Hungary, 1956

The writer Adam LeBor in The Times describes the political controversy in Hungary over the fiftieth anniversary today of the uprising against Soviet oppression.

“Hungary is a divided nation, based on the question of which side of the barricades was your father on in 1956,” Sebestyen Gorka, of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, said. “Was he fighting for independence and democracy or to maintain the dictatorship and communism?

“People cannot understand how the Government today is made of supporters of the old regime.” Government supporters argue that the communist party of the 1980s was very different from that of the 1950s, the terror having long since ended.

Yet Hungary has not had a reckoning. Many communist-era officials and former secret police officers remain in their luxury villas in the Buda hills. “We need to come to terms with the fact that Hungarians willingly killed Hungarians after 1956,” said Mr Gorka.

That absence of reckoning is an important and often overlooked issue not only in postwar Hungarian history but also in the the character of Communist rule in Europe more widely. Surprisingly there are still some serious writers for whom Communism after 1956 was a reasonably stable system held together more by ideological concord than by oppression. A couple of years ago I wrote a short piece for The Times about Eric Hobsbawm - a very noted scholar indeed of 19th-century history - in which I quoted a judgement that ought on its own to destroy his reputation as an observer of more recent political history:

Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.

Moreover, and even allowing for Hobsbawm's dating this state of affairs from a year after the Uprising, it is a gross misreading of Hungarian politics (not to speak of Poland, but that will be a subject for another time). The man whom the Soviet Union installed as party chief after the Uprising, János Kádár, came to be seen in the West as a liberalising influence. In economics, this had some limited truth to it (though several other Eastern European countries had larger private sectors). In politics, the man was an unreconstructed practitioner of terror and tyranny.

On coming to power Kádár immediately became known as Hungary's Quisling. He gave a pledge not to arrest the deposed leader Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; and of course he was lying. Nagy decided not to seek asylum, emerged, and was promptly arrested. He and his comrades were imprisoned in Romania for 18 months, before being repatriated to Hungary in June 1958, tried in secret, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave. Nagy thereby joined the fate of thousands of freedom fighters who were murdered by Kádár's regime, thousands more who were imprisoned or exiled, and scores of thousands more who were transported to the Soviet Union.

I got to know one of those freedom fighters, Péter Mandoki, who fled Hungary and settled in - of all places - the East Midlands city of Leicester, where I grew up. He married a local girl, and their daughter, Anna, was and still is one of my dearest friends. Though her father insisted on speaking only in broken English after he left Hungary, Anna learned Hungarian, settled in Budapest and worked there as an accountant in the early 1990s. I used to go to see her there, which is my only direct experience of Hungary. Now living in Melbourne, Anna wrote a book this year that comprised the recollections of Hungarian émigrés who had fled to Australia. To my regret and surprise - as it is a good book and she is a published writer - she found it impossible to interest a mainstream publisher in taking the book on, and so she very properly self-published it. There is a passage in which Anna describes the games of a young boy playing with his toy soldiers; those in best condition are (uniquely in the history of wargaming, I would imagine) UN forces, and those in the ugliest condition are Soviet troops. "Itt vannak ENSZek!" cries the boy: "The UN troops are here!" Except they never came, of course.

The Hungarian Uprising lasted for twelve days. The Soviet ambassador to Budapest, Yuri Andropov, urged unrelenting bombardment of the city, after which Soviet troops turned artillery fire not only on the barricades but on residential areas. To those who resisted, I extend my admiration and respect.

UPDATE: I initially stated in this post that the Uprising lasted for nine days. I was thinking of the sniper resistance, under the command of General Béla Király, which did last for nine days before Soviet troops defeated them. But the length of the Uprising from beginning to end was actually twelve days. I have therefore changed this in the text.