1956 HUNGARIAN UPRISING SAW BETRAYAL, MURDER OVER `TWELVE DAYS’
By George Walden

Bloomberg
Oct 23 2006

Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) — It is tempting to make something of the
coincidence between the recent anti-government riots in Hungary and
Victor Sebestyen’s new account of the uprising against the Russians
in 1956, "Twelve Days: How the Hungarians Tried to Topple their Soviet
Masters," but I will resist.

There is no connection between the Hungary of the communist dictator
Matyas Rakosi ("Stalin’s Best Pupil" in his own propaganda posters),
whose vicious regime led to the revolt, and today’s troubles, except
perhaps that Hungarians tend to be a spirited people.

Unlike in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, Hungary had enjoyed a fledgling
democracy before the Soviet takeover in 1948, and as is so often the
case, the West was taken in: "an oasis of culture and liberty" was
the description of Hungary in these years by the British historian
Hugh Seton-Watson.

Perhaps the influence of writers and intellectuals helped make its
secret police, the AVO, the most brutal of Eastern Europe. From 1950
until the death of Stalin in 1953, over 10 percent of the country’s
10 million people were at some point arrested.

Sebestyen, a British journalist of Hungarian parentage, tells
the story of the tragic uprising with the drama it demands. There
are no simple villains, or heroes — there are only the Hungarian
people themselves. Imre Nagy, much admired in the West, emerges as a
complex figure: A genial man who earned public sympathy through his
land-distribution program, he had a record as a tough communist. Nor
did he place himself at the head of the revolt; he was pulled along
in its wake, to the point where he crossed the line by talking about
leaving the Warsaw Pact and holding free elections.

Intervention a Certainty

At that point, Soviet intervention became a certainty.

His replacement, Janos Kadar, began as a Soviet stooge and ended by
earning the grudging respect of many of his people. As a diplomat,
I once met him. His long, lugubrious face seemed marked by the
contradictions and contortions of his career: hard-line communist,
prisoner of the Rakosi regime, sympathizer with the 1956 uprising, then
the betrayer who urged a reluctant Khrushchev to hang his colleague
Nagy, and finally Hungarian leader, under whom hundreds of insurgents
were executed and thousands imprisoned.

Eventually Kadar presided over the gradual relaxation of the regime,
as it settled into the reformist model of "goulash communism" so
despised by Mao Tse-tung, whose spread would prove a key factor in
the great schism in the communist camp.

Khrushchev Vacillated

A large plus for this book is the new availability of official records,
so that we now know about Soviet reactions as the crisis unfolded. Like
Khrushchev himself, his men on the spot — the wily Armenian Anastas
Mikoyan and the Stalinist ideologue Mikhail Suslov — vacillated in
their assessments from day to day, though it did not take long to
decide that Rakosi had to go. And so Mikoyan told him that the Soviet
leadership had decided that he was ill, and needed treatment in Moscow.

All three were initially reluctant to use full-throttle violence,
and when Moscow did, killing 2,500 Hungarians, Mikoyan was violently
against it. The prize for unashamed mendacity and double-crossing
goes to the suave Yuri Andropov, then ambassador in Budapest, later
head of the KGB and briefly Soviet leader.

In retrospect it is surprising how far Khrushchev was prepared to
go in placating the insurgents, but in the end he became afraid he
would go down in history as the man who "lost" Hungary. There was
unrest in Poland and Romania, and Khrushchev was part of a collective
leadership whose diehards, like Vyacheslav Molotov (known as "stony
arse"), were waiting to trip him up.

Equally uncertain how to react was the U.S. President Eisenhower
who nevertheless emerges well. Though consistently skeptical about
Moscow’s intentions, he saw at once that a U.S. intervention, which
might have triggered world war, was out.

Appalling Brutalities

When the book cuts between Washington and Budapest, there is an odd
dissonance between descriptions of the appalling brutalities of the
regime, such as a minister of defense urinating in the mouth of a
tortured prisoner, and passages on U.S. internal politics implying
that anti-communism in the America was unjustified or excessive.

We could also have done with more about the effect of 1956 on the
world communist movement. Certainly it shook the faith of some, but
what is more remarkable is how many went on believing. The historian
Eric Hobsbawm continues, for example, to argue that communism was a
worthwhile experiment, yet he remains respected, in parts of academia
if nowhere else. Perhaps his admirers should read this book.

"Twelve Days: How the Hungarians Tried to Topple their Soviet Masters,"
is published in the U.K. by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and in the U.S. by
Pantheon under the title "Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution" (368 pages; 20 pounds, $26).

(George Walden is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are his own.)