a chauvinist. It

would be madness to continue the policy of the Tsar Nicholas ... No

nation can be free if it oppresses other nations’.

V. I. Lenin

Preface to the 1986 reprint

Any writer whose first book is thought to be worth reprinting after 30

years, for a new generation of readers, is bound to feel a sense of

pride. But my pride in the reappearance of Hungarian Tragedy does not

blind me to its flaws. This little book was written in a week.

Or rather, it poured itself on the page white-hot. It bears the marks of

haste, emotion and disillusionment. It is not free from naivetés and

purple passages. There are two errors of fact: the ‘North-East district

secretary’ quoted in the Introduction was in fact the Durham area

secretary; the interview with Charles Coutts took place, not on November

2, but the day before.

Yet, for all its faults, this book does tell the truth about the

Hungarian uprising of 1956. To tell that truth was, I thought, my duty

to the Hungarian workers who had fought and died so selflessly and whose

gallant struggle, so brutally suppressed, I had witnessed.

For telling the truth in this book I was expelled from the Communist

Party. Thirty years later, the problem discussed in the Postscript - the

regeneration of the world communist movement - is still unresolved. This

problem has proved more stubborn, and more contradictory, than anyone

could have foreseen. It is the key problem of our epoch, and the future

of humanity depends on its solution.

Some of the Hungarians referred to in these pages were soon to fall

victim to Stalinist repression. Attila Szigeti slashed his wrists with

his spectacles, then jumped to his death from his cell window. Géza

Losonczy went on hunger strike. His health had been shattered in

Rákosi’s jails, where he had suffered a lung haemorrhage; when his new

captors carelessly pushed a feeding tube down his windpipe, he died.

Another victim was the ‘outstandingly shrewd, well-informed and

intelligent Hungarian communist’ who is quoted in Chapter 3. His name

was Miklós Gimes. He was a very brave man. He took his wife and child to

safety in Vienna during the uprising, then went back to Budapest to face

arrest. He was hanged in 1958 with Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter, and József

Szilágyi, after the shameful farce of a secret trial. The whole business

was finished, and the murderers were washing the blood off their hands,

before the world labour movement had been given the slightest chance to

protest. Gimes and his three comrades refused to compromise. They went

to their deaths without confessing to ‘crimes’ they had not committed.

They died as they had lived: sworn enemies of capitalism and Stalinism

alike.

Though I only met him once, Gimes’s integrity and passion, his fierce

love of truth and justice, made a powerful impression on the young man I

then was. He represented all that was best in Hungary. I dedicate this

new edition of Hungarian Tragedy to his memory.

P.F.

Introduction

There are really two Hungarian tragedies.

There is the immediate and heart-breaking tragedy of a people’s

revolution - a mass uprising against tyranny and poverty that had become

insupportable - being crushed by the army of the world’s first Socialist

State.

I was in Hungary when this happened. I saw for myself that the uprising

was neither organised nor controlled by fascists or reactionaries,

though reactionaries were undeniably trying to gain control of it. I saw

for myself that the Soviet troops who were thrown into battle against

‘counter-revolution’ fought in fact not fascists or reactionaries but

the common people of Hungary: workers, peasants, students and soldiers.

The army that liberated Hungary in 1944-5 from German fascist rule, that

chased away the collaborating big landowners and big capitalists and

made possible the land reform and the beginning of Socialist

construction - this army now had to fight the best sons of the Hungarian

people.

At least 20,000 Hungarians dead; at least 3,500 Russians dead; tens of

thousands wounded; the devastation of large areas of Budapest; mass

deportations of Hungarian patriots; hunger verging on starvation;

widespread despair and the virtual breakdown of economic life; a burning

hatred in the hearts of the people against Russia and all things Russian

that will last at least a generation: these are the bitter fruits of the

Soviet leaders’ decision to intervene a second time.

There is another tragedy, too. It, too, is written in blood on the

streets and squares of Budapest. It, too, can be read in the lines of

suffering long-endured on the faces of Hungarian citizens, in the

forlorn gaze of the children who press their noses against the windows

of Western cars and beg for chocolate, in the tears of men and women who

have been promised much and given little. It is the long-term tragedy of

the absolute failure of the Hungarian Communist Party, after eight years

in complete control of their country, to give the people either

happiness or security, either freedom from want or freedom from fear.

Most Hungarians, while they do not want capitalism back or the

landowners back, today detest, and rightly so, the regime of poverty,

drabness and fear that has been presented to them as Communism. The

responsibility for this lies squarely on the shoulders of the Communist

leaders, and principally on those of Rákosi, Farkas and Gerö, who

promised the people an earthly paradise and gave them a police state as

repressive and as reprehensible as the pre-war fascist dictatorship of

Admiral Horthy. The workers were exploited and bullied and lied to. The

peasants were exploited and bullied and lied to. The writers and artists

were squeezed into the most rigid of ideological strait-jackets - and

bullied and lied to. To speak one’s mind, to ask an awkward question,

even to speak about political questions in language not signposted with

the safe, familiar monolithic jargon, was to run the risk of falling

foul of the ubiquitous secret police. The purpose of this highly-paid

organisation was ostensibly to protect the people from attempts at the

restoration of capitalism, but in practice it protected the power of the

oligarchy. To this end it used the most abominable methods, including

censorship, thought control, imprisonment, torture and murder. The

tragedy was that such a regime was presented as a Socialist society, as

a ‘people’s democracy’, as a first step on the road to Communism.

The honest rank-and-file Communists, inside whose party the reign of

terror was in full force ‘ saw their ideals and principles violated,

their sacrifices abused, their faith in human beings rejected in favour

of a soulless bureaucracy which mechanically copied the Soviet model and

which stifled the creative initiative of a people that wanted to build

Socialism. The honest Communists, inside and outside Rákosi’s jails, saw

their party brought into disrepute, their ideology made to stink in the

nostrils of the common people to whose elevation they had dedicated

their lives. No wonder they joined in the people’s revolution; no wonder

they helped to resist the Soviet invasion.

There is yet another tragedy with which this book must deal to some

extent. But it is a British, not a Hungarian tragedy. It is the tragedy

that we British Communists who visited Hungary did not admit, even to

ourselves, the truth about what was taking place there, that we defended

tyranny with all our heart and soul. Till the Twentieth Congress of the

Soviet Communist Party half-lifted the bandage from our eyes we admitted

what we called certain ‘negative aspects’ of the building of Socialism.

We were confident that healthy criticism and self-criticism would enable

these ‘negative aspects’ to be overcome. After the Twentieth Congress we

allowed ourselves to speak of ‘errors’, ‘abuses’, ‘violations of

Socialist legality’ and sometimes, greatly daring, ‘crimes’. But we were

still the victims of our own eagerness to see arising the bright new

society that we so desperately wanted to see in our lifetime, and that

our propaganda told us was being built.

When, in the Daily Worker last August, I revealed that the standard of

living in Hungary had fallen since 1949, and ventured some very mild

criticisms of certain inessential features of Hungarian life, the paper

came under heavy fire from Communist Party functionaries. The Surrey

district secretary complained that such articles were undermining the

morale of the Party and making it hard to sell the Daily Worker. The

North-East district secretary warned me sternly to ‘think again, leave

the sniping and the muck-raking to the capitalist Press, and write with

passion and enthusiasm about the New Hungary you are privileged to see’.

Two months later I was privileged to see the New Hungary collapse like a

house of cards as soon as its people rose to their feet, and I must

reserve my passion and enthusiasm for the Communists and non-Communists

who fought for liberty, won it - and had it torn from their grasp by

foreign intervention. Theirs is the glory, not ours. Yes, we Communists

are always right; we know all the answers, and if we don’t our

questioner has base motives - and has he stopped beating his wife? We

are the leaders; we are making history. But here was history being made

in a way that none of us had foreseen. Our preconceived theories were

shattered overnight. Painful though it may be, if we are really Marxists

we must be brave enough to revise our theories. We must no longer try to

twist or stretch or mutilate the facts to make them fit the Procrustean

bed of textbook formulas or of Soviet policy.

I know a former Communist - he eventually left the Party in disgust -

who was appalled by what he found during a lengthy stay in Eastern

Europe as a journalist. On his return to Britain he went to see Harry

Pollitt, then general secretary of the Communist Party, and told him

everything that had distressed him. Pollitt’s reply was: ‘My advice to

you is to keep your mouth shut’. The day is over when Communists will

follow such advice. Never again shall we keep our mouths shut. The Daily

Worker sent me to Hungary, then suppressed what I wrote. Much of what I

wrote was concealed even from my colleagues. Both as a Communist and a

human being I believe it my duty to tell the truth about the Hungarian

revolution. I believe this will help bring about the urgently-needed

redemption and rebirth of the British Communist Party, which for too

long has betrayed Socialist principles and driven away some of its

finest members by defending the indefensible. That is why I have written

this book.

1. Arrival - Hungary

A naked girl rose Venus-like from the milky-blue waters of Lake Balaton.

Her hair brushed bunches of luscious grapes on the lake-shore at

Badacsony. There were more grapes behind her head, at Eger and Tokay,

framing the Miskolc blast furnace. Gaudy lengths of cloth, representing

the Szeged textile works, ran to the very foot of the four-towered,

thousand- year-old cathedral of Nécs. In between were dancing peasants

in national costume, peasants in everyday clothes driving tractors,

sportsmen proving Hungarian prowess, railway trains speeding to and from

Budapest. To one side of the pictorial map stood two idealised, red-

scarved Pioneers - solemn, angelic children blowing long trumpets. And

around and above stretched an immense scroll welcoming the foreign

visitor to the Hungarian People’s Republic and bearing that Republic’s

coat of arms, its most prominent feature a hammer and an ear of wheat

crossed and, above, a five-pointed red star. It was this red star that

the young soldier was working on.

He whistled happily between his teeth as he bent forward in his

ill-fitting uniform, closely modelled on the uniform of the Soviet Army.

He was absorbed in his task of picking with a nail-file at the red star.

It was not an easy task, for the mosaic was stuck firmly on the wall. It

had been put there to stay. But eventually the red star came away.

Pocketing his nail-file the young soldier ground the bit of stone to

powder with his heel and sauntered away. Another red star was easier to

remove. A group of soldiers hauled down the red, white and green

Hungarian flag, and carefully cut a circle round the coat of arms in the

middle of it, took it out, then hoisted the flag once more.

This was at the Hegyeshalom frontier station on the morning of Saturday,

October 27. The Hungarian revolution was less than four days old. Since

its outbreak in Budapest on the night of October 23, it had surged

irresistibly through the provinces; and now I was seeing the tide of

revolt lap the very frontier. Across the road, chafing and fuming behind

the red, white and green stripes of the barrier, stood a small army of

journalists - mostly Austrian, British and German - being soothed by

Austrian frontier police. They had cars but no visas, and at that stage

the Austrian authorities were not letting visa-less journalists through.

I had a visa but no car. All of us wanted to get to Budapest. Across the

barrier we commiserated with each other, and I scribbled a telegram to

be sent in Vienna to the Daily Worker announcing that I had crossed into

Hungarian territory and was trying to get ahead.

I was still in a state of bewilderment and, I must confess, a little

afraid. My naive expectation that as soon as I got to Vienna - or, at

the worst, Hegyeshalom - I would be whisked to Budapest like the

honoured guest I had been in July had not been fulfilled. My

announcement that I was the London correspondent of the Communist Party

paper Szabad Nép (which means ‘free people’) and the special

correspondent here in Hungary of the Daily Worker had been treated by

the customs officials and soldiers with complete indifference. They told

each other that I was a Communist journalist, but they gave me blankets

and let me sleep on the sofa in the reception room, and next morning

they gave me coffee and simply smiled when I said I had no Hungarian

money to pay for it. When, however, I asked if it were possible to

telephone Budapest, or at least Györ, to ask for a car to be sent for

me, they told me curtly that there was a revolution on, and that both

telephones and cars were required for other purposes. It was not till

the morning came to the desolate flat fields and I took stock of my

position that I noticed that the soldiers were not wearing their cap

badges. I was in the hands of troops who - whether one called them

revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries - had revolted against the

Hungarian Government. I could not go back, or, if I did, I would not be

allowed to re-enter Hungary on my one-visit-only visa, and my assignment

would be over before it had begun. I could not go forward, for I had no

transport. I could not stay where I was, for coffee was all they could

give me and I was already desperately hungry. The only thing to do was

to hang around in the hope that some other journalist, with room in his

car, would cross the frontier during the day.

I remembered ruefully the optimism of the young man at the Hungarian

Legation in Eaton Place, who assured me as he gave me my visa - ‘issued

on the personal instructions of Comrade Imre Nagy’, he said - that

Budapest knew I was coming; it was all arranged; all I had to do if

there was no plane from Vienna was go to the Hungarian legation there

‘and they will give you every assistance’. That was why I took only £10

with me. I had friends in Budapest and money in the bank there, and even

if the Vienna-Budapest planes were grounded, what would be easier than

for the Legation in Vienna to send me to the frontier in a car, and for

Budapest to send a car to pick me up? Only the previous day the Daily

Worker had assured its readers that ‘the Government is master of the

situation’, that ‘the situation is steadily improving’.

I had spent the best part of five hours at the Legation in Vienna’s Bank

Gasse. They were polite and sympathetic. But they could not telephone

Budapest - communication had ceased at midnight. They could not lend me

a car. And - very regretfully - they could not lend me any money. ‘If

you want to go to Budapest we cannot stop you,’ they said. ‘But we

cannot help you.’

Among the journalists applying for a visa at Bank Gasse had been Jeffrey

Blyth of the Daily Mail, looking resplendent in brand-new clothes. He

had flown out suddenly from Cairo and had to re-equip himself for

Vienna’s autumn chill. But the re-equipment for the Budapest assignment

was more than sartorial. He told me how British journalists, his own

colleague Noel Barber included, were hiring cars at fabulous prices in

Vienna for the hazardous 160- mile run to Budapest; some even bought

cars outright. I imagined the startled look on the face of David Ainley,

the Daily Worker’s secretary, if I wired for the money to buy a car. So

I gratefully accepted Blyth’s offer to give me a lift to Hegyeshalom,

where he was meeting Barber and collecting his dispatch. Barber had

driven alone through the previous night to Budapest and got through, and

might be willing to take me back with him. But Barber, when I met him,

was setting out for a tour of Western Hungary. His tremdendous personal

courage later earned him a bad skull wound from Soviet bullets, and he

lay dangerously ill in hospital for many days.

So Blyth and I had set out from Vienna through the drizzle and had

reached Nickelsdorf, the Austrian frontier post, about 9 p.m. It was

full of journalists and Red Cross men. Inside the guardroom an excited

girl was shouting down a telephone something about ‘two hundred wounded:

they desperately need plasma and anything else you can send’.

’From Budapest?’ asked a harassed Austrian officer, seizing my proffered

passport and reached for his rubber stamp. ‘No’, I said, ‘to Budapest.’

He looked at me in consternation.

‘You cannot get to Budapest,’ said a young man. ‘I shall have a good

try,’ I replied. ‘You will be killed,’ he said. ‘You are committing

suicide.’

It took several minutes to convince them that I meant what I said. They

peered at my Hungarian visa, stamped my passport regretfully, and sent

two soldiers with rifles to sit in the car with us, an escort along the

no-man’s-land road that led through a dark, wet wilderness to

Hegyeshalom. As I got out of the car the Austrian soldiers shook my

hand. I am sure they thought I was mad.

Here I was back again in the first foreign country I had ever visited, a

country whose people I loved and on whose soil I felt safe and among

friends. A country where all my private symbols for the past fourteen

years, most of all the red star of the Soviet Union, were the official

insignia. A country where ‘we’ were in power. A country where a new life

was being built, where the workers were in command, where, as Rákosi had

put it five years before, ‘the inheritance of the accursed past has

disappeared’ and ‘our working people look calmly forward to tomorrow and

build their free, Socialist country successfully according to a plan, in

the secure knowledge of a better future’.

A bitter awakening was in store for me.

2. Magyaróvár

Half-way through the morning the barrier was lifted and a car came

through and drew up in front of the customs house. Inside were German

Red Cross men and a German journalist. The car was full of food and

medical supplies; something had happened at the town of Magyaróvár, ten

minutes drive along the main road to Györ. They did not know what, but

it was reported that many were wounded. They intended to leave the

supplies at Magyaróvár and then try to get through to Budapest to see

what was needed there. I begged for a place in the car and they agreed

to squeeze up and take me. Soon we were speeding through the Kis Alföld,

Hungary’s Little Plain, a countryside of harvested fields as

monotonously flat as my native Holderness, and that was the only

comforting feature of this plunge into the unknown.

In Hegyeshalom village, a few minutes away, adults stared at our car and

children waved. But there were not many people about. In Magyaróvár the

streets were packed, and the car was at once surrounded by people who

tried to talk to us in German, English and French.

There was an air of tremendous tension in the town as if some terrible

natural calamity had taken place. It was a feeling such as hangs over a

British mining town when a pit disaster draws crowds to the pit-head.

Some women were crying. No one smiled. From the disjointed phrases, we

learned that a demonstration had been fired on the previous day by men

of the secret police. There were eighty dead and between one hundred and

two hundred wounded.

We must see the bodies of those who had been murdered. But first would

we go to the revolutionary committee, which was in session at the Town

Hall?

The Hungarian tricolour and the black flag of mourning flew side by side

from almost every house. In everyone’s button-hole there was a scrap of

red, white and green ribbon and, pinned with it, a scrap of black

ribbon.

The revolutionary committee received us with great courtesy. It had been

set up after the events of the previous day, and was in continuous

session, mainly organising food supplies and arranging contact with the

similar committee at Györ, the county town. The twenty members of the

revolutionary committee were all local men; none could be called an

émigré.

Some were Communists, but rank-and-file Communists, not officials. What

had happened to the officials? ‘The party secretary was a bully, but he

was not a criminal. We told him to go home and stay there for a bit.’

Most of the committee members were former members of the

Social-Democratic Party, who for one reason or another had dropped out

of political activity since the Communist Party and the

Social-Democratic Party were merged in the Hungarian Working People’s

Party in June 1948. Magyaróvár, its population of 22,000 almost entirely

working-class, had elected a town council with a Socialist majority in

1945. But after the merger of the two parties the people’s own creative

initiative, their desire to build Socialism, was stifled. They were

neither consulted nor drawn into the administration of their own

affairs. The Party bosses ran the town by issuing orders. There was no

feeling that the town and its factories belonged to the people, or that

the Party was an organisation of the people, despite all the propaganda

about Socialism. ‘Entrance allowed only on official business’, said a

notice at the Party headquarters. Where could the people turn in their

poverty? The trade unions were a farce - dominated by Party puppets, and

existing not to protect and improve the wages and conditions of their

members but to ‘mobilise’ them in the struggle for higher production.

They were no longer an instrument of the working people but an

instrument of the State. Magyaróvár was a poor town, its poverty made no

more bearable by the veneer of Socialism: the red star, the slogans, the

portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Rákosi (until recently), the expression

elvtárs (‘comrade’), and the compulsory May Day demonstrations. The

people had been promised a better life, and were prepared to co-operate

to the full to achieve it. But life grew worse instead of better. The

townsfolk knew from personal experience that the propaganda in Szabad

Nép and on the wireless was so much hypocrisy.

This was the story the revolutionary committee told me, and the old

Socialists among them, men who remembered what it had been like before

the war, were the most vehement and passionate in their denunciation of

the ‘Socialism’ that had been foisted upon their fellow- citizens in the

past eight years. ‘It has been eight years of hell’, they said.

They began to speak of the preceding day’s events. On Wednesday and

Thursday the word had spread round the factories and streets of the

fighting in Budapest. By Friday the whole town was in ferment, and at

about 10 o’clock in the morning the people poured out of their houses in

a spontaneous demostration. They were unarmed, and at that stage they

did not want arms. Their only weapons were red, white and green flags,

and occasional rough posters bearing the two fundamental demands of the

national uprising: ‘End the Russian occupation’ and ‘Abolish the AVH’

There were 5,000 people in the demonstration, including old men and old

women, young girls from the aluminium factory, women with their babies

in their arms and schoolboys. Singing the Hungarian National Anthem,

they marched through their town in the first spontaneous demonstration

since 1945. They were entirely peaceful - except that wherever they saw

a red star they tore it down. This was not an expression of their desire

for the restoration of capitalism. It expressed their desire for an end

of Soviet occupation, for the removal of the Soviet symbols that had

been thrust down their throats in place of bread, for the silencing of

the empty slogans that had been dinned into their ears in place of

truth.

The crowd, a good-humoured one, drew near the AVH headquarters where a

huge red star stood out against the sky. ‘Take down the red star’, they

roared.

The reply was a hoarse word of command, the rattle of machine-gun fire,

the mowing down of those in the front ranks; then the screams of the

wounded.

No warning was given, no Riot Act was read, for Hungary does not have a

Riot Act. There was not even an initial burst of firing into the air, or

over the people’s heads. At the command of AVH Lieutenant Jósef Stefko,

two machine guns hidden behind the windows of the headquarters pumped

bullets into the thickest part of the crowd. AVH men also threw hand-

grenades. The firing went on for four minutes, and some of those wounded

were shot again in the back as they tried to crawl away. Men and women,

students and workers, children and even an 18-months-old baby were among

the victims.

Nothing could now restrain the crowd, and they rushed to the army

barracks to pour out the story to the soldiers. Without hesitation the

soldiers broke open the armoury and gave the people weapons. There was a

fierce battle for the AVH headquarters, in the course of which one of

the detachment’s four officers was killed. Another was captured and

lynched and the other two were wounded and taken to hospital. One of

these had died during the night and the other, Lieutenant Stefko, was

still lying there; a crowd had gathered outside the hospital and was

demanding that he be handed over to them for summary justice.

When we had listened to this story, the revolutionary committee insisted

that the German and English journalists go out on the balcony and

address the crowds, and then visit the cemetery to see for themselves

the victims of the atrocity. Interpreters were provided, and we faced a

crowd of several hundreds: soldiers, workers, students and women. The

German said simply that medical help was on the way from West Germany. I

did not know what to say; my heart was too full to do more than tell the

people that the British people had not yet any reliable news of what was

happening in Hungary, that I would make it my business to tell them as

speedily as possible, and that I was sure that as soon as the news

spread medical aid would be on its way from Britain, too. I have tried

to keep the promise to tell the truth I made that day as the black flag

hanging from the Town Hall balcony flapped in my face and the faces of

the people striken by a grief beyond words merged into a blur in my

eyes. I should be interested to know what J.R.Campbell, editor of the

Daily Worker, or Mick Bennett, assistant editor, or George Matthews,

assistant secretary of the Communist Party, who suppressed the dispatch

I wrote about Magyaróvár, would have said to the people of that town if

they had been in my place. Would they have insulted their grief with

warnings about ‘counter-revolution’, or delivered a little homily about

‘White Terror’? Would they have addressed them in the lofty, omniscient

tones of the Daily Worker editorial of the day before, the day this

abominable mass murder took place:

What has happened in Hungary during these past days has not been a

popular uprising against a dictatorial Government. It has been an

organised and planned effort to overthrow by undemocratic and violent

means a Government which was in process of carrying through important

constructive measures.

And when they were taken to see the dead, as I then was, how would they

have described them? As fascists? Reactionaries? Counterrevolutionaries?

I should like to know.

They took us in slow, silent procession along an avenue of plane trees

to the little chapel and mortuary in the town cemetery. Hundreds went

with us; we passed many more coming away, having identified kinsfolk or

sweethearts or friends, or having stood in homage to dead workmates or

fellow-students. Some faces were set and stern, others were contorted

with weeping, and I wept myself when we reached the chapel and the

mortuary. The mourners made way for us and gently pushed us to the very

front, so that we should see and know and tell what we had seen. The

bodies lay in rows; the dried blood was still on the clothing. Some had

little bunches of flowers on their breasts. There were girls who could

not have been more than sixteen. There was a boy of six or so. Already

in a coffin, lightly shrouded, lay the corpse of the eighteenmonths-old

baby. After eleven years of ‘people’s democracy’ it had come to this:

that the security police was so remote from the people, so alien to

them, so vicious and so brutal that it turned its weapons on a

defenceless crowd and murdered the people who were supposed to be

masters of their own country.

I did not want to hear any more or see any more. But I was forced to.

For several hours I stood at the entrance to the cemetery, hemmed in by

a gigantic crowd, a succession of interpreters coming forward to

translate through English or French. I must have spoken to well over a

hundred people that day alone. All were obviously working-class people.

All told more or less the same story. I made a point of questioning

every one who claimed to be an eyewitness of the atrocity. I did not

want to believe what they told me, but their stories tallied in every

important detail. In particular, I sought to make absolutely sure that

the demonstrators did not carry arms, and that the arms they ultimately

obtained were given them by the soldiers. The answers I received to

these points carried complete conviction.

But the crowds spoke also to me of their lives in this small industrial

town, of the long years of grinding poverty, without hope of

improvement, of their hatred and fear of the AVH. ‘I get 700 forints a

month,’ said one. ‘I only get 600.’ said another. [1] They were

ill-dressed, the women and girls doing their pathetic best to achieve

some faint echo of elegance. They spoke to me about the AVH men. ‘They

were beasts, brutes, animals who had sold themselves to the Russians.’

‘They called themselves Hungarians and they mowed our people down

without hesitation!’ ‘We shan’t leave a single one of those swine

alive - you’ll see.’ They asked me what the West was doing to help, and

some asked outright for arms. I for one do not regard these as

counterrevolutionaries. If after eleven years the working people, goaded

beyond bearing, look to the West for succour, whose fault is that? If

the Americans are guilty of seeking to foster counter-revolution with

the Mutual Security Act, surely the Rákosis and the Gerös are a hundred

times more guilty for providing the soil in which seeds sown by the

Americans could grow.

There was a general movement in the direction of the hospital, where an

immense crowd had gathered, clamouring more and more insistently with

every minute that passed for Stefko to be brought out to them. The

German journalist and I were admitted into the hospital, where we met

the director’s wife and a French-speaking woman who had volunteered to

help with the nursing. It was here that I got for the first time

reasonably accurate figures of the number of wounded. There had been

about 80 wounded brought here, of whom eleven had died, and about 80 had

been taken to the hospital at Györ. The need for plasma and other

medicaments was desperate if lives were to be saved and so was the need,

said the director’s wife, to end the tumult outside. A deputation from

the revolutionary committee was interviewing her husband to demand that

Stefko be handed to the people.

A few minutes later the director was forced to give in, and we saw a

stretcher carried by four men appear out of a hut in the hospital

grounds. On it lay Stefko, wearing a blue shirt. His legs were covered

by a blanket. His head was bandaged. He was carried close enough to me

for me to have touched him. He was fully conscious, and he knew quite

well what was going to happen to him. His head turned wildly from side

to side and there was spittle round his mouth. As the crowd saw the

stretcher approaching they sent up a howl of derision and anger and

hatred. They climbed the wire fence and spat at him and shouted

‘murderer’. They pushed with all their might at the double gates, burst

them open and surged in. The stretcher was flung to the ground, and the

crowd was upon Stefko, kicking and trampling. Relations of those he had

murdered were, they told me, foremost in this lynching. It was soon

over. They took the body and hanged it by the ankles for a short time

from one of the trees in the Lenin Street. Ten minutes afterwards only a

few people were left outside the hospital.

I wrote later in my first, unpublished, dispatch:

After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the

brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and

mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led

to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists

and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which

rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship

dressed up as a Socialist society - a police dictatorship backed up by

Soviet armed might.

I am the first Communist journalist from abroad to visit Hungary since

the revolution started.

And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events

squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party

for eleven years - up to and including Ernö Gerö They turned what could

have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a

grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police

which tortured all - Communists as well as nonCommunists - who dared to

open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in

these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose

defenders it was supposed to be.

I wrote this under the immediate impact of a most disturbing and

shattering experience, but I do not withdraw one word of it. Much of the

rest of the dispatch was never received in London because the call was

cut off after twenty minutes, and the first ten had been taken up by

three different people giving me contradictory instructions as to the

‘line’ I should take. Mick Bennett insisted on reading me a long extract

from a resolution of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’

Party. I had had enough of resolutions. I had seen where eleven years of

terror and stupidity had led Hungary, and I wanted to tell the readers

of the Daily Worker the plain unvarnished truth, however painful it

might be. But the readers of the Daily Worker were not to be told the

truth. The day after I had sent this dispatch they were reading only

about ‘gangs of reactionaries’ who were ‘beating Communists to death in

the streets’ of Budapest. The paper admitted in passing that ‘some

reports claimed that only identified representatives of the former

security police were being killed’. Next day Hungary disappeared

altogether from the Daily Worker’s front page.

For many years I had opposed, in what I wrote and said, and in my heart,

the crimes of British imperialism in the Colonies. At Magyaróvár on

October 27 I vowed that in future I would oppose with equal passion and

energy crimes committed by those who called themselves Communists,

crimes which besmirched a noble and humanitarian cause.

3. Background to October

However tragic the outcome of Hungary’s revolution of October 1956, it

may well have an effect on the development of the international

working-class movement no less profound and far-reaching than that other

October Revolution of 1917, which gave birth to the Soviet Union and the

Communist International. The whole labour movement has therefore a duty

to understand why Hungary’s October Revolution took place. It would be

wrong to dismiss the sudden upsurge of October 23 in Budapest as merely

the result of years of effort by American imperialism to bring about the

overthrow of Socialism in Hungary. Undoubtedly the Americans had been

trying very hard; undoubtedly their reactionary friends inside Hungary,

and those who were sent over the border to exploit the situation, tried

harder still to gain control of the movement. This is undeniable. But

who could be content with this shallow, one-dimensional explanation of a

movement which clearly embraced over 90 per cent of the Hungarian

people, which produced such dogged mass heroism, and which, as these

lines are written, still continues in the form of obstinate strike

action by the industrial workers in open defiance of a ‘Workers’ and

Peasants’ Government’?

Certainly the Daily Worker could not and did not remain content for long

with branding the movement as counter-revolution which had ‘staged an

uprising in the hours of darkness’ (October 25). Four days later it was

clear ‘that counter-revolutionary actions and just demands of the people

were both factors in the situation’. On November 13 the Daily Worker’s

own early estimate was called ‘fantastic’ and it was admitted that

‘large masses of honest workers came out against the Government’ and

‘fought for what they believed to be the independence of their country’.

On November 16 János Kádár himself was quoted as referring to the ‘great

people’s movement’. On November 19 an ordinary Csepel worker was quoted

as saying:

The West should not believe that the workers fought to bring back Horthy

or the landowners and counts. We shall not give back the land or the

factories or the mines.

These estimates of the origin of the Hungarian revolution are in direct

conflict with the opinion of Mr. V. Kuznetsov, the Soviet delegate, who

told the United Nations on November 13 that the uprising was led by

fascists and reactionaries and was a matter of ‘bloodthirsty orgies’

staged by counter-revolutionary forces. Indeed they are in conflict with

the statement of Kádár himself on November 19 about ‘a wellprepared

military campaign.

Clearly there is a deep difference of opinion. There is the view that,

although by the eve of the second Soviet intervention reactionary forces

had become active (whether that in fact justified the second

intervention is a separate issue) the uprising was essentially a genuine

popular movement, a spontaneous upsurge of pent-up feeling. And there is

the view that the uprising was essentially a fascist plot, planned

beforehand, which somehow or other managed to win the support of large

masses of honest but deluded workers. Kádár cannot have it both ways. It

was either ‘a great people’s movement’, in which the element of

reactionary activity was secondary - or ‘a well-prepared military

campaign’ by counter-revolutionary forces, in which the element of mass

revolt was secondary.

The view that in origin and in essence the Hungarian revolution was an

example of what Marx used to call a ‘real people’s revolution’ is the

only view consistent with the facts of Hungarian history, let alone with

the observations of eyewitnesses. The logic of Hungarian history since

1919, and especially since 1945, made such an uprising inevitable, just

as the February and October revolutions of 1917 in Russia were

inevitable. Hungary’s October had to happen, sooner or later, whether or

not the Americans were doing their utmost to provoke trouble. The people

could not go on living in the old way.

Hungary has never known democracy, except for four and a half quite

abnormal months at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, under the

bourgeois-democratic government of Károlyi. The Soviet Republic which

followed, and which was crushed after three months by foreign

intervention, made serious mistakes. Among them was its failure to win

the land- hungry peasants as allies; it socialised the land instead of

distributing it to the poor peasants and the agricultural workers. There

followed the first fascist regime in Europe, the rule of Admiral

Nicholas Horthy de Nagybánya, former commander-in-chief of the Austro-

Hungarian Navy. Horthy’s regime began with White Terror: the torture and

murder of thousands of Communists and Jews. It is said that when members

of a British Labour delegation investigating atrocities complained to

Horthy that officers responsible for the White Terror were not punished,

he replied indignantly: ‘Why, they are my best men!’

Under Horthy forty rich families owned practically two-thirds of

Hungary. One-third of the total arable land was in the hands of 980 big

landowners; 1,130,000 peasants were landless out of a total population

of nine million. Trade unions were repressed, and the tiny Communist

Party carried out its work in deep illegality and made the kind of

sectarian mistakes that are so easy to make under such conditions, with

leaders in jail and murdered.

The best known of those leaders was Mátyás Rákosi, People’s

Vice-Commissar for Trade and Transport, and later People’s Commissar for

Social Production, in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Rákosi was in

prison from 1925 to 1940 and was tried for his life in 1925, 1926 and

1935. In 1940 the Soviet Government negotiated his release from prison

in exchange for some historic Hungarian flags, and he remained in the

Soviet Union until the liberation of Hungary by the Soviet Army.

Rákosi’s fortitude cannot be denied; but his record as dictator of

Hungary from 1945 to 1956 makes it doubtful whether a man who had spent

fifteen years in prison and then five years in Moscow, all the time

remote from the lives of the ordinary people and ordinary Communist

Party members, should have been entrusted with such immense

responsibilities. He brought the Hungarian people to disaster and turned

the widespread respect and admiration for himself into hatred ‘because

he could never say “no” to Stalin’, a Budapest Communist told me last

July, when Rákosi resigned, too late, from the office of first secretary

of the Party.

It would be idle to deny the many positive achievements registered in

Hungary after the liberation. An immense amount of reconstruction work

was carried out, though even in 1956 the effects of the Second World War

are still visible. The land reform broke up the great estates of the

landowners and satisfied the land hunger of the peasants. Four and a

half million acres were distributed among 400,000 peasant families. The

great bulk of industry came under public ownership. Until 1949 the

standard of living rose. Excellent advances were made in the fields of

education, culture and public health. Recreation facilities were

provided for workers and young people who had never had them before.

There were many achievements, thanks very largely to the

self--sacrificing work of honest Communists, many of whom did two jobs,

14 or 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, because of

the actute shortage of trained personnel. I know one Communist who, the

week one big industry was nationalised, worked solidly through three

days and nights without sleep. On May Day 1947 -the people of Budapest

danced in the streets. Life, they felt, was becoming better.

But life did not get better. It began to get worse. Mistakes were made.

Crimes were committed. The Communist Party leaders did not keep faith

with the people. Instead of the method of taking the people into their

confidence in the building of Socialism, the method of relying on the

people’s own initiative, they chose the method of deceiving the people,

of concealing from the people what was being done until some new measure

was presented to them as a fait accompli. Fortunately, we have a frank

description of how this was done - indeed a Stalinist theoretical

substantiation of the entire process - in a speech delivered by Rákosi

on February 29, 1952, at the Party Academy of the Hungarian Working

People’s Party and printed in the February-March 1952 issue of

Társadalmi Szemle (Social Review).[2]

This was the famous ‘salami’ speech, which aroused misgivings in the

Manchester Guardian at the time, and a defence by John Gollan. It is a

remarkable study in how to make a revolution ‘from above’ before the

people are ready for it, when you have no real mass support but only a

foothold in the State machine, an infinite capacity for political

duplicity and dishonesty, and Soviet tanks in the background. To read

this speech and to see how the Hungarian people were tricked into

squeezing twenty or thirty years of political development into five

years is to understand the roots of the uprising of October 23, 1956.

Rákosi admits that in 1945 the Communist Party had not got majority

support, even among the working class. The problems involved in

achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat were raised only in narrow

Party circles.

We did not bring them before the Party publicly because even the

theoretical discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an

objective would have caused alarm among our companions in the coalition

and would have made our endeavour to win over, not only the

petitbourgeoisie, but the majority of the mass of the workers more

difficult. (p. 8)

In other words, don’t take the workers into your confidence. Trick them,

deceive them, conceal from them and from your allies your real aims.

This was particularly important since, in the elections for the National

Assembly held in November 1945, the Communist Party received 17 per cent

of the votes, the Social-Democratic Party 17 per cent, and the

Smallholders’ Party 56 per cent.

Our Party used the election results to strenghten its position.

Therefore it demanded the post of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of

Interior, which it received after some procrastination. (p. 19).

The possession of the Ministry of the Interior made possible the

‘unmasking’ and ‘removal’ of leaders of the Smallholders’ Party.

In those days this was called ‘salami tactics’, whereby we sliced off

bit by bit reaction in the Smallholders’ Party ... We whittled away the

strength of the enemy. (p. 22).

Indeed one of the ‘enemy’, Béla Kovács, was ‘whittled away’ to the

Soviet Union for nine years, after being accused of conspiracy to

restore the old regime. Rákosi describes the merger of the two

workingclass parties in June 1948 as ‘the victory of the Communists and

the complete defeat of the Social Democratic Party’ (p. 29). He goes on

to give a revealing description of the capture by the Communist Party of

the army, police and State security forces. This was achieved in ‘bitter

battle ... the more so because our Party also had a strong foothold in

those organisations ... When, in the autumn of 1948, our Party took over

the Ministry of Defence, the vigorous development of the defence forces

could start’ (p. 32).

Then, in a passage of enormous interest in the light of later events,

Rákosi turns to the security police:

There was a single position, the control of which was claimed by our

Party from the first minute and where it was not inclined to consider

any distribution of posts according to the strength of the parties in

the coalition; and this was the State Security Authority ... We kept

this organisation in our hands from the first day of its establishment.

(p. 33)

Out of Rákosi’s own mouth, this is the picture of how the rule, not of

the Communist Party, but of a tiny handful of Stalinists, was imposed on

9,500,000 Hungarians. This way of building Socialism could not but lead

to the corruption of the Communist Party, in which honest Marxists and

honest workers were swamped by an influx of careerists, swarming onto

the bandwagon as soon as it became clear that was the way to obtain a

lucrative job. But in order to maintain a dictatorship over the honest

Communists, free discussion and criticism within the Party had to be

stifled. Dissenters were victimised, and if they persisted in their

dissent they soon found themselves the object of attentions from the

AVH. One honest Communist who paid a heavy price for his honesty was

László Rajk.

I attended the trial of Rajk for treason in 1949, and, in common with

other Communist journalists there, I was convinced by the evidence and

by the lengthy and detailed confessions of Rajk and his fellowaccused.

It is all too obvious now that the trial had two purposes. First and

foremost it was designed to provide ammunition for the attacks of the

Soviet leaders on Tito and the Jugoslav Communist Party. It was on the

basis of the Rajk trial that Tito was first called a fascist, and a

fantastic plot was alleged, reaching right back to the Spanish Civil War

and involving the Deuxiéme Bureau, British Intelligence and the US

Secret Service. Largely basing himself on the Rajk trial James Klugmann

wrote a book called From Trotsky to Tito (1951). The book was withdrawn,

rather belatedly, last April, but Klugmann remains in charge of the

education of British Communists. The second, internal purpose of the

Rajk trial was to crush every vestige of opposition to Rákosi and his

fellow Stalinists within the Hungarian Party. Rajk was in a leading

position in the Party during the days of illegality. He was popular,

hard-working and honest. He had doubts about the wisdom of Rákosi’s

leadership. He had to be got rid of, as an awful example to dissenters.

While I was in Hungary last July and August I was told how Rajk was made

to confess. First he was tortured by Farkas’ son. Then, when the

softening-up process had made him suitably receptive, a Soviet

Communist - ‘a Beria man’, I was told - put it to him that the Soviet

Union needed his confession as a weapon against Tito. If he agreed to do

this important political job he would (though officially dead) be well

looked after in the Soviet Union for the rest of his life, and his child

would be given a good education. He agreed. When they came to take him

to the execution, which his wife Julia was made to witness, they put a

gag - a piece of wood - in his mouth to prevent his revealing to the

soldiers how he had been betrayed. His last words were: ‘What are you

doing to me?’

A final turn of the screw was the removal of his child from the custody

of its mother, and its rearing, by strangers, under another name.

When Rajk and three other Communists executed with him were reburied

with full honours last September the ceremony was attended by 200,000 of

Budapest’s citizens. It was a pity the Daily Worker carried no report of

this not inconsiderable event. Its readers might then have been better

prepared for the October 23 uprising.

The corruption within the Hungarian Working People’s Party was not

confined to careerism and terror. The whole of Party education was

based, not on the voluntary creative study of the critical, antidogmatic

method of Marxism, but on the compulsory assimilation of texts. It

turned workers into parrots and cliché-mongers. Members went to classes

not because they wanted to, but because it was inadvisable not to be

there, every Monday night, from 6.30 to 8.30 p.m. Education of children

was just as bad. In August some long-needed revision of textbooks was

being undertaken; the old ones were appalling. Not content With teaching

the infallibility of Stalin, they told the children all about supposed

Russian inventions and discoveries. And Russian was often the only

foreign language taught in a school.

This insensate praise of everything Russian, this blind, mechanical

copying of everything the Russians did, extended into every field.

Writers and artists and composers were compelled to write and paint and

compose in strict conformity with the principles of Socialist Realism,

as laid down by the coryphaeus of art, Comrade Stalin. Scientists were

required to study and popularise only the achievements of their Russian

colleagues, and woe betide a biologist who found fault with Lysenko or a

psychologist who found Pavlov inadequate to explain every aspect of

human consciousness. And when the world’s greatest scientist, Comrade

Stalin, pronounced on Marxism in Linguistics, it was not enough for the

Hungarian philologists to hold a conference on this immortal

contribution to Marxism-Leninism: the historians and economists and

mathematicians and geologists had to meet as well to consider its

application to their own fields of study. No wonder the revolutionaries

tore down the red stars.

Friendship with a Socialist country and gratitude for the blood it spilt

in liberating you is one thing: bootlicking is quite another thing.

But by far the worst aspect of the mechanical transference of Soviet

methods to Hungary was the atmosphere of suspicion and fear, and the

whole destestable security apparatus. When the Soviet Union had a

doctors’ plot and arrested Jewish doctors, Hungary had to follow suit

with a doctors’ plot and the arrest of Jewish doctors. And the heart

specialist who attended the Party theoretician József Révai was for

weeks not allowed to communicate in any way with his family, lest the

‘enemy’ discover where Révai was staying and assassinate him. The

specialist was in fear for his own life, since if Révai had suddenly

collapsed and died it would have been the easiest thing in the world for

the AVH men to have trumped up a charge of murder against him.

The AVH. The oppressors of a whole people, including the Communist

Party. Moulded and trained on the approved Stalinist pattern, completely

lacking in either political understanding or common humanity, guilty of

the most unspeakable crimes. In the British Legation at Budapest I met

an Austrian, a gaunt, hollowcheeked man, who sought sanctuary, was

refused it since he was not British, and then collapsed in the

entrance-hall with a heart attack. He was with us throughout the

bombardment. He was not a bitter man, despite his years in the hands of

the Soviet secret police and then of the AVH. He bore no special grudge

against the fiends who had tortured him; he was too sick and too old in

pain to have the energy for hatred. He showed us his body. The Russians

had merely stuck cotton wool on his arm and set it alight.

But the Hungarian AVH men, to whom they handed him over, had pinned his

genitals to a table and flogged them.

The AVH. Do you wonder that working men and women not only shot them on

sight in Budapest, not only strung them up by the score, but then spat

in contempt and loathing at the bodies as they swung head downwards?

Lynching is wrong, mob justice is wrong, terribly wrong, whatever the

provocation. But as each political prisoner was released from the cells

to add his story to the indictment, could the citizens of Budapest be

expected to confine their anger to pious protest resolutions? And if

some of them, in Budapest but not in the provinces, went further and

sought out Communist Party officials to vent their hatred on, as some of

them did, then who is responsible? It did not need American-trained

émigrés, or Cardinal Mindszenty, to inflame the people. Rákosi, Farkas

and Gerö had already inflamed them, and Rákosi, Farkas and Gerö are as

guilty of the murder of Communist officials in the Budapest Party

headquarters at the hands of a vengeful mob as they are guilty of the

murder of Rajk.[3]

The AVH. There were Gestapo-like torture chambers with whips and gallows

and instruments for crushing people’s limbs. There were tiny punishment

cells. There were piles of letters from abroad, intercepted for

censorship. There were batteries of tape recorders to take down

telephone conversations. There were prostitutes retained as police spies

and agents provocateurs. And the young brutes who made up this strong

arm of the people’s democratic State were paid - according to documents

found on their dead bodies - 3,000 to 4,000 forints a month as men,

9,000 to 12,000 as officers: three to twelve times the average wage.

Plus luxurious flats while thousands in Budapest lived cramped in slums

and cellars.

After the death of Stalin in March 1953 there were some signs of a

change in Hungary. On July 5, 1953, Imre Nagy took over the premiership

and certain concessions were made to the people’s wishes. Rákosi retired

into the background. There was some correction of the blunders made in

economic planning. There was more stress on the production of consumer

goods, especially food, and less on heavy industry. People began to

breathe a little more freely. But it was not to last. And the way the

new course was abandoned, besides being a slap in the face to public

opinion, was just one more proof that decisions of the most vital

importance to the Hungarian people were taken, not in Budapest, but in

Moscow. Malenkov resigned; Khrushchov took his place. Moscow took

pepper; Budapest burst into an uncontrollable fit of sneezing. On April

18, 1955, Nagy was ousted from the premiership (by a unanimous vote of

the National Assembly) and later expelled from the Party as an

incorrigible Rightwing deviationist. Rákosi came back with a bang. The

policy of satisfying the people’s needs was condemned in a wordy Central

Committee resolution that showed every sign of having been both drafted

in the Kremlin and imposed by big stick methods on an unwilling and

uneasy Central Committee.

Uneasy it might well have been. Already there were stirrings among the

writers, who had taken the instructions to model themselves on the

Russians so literally as to copy the famous ‘thaw’. The Stalinists gave

István Kovács the task of bringing the writers to heel, and he did so in

November 1955 in a speech that Zhdanov would have been proud to call his

own. The intellectuals were furious at this tirade.

Then, in February 1956, came the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet

Communist Party and the famous secret session report by Khrushchov

denouncing Stalin’s crimes. It was not long before the substance of this

report was common knowledge. The country seethed with discussion. But

Rákosi remained, just as the bronze statue of Stalin remained at the

edge of the City Park. The demand for Rákosi’s removal was put forward

more and more openly.

This, however, was not a question that could be settled in Budapest. And

people gradually realised that the decision whether Rákosi fell or was

confirmed in power was being delayed by a difference of opinion in the

Political Bureau of the CPSU. There was speculation as to which

prominent figure was on which side, but it could not be more than

speculation. All that people knew for certain was that Rákosi’s 64th

birthday, on March 9, had earned him a more than usually fulsome message

of congratulation from the CPSU.

It was the intellectuals, and primarily the young intellectuals, who

brought matters to a head.

They held the now famous all-night meeting at the Petöfi circle, run by

the youth organisation and named after the great revolutionary poet who

fought in the Hungarian War of Independence in 1849. Attended by some

6,000 people, who spilled out into the street, this meeting consisted of

a succession of vigorous demands for democratisation and for

intellectual liberty. There were further meetings, at one of which

Rajk’s widow made a moving speech. Her husband’s rehabilitation had been

announced by Rákosi at the end of March; it was a passing reference made

in a speech in the provinces. Mrs Rajk protested against this formal

rehabilitation of a man who had been a good Communist, and demanded that

he be given his rightful place in the Party’s history. (One of the jokes

current in Budapest at that time was: ‘What is the difference between a

Christian and a Marxist? The Christian believes in a hereafter; the

Marxist believes in a rehabilitation hereafter.’)

The ferment among the intellectuals was first welcomed by Szabad Nép on

June 24, then denounced in an angry Pravda article, upon which the

Szabad Nép hastened to carry a Central Committee resolution, passed on

June 30, denouncing ‘demagogic behaviour’, ‘anti- Party views’,

‘vacillating elements’, ‘articles with a provocative content’ and

‘attempts to spread confusion’. In the middle of July the Central

Committee met, attended by Mikoyan. I arrived in Budapest on July 16, to

be told by my friends: ‘You have arrived during a very delicate

political situation. Big changes are expected. Stand by for a big

story.’ Two days later the story broke. Rákosi had resigned and General

Farkas, as the man mainly responsible for the ‘violations of Socialist

legality’, was reduced to the rank of private and expelled from the

Party. Two men who had spent periods in jail as ‘Titoites’ and had later

been rehabilitated were put on the Political Bureau: Kádár and Marosán

(a former Social-Democrat). It was big news indeed - so big that Neues

Deutschland in Berlin did not believe its Budapest correspondent’s

account, and rang Szabad Nép to check it. But that the change was

essentially a compromise was shown by three facts: the new first

secretary was Ernö Gerö, a Stalinist; Imre Nagy, whom the people and the

honest Party merbers wanted back in the leadership, was not even

readmitted to the Party; and Rákosi retained a good deal of power, as

was proved within a day or two by the announcement side by side with the

demotion of Farkas of the similar demotion of a relation by marriage of

Nagy’s. Inquiries revealed that this sop to the Stalinists was given on

Rákosi’s , orders, without the knowledge or consent of the Political

Bureau.

Such a compromise could not solve the glaring contradiction between the

wishes of the Hungarian people and the set-up which Moscow and the

native Stalinists deemed good for them. From an outstandingly shrewd,

well-informed and intelligent Hungarian Communist, long before removed

from any position of influence because he insisted on thinking for

himself and telling others what he thought, I had a brutally realistic

assessment of the situation. By and large, he said, the Party leaders

were hated. The Party itself was corrupt, and at least half of its

700,000 members were simply careerists. Communists who expressed

dissenting views had either been put in positions where they could do no

harm, or terrorised into silence, or imprisoned, or murdered. ‘I do not

say killed,’ said my friend. ‘If a man is executed for crimes he did not

commit then that is murder, and whoever is responsible must be punished.

In other words, I am calling Rákosi as well as Farkas a murderer, and

the people will not be content until he is publicly disowned and

publicly brought to justice by the Party.

Until it takes those steps the Party is discredited in the people’s

eyes, and they just will not listen to us.’ My friend said that if next

day there were genuinely free elections without the presence of foreign

troops, and a guarantee that neither the West nor the Soviet Union would

occupy Hungary whatever the result, then the Communist Party would be

extremely lucky to poll its 1945 figure of 17 per cent of the votes -

and he personally would estimate about 10 or 12 per cent.

’We have to face,’ he said, ‘a moral problem. How far is one justified

in imposing on a country the rule of a Party against the will of the

majority of its inhabitants? Even if, “objectively”, and from the

standpoint of our beloved “historical necessity”, that Party represents

the “best interests” of the country and of its people? Even if the

interests - I would say the great power interests - of a neighbouring

Socialist State are involved?’

’Well, what is your solution?’ I asked. ‘Must there be - or ought there

to be - a return to capitalism?’

’No,’ he replied. ‘Nor would the majority of Hungarians want to see the

clock put back in that way. But every front-rank leader of the Communist

Party is mistrusted. Except one: Imre Nagy. He is at present outside the

Party, and it is said that he will not come back without certain

guarantees.

’The solution is to put Nagy at the head of a new People’s Front

Government, to return to the new course of 1954 and try to rally people

behind that. I mean a real People’s Front, not an association of stooge

parties. For a long time our Party will have to take a back seat. Both

the future of the Party and the future of Hungary itself depend on Nagy

and a People’s Front government.

’Without them’ - and he spoke with great emphasis - ‘Hungary is facing

disaster.’

This conversation took place on Sunday, August 5. When I returned to

London I told my colleagues on the Daily Worker about it. The measure

that could have prevented the disaster my friend warned about was taken.

But it was taken too late, when the guns were already firing in

Budapest. At every stage the Party lagged behind events. At every stage

it failed to read the people’s mood in time.

The enormous crowds that attended the reinterment of Rajk should have

been a warning. But the leaders were blind. The last two catastrophic

acts of blindness were Gerö’s broadcast on the night of October 23,

after the demonstrations had already started, and the calling in of

Soviet troops in a request made officially by Imre Nagy, but in actual

fact by Gerö and Hegedüs. They were Stalinist to the very end.

4. How the revolution began

I was not, of course, an eyewitness of the start of the revolution in

Budapest on October 23. I have pieced together the account which follows

from those who were, both Hungarians and a British Communist, Charles

Coutts, English editor of World Youth, who had lived in Budapest for

three years.

It began with a students’ demonstration, partly to show the students’

sympathy for the people of Poland, who that weekend, through Gomulka and

the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, had

resolutely rebuffed an attempt by an unprecedented delegation of Soviet

leaders to get tough with them. This sturdy assertion of independence

captured the imagination of the Hungarians, and the student orators who

addressed the demonstration from the statue of Josef Bem, a Polish

general who helped lead the Hungarians in 1849, recalled the words of

Petöfi:

Our battalions have combined two nations,

And what nations! Polish and Magyar!

Is there any destiny that is stronger

Than these two when they are united?

The students had started marching and meeting in different places during

the afternoon. Their demonstration was at first prohibited by the

Ministry of the Interior, but the ban was lifted after the Central

Committee of the Party intervened. Nagy himself addressed a great

gathering of the students outside the Parliament building, but his words

were guarded, and obviously had to be.

At 7.30 that night I was on the telephone to Szabad Nép, giving them a

review of British Press comments on the events in Poland and -

ironically enough - a short piece about the arrest of twelve British

seamen in the aircraft carrier Ocean, following unlawful meetings. I

also dictated an article asked for by the magazine Szovjet Kultúra about

the Bolshoi Ballet in London. When I had finished, the interpreter,

Dobzsa - he used to take my articles down in shorthand, translating them

into Hungarian as he did so at about 120 words a minute - said:

‘Don’t ring off. Comrade Bebrits wants to speak to you.’ Anna Bebrits,

the quiet, efficient deputy foreign editor, sounded unusually excited.

’There are big student demonstrations,’ she said. ‘Does the Daily Worker

want anything from us?’

’I expect we shall be getting a piece from Coutts,’ I said. ‘But I’ll

find out and let you know. Is there any trouble?’

’No,’ she said. ‘A few nationalist slogans, but everything is

good-humoured.’

That was the last conversation I ever had with Szabad Nép. Two and a

half hours later telephone communication between Budapest and the

outside world had been cut off. What had happened in the intervening

time?

Two things had happened.

First Gerö had gone on the wireless to make an address which, I was

told, ‘poured oil on the flames’. He had called the demonstrators ;’now

joined by workers from the factories, to which the students had sent

delegations) counter-revolutionaries - ‘hostile elements’ endeavouring

to disturb ‘the present political order in Hungary’. In other words he

had made it clear to the most obtuse among his hearers that nothing was

going to change. Not even the resignation of Martin Horváth,

editor-in-chief of Szabad Nép, and of Berei, the chief planning officer,

from the Party’s Central Committee, could undo the disastrous effect of

this speech.

Secondly, the crowds which had gathered outside the radio station to ask

that the students’ demands be broadcast were fired on by AVH men, 300 of

whom were in the building. This was, without question, the spark that

turned peaceful demonstrations (’the quiet and orderly behaviour of the

marchers was impressive’, Coutts had telephoned the Daily Worker) into a

revolution.

What had the students been demanding before the shooting at the radio

station? First and foremost the replacement of Hegedüs as Prime Minister

by Imre Nagy. The election of a new Party leadership by a national

congress. Friendship with the Soviet Union, but on the basis of

equality. Withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Free elections.

Freedom of the Press. Academic freedom. The use of Hungary’s uranium

stocks by Hungary herself.

After the AVH men shot into the crowds the pent-up feeling burst forth.

News of the shooting swept through the city like wildfire and soon the

people were armed and engaged in running street battles against the AVH.

Their demands now crystallised into two points: the abolition of the AVH

and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Where did the arms come from that found their way so speedily into the

hands of the workers and students of Budapest? According to Kádár (Daily

Worker, November 20) there were ‘hidden arms’ on the Szabadsághegy

(Liberty Hill), and the young people had been told at midday, before the

demonstration, to go to a ‘certain place’ where they would find them.

This version of the arming of the people side-steps the whole question

of the attitude of the Hungarian People’s Army. The troops in Budapest,

as later in the provinces, were of two minds: there were those who were

neutral and there were those who were prepared to join the people and

fight alongside them. The neutral ones (probably the minority) were

prepared to hand over their arms to the workers and students so that

they could do battle against the AVH with them. The others brought their

arms with them when they joined the revolution. Furthermore, many

sporting rifles were taken by the workers from the factory armouries of

the Hungarian Voluntary Defence Organisation. The ‘mystery’ of how the

people were armed is no mystery at all. No one has yet been able to

produce a single weapon manufactured in the West.

The Hungarian Stalinists, having made two calamitous mistakes, now made

a third - or rather, it would be charitable to say, had it thrust on

them by the Soviet Union. This was the decision to invoke a nonexistent

clause of the Warsaw Treaty and call in Soviet troops. This first Soviet

intervention gave the people’s movement exactly the impetus needed to

make it united, violent and nation-wide. It seems probable, on the

evidence, that Soviet troops were already in action three or four hours

before the appeal, made in the name of Imre Nagy as his first act on

becoming Prime Minister. That is debatable, but what is not debatable is

that the appeal was in reality made by Gerö and Hegedüs; the evidence of

this was later found and made public. Nagy became Prime Minister

precisely twenty-four hours too late, and those who threw mud at him for

making concessions to the Right in the ten days he held office should

consider the appalling mess that was put into his hands by the

Stalinists when, in desperation, they officially quit the stage.

With Nagy in office it would still have been possible to avert the

ultimate tragedy if the people’s two demands had been met immediately -

if the Soviet troops had withdrawn without delay, and if the security

police had been disbanded. But Nagy was not a free agent during the

first few days of his premiership. It was known in Budapest that his

first broadcasts were made - metaphorically, if not literally - with a

tommy-gun in his back.

There were forces which still hoped to give the people a thrashing and

so bring the Rákosi- Gerö group back to power, and these forces

engineered the provocation in front of the Parliament building on

Thursday, October 25.

According to Charles Coutts, whom I met a week later, and who still had

the details of the whole turmoil very fresh in his mind, a big and

completely unarmed demonstration had started from Rákoczy út, carrying

the national flag and black flags in honour of the dead. On their way to

Parliament Square they met a Soviet tank. The tank stopped, a soldier

put his head out, and the people in the front of the crowd began to

explain they were unarmed and were engaged in a peaceful demonstration.

The soldier told them to jump on the tank; a number of them did so, and

the tank set off in the demonstration - ‘and I have a photograph of

this’, said Coutts.

Entering Parliament Square they met another Soviet tank which had been

sent to fire on them, and this tank, too, turned and joined the

demonstration. In the square were three more Soviet tanks and two

armoured cars. The crowd went right up to them and began to talk to the

soldiers. The Soviet commandant was saying: ‘I have a wife and children

waiting for me in the Soviet Union. I don’t want to stay in Hungary at

all’, when suddenly from the roof-tops there were three salvoes of

gun-fire. Some of the people ran to the sides of the square for shelter.

Others were told by the Russians to shelter behind the tanks. Some

thirty people were left lying on the square either dead or wounded,

including a Soviet officer. Tanks and cars opened fire on the roof-tops.

‘It is not clear to me who it was that began the shooting, ‗ Coutts

added. ‘It is more than likely they were security police.’ More than

likely. And the provocation served its purpose: to prevent

fraternisation, and to start the story that Soviet troops had opened

fire on unarmed demonstrators. If the Soviet withdrawal had begun on

October 24 instead of one week later, better still if the Soviet Army

had never entered the fight, and if the AVH had been disarmed and

disbanded on October 24, much bitterness and suffering could have been

prevented.

My second dispatch from Budapest, telephoned on November 2, dealt with

the causes of the revolution and with how it broke out in Budapest. The

dispatch consisted entirely of an interview with Charlie Coutts. Except

for a short ‘intro’ of my own, everything in it was taken down as Coutts

told it, while we sat together at breakfast that Friday morning in the

Duna Hotel. I limited this dispatch to what Coutts told me for two very

good reasons. First, calls were severely restricted, and my piece had to

be kept reasonably short - not more than a typist could take down in

twenty minutes. Secondly, and more important, it provided an independent

assessment of the causes of the revolt by a man whose judgement the

paper was bound to respect, even if it no longer respected mine. After

all, he had been in Budapest three years - long enough to find out a

fair amount.

When the dispatch was received there was a half-hearted attempt to

dismiss Coutts as ‘politically naive.’ George Matthews, assistant

general secretary of the Communist Party, who was standing in at the

Daily Worker in place of the editor, J.R. Campbell, at that time in

Moscow, blue-pencilled the dispatch to ribbons. I gather there was a

certain amount of feeling about this among the staff. After all, Fryer

might have got drunk, or had a nervous breakdown, or temporarily lost

his political bearings and balance. But here was old Charlie Coutts,

whom everyone knew as a reliable, level-headed man, backing him up.

As a result of this pressure, it seems, some of the cuts were restored

in time for the first edition. Others were restored in between the first

and second editions, but many important things - essential, I would have

thought, if the readers were to understand the Hungarian turmoil

properly -were still omitted altogether. The Daily Worker has made the

amazing claim that this dispatch was given merely ‘normal editing and

“subbing”.’ In view of the fact that a total of 455 of Coutts’s words

were omitted altogether (I am not counting my introduction) and several

others were subtly changed (’uprising’ for ‘revolution’, ‘Mr. Coutts

asserted’ and ‘Mr. Coutts believed’ for ‘Mr. Coutts said’) the editing

of such an important interview seems to me to be completely abnormal.

The whole effect of the deletions was to water down the piece and to

conceal really vital facts from the reader.

For instance, Coutts quoted a Hungarian Communist Party member who said

to him during the fighting: ‘The feeling here is like that May Day in

1947, when we danced in the streets.’

This was omitted. So was a passage about the ‘revolt of the

intellectuals’. So was a statement that ‘the Communist Party had ceased

to be a Communist Party - it had become an organ of the State and

nothing else’, backed up by what honest Communists had told him: ‘Ours

is not a Communist Party. You can’t change anything.’

Particularly significant was the cutting out of Coutts’ statement that

the security police was deliberately created by a dominant clique inside

the Party, the people who had returned from the USSR: Rákosi, Farkas,

and Gerö, and that this dominant clique, ‘incapable of independent

thought, relied on the thinking of the Soviet Communist Party, right or

wrong.

They felt that if the Soviet Party made a turn, then they had to make a

turn.’

The Daily Worker also deleted Coutts’ considered opinion that there was

no reason for calling in Soviet troops on October 24, other than the

concern of Gerö and the other leaders to save their skins and their

positions. ‘They were not called in to restore order nor to defend

Socialism,’ he told me. His description of how forty AVH men trapped in

the Budapest Party headquarters were captured and hanged and of how

thirteen and fourteen-year-olds were fighting with machine-guns and

tommy-guns was also left out. Coutts told me how Freedom Fighters said

to him: ‘It is better to die than to live as they have made us live.’

The Daily Worker thought that this, too, had better be withheld from its

customers. Finally Coutts’ forecast of the emergence, for the first time

in eight years, of ‘a real Communist Party in Hungary, not a Party run

by professional politicians and bureaucrats but led by those Communists

who have remained true to principle and have suffered for it’ - this,

too, fell victim to ‘normal editing’.

Readers can judge for themselves how far this was in fact ‘normal

editing and “subbing”’, and how far it was the result of a deliberate

decision by Party leaders afraid to let the whole distressing, shocking

and for them - dangerous truth be known.

5. Györ

My German Red Cross companions decided that the need for medical aid at

Magyaróvár was so urgent that they would return the same evening to the

Austrian border to spread the news.

By sheer luck I found a Hungarian willing to drive me to Györ, 20 miles

farther on, which would break the back of the journey to Budapest. His

car was an ancient and ramshackle Ford, tied together with bits of wire.

But at least it was a car, and before we left Magyaróvár we made ready

for the journey with a tot each of some ferocious spirit, home-brewed in

his illegal still. After the day at Magyaróvár I badly needed a drink;

wisely, the Nagy Government had banned the sale of anything

intoxicating, even beer. The road to Györ was very dark and very bumpy,

but there was neither sight nor sound of fighting. Every single

Hungarian Army unit in the Györ-Sopron county had gone over to the

revolution and the Soviet Army was sitting tight and doing nothing. I

was later to learn how the neutralisation of the Soviet troops had been

accomplished.

I reached Györ about 9.30 p.m., booked in at the Vörös Csillag (Red

Star) hotel, and shouldered my way through the crowds of people still

standing about and holding discussions in the square outside the Town

Hall, the seat of the Györ national committee. The word ‘national’ was

not intended to imply that this body arrogated to itself any authority

outside its own region; such committees called themselves indifferently

‘national’ or ‘revolutionary’. In their spontaneous origin, in their

composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient

organisation of food supplies and of civil order, in the restraint they

exercised over the wilder elements among the youth, in the wisdom with

which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops, and, not

least, in their striking resemblance at so many points to the soviets or

councils of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies which sprang up

in Russia in the 1905 revolution and again in February 1917, these

committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary,

were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection - the

coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mine

and Army units - and organs of popular self-government, which the armed

people trusted. As such they enjoyed tremendous authority, and it is no

exaggeration to say that until the Soviet attack of November 4 the real

power in the country lay in their hands. Of course, as in every real

revolution ‘from below’, there was ‘too much’ talking, arguing,

bickering, coming and going, froth, excitement, agitation, ferment. That

is one side of the picture. The other side is the emergence to leading

positions of ordinary men, women and youths whom the AVH dominion had

kept submerged. The revolution thrust them forward, aroused their civic

pride and latent genius for organisation, set them to work to build

democracy out of the ruins of bureaucracy. ‘You can see people

developing from day to day,’

I was told.

Both sides of the picture could be studied in the Györ Town Hall. There

were deputations arriving here, delegations departing there. There was

noise and bustle and, outside on the balcony during most of next day,

constant speech-making. At first glance one might have seen only flags,

armbands, rifles slung over shoulders, a jostling throng of people in

room after room; or heard only uproar and argument and jangling

telephone bells. But each room had its point of rest: one or two calm,

patient figures engaged in turning near-chaos into something like order,

sorting things out, soothing the hasty tempers of men who badly needed

sleep, organising, advising, building an apparatus to prevent, above

all, hunger and demoralisation. These were the leaders - some of them

Communists who had at last found the revolution of their dreams, some of

them Socialists, many of them indifferent to political distinctions,

since all Hungary was now united around two simple demands that even the

children of six were shouting. Here was a revolution, to be studied not

in the pages of Marx, Engels and Lenin, valuable though these pages may

be, but happening here in real life before the eyes of the world. A

flesh and blood revolution with all its shortcomings and contradictions

and problems - the problems of life itself. As they took me to see the

president and vice-president of this committee not yet forty-eight hours

old I caught sight of a portrait of Lenin on the wall, and I could

almost fancy his shrewd eyes twinkling approvingly.

The president, György Szabó, a metal-worker, was a tall figure in a

shiny blue suit, the inevitable red, white and green ribbon in the

buttonhole. But the real personality of the committee was its

vice-president, Attila Szigeti, an M.P. for the National Peasant Party

(a party that had long been a dormant ally of the Communists: a few days

later it renamed itself the Petöfi Party.) Szigeti looked for all the

world like an English academic, with his stoop, his untidy hair, his

Sherlock Holmes pipe, his bulging briefcase tucked under his arm and his

swift, quizzical, appraising glance. His and Szabó’s main efforts that

Saturday and Sunday were devoted to calming the hotheads among the

youth. From all over the county delegates had been coming to demand

trucks for a grandiose ‘march on Budapest’, where fighting between

Hungarians and Russians was reported to be still going on. This would

clearly have been folly. The national committee, in touch with the Nagy

Government by railway telephone, had information that a Soviet

withdrawal from the capital was only a matter of two or three days. For

young people with rifles and tommy-guns to converge on Budapest would

prejudice Nagy’s delicate negotiations. I watched Szabó and Szigeti

arguing with each fresh delegation, convincing them that their

exuberance could only prejudice the success of the revolution, and that

such trucks as were available must be used to carry food to the people

of Budapest.

No one who was there would pretend that this line of the national

committee was universally popular in Györ. The Catholics were conducting

a lively agitation outside the Town Hall on the Sunday afternoon. They

mustered around 3,000 people (the population of Györ is 66,000) to hear

a priest say, ‘I speak to you not as a priest, but as a Hungarian’, and

demand the removal of the ‘compromisers’ on the national committee. It

was in Györ that I met my first real counter-revolutionary, a young man

behind the reception desk at the Vörös Csillag hotel who crossed off the

name Vörös Csillag from my bill and wrote ‘Royal’ in big, bold letters;

who kept declaiming in ringing tones: ‘This is the proudest moment of

our history’; and who said of Szigeti and Szabó: ‘They are trying to

pacify us instead of mobilise us’. But the majority of Györ citizens

seemed to be solidly behind the committee they had elected from their

factories. Huge numbers, for instance, had responded to its call for

help in the loading of food for Budapest, and I was most impressed by

the efficiency of this organisation when I visited the central depot

where provisions were assembled and loaded.

By 11 p.m. on the Saturday night over a dozen journalists of different

nationalities had arrived in Györ, and Szigeti agreed to give a press

conference. He made no bones about his committee’s broad support for the

Nagy government, ‘but there are things which the Nagy government has not

yet said’. The basis of the committee was a people’s front. They wanted

complete independence and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. It was true

that Nagy was a Communist, ‘but he is a clean man and an honest man’.

The next step was to persuade people to start work again.

‘Gee, that’s all Commy double-talk,’ muttered an irate American

correspondent behind me.

‘This guy’s just a stooge.’ Obviously the US Press wanted something in

the nature of a permanent revolution.

Szigeti told us how the AVH had been overcome in Györ. The ordinary

police and the soldiers went over to the side of the workers, and a

concerted assault was made on the prison, from which the political

prisoners - some of them had been tortured off and on for years in an

attempt to extract from them confessions of spying - were liberated. So

were a few petty thieves. Three insurgents and three AVH men were

killed, one AVH man committed suicide and three others were taken

prisoner. ‘They will be put on trial for their crimes,’ said Szigeti.

It was in Györ, too, that I met a group of Communists for the first time

and was able to have a long talk with them. They were members of a

theatrical and puppet theatre company and, hearing that I was in town,

they sought me out, took me to their club and gave me a meal.

They were first class comrades, open and forthright about what had

happened in the past few days and the past eleven years. One of them,

who had left the Party in 1948, when things began to go wrong, was

revelling in the new freedom of discussion. It was from them I heard how

the Soviet troops at Györ had been neutralised. On the Wednesday Soviet

tanks and armoured cars had patrolled the town. Youths had catcalled and

thrown apples, and one soldier had levelled his gun as if to fire, but

his colleague had knocked his arm down. Then the Russians disappeared to

their camp a few kilometres away. By Friday there was news of foraging

parties at nearby farms, and the national committee decided to send a

delegation to the Soviet commander with the following proposal: that if

the Russians would promise to stay away from the town and not fire on

people the national committee would supply them with food. That promise,

said my Communist friend who had been on the delegation, had been kept.

The Communist Party district organisation had fallen to pieces, but that

Sunday, as I changed pound notes for forints at the Ibusz office

opposite the hotell, the clerk obligingly translated for me a

proclamation by the entirely new district committee - ‘all Nagy men’ -

printed prominently in the local paper that morning. (The slogan by the

title-piece was no longer ‘Proletarians of all countries unite!’ but

‘For an independent, democratic Hungary!’) The local Party statement

declared complete support for the two main demands: abolition of the AVH

and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

The clerk looked up in surprise as I signed my name on the form he

passed me. ‘I have seen that name many times before,’ he said, ‘in

Szabad Nép.’ He paused for a moment. ‘What do you as an English

Communist think of our revolution?’ I told him my first impressions.

‘And will you write the truth?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will.’

6. Bábolna

That day I had the good fortune to acquire a fine interpreter in Károly,

a Hungarian who spoke excellent English. His wife and children were in

Budapest and, like myself, he was more than anxious to get there. When

the revolution broke out he had been with a German visitor shooting

stags in the Bakony hills south of Györ. The German wanted to get out of

the country as soon as possible, and Károly accompanied him to the

frontier. They passed through the mining town of Várpalota, where the

car was stopped by a group of miners who asked that two of their number,

both badly wounded, should be taken to the nearest hospital.

One of the wounded miners said as they laid him in the car: ‘Carry on

the fight, comrades.

Don’t give up till we win!’ The miners told Károly that they were

solidly behind the revolution, and that their workmates at the famous

mining town of Tatabánya had risen ‘to a man’.

Károly had a plan for getting to Budapest, and he was willing to take me

with him. Half and hour’s bus ride away, if the bus was running, was the

big Bábolna State farm, where he had friends who owned a jeep and might

(he stressed ‘might’) be prepared to lend him it to complete the

journey. It turned out that there was a country bus leaving Györ at six

in the evening. Two days later the buses were standing in the street

with placards saying ‘strike’ on them. The busmen had decided to show

their solidarity with the railwaymen and the revolution. But on Sunday

we were lucky. We arranged to meet at the terminus at a few minutes to

six.

My actor friends tried hard to persuade me not to go. It was off the

main road, where there were chances of picking up a car; the road beyond

Bábolna ran through mining areas, where there was heavy fighting, and it

would be dangerous. But I had to take whatever chance there was of

getting through, and this seemed as good as any. As it happened we could

get no transport at Bábolna and came back to Györ on the Tuesday. But I

was glad to have been to Bábolna; what took place there was a microcosm

of the whole revolution, and I was the only foreigner and the only

journalist to see it. My friends took me to a restaurant near the

station and bought me tea and cakes and laughed as I politely denied

that the tea was any weaker than I was used to. ‘Be sure to come to us

if you come back to Györ,’ said Zsuzsa the puppetmistress. I promised,

and we said good-bye.

The single-decker bus ran unlit over what felt like a cart-track. On the

way Károly told me about Bábolna. It was Hungary’s outstanding show

farm: 35,000 acres of game preserve and farmland. But the central

feature was the celebrated stud farm, where for 200 years Arab and

Hungarian horses have been crossed to produce the magnificent Bábolna

strain. The whole farm employed over 1,000 workers, veterinary surgeons,

stable-hands, game-keepers, foresters, labourers and so forth.

We got off the bus at the main entrance to the farm, and there, by

chance, was a friend of Károly’s who promptly invited us to stay the

night at his home. His father was a shepherd and I would be interested

to hear his story. So we set off down a long lane and clambered over a

field and across a railway line to a little settlement where our arrival

set the fiercest dogs in Hungary all barking at once.

The old man was lying on the couch in his sheepskin jacket when we went

in, while his wife, a typical peasant woman in dark blue shapeless

garments and greasy apron, sat rosy-cheeked in front of the stove,

feeding it with logs. Neither would believe at first that I came from

London, but they welcomed me with almost embarrassing hospitality.

’The old man’s been at the bottle a bit,’ murmured Károly. ‘But don’t

blame him. Perhaps he’s had something to celebrate.’ He had. He shook my

hand vigorously. He seemed a year or two over 70, and his gnarled hands

and weather-beaten face, and the faint smell of sheep that clung about

him, told of hard work to bring his family to a level of prosperity

about that of a skilled worker in Britain. Deaf to our protests they

went out and killed ducklings to make us a gigantic meal, first taking

the skin off my throat with a soup livid with paprika - not the anaemic

stuff you buy as paprika in London but something altogether more

caustic.

‘They’ had called the old shepherd a ‘kulak’. Not even a Hungarian word,

you notice, but a Russian word meaning ‘fist’, and easy to apply to a

man who has a couple of dozen sheep and knows how to make them pay.

‘They’ had bullied him into joining an agricultural co- operative, as

‘they’ had bullied other peasants in the village. Every peasant was

rejoicing tonight at the disbanding of this co-operative which nobody

wanted. They had taken back their individual pieces of land and their

own animals. It was a second land distribution.

‘Trying to tell me I don’t know how to run things,’ grumbled the old

man. ‘Trying to tell me I’d got to apply Soviet experiences and the

latest discoveries of bloody Lysenko.’ He hawked and spat voluminously

into the stove. What accumulation of mistakes had been piled on this

unrepentant ‘kulak’s’ shoulders, I reflected.

But he had another reason for celebration. It appeared that the director

of the Bábolna State farm for the past five years had been, not a

countryman, but a former ironworker, a Party appointee, who knew nothing

about horsebreeding or agriculture, but was sent down to administer from

the comfortable side of a desk. Four years ago, before the shepherd was

‘de- kulakised’, he allowed his sheep to stray one day on to a field

belonging to the State farm, a field in which shoots of rye were

springing up. According to the shepherd, for rye to be nibbled down by

live-stock for a week or two is not a bad thing, as it strengthens the

crop. Be that as it may, along came the director and swore at the

shepherd, ordering him ‘as you wouldn’t speak to a dog’, to get his

sheep off State farm land at once. The old man’s command of Hungarian

invective was equal to the occasion, and he told the director in a few

sentences exactly what his mother was. Whereupon the director punched

the old shepherd in the face, knocking him to the ground, and then

seized his crook and beat him with it savagely.

That was four years before.

Come the revolution, three days ago, the shepherd’s two husky sons had

made their way to the director’s office. He was not slow to guess their

errand, for he reached in his desk draw for his revolver. But they

overpowered and disarmed him before he could use it and then beat him.

He had left Bábolna and had not returned.

Next morning the newly-elected workers’ council was to meet to elect in

its turn a leading committee and a new director. A foreign journalist

would be welcome. So next morning, after a long farewell to the old

couple, who spoke with tears in their eyes of their relations in Canada,

we set out for the farm offices. There was time first to look at the

horses, to see the tablet in the courtyard bearing the name of the Arab

stallion Obayan, grandsire of the Bábolna breed, and to admire the

little horses’ heads, like white knights, that topped the posts along

the fences.

Then we were asked to watch the entry into the Party committee office,

the opening of the safe, the discovery of hundreds of dossiers, one for

each worker at the farm, in which were recorded his whole career, his

political reliability or otherwise, any scrap of information known about

him. Any sordid little informer who had a grudge against a workmate

could be sure of having his tale, true or false, solemnly recorded on

one of these documents. In some cases a man’s history was taken back

twenty years or more. All over Hungary in these days of revelation the

people were finding and burning these dossiers, whose contents were

unknown to the individual concerned, which were passed on from job to

job and which might easily prevent promotion or lead to arrest, secret

trial, torture, imprisonment or death.

The workers’ council meeting comprised some eighty delegates

representing every section of the farm. Some sat around a long trestle

table adorned with little tricolour flags, others on rows of wooden

seats facing the chairman and a woman secretary taking a careful record

of the proceedings.

First there were general speeches: about the revolution, its aims and

tasks and prospects, and about Bábolna’s place in a new, genuinely

Socialist, genuinely democratic Hungary. I was given a fairly full

translation, and I noted down outstanding phrases: ‘We shall obey a

democratically-elected Parliament.’ ‘Our duty today is to make sure we

elect the best men.’

‘This is our country now.’ ‘We must set our faces resolutely against any

personal revenge.

We don’t want Hungarians to kill Hungarians.’ ‘Rákosi cheated and

deceived the people.’

One elderly man got up and said:

I am an ordinary workman. I am convinced that the system we have had up

to now was only working for foreign interests. Many of those who joined

the Communist Party did so for bad reasons. I ask that those we choose

today should be reliable, honest people. We don’t want turncoats.

He was warmly applauded. Another delegate addressed ‘the English

journalist’ directly: ‘Tell the English people and your friends in

England about the heroism of this little country.’

Several who spoke made it clear they were Communists, and they were

listened to gravely.

But there was one man who demanded the banning or voluntary dissolution

of the Communist Party as a completely discredited organisation. The

next speaker, a serious, bespectacled man of about twenty-five, said:

I am against demanding that the Communist Party be dissolved, because in

a democratic country there should be freedom for all parties. But it

will have to be a Communist Party that operates in an entirely new way.

This clearly expressed the general feeling of the meeting.

Soon the delegates, in a buzz of excitement, proceeded to the election

of their leadership.

Three candidates were proposed for the directorship, all local men. The

one whom Károly told me was most likely to head the poll was a tall

sober-looking man in riding breeches, some forty-five years old, who

came over and chatted with us. Károly said he was an agricultural

expert. His popularity was shown when a spokesman for one section rose

and said if this candidate did not win, that section wanted him as

section leader and hereby got its claim in first. The election was by

secret ballot. Everyone was given a slip of paper and wrote on it the

name of one of the candidates, and then the slips were collected and the

votes counted by the chairman. It all took a very long time indeed, and

one of the delegates came across and said to me through Károly something

that has stuck in my mind ever since: ‘I am sorry it is so slow, but you

must understand we have not got any practice in electing people.’

I think my last remaining illusion about the past was destroyed at that

moment.

The agricultural expert was elected director by 57 votes against his

nearest opponent’s 13.

Then the council elected a committee. Fifteen members were chosen, one

or two by the delegates from each section. Again it was a secret ballot,

and again these novices in democracy took their time. But at last the

committee took office and the council meeting broke up.

We left with the delegates, but the committee sent word after us that we

were welcome to watch its proceedings for as long as we wished. We sat

in for about an hour. All kinds of questions, from the most trivial to

the most momentous, were under discussion, and it was impossible to miss

the sense of responsibility with which these new leaders approached

their tasks. Should they continue to use the old, tainted word elvtárs

(’comrade’)? Or would it be better to address each other as polgártárs

(’fellowcitizen’)? By a large majority the comrades became

fellow-citizens. What practical measures should be taken to set up a

local militia to keep order and protect farm property? What precisely

were the limits of the decisions the director could take without

immediately consulting the committee? And, above all, what could this

farm do to send food to hungry Budapest? After an exchange of views it

was agreed to send a deputation to the national committee at Györ to see

how many trucks were available to come to Bábolna and be loaded with

meat and milk and eggs and butter and flour for the people of the

capital.

At this point we left them, the young man who had opposed the banning of

the Communist Party counting a number of proposals off on his fingers.

And what has puzzled me ever since, and what puzzles me greatly, is

this: where exactly was the ‘White Terror’ at Bábolna? Where was the

‘counterrevolution’? Where were the ‘reactionaries’? Where were the

‘Horthyites’? Where was ‘the terrible spectre of the fascist beast’

which, according to D.T. Shepilov’s speech at the General Assembly of

the United Nations on November 22, had ‘risen over the peaceful fields

of Hungary’? just what had the workers of Bábolna done to justify

foreign intervention?

7. Budapest

Unable to get transport at Báblona, we returned to Györ with two members

of the workers’ committee, passing on the way two check-points manned by

Freedom Fighters. I spent one more night at Györ, and the evening was

made memorable by the hospitality and comradeship of the actors. They

were planning a tour of the hospitals to play before the not- too-badly

wounded, and they were bubbling over with longterm plans for the

vigorous theatre they were going to develop in a really Socialist

Hungary.

Next morning I met three Austrian journalists with a free place in their

car, and at last I began the final lap of the trip to Budapest. It took

us something over three hours to cover the 80 miles, since we had to

stop several times at check-points. Funerals were distressingly frequent

in the villages. We saw nothing of Soviet troops, but the Hungarian

sentries who stopped us told us the glad news that the fighting between

Russians and Hungarians in the capital was over, and the Soviet

evacuation had begun. This was Wednesday, October 31.

‘My friends, the revolution has been victorious, Imre Nagy told a mass

demonstration in front of the Parliament House that afternoon. ‘We have

chased out the Rákosi-Gerö gang. We will tolerate no interference in our

internal affairs’. That day Anna Kéthly, after six years in prisons and

concentration camps, became chairman of the newly reborn

SocialDemocratic Party. That day János Kádár announced the birth of a

new Communist Party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, whose ranks

would be closed to those responsible for the crimes of the past. That

day score upon score of secret police swung head downwards from the

Budapest trees and lamp-posts, and the crowds spat upon them and some,

crazed and brutalised by years of suffering and hatred, stubbed out

cigarette butts in the dead flesh.

That day British bombs were dropped on Egyptian territory and sank an

Egyptian frigate in the Suez Canal, and President Eisenhower called the

attack an ‘error’. It anticipated the Soviet aggression in Hungary by

four days.

At this point of time effective power in Hungary was divided between the

Nagy Government, which had the support of the people because it

reflected their will - and the armed people themselves, as represented

and led by their national committees. It was a dual power.

Delegates from the national committees in western, eastern,

south-eastern and southern Hungary were meeting at Györ and putting

forward the people’s demands: the immediate withdrawal of the Soviet

reinforcements that were reported to be arriving in the east; the

withdrawal of all Soviet troops by the end of the year; and free

elections. Some reports said a provisional government had been formed at

Györ, but this seems to have been a garbled version of the demand that

representatives from the national committees be included in the Nagy

Government. At all events there could be no doubt who held the power in

Budapest.

The people who had held the arms held the power.

And who held the arms? Fascists? No, the people who had done the

fighting, the Freedom Fighters, the workers of Csepel and Újpest, the

students, teen-age boys and girls, bandoliers over their shoulders,

hand-grenades stuck in their belts and tommy-guns - ‘guitars’, they

called them - in their hands, the soldiers who had exchanged the red

star of servitude for the red, white and green ribbon of liberty. They

had won a glorious battle, and for a time (how dreadfully short a time!)

they rejoiced, even as they mourned their dead and lit candles on the

thousands of freshly-dug graves. Even the children, hundreds of them,

had taken part in the fighting and I spoke to little girls who had

poured petrol in the path of Soviet tanks and lit it. I heard of

14-year-olds who had jumped to their deaths on to the tanks with blazing

petrol bottles in their hands. Little boys of twelve, armed to the

teeth, boasted to me of the part they had played in the struggle. A city

in arms, a people in arms, who had stood up and snapped the chains of

bondage with one gigantic effort, who had added to the roll-call of

cities militant - Paris, Petrograd, Canton, Madrid, Warsaw - another

immortal name. Budapest!

Her buildings might be battered and scarred, her trolley-bus and

telephone wires down, her pavements littered with glass and stained with

blood. But her citizens’ spirit was unquenchable.

There was still some mopping-up of AVH to be done. At 45 May the First

Road, over in the City Park, they discovered the headquarters of the AVH

radio jamming branch, and found there a great number of tommy-guns,

rifles, pistols, ammunition, hand-grenades and a variety of clothing.

One spectacular operation with picks and shovels and pneumatic drills

disclosed a vast system of cellars running under the street from the

Party headquarters. These cellars, two floors deep, must have taken

months, perhaps years to construct. There were six-foot- thick concrete

walls, hermetically-sealed doors, vast stores of food and clothing, vast

stocks of arms, and a varied apparatus of torture. The whole city knew

of the tappings from somewhere deep inside this subterranean fastness,

tappings that might have been made by AVH men, or by prisoners, or by

both, but which made it impossible to use high explosives freely to

blast open the secrets of this maze of tunnels. As far as I know, those

trapped down there were still trapped when the Soviet attack began on

November 4 ... From prisons elsewhere in the city, those who had been in

darkness came out into the light and told their stories. From

underground cells, sometimes ankle-deep in water, they stumbled into the

arms of their deliverers, and it was the latter-day fulfilment of

Pushkin’s prophecy:

The heavy-hanging chains will fall,

The walls will crumble at the word;

And Freedom greet you with the light,

And brothers give you back the sword.

They were ghosts, many of these prisoners: men and women whom their

friends had long ago given up for dead. Men and women like Dr. Edith

Bone, former Daily Worker correspondent in Budapest, whom I last met

there in September 1949, when she was preparing to return to Britain. I

remember going shopping with her and helping her to choose a chess set.

A few days later she disappeared, just before she was due to board the

aeroplane.

She was accused of espionage, kept in solitary confinement for fourteen

months, handcuffed so tightly that her wrists carry a permanent mark,

taken before a secret court ‘ sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment

without being told how long the sentence was, put back in solitary

confinement for six months for defying the court and kept in jail for

another five and a half years till the revolution set her free.

Dr. Bone prides herself on her phyiscal and spiritual toughness. Others

were less tough. On the Friday night I saw 450 prisoners, still in their

striped jackets and trousers, like pyjamas, set free from the

Gyustofogház jail in Budapest. Some of them were raving mad, and had to

be restrained and taken into a gentler custody. Four of the prisoners

were engineers who had been accused of sabotage when they built the

Stalin Bridge across the Danube. In one of the cells, on the black,

grimy wall, one of these prisoners had scratched a poem with a Latin

title: Pro Libertate. By the Friday night the revolution had released

5,500 political prisoners.

There were in all three and a half days of freedom, and at times it

seemed as if the people of Budapest felt in their bones that the

interregnum was destined to be a short one, so ardently did they

practise democracy. Life was hardly gay. Only food shops were open.

There was no public transport till the Saturday, when a few buses began

running, crowded to danger point, and with people clinging on outside.

Lorry loads of youth and soldiers and cars with Red Cross flags swept

by, but there was little other traffic on the streets. Cinemas, theatres

and restaurants were closed. But no one needed the stimulus of

entertainment. Political parties sprang up in a ferment of discussion

and organisation. I have mentioned the reappearance of the

SocialDemocratic Party, the rebirth of the Communist Party and the

invigoration of the National Peasant Party as the Petöfi Party. The

Smallholders’ Party reappeared. A Hungarian Christian Party was formed.

So was a new Federation of Trade Unions. Rough placards were hung

outside their headquarters. The ice of eleven years had cracked, and

democracy had flooded incontinent into the people’s lives.

The most visible aspect of this ferment, and the most exciting,

especially to a journalist, was the sudden, explosive advent of no fewer

than twenty-five daily papers in place of the five sad, dreary,

stereotyped sheets of recent years. Very often the Budapest worker used

to find exactly the same announcement, word for word, and sometimes with

just the same photographs, in Szabad Nép, Népszava, Magyar Nemzet,

Szabad Ifjúság and the evening paper Esti Budapest. Now he had two dozen

papers to choose from (what a field-day the newsvendors had!) with

independent editors, clashes of opinion, fullblooded polemics, hard-

hitting commentaries, and, above all, news. Szabad Nép, the Communist

daily, came out for a day and then gave place to Népszabadság when the

new Communist Party was launched. Népszava, the trade union daily,

became the organ of the Social-Democratic Party again. The trade unions

brought out Népakarat. The Smallholders’ Party resurrected their Kis

Ujság after six years. The National Revolutionary Committee brought out

Magyar Függetlenség.

The Revolutionary Hungarian Army and Youth Organisation produced

Igazság. The Revolutionary Council of Young Workers launched Magyar

Ifjúság. The Petöfi Party launched Üj Magyarország. There were Magyar

Világ, Valóság, and many more.

I went to see the editor of one of these papers in his office at what

had formerly been the Szabad Nép and Esti Budapest building, and which

now housed in its warren of offices, more rationally, several newspapers

and committees. He turned out to be an old friend of mine, a Communist,

whose journalistic skill was being taxed to its uttermost limits by the

sudden but welcome blossoming of new writers, principally from among the

youth. ‘Wait half a minute, will you?’ he asked, motioning me to a

chair. It was an hour before he had finished, first correcting a mass of

copy, then interviewing a stream of shy but enthusiastic youngsters.

‘They bring us poems, news items, articles, short stories about the

revolution by the score,’ he said. ‘Some of them are good, some not so

good. But we try to help them. New talent. We never suspected it,

never.’ He asked me suddenly if I would be prepared to help with an

English-language newspaper giving the revolutionaries’ point of view to

the world.

This was the first time I had been faced with a direct decision about

helping the Hungarian people, but I did not hesitate. It never came to

anything, however, for 24 hours later Soviet guns were pounding

Budapest.

I was staying at the Duna Hotel, on the Danube bank a few minutes’ walk

from the Parliament House. The hotel was practically taken over by

journalists, who scrambled desperately each day for the few telephone

lines available. To be reasonably sure of getting a call within twelve

hours one had to go to the exchange on the fourth floor, where two

harassed switchboard operators struggled with an evergrowing pile of

slips demanding calls to all over Europe. One day a call to London I had

booked for 3.30 in the afternoon came through about two the next

morning, far too late for the edition. I managed to get through to

Moscow and have a chat with Sam Russell, Daily Worker correspondent

there, who was sent to Budapest after my return and resignation. Tass,

he said, was sending very little from Budapest. On the whole I was not

surprised.

The Duna was full of rumours about Soviet reinforcements and troop

movements and the seizure of Hungarian aerodromes. About 600 tanks and

30,000 fresh troops were said to be advancing. The Russians were said to

be building a broad-gauge railway into Hungary from the USSR. But most

of us discounted these rumours. We just did not believe the Russians

would attack. Neither did the Nagy Government, which on the Saturday,

during a break in the negotiations with the Soviet officers about the

withdrawal of Soviet troops, gave a Press conference in the Gobelin room

at the Parliament House.

Two members of the new, enlarged cabinet answered questions for over an

hour, progress being made painfully slow by the need to translate

replies into English, French and German, one after the other. The

replies were given by the Minister of State, Dr. Zoltán Tildy, who had

been President of the Republic from 1946 to 1948, when he resigned after

his son-in-law was accused of spying and arrested, and Géza Losonczy, a

rehabilitated Communist. Nagy had promised to appear, but,

understandably, found himself too busy.

Both Tildy and Losonczy were quite hopeful about the results of the

talks with the Soviet officers. ‘There are encouraging signs that they

will lead to a further easing of tension,’ said Losonczy. ‘The talks

will be continued at ten tonight,’ said Tildy. ‘Meanwhile the Soviet

side has made a promise that no more Soviet military trains will arrive

at the Hungarian frontier.’ Had the Hungarian Government any information

that the Polish Government supported its demand for the withdrawl of

Soviet troops? ‘Yes,’ replied Losonczy, ‘we know that the point of view

of the Polish Government is that all that is happening in Hungary is the

internal affair of Hungary.’

In view of the suggestions that the Nagy Government was blind to the

dangers of counter- revolution, it is worth recalling that Losonczy went

out of his way at this Press conference to emphasise those dangers.

‘Counter-revolutionary forces are active,’ he said. ‘The Government

declares that it does not desire to let any of the gains of the past

period be lost: the agrarian reform, the nationalisation of factories,

the social achievements. It desires also to maintain the consquences of

the present revolution: national independence, equality between nations,

the building of Socialism on a democratic and not a dictatorial basis.

The Government is unanimous that it will not permit the restoration of

capitalism.’ Losonczy said his Government wanted to continue its

relations with the Soviet Union ‘on the basis of equality’. Then he

added laconically: ‘Even in the countries of Socialism there are

misunderstandings about the character of the Hungarian Government and

the present situation in Hungary.’

Tildy was asked point-blank how strong, in his opinion, was the, danger

of Soviet attack. He replied:

I believe it is humanly impossible that such a tragedy could take place.

It would be tragic from the point of view of the Hungarian people, from

the point of view of the Soviet people, from the point of view of the

whole world. That is why I believe it will never take place.

Three hours later the Hungarian Government delegates to the negotiations

were arrested by the Soviet authorities. Before dawn next morning we

were awakened by the thunder of Soviet guns shelling the city from the

Gellért Hill and from the other hills of Buda. The ‘humanly impossible’

had happened. The tragedy had moved inexorably to its climax. The statue

of Stalin might have been toppled from its plinth with blow-lamps and

hawsers and broken into ten thousand bronze fragments for souvenirs. But

Stalinism, vengeful, cruel, remorseless, had returned to Budapest.

8. Revolution and counter-revolution

The question of the origin of the Hungarian revolution was discussed in

Chapter Three. It was argued that the revolution was not a well-prepared

plot by counter-revolutionary forces, but a genuine upsurge of the

overwhelming majority of the Hungarian people, for whom life had become

intolerable - an upsurge prepared for by the past thirty-seven years and

called forth in particular by the blunders, crimes and trickery of the

Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party. There are some who would

accept this view, and who would deplore the initial Soviet intervention,

but who would defend the second Soviet intervention as a regrettable,

but bitter, necessity. Three arguments are advanced to support this

defence. In the first place it is said that the Nagy government as

reconstituted on Saturday, November 3, had moved considerably to the

Right, and was on the point of sliding still further to the Right, since

it included people who wanted not merely to neutralise Hungary but to

restore capitalism and landlordism. Secondly, it is held that a growing

danger of counter-revolution, the increasing activity of reactionary

forces throughout the country, which the Nagy government was powerless

to check, made Soviet intervention imperative. (Cardinal Mindszenty’s

broadcast on the evening of November 3 is usually cited as proof.)

Thirdly, the defenders of the second Soviet intervention claim that

White Terror was raging in the country, and that prompt action by Soviet

troops was needed to save the lives of Communists. I propose to try to

answer these arguments in turn.

The character of the Nagy Government on the eve of the Soviet attack,

and the positions taken up by the parties represented in it, have been

analysed by Daniel Norman in an article in Tiibune of November 23, 1956,

to which I am indebted for some of the translations below.

The ‘Inner Cabinet’ of three Communists and four non-Communists had been

replaced by a Government consisting of two representatives of the

Socialist Workers’ (Communist) Party, three each from the

Social-Democratic Party and the Smallholders’ Party, two from the Petöfi

(National Peasant) Party and - what Norman does not mention - one

representative of the revolutionary committees, Colonel Pál Maléter, who

sat as Minister of War, and who was one of the two delegates arrested by

the Russians. The suggestion seems to be that this change meant a

certain swamping of the Communists, and that the non-Communists in the

coalition could not be trusted to retain Socialism, but would pave the

way for fascism.

To which it must be answered first, that this coalition was more truly

representative of the Hungarian people than any government Hungary had

known since 1947: it was a real people’s front goverment, and, if the

matter had been put to the test, would undoubtedly have enjoyed the

trust of the national committees; and, secondly, that statements by

responsible leaders of the three non-Communist parties in the coalition

gave no grounds whatever for branding them as enemies of Socialism. In

the first issue of the new Népszava, on November I, the Socialist leader

Anna Kéthly had written:

The Social-Democratic Party ... has won its chance of living, and it has

won this from a regime which called itself a popular democracy, but

which in form and essence was neither popular nor democratic. We greet

with profound respect the heroes who have made possible the rebirth of

the party, thousands of young intellectuals and workers who have fought,

starving and in rags, spurred on by the idea of a free and independent

Hungary ... Freed from one prison, let us not allow the country to

become a prison of another colour. Let us watch over the factories, the

mines and the land, which must remain in the hands of the people. (My

italics - P.F.)

On October 31, in a speech to the inaugural meeting of the Pécs branch

of the Smallholders’ Party, Béla Kovács said:

No one must dream of going back to the world of counts, bankers and

capitalists: that world is over once and for all. A true member of the

Smallholders’ Party cannot think along the lines of 1939 or 1945.

On November 3 Ferenc Farkas, general secretary of the Petöfi Party, and

one of its members in the Nagy government (the Daily Worker on November

5 described this party as ‘semi- fascist’) said there were a number of

points on which the Government was unanimous, including the following:

The Government will retain from the Socialist achievements everything

which can be, and must be, used in a free, democratic and Socialist

country, in accordance with the wish of the people.

We want to retain the most sincere and warmest friendly economic and

cultural relations with every Socialist country, even when we have

achieved neutrality. We also want to establish economic and cultural

relations with the other peace-loving countries of the world.

The demand for neutrality, which Nagy supported, was no evidence of a

slide to the Right, nor of ‘open hostility ... to the Soviet Union,’ nor

of ‘repeated concessions ... to the reactionary forces’, as that

shameful statement of the Executive Committee of the British Communist

Party, issued only twelve hours after the Soviet attack began yet

thoroughly approving it, sought to make out. If Yugoslavia could choose

its own path to Socialism without joining one or other bloc, why could

not the Hungarian people, too, have both neutrality and Socialism? I am

in complete agreement with Norman’s conclusion that, far from being

‘reactionary forces’, the parties associated in the Coalition Government

of Imre Nagy on the eve of the Soviet attack ‘were the only forces

capable of dealing with the dispersed fascists, little groups of

fascists or plain hooligans who had made their appearance lately among

the revolutionary mass and perpetrated crimes condemned by everyone

among the insurgents. Their number was not great. They had no

possibility of organising themselves.

Only a government which had the backing of the overwhelming majority of

the Hungarians, as Nagy’s last government had, could have detected and

dealt with them.’

This brings us to the second question. Were reactionary forces becoming

more active? Of course they were. Was there a danger of

counter-revolution? It would be senseless to deny it.

The night I reached Vienna, November 11, I was told by Austrian

Communists how 2,000 Hungarian émigrés armed and trained by the

Americans, had crossed over into Western Hungary to fight and agitate.

But the danger of counter-revolution is not the same thing as the

success of counter-revolution. And between the two lay a powerful and

significant barrier, which I for one was prepared to put my trust in:

the will of the Hungarian people not to return to capitalism. As Bruce

Renton wrote in The New Statesman and Nation on November 17:

Nobody who was in Hungary during the revolution could escape the

overwhelming impression that the Hungarian people had no desire or

intention to return to the capitalist system.

And remember that these people who wanted to retain Socialism and

improve it had arms in their hands; they were armed workers, armed

peasants, armed students, armed soldiers. They had guns and tanks and

ammunition. They had splendid morale. They were more than equal to any

putsch, if one had been attempted. But they were never given the chance

to prove it. It was none other than the Communist Party paper Szabad Nép

which on October 29 indignantly rebuffed Pravda’s article The collapse

of the adventure directed against the people of Hungary. What happened

in Budapest, said Szabad Nép, had not been directed against the people,

it had not been an adventure, and it certainly had not ‘collapsed’. The

demands were demands for Socialist democracy. Pravda’s claim that the

insurrection had been instigated by ‘Western imperialists’ was ‘an

insult to the whole population of Budapest’.

It was not imperialist intrigue which produced this ‘bloody, tragic, but

lofty fight,’ but the Hungarian leadership’s own ‘faults and crimes’,

and, in the first place, its failure to ‘safeguard the sacred flame of

national independence’. And Szabad Nép answered in advance the cry that

counter-revolution obliged the Soviet Union to intervene:

The youth will be able to defend the conquests which they have achieved

at the price of their blood, even against the counter-revolutionaries

who have joined them. (The students and workers) have proved that they

represent such a political force as is capable of becoming a guiding and

irreplaceable force ... From the first moments of the demonstration and

fighting they declared many times - and in the course of the fighting

they proved it - that they were not against popular rule, that they were

neither fascists nor counter-revolutionaries nor bandits.

As for the Mindszenty broadcast of November 3, the lengthy extracts

quoted by Mervyn Jones in Tribune (November 30) make nonsense of Andrew

Rothstein’s claim that it ‘issued a programme of capitalist

restoration’, and John Gollan’s description of it as ‘the virtual signal

for the counterrevolutionary coup’. Mindszenty on the whole supported

the Nagy Government, and his one reference to private ownership came in

a sentence beginning: ‘We want a classless society’! As Jones said, the

speech was ‘reminiscent ... of a Labour Party policy statement’.

There is one further proof of how false was the claim that the Soviet

troops went into action against reactionaries and fascists, and that is

the indisputable fact that they were greeted, not with joy, as the

Soviet communiqués claimed, but with the white-hot, patriotic fury of a

people in arms; and that it was the industrial workers who resisted them

to the end. ‘Soviet troops are re-establishing order ... We Soviet

soldiers and officers are your selfless friends’, said the Soviet

communiqué of November 5. It was the proletariat of Hungary, above all,

that fought the tanks which came to destroy the revolutionary order they

had already established in the shape of their workers’ councils. In my

dispatch of November 11, I asked:

If the Soviet intervention was necessary to put down counterrevolution,

how is it to be explained that some of the fiercest resistance of all

last week was in the working-class districts of Újpest, in the north of

Budapest, and Csepel, in the south - both pre-war strongholds of the

Communist Party? Or how is the declaration of the workers of the famous

steel town of Sztálinváros to be explained: that they would defend their

Socialist town, the plant and houses they had built with their own

hands, against the Soviet invasion?

Not only was no answer forthcoming to these questions, but the questions

themselves never saw the light of day. The Stalinists in control of the

Daily Worker backed the export of Socialism in high explosive form

against the bare-handed heroism of ‘Red Csepel’. They took their stand

on the wrong side of the barricades.

The third argument in favour of Soviet intervention is that there was

‘White Terror’ raging in Hungary, and that for the Soviet Union to have

refused to intervene would have been ‘inhuman’. Leaving aside the still

uncertain question of whether anyone ever did appeal to the Soviet Union

to intervene, let us make quite sure what White Terror is. just as Red

Terror is the organised, systematic repression by a proletarian

dictatorship of its counter- revolutionary opponents, so White Terror is

the organised, systematic repression by a bourgeois dictatorship of its

revolutionary opponents.

Heaven help Andrew Rothstein and those others who call the state of

affairs in Hungary on November 1, 2 and 3 ‘White Terror’ if they ever

come face to face with real White Terror. In ten days the Versailles

army which suppressed the Paris Commune of 1871 slaughtered between

20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children, either in battle or in cold

blood, amid terrible scenes of cruelty and suffering. ‘The ground is

paved with their corpses’, gloated Thiers. Another 20,000 were

transported and 7,800 sent to the coastal fortresses. That was White

Terror. Thousands of Communists and Jews were tortured and murdered

after the suppression of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and

hideous atrocities took place at Orgovány and Siófok. That was White

Terror. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek massacred 5,000 organised workers in

Shanghai. That was White Terror. From the advent of Hitler to the defeat

of fascist Germany untold millions of Communists, Socialists, trade

unionists, Jews and Christians were murdered. That was White Terror. It

is perfectly true that a section of the population of Budapest, outraged

to the pitch of madness by the crimes of the secret police, was seized

with a lust to exterminate Communists. It is true that the innocent

suffered as well as the guilty. This is a painful and distressing fact.

But to describe the murder of a number of Communists (which all

observers agree was confined to Budapest) as ‘White Terror’

necessitating Soviet intervention is to describe events in Hungary in a

one-sided, propagandist way. How many innocent Communists were murdered

in Budapest? Twenty? Fifty? I do not know. But certainly fewer - far,

far fewer - than the number of AVH men who were lynched. At the Agony of

Hungary exhibition in London, and in all the hundreds of photographs I

have seen, there was not a single one showing a lynched Communist. But

there were many showing lynched AVH men in their uniforms. [4] There was

one sequence showing a woman in civilian clothes being molested by a

crowd, who accused her of being an AVH spy. The caption stated that the

crowd let her go.

Now the only circumstantial evidence for the murder of Communists is

that put forward by André Stil in an article translated in World News of

November 24. Stil arrived in Budapest on November 12, nine days after

the second Soviet intervention. His article was published in Humanité on

November 19. Even bearing in mind the assertion of Coutts and others I

spoke to that forty of those killed in the Budapest Party headquarters

were AVH men, it is impossible to find Stil’s account of the treatment

of the seven Communists whom he names anything but convincing and

horrible. Yet Stil is obviously performing the disagreeable task of a

propagandist making the most of a small number of atrocities. His need

to have the attack on the Party headquarters begin on October 30 makes

him antedate the Soviet withdrawal from Budapest by three days; he

describes ‘the vandals attacking the liberation monument built upon the

Gellért Hill’, whereas in fact the main figure was not attacked; and,

worst of all, he mentions the AVH and its crimes in the following

curious and oblique way:

Many of those who were there did not at first believe that the Party and

its active members were being attacked, but that the attack was directed

to the members of a secret police about whom the most unlikely stones

were being told.

I have met Stil and have a great personal respect for him, as comrade,

journalist, novelist and militant, but I should be dishonest if I did

not say that the words I have italicised are unworthy of him. The truth

about the ‘White Terror’ has been told by Bruce Renton:

In the provinces only the AVH was physically attacked. (New Statesman,

November 17) I had seen no counter-revolutionaries. I had seen the

political prisoners liberated ... I had seen the executioners executed

in the fury of the people’s revenge ... But there was no ‘White Terror’.

The Communists walked free, the secret police were hanging by their

boots. Where then was this counter-revolution, this White Terror?

(Truth, November 16)

The arguments in favour of the second Soviet intervention do not hold

water. But even if Nagy had been making concessions all along the line

to fascism, even if counter-revolution had succeeded, even if White

Terror had been raging, it must be said, and said openly and with

emphasis, that from the standpoint of Socialist principle the Soviet

Union would still not have been justified in intervening. The Soviet

aggression against Hungary was not merely immoral and criminal from the

standpoint of the Hungarian people. It was a clear and flagrant breach

of what Lenin called ‘that elementary Socialist principle ... to which

Marx was always faithful, namely, that no nation can be free if it

opresses other nations’. November 4, 1956, saw the leaders of the Soviet

Union defy Lenin’s warning never to ‘slide, even in trifles, into

imperialist relations with the oppressed nationalities, thereby

undermining entirely our whole principle of sincerity, our principle of

defence of the struggle against imperialism’.

9. The second Soviet intervention

Vienna, November 11

I have just come out of Budapest, where for six days I have watched

Hungary’s new-born freedom tragically destroyed by Soviet troops.

There was general agreement among us at the Duna that the wisest thing

was to take shelter in the British Legation, five minutes’ walk away.

There was a Soviet ultimatum threatening to bomb Budapest, and the

Legation cellar offered protection against anything but a direct hit.

Basil Davidson lay in bed reading Tacitus and refusing to get up; but

eventually he accepted the majority decision. Crossing Vörösmarty tér

while tank-fire rattled and jets screamed overhead I recalled with a

pang of nostalgic regret the last time - only in August, but it seemed

an epoch ago - I had drunk coffee at the famous pavement café, now

closed and deserted.

Vast areas of the city - the working-class areas above all - are

virtually in ruins. For four days and nights Budapest was under

continuous bombardment. I saw a once lovely city battered, bludgeoned,

smashed and bled into submission. To an one who loves equally the

Socialist Soviet Union and the Hungarian people it was heart-breaking.

Each day the tanks patrolled the city, shelling the buildings at

point-blank range. Each night they withdrew, but the heavy artillery

kept up its thunder. Inside the Legation tempers frayed.

The Minister, Mr. Fry, delivered a tirade against the Daily Worker and

its luckless correspondent. Ivor Jones of the BBC and Davidson soothed

us both - by Tuesday we could leave the Legation during the day and

reconnoitre. Five minutes’ walk eastwards the havoc began.

The people of Budapest are hungry today. Many are almost starving. By

eight each morning hundreds of thousands are standing in long silent

queues all over the city waiting for bread. Shops and restaurants are

still closed, and the workers refuse to end their general strike,

despite frantic appeals by the new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

Back at the Duna I found my room strewn with broken glass. A corpse lay

on the opposite pavement. Breakfast was one slice of bread and one cup

of tea. Other meals were scanty, too.

The citizens of Budapest must have had less. No one believed the tale

that Kádár’s Government, miles away at Szolnok for the first few days,

had invited this holocaust.

Corpses still lie in the streets - streets that are ploughed up by tanks

and strewn with the detritus of a bloody-war: rubble, glass and bricks,

spent cartidges and shell-cases. Despite their formidable losses in the

first phase of the Hungarian revolution, Budapest’s citizens put up a

desperate, gallant, but doomed resistance to the Soviet onslaught.

Budapest’s workers, soldiers, students, and even schoolboys, swore to

resist to the very end. And every foreign Journalist in Budapest was

amazed that the resistance lasted so long.

Each day we told each other: ‘Tomorrow will have finished it’. But the

battle of tanks versus men was not so easily won.

In public buildings and private homes, in hotels and ruined shops, the

people fought the invaders street by street, step by step, inch by inch.

The blazing energy of those eleven days of liberty burned itself out in

one last glorious flame. Hungry, sleepless, hopeless, the Freedom

Fighters battled with pitifully feeble equipment against a crushingly

superior weight of Soviet arms. From windows and from the open streets,

they fought with rifles, home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails

against T54 tanks. The people ripped up the streets to build barricades,

and at night they fought by the light of fires that swept unchecked

through block after block.

In the hospitals crammed with wounded, operations were performed without

anaesthetics while shells screamed and machine guns sputtered. I was

heart-sick to see the army of a Socialist State make war on a proud and

indomitable people.

On the Sunday and the Monday, while the din of the artillery bombardment

and the ceaseless tank-fire mingled with the groans of the wounded, the

battle spared neither civilians nor those bringing aid to the wounded.

Bread queues were fired on by Soviet tanks, and as late as Thursday I

myself saw a man of about seventy lying dead outside a bread shop, the

loaf he had just bought still in his hand. Someone had half-covered the

body with the red, white and green flag. Soviet troops looted the

Astoria Hotel as far as the first storey, even taking the clothes from

the porters’ rest room; they ransacked the Egyptian Embassy; they shot

dead a Yugoslav diplomat looking out of the window of his Embassy. On

the other hand, five Hungarian bullets broke five windows at the British

Legation. These are things that happen in the heat of battle and it

should be said that the Soviet troops are now making efforts to

fraternise with the people. Some of the rank-and-file Soviet troops have

been telling people in the last two days that they had no idea they had

come to Hungary. They thought at first they were in Berlin, fighting

German fascists.

Nothing will make me forget Stalingrad, and the debt the whole world

owes to the Soviet Army, whose officers and men were given a filthy job

to do in Budapest, a job that many of them obviously hated. By and

large, they did it without excesses. I for one believe that the firing

on bread queues might well be explained by the fact that many Freedom

Fighters fought in civilian clothes, and that in the heat of battle a

queue might look menacing from a moving tank. I recorded all the

authenticated instances of Soviet excesses, since it was well to know

how small they were compared with the fantastic and completely false

story, later denied by the three main news agencies, of the shooting-up

of a children’s clinic.

In building after building there are gaping shell holes like eye

sockets. In most of the main shopping streets every single window was

blown out. Some of the loveliest buildings in the city have had their

facades cruelly spoiled.

In 1945 they came as liberators. They wanted Budapest declared an open

city, and they sent officers in a car, prominently white-flagged, to

propose this to the Nazis. The Nazis waited till the car came within

range, then shot its occupants. The Russians took Gellért Hill inch by

inch. And now they come back, thrust against their will into the role of

vandals and oppressors and destroyers of liberty.

As late as Thursday I visited the headquarters of a guerilla detachment

in the VIIth district.

While Soviet tanks were only round the corner, 20-year-olds in fur hats

stood outside an hotel, strumming the butts of their tommy-guns as if

they were real guitars. As tanks approached they would slip inside and

inside was a well-stocked armoury, in the hands of workers and students

ready to slip out of the back door and carry on the fight as soon as the

hotel was attacked.

The audacity of these boys summed up the whole spirit of the resistance.

Anthony Terry of the Sunday Times, his wife and I had crossed the

‘lines’ (in fact, of course, there were no real lines - just pockets of

resistance) without realising it, into an area, five minutes away from

the National Theatre, where brisk fighting was still going on. I felt

not in the least brave, but Terry insisted on forging ahead, heedless of

prowling tanks and stray bullets. He ventured into the Lenin körút a

centre of heavy battles, amid the bricks and the stinking corpses, with

me creeping after him, trying to look small and not worth shooting. A

Freedom Fighter in a steel helmet, hidden in a doorway near one of the

ninety-five damaged cinemas, told us to get to hell out of it. ‘Fine,’

said Terry, ‘I just wanted to make sure they had bazookas. That bloke

had.’ In my fear I had not even noticed. A few minutes later we came

across this hotel, and were invited inside to meet the commander, an

army officer of twenty-six. He recognised that resistance was hopeless.

But resist they would until the very end: as individuals, if necessary.

He claimed to be in control of the whole Dohány utca - literally,

Tobacco Street - area. We rather doubted this, but he sent a worker in a

khaki padded jacket to see us off his ‘territory’.

By Saturday, November 10, it was clear that the fighting was as good as

over, though the resistance continued in the form of an obstinate

general strike. The people of Budapest were out again on their streets,

weeping at the devastation they saw, staring sullenly at the Soviet

patrols as they rumbled by with that curious insect-gait of tanks. The

journalists decided it was time to go, for no telephone lines out of the

capital were yet open, and a week-old story was clamouring to be told.

How we agitated and waited for our exit permits is no part of the

Hungarian tragedy; it is a comedy that is better told elsewhere, as is

my fight with a certain Red-hating American journalist to keep the seat

I had been allotted in one of the American cars. About 2 p.m. on

November 11 we set out, and passed through nine check-points till, at

last, we crossed the frontier. Then Vienna, where I telephoned to the

Daily Worker the dispatch italicised above. My wife came through half an

hour later. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I’m all right,’ I said,

‘but what about my story?’ ‘The editor won’t even let the staff see it,’

she said. It was there and then that I knew I must resign.

10. What now?

’In The Hungarian People’s Republic’, says the 1949 Constitution, ‘all

power belongs to the working people,,’ For a brief time this autumn that

statement became true. The people tasted power, and they are not

relinquishing it without a most tenacious struggle. Every day that has

passed since the fighting stopped has brought news confirming this

book’s chief contention: that the turmoil in Hungary was a people’s

movement against tyranny, poverty and foreign occupation and tutelage.

The revolution was defeated - was drowned in blood and buried in rubble

and lies, rather; but the movement continues, stubborn, desperate,

seemingly irrepressible. The industrial proletariat of Hungary is daily

demonstrating before the entire world its calm defiance of a puppet

government, buttressed by foreign arms, which has the audacity to call

itself a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’. The government threatens

dismissal, cajoles, pleads, bribes with offers of food, but the workers

prove that they are the real masters. The miners stand by to flood the

pits, the factory workers simply stay away from the factories. They

prefer starvation and ruin to submission. This is a people whose spirit

will be very hard to break.

Such an episode as the disappearance (or deportation) of Imre Nagy and

his companions, allegedly for their own safety, provides fresh evidence

of the true state of affairs in Hungary and adds fresh fuel to the

flames of the workers’ anger and determination. The workers’ councils

are clearly still flourishing and are refusing to limit their activities

to production matters, but are interfering vigorously in affairs of

State. Proof of the dissatisfaction of Hungarian Communists with the

crushing of the revolution is the extraordinary episode of the strike of

journalists and printers employed on the Communist newspaper

Népszabadság. It was a strike against Government interference with the

freedom of the Press. In an attempt to have printed a commentary on the

dispute between Pravda and the Yugoslav Communists, the staff of

Népszabadság rewrote it every day for several days. But the Government

demanded that these Communist journalists should support unconditionally

the views expressed by Pravda. In Hungary, as in Britain, many Communist

journalists prefer to think for themselves.

Gradually, the truth about events in Hungary is becoming known to honest

Communists all over the world. According to the Manchester Guardian’s

Warsaw correspondent, Polish journalists returning from Budapest ‘have

described in their papers in the most vivid colours what really happened

in Hungary’. The Polish newspaper Zycie Warszawy has roundly condemned

Soviet intervention in Hungary, glorified the Hungarians as heroes and

attacked the revival of Stalinism. The paper said the Hungarian

revolution started like the Poznan uprising in Poland, which was to

change the course of Polish history, and developed into ‘a mutiny

against Stalinism on an international scale’. The real struggle, the

paper added, was about Soviet domination of the countries of Eastern

Europe.

This comment from Socialist Poland suggests a significant aspect of the

Hungarian tragedy: the contrast between Poland and Hungary. In Poland

the healthy forces inside the Communist Party acted quickly enough and

resolutely enough; by great good fortune the outstanding anti-Stalinist,

capable of rallying the bulk of the Party and the mass of the people

behind him, and strong-nerved enough to stand up to Russian bluster, had

not been shot. Today in Poland the people are behind the Party as never

before, democratisation is proceeding swiftly, and there is every chance

that Poland will achieve a measure of prosperity in a matter of a few

years. In Hungary the picture is a very different and a very sombre one.

Rajk was executed and, unhappily, Kádár and Nagy were not bold enough to

act in time. A revolution has been crushed, but the troops who crushed

it, and the Government they have installed, are sitting on a volcano of

hatred and resentment. It will be a very long time indeed before the

economy recovers. Already the total loss of production in Hungary since

October 23 exceeds 6,000 million forints (£181 million at the official

rate of exchange).

It is hard to say what the immediate future holds for Hungary. The

present regime, so unrepresentative and so obviously powerless to act on

its own, cannot last. There can be no return to the past. Capitalism has

nothing to offer Hungary, and most people do not want it.

The return to power of the Rákosi-Gerö group would be unthinkable.

Equally, the people do not want the present limbo, this shadow-world of

chaos, hunger and despair. If Nagy were brought back as Prime Minister,

a representative people’s front govenment formed, and the country

cleared of Soviet troops the people’s co-operation might then be won for

the gigantic task of reconstruction that faces this gallant but crippled

little country.

The land of Rákóczy and Kossuth, of Petöfi, Vörörsmarty Arany, Ady,

Madách and Móricz, of Bartók and Kodály, deserves liberty and happiness.

Fresh tribulations may await the Hungarians, but they will win liberty

and happiness in the end.

Postscript

Since I began this book I have been informed that the London District

Committee of the Communist Party has suspended me from Party membership

for three months. The reason given is my ‘action in publishing in the

capitalist Press attacks on the Communist Party’. The District

Committee’s statement says that when asked why I had not discussed my

views with the editor of the Daily Worker or the Executive Committee of

the Party ‘he replied that he had no confidence in either’. That is

perfectly accurate. The statement ends with a warning, to which my

attention is drawn in a covering letter from the district secretary,

that if ‘Peter Fryer should resort to the capitalist Press or to a

capitalist publisher to carry forward his attacks on the Party, this

would make it necessary for the District Committee to take further

action’. This is quite clearly a threat to expel me if I continue to

tell the truth about Hungary.

The publication of this book is my answer.

It is painful after fourteen years to contemplate an estrangement - even

if, as I am convinced, it will be only temporary - from a movement which

has meant everything in the world to me.

It was equally painful, after nearly nine years’ work proudly performed

at less than a labourer’s wage for the Daily Worker, work which gave me

profound satisfaction and joy because I felt able to tell the truth and

do battle against injustice every day of my life, to have to resign from

the paper because it would not let me do an honest job in Hungary.

The decision is a hard one. But I am not going to be gagged.

As I write there lie in front of me two of the many letters I have

recieved from Communists, Labour Party members and others. The writers

of these two both spent long periods in Eastern Europe. ‘Anyone who has

“seen” must speak out’, says one. ‘It is an imperative duty to speak out

and warn.’ The other, who lived in Hungary, says: ‘Every honest

Communist ought to be heartsick at the suffering inflicted by the Party

on the Hungarian people.’

The real reason for my suspension is that the leaders of the Communist

Party are afraid of the truth. Fortunately they have no AVH to help them

suppress it. They kept the truth out of the Daily Worker, but cannot

censor what I write elsewhere. They cannot put me in prison. The most

they can do is threaten me - and the threat serves only to show their

bankruptcy.

Many people have asked me why, when I resigned from the Daily Worker, I

did not also resign from the Communist Party. Such a step, they tell me,

would be consistent with the horror and revulsion I felt at what I saw

in Hungary. To this my reply is that the Hungarian revolution, for all

the evil and rottenness it revealed, has not made any difference to the

need for a working-class party in Britain based on Marxist principles.

In so far as I understand Marxism I agree with it, and I believe that

its application to the British people’s problems in a creative,

undogmatic way will help us build a Socialist Commonwealth in our

country and so make our lives much happier. No doubt there will be many

readers of this book who are against the idea of a Socialist

Commonwealth anyway, or who do not agree with the Marxist idea of how it

is to be attained. I respect their opinions, but I hold to mine: that

Marxists have a big contribution to make as an organised force to the

British Labour movement, both in the field of ideas and in the field of

leadership. I am all too well aware that the British Communist Party has

been to a large extent discredited through the political dishonesty and

mistakes of its leaders and their abandonment of Socialist principles. I

would say, however, that just as Hungary was not an example of Socialism

or Communism, so these leaders have ceased to be Communists. Their

attitude to the Hungarian revolution is the final proof of this.

Their blind, disgraceful approval of Soviet intervention has shown that

they are unfit to lead any longer. They are clearly prepared to destroy

the Party as a political force rather than allow free discussion of

their mistakes. The sooner they are swept away the better. And I do not

doubt that they will be swept away, once the honest, rank-and-file

members of the Party realise how shamefully they have been lied to and

misled.

The crisis within the British Communist Party, which is now (Daily

Worker, November 26) officially admitted to exist, is merely part of the

crisis within the entire world Communist movement. The central issue is

the elimination of what has come to be known as Stalinism. Stalin is

dead, but the men he trained in methods of odious political immorality

still control the destinies of States and Communist Parties. The Soviet

aggression in Hungary marked the obstinate re-emergence of Stalinism in

Soviet policy, and undid much of the good work towards easing

international tension that had been done in the preceding three years.

By supporting this aggression the leaders of the British Party proved

themselves unrepentant Stalinists, hostile in the main to the process of

democratisation in Eastern Europe. They must be fought as such.

They were Stalin’s men. They did what he told them and they were

dependent on him. To what extent is an open secret inside the Party. The

famous programme The British Road to Socialism, for example, issued in

February 1951 (without the rank and file being given a chance to amend

it) contained two key passages, on the future of the British Empire and

of the British Parliament, which were inserted by the hand of one Joseph

Stalin himself, who refused to let them be altered.

These men remain Stalinists. But Stalinism has been revealed, both in

theory and practice, as a monstrous perversion of Marxism. Leaders who

still believe in it and still practise it cannot be trusted to go on

leading, and cannot protect themselves from exposure by an appeal to the

Communist principles they have grossly betrayed.

Look at the hell that Rákosi made of Hungary and you will see an

indictment, not of Marxism, not of Communism, but of Stalinism.

Hypocrisy without limit; medieval cruelty; dogmas and slogans devoid of

life or meaning; national pride outraged; poverty for all but a tiny

handful of leaders who lived in luxury, with mansions on Rózsadomb,

Budapest’s pleasant Hill of Roses (nicknamed by people ‘Hill of

Cadres’), special schools for their children, special well-stocked shops

for their wives - even special bathing beaches at Lake Balaton, shut off

from the common people by barbed wire. And to protect the power and

privileges of this Communist aristocracy, the AVH - and behind them the

ultimate sanction, the tanks of the Soviet Army. Against this disgusting

caricature of Socialism our British Stalinists would not, could not,

dared not protest; nor do they now spare a word of comfort or solidarity

or pity for the gallant people who rose at last to wipe out the infamy,

who stretched out their yearning hands for freedom, and who paid such a

heavy price.

Hungary was Stalinism incarnate. Here in one small, tormented country

was the picture, complete in every detail: the abandonment of humanism,

the attachment of primary importance not to living, breathing,

suffering, hoping human beings but to machines, targets, statistics,

tractors, steel mills, plan fulfilment figures ... and, of course,

tanks. Struck dumb by Stalinism, we ourselves grotesquely distorted the

fine Socialist principle of international solidarity by making any

criticism of present injustices or inhumanitites in a Communist-led

country taboo. Stalinism crippled us by castrating our moral passion,

blinding us to the wrongs done to men if those wrongs were done in the

name of Communism. We Communists have been indignant about the wrongs

done by imperialism: those wrongs are many and vile; but our one-sided

indignation has somehow not rung true. It has left a sour taste in the

mouth of the British worker, who is quick to detect and condemn

hypocrisy.

Stalinism is Marxism with the heart cut out, de-humanised, dried,

frozen, petrified, rigid, barren. It is concerned with ‘the line’, not

with the tears of Hungarian children. It is preoccupied with abstract

power, with strategy and tactics, not with the dictates of conscience

and common humanity. The whole future of the world Communist movement

depends on putting an end to Stalinism. The whole future of the British

Communist Party depends on a return to Socialist principles.

That I am ostracised by the petty Stalins in the British Communist Party

is of no consequence. What is important, and what must be stopped

without delay, is their dragging Socialism in the mud. The writing is on

the wall for them. Once too often they have lost an opportunity to speak

out in ringing words against oppression. This time their shame is so

obvious that anyone who has not retired into a fantasy world can

recognise it. Thousands of British Communists in these past few weeks

have seen this sickening betrayal of Socialism by leaders who put their

faith in T54 tanks rather than in the Hungarian people, who are prepared

to spit on a nation’s agony and grief rather than venture even the

mildest doubt about the infallibility of Soviet policy. For many

Communists this tragic betrayal by their leaders has brought a poignant

personal dilemma, and they have resolved it by leaving the Party. Their

decision is regrettable, for it strengthens the Stalinist hard core at a

moment when the chance of removing them has never been so strong.

The British Communist Party will be able to hold up its head before the

British people only when it has settled accounts with the dark heritage

of Stalinism which still fetters it, which makes its leaders walk by on

the other side while Hungary lies bleeding. Then we shall witness the

flourishing of a real Communist Party, dedicated to the principles of

Socialist humanism. Marx called revolution ‘a human protest against an

inhuman life’. The Hungarian revolution was precisely that. It has shown

the way forward. In our own small way we British Communists, too, can

become Freedom Fighters.

[1] At the official rate of exchange, 600 forints is worth about £18, at

the tourist rate of exchange £9. The purchasing power is probably about

£12-£14, but it should be remembered that rents are generally speaking

lower in Hungary than in Britain, while clothing, quality for quality,

is much dearer. The average wage in Hungary before the revolution was

between 900 and 1,000 forints a month - say £25.

[2] An English translation, The Road of Our People’s Democracy, was

published by the Hungarian News and Information Service in June 1952.

Page references are to this.

[3] According to Charles Coutts, forty of those killed in the Budapest

Party headquarters were AVH men. See p. 41.

[4] On November 14 the Daily Worker published under the headline The

White Terror in Hungary a photograph of ‘the body of a lynched Communist

Party member in one of the wrecked Budapest Party offices’. Another

photograph of the same corpse was in the paper’s possession, but was not

used, showing clearly that the lynched man wore AVH uniform.