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Title: The Hungarian Tragedy
Date: 1956
Source: https://marx.libcom.org/library/hungarian-tragedy-peter-fryer
Authors: Peter Fryer
Topics: council communism, libertarian communism, workers’ control
Published: 2019-09-20 01:12:51Z

‘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.

[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.

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.

[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. 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’.

[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.

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.

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