Often, when I got tired of official statements, even those uttered by American diplomats, I would turn down the embassy limo and jump into a cab for the ride back to American House. I wanted to hear a Russian discuss events in Hungary. Of course not all cabdrivers were talkative, but some of them were. On this evening the driver asked me whether I had “fresh information” about Hungary. Before I could answer, he launched into his own analysis. “Whose side are the Hungarian troops on?” That was the key to his analysis. “If you know anything about our revolution, you recall that success came to us when the troops joined the insurgents. This is the critical question.” It was my pleasure to inform him that many Hungarian troops were in fact joining the insurgents; according to one report they had seized a Soviet airfield and burned the planes and hangars. When we reached American House, I tried to pay him for the ride. He waved his hand and shook his head, refusing payment. “Thank you,” he said, with a smile, emphasizing the word “you.”
One can imagine that Khrushchev had trouble sleeping for much of the next week. “Budapest was like a nail in my head,” he later recalled. He had ordered troops into Budapest but the rebellion continued, the fighting spread, and Russian casualties mounted. (He did not care about Hungarian casualties.) Lenin’s haunting question, Chto delat’?—What is to be done?—was the essential dilemma for Khrushchev. Indeed, what was to be done? He was in a quandary, uncertain about his next step.
The upshot was that his policy swung from one extreme to another, “lurch[ing] from surrender to bloodbath,” to quote one of his biographers, William Taubman. One day he would urge his colleagues to “face facts.” “There is no firm leadership there, either in the party or the government…. Their troops may go over to the rebels.” He argued that the Soviet Union had “no alternative” but to support the wobbly regime in Budapest. Zhukov, after surveying military options, flip-flopped, stunning his colleagues by changing his position from intervention to withdrawal, stating, “We should withdraw our troops from Budapest, and from all of Hungary, if that’s demanded.”
On October 30 Khrushchev seized on the Zhukov proposal, using it as a military shield against political criticism. “We are unanimous,” he proclaimed. “There are two paths, a military path, one of occupation, and a peaceful path—the withdrawal of troops, negotiations.” He obviously preferred the peaceful path, at least at the moment he spoke. In this crucial week he was given to sudden changes of mind, heart, and policy. Surprising everyone, he even approved a remarkable TASS statement admitting “egregious mistakes” by the Kremlin, including “violations of the principles of equality in relations with socialist countries” and adding a pledge “to observe the full sovereignty of each socialist state.”
Reading such an official admission of “mistakes” and “violations,” in the midst of an anti-communist revolution in an East European satellite, what was the average Russian to think about his own government’s policies? What was a communist official in the hinterlands to think? What was the U.S. embassy to think? At this revealing moment, all might have thought that the Khrushchev regime had been thrown into confusion and uncertainty by the startling events in Hungary and that it did not know what to do—and they would all have been right.
But then, in Budapest, as Nagy moved closer to supporting the rebels’ ultimate demand for “true national independence,” an anguished Khrushchev again changed his mind. He did not want to be seen as just another Stalin, using military force when political negotiations might have made more sense. In his memoirs he referred to the late dictator’s prediction that without him, Russia would collapse into uncontrollable chaos. “You are blind like little kittens,” Stalin had jokingly warned. “Without me the imperialists would strangle you.” The imperialists were always a handy villain.
In Budapest a huge crowd had gathered in Parliament Square. Hungarian security troops demanded that the crowd disperse. The protesters refused. The troops opened fire and massacred more than 100 demonstrators, wounding many more. Even at a time of spreading violence, when bloodshed was no novelty, this massacre had a stunning impact, inspiring an angry mob to attack Communist Party headquarters, where they seized a handful of officials and, propelled by disappointment and hatred, lynched them by hanging them from city lampposts in downtown Budapest, a scene soon duplicated in other cities. The sight of hanging bodies was the lead item in newsreels around the world, including in Moscow, where Khrushchev now realized that he had to act, that continuing vacillation was an embarrassing symptom of Soviet (and his own) weakness, no longer acceptable in a Kremlin leader privately frightened by the prospect of the disintegration of Russia’s Eastern European empire.
The following morning, on October 31, Khrushchev ordered what amounted to a second Soviet invasion of Hungary, only this time he sanctioned the use of overwhelming force. It was code-named Operation Whirlwind. The Red Army requested, and received, a few days for proper preparation. He also decided to brief his Warsaw Pact allies, all of whom would be affected by the news. He had never briefed them on his de-Stalinization speech, and they had been miffed. He did not want to make the same mistake twice. Accompanied by Molotov and Malenkov, on November 1 Khrushchev flew to Brest, near the Polish-Soviet border, to inform Gomulka, who was not happy about Khrushchev’s decision but could do nothing about it.
The following day the Kremlin troika flew to Bucharest to tell the Romanians and the Czechs about the upcoming invasion, and then they went to Sofia to tell the Bulgarians. No one was happy but no one objected. Finally, Khrushchev and Malenkov flew through a violent thunderstorm to the Adriatic island resort of Brioni to inform Tito of the decision to invade Hungary, a decision the Yugoslav leader initially opposed but then supported.
On November 4 Soviet troops and tanks swooped into Budapest in a vast deployment of seventeen army divisions and crushed the Hungarian Revolution. In a three-column front-page editorial, Pravda explained the invasion, using rhetoric so ugly it would have satisfied the most demanding Kremlin propagandist. “Fascist, counterrevolutionary forces” had tried to control the “putsch,” and “these elements, which are hostile to the people and alien to Marxism-Leninism,” must be eliminated. To attain this goal, “huge concentrations of Soviet troops and forces” had been moved into Hungary “determined” to “crush” the Hungarian “putsch.” There was never any doubt that they would succeed. The Hungarian Army was no match for the Red Army, and it was never in the cards, sympathetic rhetoric aside, that NATO would intervene in this Eastern European crisis. The cost in human life was high: 2,500 Hungarian “freedom fighters” and 700 Soviet troops were killed, most of them on the first day of the assault. More than 200,000 Hungarians fled the country.
The diplomatic cost was also high. The UN spent days denouncing the Soviet invasion, and the White House waved the “Captive Nations Week” banner, suggesting all workers laboring in communist-run countries were slaves and superpower relations could not be improved, despite Soviet protestations about desiring a foreign policy based on “peace, friendship and equality among nations.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his sympathy for the Hungarian people, but his words lacked conviction. “I feel with the Hungarian people,” he said limply. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, issued a statement that simply oozed with hypocritical sympathy. “To all those suffering under communist slavery,” he intoned, “let us say you can count on us.” But except for this lukewarm rhetoric, the United States offered nothing to the Hungarian people, who had expected more than words from the United States.