Revolt Started 30 Years Ago Today : Hungarians Still Building on Pillars of ’56 Uprising

In a weed-grown corner of a municipal cemetery in Budapest, a few humps in the grass reveal the presence of unmarked graves. Some are adorned with plastic flowers and rusting metal crosses, but there are no names.

Although the government refuses to confirm it, many people believe that the bodies of about 200 leading participants who were executed after the Hungarian uprising, which began 30 years ago today, are buried there.

Among the graves, it is widely believed, are those of the principal heroes of Eastern Europe’s bloodiest revolt against Soviet domination--the young army general, Pal Maleter, and Hungarian Communist Party leader Imre Nagy, a lifelong loyalist to the Soviet cause who turned against Moscow in the latter stages of the uprising only as Moscow turned against him.

On the fateful afternoon of Nov. 1, 1956, as 200,000 Soviet troops backed by 2,500 tanks bore down on Budapest and its thousands of lightly armed civilian defenders, Nagy went on the radio to declare Hungary’s neutrality and its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

Three days later, under the new leadership of Janos Kadar, who remains the party chief today, Hungary again became a faithful ally of the Soviet Union, a “fraternal” member of the socialist camp.

For 10 days that October, images of young men in the cobblestone streets of Budapest battling Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails transfixed the world, as streams of refugees poured into Austria at a crossing made famous by James A. Michener’s chronicle of the rebellion, “The Bridge at Andau.”

It was and remains by far the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II, and has left no illusion about the Soviet Union’s determination to preserve its postwar expansion into the heart of Europe.

Officially, about 6,000 people were killed, although Western estimates put the number closer to 30,000. Hundreds were executed later, and 200,000 people, one in every 50 Hungarians, fled the country before the borders were resealed.

Traumatic Scar

Thirty years later, the Hungarian uprising and its brutal suppression remain a traumatic scar on the national psyche, but one that has brought not only enduring pain to Hungary but also salutary effects. There may be no monument to the memory of those who died in the uprising, not even markers on the graves of Nagy and Maleter. But in significant if limited ways, they won.

Western historians now view the Hungarian uprising, and a simultaneous confrontation in Poland that came close to triggering a Soviet military intervention there, as the definitive end of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, at least as imposed by Moscow.

Three years after the Soviet dictator’s death, the Kremlin leadership under Nikita S. Khrushchev came to see the impracticality of cloning its own social system in East European cultures and the wisdom instead of allowing them a measure of diversity in keeping with “national characteristics,” as Soviet policy now declares.

Of its six nominal allies in Eastern Europe, none has taken greater advantage of this hard-won latitude than Hungary. Under the leadership of Kadar, a centrist member of Nagy’s 1956 Politburo who himself was imprisoned in Stalinist times, Hungary has emerged as Eastern Europe’s most prosperous, stable and--along with Poland--most “liberal” country in terms of freedom of expression and access to the outside world.

Soviets Still There

To be sure, censorship remains, the Communist Party is fully in charge and loyal to Moscow, and the trade unions are government-sponsored. The crowds that in 1956 toppled a gigantic statue of Josef Stalin and dragged its severed head through the streets chanting “Ruszkik haza” (“ Russians go home”) did so in vain. Soviet troops are still deployed at bases in Hungary, and it is still illegal to criticize Hungary’s relations with the Soviet Union.

At the same time, Hungarians enjoy a measure of liberty that most East Europeans, and Soviet citizens themselves, do not. Travel to the West is virtually unrestricted. Hungary does not jam the Voice of America and other foreign radio stations. Western books, magazines and videotapes circulate widely and freely. And the official media are regarded by Western diplomats in Budapest as the most candid and varied in Eastern Europe (along with Poland’s).

The contrast to Hungary’s neighbors is illustrated by the problem a Hungarian journalist encountered recently on a trip to East Germany.

“I’d packed my bag in a hurry, not really thinking, and threw in a copy of Time magazine,” the journalist recalls. “At the border, the East Germans opened my suitcase, and they didn’t know what to do. If I were East German, it was simple: Take the magazine and arrest me. If I were West German, that was simple, too: Take the magazine and let me go. But what do you do with a Hungarian?

“They took the magazine and let me go.”

Dissidents Watched

A small number of intellectual dissidents meet freely here among themselves and with Western reporters, but they are watched closely by the secret police--the gentler descendants of the hated AVO that sparked the 1956 uprising by firing into a peaceful street demonstration.

Today in Hungary, efforts to organize political activity and disseminate underground literature bring police harassment and occasional arrests on misdemeanor charges, and in some cases official pressures to emigrate. But according to Western diplomats, there are no known political prisoners.

Economic hardships also persist in Hungary, and worrisome signs of economic stagnation have begun to appear. A shortage of adequate housing, the universal scarcity that is a hallmark of Soviet Bloc societies, contributes to Hungary’s other social problems, including high rates of divorce, alcoholism and suicide and a perilously low birthrate.

Telephones are also in short supply, but Hungary permits a solution unique in Eastern Europe: It is the only Soviet Bloc country that allows private ownership of citizens’ band radios.

Western Market Economy

Under a series of economic reforms that the Kadar regime began planning in the months after the uprising, and finally began to implement after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary abandoned the Soviet model of rigid central planning. In its place, Kadar introduced elements of a Western market economy--notably, realistic pricing of goods--and gave new freedom to farms and factories to manage themselves.

Since 1982, small private enterprise has been allowed to blossom, though it remains restricted by a web of laws and special taxes.

The net result is an economy that tends to reward innovation and the quality of production, a novelty in the Soviet Bloc, and one that has shown itself better able than most of its neighbors to stay abreast of the West’s electronic revolution. The food shops are filled with hams and Hungary’s famous salami, and clothing and other consumer goods, although expensive by local wage standards, are well-made and plentiful.

Keeps Party Line

In its foreign policy, Hungary has hewed faithfully to the Soviet line, but it has managed to do so without offending its Western trade partners. Relations with the United States are the warmest of any Warsaw Pact country, and Washington’s annual renewal of Hungary’s most-favored-nation status stirs little if any opposition in Congress.

“Everything we have done, the country we have built, is built on the pillars of 1956,” a Hungarian diplomat observed.

Like most officials today, he avoids calling the uprising a “counterrevolution,” the official Leninist term that implies a revolt against the wishes of the proletariat. Historians might argue that the cost of economic reform need not have been so high, but on the other hand the uprising has served a useful purpose as the touchstone of liberalizing reform.

Janos Kadar, now 74 and a grandfatherly figure, emerged gradually as the only genuinely popular East European leader, and many worry that his carefully nurtured reforms will falter after he leaves the scene. Yet an ambivalence toward Kadar persists, an attitude that is rooted in memories of 1956 and his own ambiguous role in the nation’s trauma.

Ironically, the uprising grew out of momentous political events not in Hungary but in Poland. The June, 1956, riots of workers in Poznan, demanding “bread, law and freedom,” had worked their effect on Poland’s Stalinist leadership, and from Oct. 13 to 15, a new leadership headed by the popular Wladyslaw Gomulka emerged in Poland--not only without Soviet consent but over Soviet objections.

Uninvited, an angry Khrushchev had led a delegation of the Soviet leadership to Warsaw on Oct. 19 as Soviet troops began to move out of their garrisons in Poland. But reason prevailed. Khrushchev feared that the Polish army would resist, and the Chinese premier, Chou En-lai, enjoined him not to use military force.

Phoned Gomulka

The following day, Khrushchev is said to have telephoned Gomulka to assure him of his support, and the Polish crisis was over.

In Hungary, a hated Stalinist regime under Erno Gero clung to power, even as the Soviets were moving to replace him with a Hungarian Gomulka, Imre Nagy. Thousands of students in Budapest began mass meetings on Oct. 22 that produced 10 formal demands for democratic reforms in Hungary, including the installation of Nagy as head of government.

The uprising began on the evening of Oct. 23, as a peaceful student march, permitted by the government after a long internal debate, wound through the city’s streets to the main government radio station. As people in the crowd demanded to be let in, to broadcast the students’ demands, secret police guards replied first with tear gas, then fired directly into the crowd. An enraged mob stormed the radio station, occupying it by midnight, and the revolution was under way.

As street battles with police broke out across the city, party leader Gero, in consultation with Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Andropov, summoned Soviet troops, which moved into the city early the next morning. Four days of savage street fighting ensued, as Gero was replaced by Kadar, and Nagy--now the dominant figure as premier--sought to negotiate a Soviet withdrawal through Andropov.

A cease-fire on Oct. 28 brought a Soviet retreat from Budapest and other cities, and four days of respite from the fighting. As newspapers, freed from censorship, proclaimed a “victorious nation,” Nagy went on the radio on Oct. 30 to announce the end of one-party rule in Hungary and a return to the multiparty coalition that had governed in 1945.

One day later, amid the first signs of new Soviet troop movements, Nagy declared Hungary’s intention to negotiate its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

Signs of a Loyalist

Charles Gati, an American authority on the Hungarian revolution at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y., notes that until Oct. 31, Nagy, a founder of the Hungarian Communist Party, showed every sign of remaining a Soviet loyalist, consulting at every turn with Andropov and the Kremlin. Only when he realized that Moscow had betrayed him and that Soviet troops were returning did Nagy take matters into his own hands, Gati wrote in a recent issue of the journal Problems of Communism.

On Nov. 1, as his relations with Andropov abruptly chilled, Nagy broadcast a dramatic proclamation declaring Hungary a neutral nation. Late that same day, Kadar slipped out of Budapest to form a new government under Soviet protection.

At dawn Nov. 4, Soviet artillery barrages on rebel strongholds in Budapest signaled the end of the revolution, although pockets of resistance held out in some places for a month.

As embattled radio stations appealed in five languages for international aid--the message ended with the national anthem and the words help, help, help --Kadar came on the air through his own radio station to declare that “truth is on our side. We will win. . . . Disarm the counterrevolutionaries.”

Tried and Executed

Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy on Nov. 4, emerging on Nov. 22 under a sanctuary agreement worked out with Kadar, and was immediately arrested by Soviet officers. Two years later, in June, 1958, he was tried and executed.

Thirty years later, Kadar’s precise role in the return of Soviet troops and the betrayal of Nagy remains an ambiguous burden on his own slowly won popularity.

A Hungarian engineer in his mid-30s, who says he takes little interest in politics, nevertheless reflects the ambivalence that many Hungarians feel toward Kadar today.

“Is Kadar popular?” he said. “I don’t know. A lot of older people have very strong memories of ’56. My parents and my uncle remember Soviet soldiers looting their homes, stealing watches and silver.

‘Older People Remember’

“For the young, there are just a few lines in the history books. It’s ancient history. But the older people remember. They say Kadar was responsible for the deaths, that he asked the Russians to come in.

“The Russians say they liberated us, but what does that mean? They didn’t give us liberty. We don’t have our own government, we don’t have a free press.

“But it’s true, we have our economic problems, but life here is the best there is behind the Iron Curtain.”