The summertime run-up to the Hungarian crisis started after the Poznan uprising with purges in Hungary’s ruling elite. Matyas Rakosi, one of the “little Stalins” running Eastern Europe, was arbitrarily dismissed on July 18 and replaced by a faithful understudy, Erno Gero, who promised better days but at the same time warned that in Hungary there would be no “second Poznan.” His program might have been drafted by Khrushchev himself. It included:
Reconciliation with Tito
The end of Rakosi’s “personality cult”
The start of “collective leadership”
The abolition of terror in government
Freedom for Janos Kadar, a former senior official, jailed three years earlier, ironically, for “Titoism”
Several weeks later Gero welcomed Imre Nagy, another former senior official, back into the Communist Party. He had been accused of “rightwing deviationism,” whatever that meant at the time. Gero, under heavy pressure to reform his country, also opened parliament to political debate, unimaginable until then, and allowed Catholic priests to return to their parishes in Hungary. Many priests had fled the country to avoid religious persecution.
Meanwhile, in late September, Khrushchev and Tito exchanged visits—not, as it turned out, because they enjoyed each other’s company, but rather because they were trying to divide up Eastern Europe into a Titoesque sphere of influence and a Soviet sphere of influence. It was a cockeyed idea, probably Khrushchev’s, and it had little chance of success. But in Moscow it was a serious topic of conversation, mostly among those Western diplomats and journalists who felt Khrushchev might be losing power to hard-liners. Theoretically the Tito scenario would have allowed Khrushchev to retain personal power and keep all of Eastern Europe in communist hands as it grappled with Western capitalism (read the United States and NATO) for control of the rest of the world. According to one report of the plan, Tito would acquire ideological control over Romania and Bulgaria while Moscow would solidify its control over Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Also, as part of the deal Moscow would loosen its financial grip over all of Eastern Europe, theoretically stimulating economic growth and trade. On September 30 Gero joined Khrushchev and Tito in Yalta, thus adding the weight of his opinions as a communist leader eager for reform but determined to keep his country in the communist bloc.
On October 23 the lid blew. Thrilled by Gomulka’s ascension to power in neighboring Poland, several hundred thousand Hungarian students and workers took to the streets in Budapest in a massive show of solidarity with Gomulka and his Polish colleagues. Many marched on parliament to hear Nagy lay out his reform plans. Others demonstrated in front of Budapest Radio, demanding a Tito-style “national communism.” Still others converged on the hulking, thirty-foot-tall statue of Stalin in a central square and, in their rage, tore it down. “This we swear,” the rebels sang, chanting the words of a patriotic poem, “this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves.” Later that evening, Hungarian security forces opened fire on the crowd in front of the offices of Budapest Radio, killing one, wounding many others, and igniting a clash between the demonstrators and the police that ended with many of the police switching sides and joining the demonstrators. They probably didn’t know it at the time, but they had just started a revolution that would send shivers through the Kremlin and, for this reason, among others, send tens of thousands of Russian troops and tanks into Hungary in an effort to crush it.
The same evening, in Moscow, Soviet leaders met in a frenzy of anxiety and fear. “Hungary is coming apart,” cried Molotov. “The government is being overthrown,” wailed Lazar Kaganovich. “It’s not the same as Poland,” observed Zhukov. “Troops must be sent.” Everyone agreed, with the exception of the veteran communist negotiator Anastas Mikoyan. He argued for patience, suggesting that the Hungarians “restore order on their own.” Khrushchev, fighting to protect his endangered policy of de-Stalinization, joined his other colleagues in their decision to send troops into Budapest and also to send Mikoyan and the Kremlin’s chief ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, to Budapest to monitor the mess.
Very early the next morning, on October 24, Soviet troops invaded Budapest. A force of some 10,000 troops, supported by eighty tanks, rolled into the capital from their bases in the countryside. It was a rare show of Soviet efficiency, triggered by the fear that, as Molotov had warned, Hungary was “coming apart.” Russian generals initially believed that their troops could contain the crisis, but after only a few hours it was clear that they had only inflamed it. Hungarian students threw Molotov cocktails at the tanks. The Russians fired at the rebels, starting a flow of blood that inspired those Hungarians sitting on the sidelines to take up arms and join the rebellion. The Kremlin quickly learned that the bonds of blood and nationalism were thicker than those of communist allegiance. According to one estimate, by midafternoon twenty-five students had been killed and 200 wounded. That was the estimate in Budapest. There was none for those killed in other parts of Hungary.
I noted in my diary that “Hungary had just ripped a page out of Poland’s recent history and stolen the headlines from Gomulka.” Just from the Soviet press, rarely a reservoir of reliable information, we learned that Hungarian rebels were demanding that Nagy replace Gero and press his plans for reform. At Moscow’s direction Nagy did in fact replace Gero, but, like Gero, he also distrusted the student rebels. What were their true intentions? Nagy, as a Moscow-trained communist, wanted only to reform the Hungarian system of government, not to overthrow it, as many students demanded.
At JPRS and at the embassy we were being inundated with reports from Hungary, some reliable but many less so. One said that Soviet aircraft had opened fire on insurgent “mobs.” At the time there was no confirmation of this. Another report, from Budapest Radio, said that Hungarian wives were appealing to their husbands to stay at home and “amuse” themselves with domestic “activities,” which were left undefined. The point was to keep them from joining the student rebels. Still another report said that miners in two towns fifty to sixty miles from Budapest had joined the uprising, shutting down their mines and taking up arms against government troops. Again there was no confirmation, but the report strongly suggested that the rebellion was already spreading into the provinces.
We also heard that many rebels were now calling for “true national independence” and free elections—elections involving more than one party. Nagy, their hero in the early days of the revolt, took an interesting but puzzling approach to these rebel demands. While the demonstrators were hurling Molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks and troops, clearly seeing them as enemies of their revolt, Nagy appealed to the demonstrators to show “love and kindness” to the invading Soviet troops, suggesting that, even in these early days, the new prime minister was already losing touch with the fiery goals of the student-led uprising. Nagy favored the Soviet intervention, hoping it would restore calm. His goal was always reform; the students wanted revolution.