Europe. daily MacDonald.
It must be unique for a revolution to begin with a mass demonstration in solidarity with the people of another country. Why did demonstration in support of Poland on 23 October produce popular uprising in Budapest?
The international context was very fundamental. In Soviet Union had accepted Austrian neutrality, and in 1956 Khrushchev had recognised Yugoslavia as a country 1. Imre Nagy addressing parliament. Purged at the end of the 1940s, Nagy returned to become Prime Minister during ine thaw of 1953.55. Purged again he came back as Prime Minister during the uprising. Kidnapped by the Russians. Nagy was imprisoned then executed in 1958. Revolution and the Polish October events of 1956, Red Weekly is publishing a series of studies on the problems of the political revolution in Eastern We begin with an interview with NICHOLAS KRASSO, who played a central role in the formation of the Budapest central workers council in 1956. Krasso joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1945 at the age of 14, writing the first denunciation of Cardinal Minszenty in the Party that same year and contributing Party's theoretical organ between 1947 and 1959.
Banned from university in the course of the drive against Lukacs in 1950, he was drafted into the army and returned to play a leading role in the intellectual struggle against Rakosi's Stalinist leadership before the October uprising. Forced into exile after the Hungarian revolution, Krasso has been on the editorial board of New Left Review since the early 1960s. He speaks here to Oliver on the road to socialism even though it was outside the Warsaw Pact. And now suddenly Gomulka was being swept into power in Warsaw and he also seemed to be taking a neutralist position.
So it seemed that everybody around us was taking a neutralist stand and we Hungarians were again missing the bus, just as we had been the last satellite of Hitler at the end of the war. a The student demonstration in solidarity with Gomulka's Poland had been banned a day or two before, but on 23 October itself, at about midday, the radio announced that the ban had been lifted. This turned what would have been a largely intellectual affair into a mass mobilisation with workers pouring out of the factories 2. Sandor Petofi [1823-49] was the great poet of the Hungarian revolution against the Hapsburgs in 1848-49 tion was eventually crushed by the Russian armies of the Tsar. in the suburbs towards the centre of the city. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the with the dramatic events in Poland (which filled the newspapers) fresh in their minds.
Parliament building and everybody wanted to hear Imre Nagy.
actors recited Petofi poems from 1848 [2]. But it was well over an hour before Nagy finally agreed to appear I to the crowd, and a more incendiary speech singing the national anthem.
people that they would have to act themselves: Nagy was an anti-climax.
to the radio building.
uprising began. 3] Soviet troops occupied Budapest almost aight away. What was the character of this It was about two o'clock the followRussian tanks The next morning, across the city to the Writers' Union, boulevards. They demonstration of strength. the state security authority, whose anal revolu officer, lynched during the uprising.
side streets.
The gigantic crowd reached the Russian tanks -[1].
People kept going to fetch him while connected in front of an increasingly restive could not have been made: he called on the people to remain calm and trust him, and return home after want to be blown up.
This convinced large numbers of this first intervention.
A section of the demonstration went What The AVH forces there fired on them: the took?
strintervenpated 5].
ing morning when I saw the first burst forth, entering Budapest. the country. when I walked there were Russian tanks all along the were not doing anything; just standing by, making a It is a myth to say that there was heavy fighting between the Russians and the youth during this first Soviet intervention. It is true that AVH cars Kene avn allamvecelm atosacwas officials carried out the bloody purges of the Stalin Denod. Hated ov ine poouation. second many suffered the same fate as this AVH were entering the small streets shooting. But apart from anything else, the tanks were too big to enter the small Occasionally the freedom fighters would run out with Molotov cocktails and blow up a tank. Then other would respond by moving up and down the boulevards, firing at houses that were in no way with the uprising. And soon lots of tank crews raised the Hungarian flag and people were saying that they had come over to our side; but when one talked to the Russians it became clear that they had put up the flags because they didn't At the same time they did not have orders to crush the uprising during were the main forms that the uprising The anti-Stalinist movement had remained a student and intellectual affair, focused on the Petofi circle debates and the various official organisations of intellectuals until the Rajk funeral on 6 October 1956, when about 200,000 people particiAnd it was really only during the night of 23 October that the tremendous popular uprising spreading throughout It was the young people, including wing very young schoolchildren, who were doing most of the fighting in various parts of the city. The adults were organising the general strike and the workers councils and all kinds of revolutionary committees.
The general strike began immediately and workers councils were set up completely spontaneously, at first 4. The tanks, seen here enterina Buda pest, were withdrawn after a few days, on 4 November in the cade Hussiar intervention -WRICE crushed the armed resistance movement. started with the workers refusing to allow the Party secretary into the factory premises and then setting up councils to run things The national bank had its own revolutionary council and so workers were still paid while the general strike was on. And there was absolutely no problem with telephones, gas or electricity - these services were maintained by their respective workers councils. Peasants were coming into the city to sell food in amazing amounts.
Of course, it was not workers' management over production because the whole task was to push forward the general strike. There were workers councils for tactories and workers councils for districts. Their fundamental functions were to org anise meetings, frame demands, keep up the general strike and organise the weekly distribution of wages.
It was extraordinary to see how identical the demands were: freedom of parties to operate, withdrawal of Russian troops, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, neutrality, the right to strike, and so on. There were only very occasional deviations to the right or left Left deviations would include demands like freedom only for those parties adhering to public ownership of the means of production - this demand came from several factories. Then there was the occasional rightpoint, like the rather silly demand for the re-introduction of religious teaching in schools.
I myself was elected to one of the district workers councils. On Friday 26 October I spoke at a huge public meeting in Ujpest, the biggest industrial area after Csepel. Because they liked what I said, they elected me a member of the Ujpest Revolutionary 5. Laszio Rajk, pıctured nere during ni frame-up show trial in 1949. Rajk, underground Communist Party during the second word war, nac been the most popular Communist offi cial in the forties before his arrest. The struggle tor the renantaton or najk an other victims of the purges was one of motor forces anti-Stalinist movement Detore october. nis renabin
...and why we lost Council then and there. I had never been to the district in my life before, except to watch the odd film.
The head of the council was a carpenter. I stayed in Ujpest for the next three days, and returned later after the second Soviet intervention.
The atmosphere among the intellectuals, who had played a leading role before October, was transformed after the uprising began. On the morning of 24 October 1 went into the Writers" Union, and the writers were just sitting there, with their heads hanging as though in mourning; and some were becoming very poetic. One told me he would just like to sit and let his tears flow and flow and flow.
I said to Dery [6] that surely the writers were at least partly respon sible for what was happening, and shouldn't they consider what was to be done? And he replied: Why? We are writers and we just told the truth. We are not politicians, we were just telling the truth. They really felt everything was lost.
This was in complete contrast with the total optimism of the teenagers who were making the uprising. Generally the attitude of the intellectuals was pessimistic; but the workers and young people, feeling their power, were filled with optimism.
The period between the first and second Soviet interventions gave breathing space some kind of organised leadership to emerge, around Imre Nagy, or in opposition to Isaac Deutscher called 6. Tibor Dery, leading Communist novelist, played a prominent role in the Petofi circle, one of whose meetings is shown nere. -ine circie was mme tocus Stalinist activity amongst intellectuals before October 1956. Nagy a kind of Bukharinite, and a possible harbinger of a Hungarian Thermidor [7]. What was your Nagy, and to the problem of political leadership?
In a certain sense the analogy with Bukharin is valid. Nagy was an agrarian socialist in origin. He had participated in the civil war in Russia with the Bolsheviks, and belonged to the Landler-Lukacs faction against Bela Kun's ultra-left voluntarism in the 1920s [8].
He spent the 1930s in an agrarian institute in Russia doing research to prove the feasibility of a radical agrarian reform in Hungary, against the whole record of the Kun CP, the Social Democrats and the reactionaries who had all in different ways opposed a land redistribution as economically disastrous.
Nagy was undoubtedly courageous man. In 1949 he had stood out in the Central Committee against the Stalinist plan for forced collectivisation. His concern for the peasantry in the 1950s was, in itself, absolutely justified. But something of the agrarian socialist remained in him, and criticism of sidedness of his pre-occupation with the peasantry to the point of underestimating the problems of the worka ers would also be justifiable. for Moreover, in the field of political manoeuvre and organisation, Nagy was very naive, Gero who were very acute in political intrigues [9]. Nagy's whole idea was him. to stand for moral purity Rakosi's dirty ways: and this moral condemnation of Stalinist practices 7. Thermidor was the phase of the French Revolution which paved the way POUMists in Barcelona in May 1937 and used the thermidor analogy to describe or anti- danger Bukharin was the leader of the Right Opposition in the Bolshevik Party was, of course, absolutely justified, attitude to ganisational vacuum.
opening the door to Thermidor Nagy Hungarian context. endless show clear COULSC.
a very merged in a workerist mysticism.
The initiative to create anyone else.
OICand was fully fledged.
intervention. unlike Rakosi or would not start working.
against 8. Bela kun, pictured above, leader of the liquidation in Comintern functionary during left 'third period' at the end of the Kun was opposed solved in 1930. but it was not enough to meet the organisational and political tests of the There was simply no leadership which represented the line that I thought should be followed, so my position was to support these "Bukharinites', back them in forming a government, but try to build an opposition to them at the same time.
But here there was this complete or- manipulated.
This was the problem, not whether Nagy might be might have moved towards previous some kind of NEP, but this would not have been disastrous in the The unanimity of the workers' political demands was really extraordinary. But equally striking was the fact that nowhere did the workers • ideas as to now to achieve their demands. There is, of nothing remarkable about Marxism, this, except to those who are subNowhere was the slogan 'All Power to the Workers Councils' raised, or at least I didn't come across it.
central the situation. workers council came from myself and I didn't hear about it from What, then, is The general strike was continuing The workers there felt their strength and believed that the general strike would solve everything, even after the second Russian They believed that the official CP Russians would not be able to stabilise the situation because the workers This is of course true, but things Furthermore, become more complicated. The strike bourgeois may go on, but the mass of workers 9. Matyas Rakosi, left, Hungarian CP unti his was priest of Stalinism in ring trien war, tamous tor nis ultradenly removed a faction sians In July Hungarian CP led by the Marxist theore Gero ISeC INE are sitting at home and the force of inertia sets in. Also it will not be possible to continue to get money each week from the national bank and the children will begin to starve.
It is true that you have the active minority and they can be decisive, leaning on the support of the great But then another problem came up: there was this tremendous reaction against Stalinism, against a situation where every meeting was Rigged meetings are obnoxious, but this does not mean that the active minority can leave things without any plans or arrangements, relying entirely on spontaneity. Political strategy and tactics have to be worked out and consciously put into practice in an organised way.
But here another problem arose: there was this ideology that the task of intellectuals was to get things started and then leave it to the workers to carry everything through. This is, in fact, completely alien to to Lenin's outlook, this idea that the intrinsic virtues of the masses will sort things out. These virtues are very great but not of that kind, not of the kind to be clear about the political relationships in class, your attitude to the view that was at least the possibility of a counterrevolution? This is the position, and was also held by Deutscher at the time.
every commentwas the Hungary after the salam i tactic for chopping down opponents. He was sudthe Rus1956. never to return. Emo Rakosi's lieutenant and a long-time Comintern functionary and OTIVE agains revolution in me soviet uni the Hungarian Revolution as his own. In particular, what do you think of the view that Nagy might have given way to a Minszentytype regime? [10] There is a sexist German expression, "Madchen fur Alles', a girl for all purposes. The Hungarian Revolution was destined to be treated in this way: everyone has taken it as a justification of their outlook. This was an instant reaction to the event: for socialists of all kinds, for anarchists. liberals, fascists and conservatives it was their revolution.
And it could hardly have been otherwise, considering that Hungary had been dominated by a Stalinist state that was opposed by the entire population, and, having had a complete organisational monopoly, when this state crumbled it left behind a total organisational vacuum. There had been no parties, no free trade unions and even the cultural or ganisations could be formed only by The Hungarian masses, and in the first place the Budapest working rose up in a tremendous national uprising without any or ganised political CADICUL on national scale. And before the forces of the Hungarian Revolution could acquire a definite political form, the process was crushed by Russian intervention. In defeat, the uprising could serve a multitude of causes.
Kadar's own theory of counter-revolution [/1], as outlined in the Party's December resolution was curious. It said that the reform movement before the revolution had 10. Cardinal Minszenty, Primate of Hungary from the end of the war, was jailed by Rakosi, and escaped to the American Embassy in the uprising to live there until moving to the West recently.
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first Soviet tion? [4]