Hungary’s Revolution: A 30-Year View

Thirty years ago this Thursday, Hungarians revolted against communist rule. Then on Nov. 4, 1956, 200,000 Soviet troops with 2,500 tanks and armored cars launched a massive attack on Budapest, killing thousands, deporting thousands more. The West said the brutality and treachery--the Soviets were even then “negotiating” withdrawal--branded communism forever an outlaw system. A year after the first post-war summit produced the Spirit of Geneva, the Cold War was back. Devastated Hungary symbolized heroism, failure, the impossibility of change within the boundaries of Soviet power.

How different it seems today. Everyone’s favorite Eastern European country, Hungary stands for the pragmatic emphasis of “goulash communism” on living standards and toleration of dissent. When one speaks of a “crackdown” in Budapest, as some observers have in recent years, what is meant is apartment searches or fines, not violence or jail. Dissidents, like other Hungarians, travel to the West to study, work or tour.

Tourists liken Budapest to a Western city. They may see large banners proclaiming end-of-summer sales, but not the “fulfill the plan” exhortations familiar in Moscow or Prague. Nevertheless, a case can be made that Hungary is a Potemkin village. It remains a one-party state where Soviet interests are protected. The economy, despite experiments with decentralization and market forces, is troubled. Growth rates and living standards are slipping, the per-capita debt is higher than Poland’s. Alcoholism and suicide rates signal social tension.

What does the Hungarian Revolution mean today? How much was won and lost? What lessons does the country, which still bears scars, offer to those who worry that Eastern Europe remains potentially one of the most dangerous areas for superpower rivalry

Its ideological significance has faded. Janos Kadar, now a widely respected patriarch, still leads the country he re-entered with the Soviet tanks, but too many Soviet leaders, summits and swings in the East-West climate have come and gone. No one in the West denies a need to reach understandings with the Soviets because of what happened in Budapest three years after Stalin died. Those who warn of risks use more modern, less dramatic cases.

If that long-ago November invasion is now part of the history of the Cold War, a good history of the events themselves has yet to be written. The 25th anniversary inspired surprisingly little; the Budapest and Moscow archives remain closed, and most of the prominent individuals involved have not written memoirs.

The heroic fight against overwhelming odds is an evergreen inspiration to all who treasure the indomitability of the human spirit, but there remains a need for an objective look at the full circumstances.

Several years ago, one of the Gabor sisters visited the U.S. ambassador’s residence and exclaimed, “This is how everyone used to live!” It wasn’t; nor was Hungary a democratic country before communism. There were anti-Semites and reactionaries as well as freedom fighters in the crowds that shouted for the blood of the largely Jewish Politburo and called for undoing the communist regime.

With all the contradictions of a society still authoritarian, if not totalitarian, and with appreciation that Austria, which shares so much common history, is both freer and richer, today’s communist Hungary arguably provides its citizens more social justice than they ever enjoyed.

Without joining the essentially political debate over whether 1956 was revolution or counterrevolution, one can agree with Kadar that it was a national tragedy. Hungarians themselves, despite great interest among youth and an effort to show the period honestly in a few films, are not likely to go much past this lowest common denominator for years. The issues are too divisive, particularly while Kadar lives.

That formula, however, does contain the kernel of the main lesson the country has drawn: Politics should never again be pushed to extremes; another bloodletting could mean the effective end of the nation. In an unspoken compact, the party attempts to meet the desire for more goods and personal freedom; the people respect its judgment of how fast this can be done.

The second half of the compact is beginning to break down. Young people are more inclined to complain that society’s glass is half-empty than to be grateful it is half-full. It is unlikely that either economic conditions or endemic Soviet conservatism will allow the party to move much faster. There is an urgent requirement to permit, at least when Kadar leaves the scene, a more candid national examination so a new generation can temper impatience with the 1956 perspective.

It is harder to say what lessons the Soviets have drawn. One should be that the United States, despite an inclination to revert periodically to John Foster Dulles’ roll-back rhetoric, is too responsible to use force to try to reverse the postwar settlements in Eastern Europe. But the record on later crises in Czechoslovakia and Poland suggests the Soviets still lack confidence they can protect their interests without resorting to force, if the process of change appears out of control.

The Hungarians believe there is also a positive side to the Russian view of 1956. The bloody revolt reminds Soviet leaders it can be as dangerous to ignore allies’ national feelings and characteristics as to tolerate some ideological heresy.

Kadar himself acknowledges Hungary is a Western country. By this the lifelong communist neither imputes its loyalty to the Warsaw Pact nor renounces his belief that socialism ultimately offers a better way. He refers rather to traditional ties to Western European, not Slavic, culture and history, to a manner of thinking and acting much closer to that of Austrians or Germans than Russians. The 1956 Revolution marked Stalin’s failure to forge a security buffer of identical miniature Soviet Unions throughout Eastern Europe and won Hungary the chance to experiment cautiously with its own communism.

That brand has more elements of capitalism than any except the Chinese, but it would be a mistake for Americans to believe Hungarian leaders accept that “capitalism is the final stage of socialism.” Most Hungarians, even young people passionately attracted to Western pop culture, would not want to copy uncritically what they see as an insufficiently humane, Darwinian, “sharp elbow” society.

When Hungarians say Marx remains an inspiration but has been dead 100 years, they mean they seek answers suitable to the late 20th Century and Hungarian conditions. No one has yet made a communist system that provides true prosperity, much less democratic social and political rights, but under less restrictive conditions, Budapest theorists note, Western Europe needed a century to implement the “bourgeois” French Revolution. They ask for time.

The most difficult lesson of the Hungarian Revolution and its 30-year aftermath remains one for the United States and the Soviet Union to learn jointly. Eastern Europe is a vastly dissatisfied and therefore dangerous area. If hopes for liberalization are either frustrated too definitively or advanced too rapidly, this instability can produce a crisis that at least will deeply burden superpower relations and could threaten the peace.

Hungary’s destiny thus should not be a zero-sum game in world politics. The superpowers need to accept, as they seem yet only partially to do, that they share a common interest in the gradual, controlled development of a reform, but not a revolutionary, spirit in Eastern Europe.

Both lost stature in 1956. The Soviet image, if not so irreparably as it then seemed, still suffers from the memory of how a people’s aspirations were crushed. Many Hungarians believed the United States was irresponsible to encourage resistance it had no intention, and probably no means, to facilitate. That memory of a U.S policy that seemed to place higher value on ideology and domestic politics than what might feasibly help Hungarians haunts any Administration that wants to convince Eastern Europeans of its steadfastness and prudence.

Washington has scope for an active policy that expresses American values and shows Eastern Europe is not an exclusive Soviet preserve. The United States can urge even better human-rights performance; a decent regard for Western opinion is a factor in Hungarian politics since the party knows this partly determines access to markets and financing. We should remove economic impediments, notably the requirement for annual renewal of most-favored-nation trading status.

What the United States cannot do, any more than in 1956, is pull Hungary away from the Warsaw Pact. Even empty talk, such as calling into question the Yalta arrangements or public efforts to single out “good” and “bad” members of that alliance, as Vice President George Bush did in a well-remembered 1983 Vienna speech, are counterproductive because they stir Soviet suspicions. Like it or not, the United States needs to accept that continuing Hungarian reforms will strengthen what must remain for the foreseeable future a communist state and loyal Soviet ally.

The Soviets need to see that their self-interest is served by letting Hungary continue to devise its own form of communism, which pays heed to Western cultural and economic proclivities and requirements. Looser control and more diversity means greater regional stability and thus both international respect for the Kremlin and an improved climate in which the full range of East-West issues, including arms control, can be addressed.

The common interest is thus in a liberalization and tempered renewal of nationalism in Eastern Europe that does not threaten precipitous change in fundamental political relationships on the divided continent. Only if the United States and the Soviet Union cooperate tacitly in this venture can the ground be prepared safely for the larger changes--changes that must occur someday, when the alliance systems have outlived their usefulness and Europe tries to find an identity no longer defined almost exclusively by its superpower patrons. Only then will the Hungarian Revolution end.