New Climate in Hungary

For two weeks in the fall of 1956 the world watched as Hungarians poured into the streets to challenge first the authority of their government and then the military might of the Soviet Union in a nationalist revolt aimed at overthrowing the dictatorship of the Communist Party. The uprising was brave and stirring but doomed to be crushed under ruthless attack from Soviet tanks. Thousands of Hungarians died, hundreds of thousands fled the country, and Imre Nagy, the prime minister who sided with the uprising, proclaimed Hungary’s neutrality and called for free multiparty elections, was arrested. Two years later Nagy, convicted of treason in a show trial, was hanged and buried in an unmarked grave.

On June 16 the remains of Nagy and several of his associates will be reburied in a public ceremony that the spokesman for the Communist Party’s central committee hopes will serve as a “cathartic event” of national reconciliation. A large number of Hungarians, among them many who have spent more than 30 years in exile, are expected to attend. The funeral, which is likely to be one of the more dramatic moments in modern Hungarian history, will be televised throughout the country. Nagy’s family has not invited any members of the central committee to be present.

Nagy, who was a founding member of Hungary’s Communist Party, still has not been formally rehabilitated. The central committee has agreed that his execution was an illegal “criminal act” carried out after a “fabricated political trial,” but Communist Party leader Karoly Grosz remains opposed to blaming the party for Nagy’s execution. Reformers within the party disagree; they want the past to be faced honestly and amends to be made honorably. Hungary is preparing for multiparty elections. Within a few years Communist rule could be ended by democratic means. The goals of the 1956 revolution seem to be in sight.