Hungarian Revolution of 1956

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began with university students and a list of sixteen demands. On the 23rd of October 1956, roughly 20,000 protesters gathered beside a statue in Budapest, and a crowd chanted a poem that the government had banned: "This we swear, this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves." By nightfall, gunfire had broken out. Within days, the government had collapsed, a new prime minister had taken office, and Soviet tanks were rolling back into the capital.

  The uprising lasted just 15 days from start to finish. It was crushed on the 4th of November 1956, when an operation codenamed "Whirlwind" brought 17 Soviet divisions into Hungary. When the fighting ended, roughly 2,500 Hungarians and 699 Soviet soldiers were dead. Nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.

  What drove ordinary Hungarians to take on one of the world's most powerful militaries? What decisions were made in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington that sealed Hungary's fate? And what happened to the men and women who led the revolution once the tanks withdrew? The answers unfold across a story that stretches from the ruins of the Second World War to the Olympic swimming pool in Melbourne.

• 2. Rákosi's Hungary

  ›

  Mátyás Rákosi ruled the Hungarian People's Republic from 1947 to 1956, and his model was Stalin. To keep ideological control inside his own party, Rákosi used the secret police, the ÁVH, to purge 7,000 members he labeled "Western agents" for crimes as distant as having fought in the Spanish Civil War.

  The ÁVH's reach extended far beyond party politics. In the early 1950s, the secret police forcibly relocated more than 26,000 non-communist Hungarians from their homes, handing the confiscated housing to Communist Party members. Anti-communists were sent to concentration camps, deported to the USSR, or killed outright. Among the victims was László Rajk, the minister of the interior who had himself founded the ÁVH.

  Religion was another front of repression. In 1949, the Rákosi government arrested Cardinal József Mindszenty in a show trial, convicting him of treason and collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. The charge was a fabrication. Mindszenty had in fact opposed the Arrow Cross Party, encouraged Hungarian Catholics not to vote for it, and been imprisoned by the Arrow Cross-led government for that dissent.

  The economic consequences of Rákosi's rule were grinding. By 1952, Hungarian workers' disposable income had fallen to two-thirds of what it had been in 1938. Hungary was also paying US$300 million in war reparations to the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. In 1946, the Hungarian National Bank reported that reparations cost between 19 and 22 percent of the country's annual national income, and that burden was made worse by the hyperinflation that followed the post-war collapse of the Hungarian pengő.

  Participation in the Soviet-sponsored COMECON trading bloc cut Hungary off from Western markets and from American Marshall Plan aid. By the mid-1950s, food rationing was a fixture of daily life, and the accumulated weight of austerity had turned economic grievance into political fury.

• 3. The Ground Shifts

  ›

  Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953, and his death set in motion a slow loosening of Soviet grip across the Eastern Bloc. In Hungary, the reformist Imre Nagy became prime minister in 1953, replacing Rákosi. Rákosi kept his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party and used it to sabotage Nagy's reforms. By the 18th of April 1955, he had maneuvered successfully enough that the USSR removed Nagy from office entirely, reducing him to what the source calls a "political non-person".

  The decisive international jolt came in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his speech "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences" to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The speech catalogued the abuses of Stalin and his inner circle. Radio Free Europe, backed by the CIA and cooperating Western European governments, broadcast the speech to audiences behind the Iron Curtain.

  In Hungary, pressure from de-Stalinization forced Rákosi out as General Secretary on the 18th of July 1956, replacing him with Ernő Gerő. Then, in June 1956, the Polish Army violently suppressed a workers' uprising in Poznań. Rather than intimidating Hungarians, the Polish crisis emboldened them. By October, Poland had installed the reform communist Władysław Gomułka and won real concessions from Moscow on troop levels and trade. Hungarians watched and drew their own conclusions.

  On the 13th of October 1956, twelve students from the university faculties in Szeged met to play cards, and used the occasion to revive the democratic MEFESZ student union that Rákosi had banned. Ten days later, one of those twelve students stood at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and proclaimed the Sixteen Political, Economic, and Ideological Points.

• 4. Fifteen Days of Revolution

  ›

  The peaceful demonstration started at about 2 pm on the 23rd of October at Petőfi square, where an actor named Imre Sinkovits recited the banned poem National Song. By evening, the crowd that gathered beside the General Józef Bem statue had grown to approximately 20,000, and the intellectual Péter Veres, president of the Writers' Union, read a manifesto demanding Hungarian sovereignty and democratic governance.

  At 20:00, party first secretary Ernő Gerő broadcast a hardline response condemning the protesters. Within an hour and a half, demonstrators had toppled and destroyed the eight-metre-tall Stalin Monument in Budapest, which had been erected on the site of a demolished church in 1951. At the Magyar Rádió building, ÁVH guards threw tear gas and opened fire on the crowd outside; the secret police smuggled weapons to their own position in an ambulance, which the protesters hijacked. Some Hungarian Army soldiers tore off their red-star insignia and joined the revolution.

  By 02:00 on the 24th of October, Soviet defence minister Georgy Zhukov had ordered the Red Army to occupy Budapest, the capital of a Warsaw Pact ally. By noon, Soviet tanks were positioned outside the parliament building. The same day, Imre Nagy became prime minister again.

  In the days that followed, workers' councils took over municipal governments across Hungary. In 1,170 communities, revolutionary councils dismissed local administrators, sacked bosses, and burned communist administrative records. Symbols of Soviet control came down in 681 communities; books by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were burned in 122 communities. Approximately 2,100 local revolutionary and workers' councils formed, with over 28,000 members total.

  By the 28th of October, the Nagy government had agreed to a ceasefire, disbanded the ÁVH, and declared the revolt a "great, national and democratic event". About 8,000 political prisoners were released, most notably Cardinal Mindszenty. On the 1st of November, Hungary formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and declared itself a neutral state. The revolution had, in under a fortnight, undone the architecture of Soviet control.

• 5. Moscow's Calculation

  ›

  On the 30th of October 1956, the Presidium of the CPSU voted not to depose the new Hungarian government. Marshal Zhukov said that Soviet forces should withdraw from Budapest and, if necessary, from Hungary altogether. The Presidium published a declaration offering to enter negotiations on the question of Soviet troop presence in Hungary.

  That same day, news and filmed footage of anti-communist demonstrators attacking the Budapest headquarters of the Hungarian Working People's Party in Köztársaság tér reached Soviet audiences. More than 20 ÁVH officers and conscripts were killed in the attack, along with the head of the Budapest party committee, Imre Mező. The CPSU turned those images into propaganda.

  Nagy's declaration of Hungarian neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact became the turning point. Khrushchev identified several reasons for reversing course. Simultaneous moves toward multi-party democracy in both Hungary and Poland threatened the authority of communist parties across the Eastern Bloc. Hardliners in the CPSU would not accept inaction. And Hungary's departure from the Warsaw Pact broke the buffer zone of satellite states the USSR relied upon to guard against Western encroachment.

  Mao Zedong's influence was also direct. Initially opposing a second intervention, Mao changed his mind and communicated support for military action. The deputy chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Liu Shaoqi, pressed Khrushchev to act. Although Sino-Soviet relations were strained, Mao's opinion carried weight inside the Presidium.

  The Soviets then staged a deception. They invited a Hungarian delegation led by Defence Minister Pál Maléter to negotiate Soviet withdrawal at their military command at Tököl on the 3rd of November. Around midnight, KGB chief General Ivan Serov ordered the delegation arrested. The attack began hours later. Meanwhile, Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov had personally assured Nagy that no invasion was coming. Those assurances were false.

• 6. Operation Whirlwind

  ›

  By 21:30 on the 3rd of November, Soviet forces had completely encircled Budapest. At 03:00 on the 4th of November, tanks penetrated the city along the Pest side of the Danube in two thrusts: one up the Soroksári road from the south, the other down the Váci road from the north. Before a single shot was fired, the Soviets had split the city in two and controlled all bridgeheads.

  Operation Whirlwind combined air strikes, artillery, and coordinated tank-infantry action by 17 divisions. The Soviet forces deployed T-34-85 medium tanks, T-54s, heavy IS-3 tanks, 152mm ISU-152 mobile assault guns, and open-top BTR-152 armored personnel carriers. The 8th Mechanized Army under Lieutenant General Hamazasp Babadzhanian and the 38th Army under Lieutenant General Hadzhi-Umar Mamsurov arrived from the Carpathian Military District. Some rank-and-file Soviet soldiers reportedly believed they were being sent to East Berlin to fight German fascists.

  At 05:20 on the 4th of November, Imre Nagy broadcast his final message, announcing that Soviet forces were attacking and that the government was holding its post. Free Kossuth Rádió stopped broadcasting at 08:07. An emergency Cabinet meeting convened with only three ministers present. As Soviet troops arrived at the parliament, a negotiated evacuation was arranged. The last official representative of the National Government at his post was Minister of State István Bibó, who wrote a proclamation he titled For Freedom and Truth.

  Hungarian resistance was fiercest in the working-class industrial districts. Csepel was heavily targeted by Soviet artillery and air strikes; fighting there lasted until the 11th of November. Ten to fifteen thousand resistance fighters had been active in Budapest, with the heaviest combat at Csepel on the Danube. Approximately 53 percent of the dead were workers, and half of all Hungarian casualties were people younger than thirty.

  Zhukov reported disarming twelve Hungarian divisions, two armoured regiments, and the entire Hungarian Air Force. The UN recorded no Hungarian Army units that fought on the Soviet side.

• 7. Aftermath and Reckoning

  ›

  In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet victory, many thousands of Hungarians were arrested. Eventually, 26,000 were brought before Hungarian courts; 22,000 were sentenced and imprisoned, 13,000 were interned, and 229 were executed. Approximately 200,000 fled as refugees, dispersing across 37 countries, with most going to Austria. The international relief organization CARE provided refugees with welcome kits of pajamas, knitting tools, school supplies, food, and water; the U.S. Department of Agriculture worked with CARE to ship more than 500,000 packages to Vienna.

  Imre Nagy and his companions took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. Despite Soviet and Kádár government assurances of safe passage, Nagy's group was arrested on the 22nd of November when attempting to leave the embassy. They were taken to Romania. Géza Losonczy died in prison while on a hunger strike; his jailers, according to the source, "carelessly pushed a feeding tube down his windpipe". Nagy, Defence Minister Pál Maléter, and Miklós Gimes were executed after secret trials in June 1958. Their bodies were placed in unmarked graves in a municipal cemetery outside Budapest.

  Cardinal Mindszenty was granted asylum at the U.S. embassy during the November assault and lived there for the next 15 years, refusing to leave until his 1949 treason conviction was reversed. He finally departed for Austria in September 1971, at the Vatican's request and because of poor health.

  The Hungarian Communist Party's membership fell from 800,000 before the uprising to 100,000 by December 1956. János Kádár rebuilt his authority steadily, and in May 1957 the USSR increased its troop levels in Hungary by treaty on a permanent basis. By 1963, most political prisoners from 1956 had been released. Sporadic workers' strikes and resistance continued until mid-1957.

  The United Nations established the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary in January 1957. Over five months, the committee interviewed 111 refugees and reviewed documents, newspapers, and film footage. Its 268-page report, presented to the General Assembly in June 1957, concluded that the Kádár government and Soviet occupation violated the human rights of the Hungarian people. A General Assembly resolution deploring the repression was approved, but no further action was taken. Hungary and Romania refused the committee entry; the Soviet Union did not respond to requests for information.

  Time magazine named the Hungarian Freedom Fighter its Man of the Year for 1956. At the Melbourne Summer Olympics that same year, the Soviet intervention prompted a boycott by Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The Hungarian water polo team met the Soviet team in the semi-final on the 6th of December; the match, later called the "Blood in the Water match", was halted in the final minute to stop spectator fighting. Hungary won 4-0 and took the gold medal. Nicolas Krassó, a leader of the uprising who later joined the editorial committee of the New Left Review, recalled Stalin's short speech to the 19th Congress of the Soviet Union in 1952, in which Stalin spoke of two banners the progressive bourgeoisie had discarded: democracy and national independence. Krassó's conclusion was that in 1956, Hungarian workers picked those banners up.