The lecturer then requested that if anyone had a question, it should be submitted on a small sheet of paper. Notepads had been left in convenient places around the lecture hall for this purpose. The lecturer now riffled through the questions. “They all concern one question—about Poland and Hungary,” he announced, obviously disappointed. “Comrades, would it not be better if we discussed the meaning of the 20th Party Congress, or the denunciation of the personality cult, or the decisions of the July plenum of the Central Committee?” He was urging a safer plateau for discussion.
“No,” everyone shouted.
“We want to know about Hungary and Poland,” one young student said. “Tell us the truth about what’s happening there.”
The lecturer, twitching still more, responded, “Comrades, the Soviet press has reported the full facts about the recent events in both countries.”
Everyone seemed to be shouting at once, “No, no, we have all read the Soviet press. What we want now are the facts, the truth.” Near me a student whispered to a friend, “He’s on the spot now. I don’t envy him. He had better answer.”
The lecturer looked down at his notes helplessly, but they provided him with only one answer. “I truly believe, comrades, that we must turn to the 20th Party Congress for answers. There lies the truth.”
A student standing near the front of the lecture hall walked toward the lecturer and fearlessly proclaimed, “We are all literate. We read the papers. We know the official line. Now we want to know the truth. We want facts. We want to know what is happening there. Don’t repeat for us what is in the press. Tell us what is going on there.”
Almost as one, the students burst into applause, shouting, “Truth, truth, we want the truth.” The lecturer looked desperate. He had clearly lost control of the meeting. He appealed for order, but the students ignored him. They kept shouting, “Truth, truth.” Then, over the roaring crowd, the lecturer screamed a question, “Would any comrade here suggest that the Soviet press does not print the truth, that there is a truth outside the statements of the press?” His question was remarkably naive—no student any longer believed anything in the Soviet press. If in earlier years they might have believed some things in the press, now, after the 20th Party Congress, they no longer believed anything.
Another student seized a microphone and bellowed in a loud voice, “We asked for the truth. We did not ask for a recitation from the press. We all read. Give us the truth now.”
The lecturer, in an unexpected burst of candor, seemed forced to admit, “I am here to give you the official line on these matters. Please hear me out.”
Several of the students thought this was a reasonable request. “Let him speak,” they said. “Let him speak.”
Lecturer: “What are your specific questions? I’ll try to answer them.”
Student: “Where was Gomulka for the last five years?” Gomulka, released from prison only a few days before, had just been appointed head of the Polish Communist Party and had pledged to carry out a broad program of national reform, music to the ears of young reformers in Moscow.
Lecturer: “Comrade Gomulka committed many errors. Five years ago, he favored the kulaks [wealthy peasants]. He did not support the correct line of the party.”
His answer was drowned out in a chorus of boos.
Student: “Does the Sejm [parliament] rule Poland, or does the party rule Poland?”
Lecturer: “The party rules, because it is the expression of the will of the people.”
More boos, jeers, shouts.
Listening to this extraordinary outburst of anti-Soviet sentiment, I realized the scope of the changes in recent months. Prior to the 20th Party Congress, such demonstrations of disrespect for a Communist Party official would have been unimaginable. The students might have been expelled from school, sent off to the virgin lands, even arrested. But no longer. It seemed I was witnessing episodes in the disintegration of a dictatorship, though at the time I tried to steer clear of such large pronouncements. I felt more comfortable noting what I saw and heard.
A student then rose, turned his back on the lecturer, and in apparent disgust exclaimed, “I’ve wasted enough time tonight. I came here for answers, and as usual I’m not getting them. I’m leaving.” He made his way through the crowd to the back door, and as though on cue almost everyone else followed him. In two minutes the lecture hall was empty. The lecturer was alone, holding in his hand the fifty small pieces of paper, each with a question about Hungary and Poland.
As I left, I heard students mumbling, “What sort of answers is he giving us?” “What a waste of time!” “We can read the papers anytime.” “It’s time for the truth.”
That evening I noted in my diary that although I had been witness to other outbursts of student skepticism about the party line, never before had I seen “such an astonishing exposition of cynicism and disbelief.” Communism would never be built on their skeptical shoulders.
Throughout the historic summer of 1956, Khrushchev saw evidence of a fraying empire. With workers’ demands for “bread and freedom,” Poland had gone into open rebellion, and Khrushchev came close to crushing it with the Red Army. But at the last second he changed his mind, deciding instead on a political option that he hoped would calm the troubled waters of his Eastern European empire. Reluctantly he allowed the once-discredited Gomulka to return to power, even though Gomulka, with his brazen call for a “Polish way to socialism,” still represented a mortal challenge to Soviet dominance.
Yet if Poland was a crisis that for the moment seemed contained, Hungary was a crisis that was boiling, and the subject was on everyone’s mind, especially Khrushchev’s. He understood that while Stalin lived, little Stalins ruled his Eastern European empire, fearful but powerful puppets totally subjugated to the whims and temper of the man in the Kremlin. Only one communist had dared to defy Stalin, Tito of Yugoslavia, and he had paid the ultimate price in the currency of communism at that time: expulsion from Stalin’s privileged fraternity. Only once had a communist-controlled country rebelled—East Germany, in 1953—and that rebellion had been brutally crushed.
Now Khrushchev faced a new and frightening reality in Eastern Europe, and it was of his own doing. De-Stalinization, his pet initiative, had launched “the year of the thaw,” and it opened new worlds of hope and opportunity not only for the people of the Soviet Union but also for the people of Eastern Europe. They wanted a better life, a free press, a parliament with genuine debate, and they wanted a form of independence similar to Tito’s “national communism,” meaning a genuine loosening of satellite subservience to Moscow. Tito’s example was cruciaclass="underline" when Khrushchev began to improve relations with Tito—inviting him in June to a twenty-one-day visit to the Soviet Union and greeting him with full pomp and ceremony, like a founding father of communism returning to the fold—other East European leaders, such as Poland’s Gomulka, thought they could follow Tito’s example with impunity.
Over the summer, while traveling, I could see examples of Khrushchev backtracking on de-Stalinization at home. His daughter, Rada, said that her father “increasingly sought to limit the boundaries of critical analysis, lest it end up polarizing society.” But he could not “limit the boundaries” of excitement then sweeping through Eastern Europe, although he tried. The potential for positive change was in the air. People could breathe its intoxicating power. Fear, the normal human response to living in a totalitarian society, began magically to vanish. It was a time for action, not words. Hungary overnight became the stage for what the Soviets would later denounce as a “putsch… by fascist, counterrevolutionary forces,” the very same forces hailed in the West as freedom fighters. Russian students told me that when they saw the word “putsch” in a Pravda editorial, they knew for certain that an anti-Soviet rebellion was under way. They demanded to know the truth about what was going on in Hungary, and they knew they were not getting it. Khrushchev had profoundly misjudged the impact of de-Stalinization on Russia’s satellite empire. His reaction was late, confused, and ultimately self-destructive. For months he had hoped a political solution could be found, even if that meant he would open much of Eastern Europe to Tito’s “national communism,” but in early November, after much hesitation and self-doubt, he looked in the mirror one morning and saw only one option—no matter the cost, he felt he had to crush the uprising in Hungary, just as Russia had crushed the uprising in East Germany in 1953. Khrushchev had gambled with de-Stalinization and lost. Unfortunately, Hungary would lose, too.