Charles Gati

Fifty Years Later

...

By the spring of 1955, I was no longer too young to get by without a bad political experience. In April, as a result of Rákosi's machinations and Moscow's fear of Hungary slipping away, Prime Minister Nagy was ousted. In a month or so, I was in the first group of twelve staffers to be fired; a second group of nine others, including Boldizsár, the editor, soon followed. For its strong support of Nagy's anti-Stalinist "New Course", Magyar Nemzet was decimated.
My dismissal was undeserved. I had overheard a lot of political gossip, and I had a sense of what was going on, but I understood little of what I knew. Politics was not my beat. My interviews with composers and ballerinas were largely free of political content. So why was I fired? I put the notice of dismissal in my coat pocket and walked aimlessly from the publisher's office toward the Danube, crying. At twenty, my journalistic career seemed over. I did not have a college education, and I did not have a usable skill. I was going to lose my precious draft deferment. What would I do now? A few miserable weeks passed before I learned that my punishment was not as severe as I had feared. I was not classified as an enemy; I was not blacklisted. My punishment was limited. I was deemed an outcast forbidden to hold a full-time job. As a freelancer, I was permitted to write for trade publications and some other lesser known, low-circulation weeklies and monthlies.
After the initial shock wore off and I regained my bearings, I began to view my pink slip as a badge of honour. In a country that puts losers on a pedestal - Hungarians love to celebrate their failed heroes - I was acquiring the respected status of an innocent victim. Though I lost my free pass to the Opera House and no longer had an office with a desk and the prized telephone I used to share with four other reporters, and though I had to hustle to make a living as a freelancer, what mattered more and what made life even exciting was that I was no longer a political innocent. I belonged to a movement now, although I did not fully understand what it was about. I just felt the same way everyone I respected felt. Being in the movement meant that I picked up and passed on political gossip in the Hungária coffee house and at the Lukács swimming pool - the latter a unique spot that combined swimming with politicking - and that I regularly attended sessions of the Petőfi Circle, a newly formed meeting place for soul searching for the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia. In fact, I began to go there when the sessions attracted no more than a dozen people; by mid-1956, thousands showed up. Not once did I speak up, however. I was less interested in the discussion, much of which I did not understand anyway, than in an attractive redhead who was a regular from the beginning. More than a year passed this way - from the spring of 1955 to the summer of 1956 - when Moscow, to please Tito's Yugoslavia, suddenly decided to dump Rákosi. The ups and downs, all dictated by Moscow, were confusing and nerveracking: from late 1944 to 1953, Moscow favoured the Stalinist Rákosi. From 1953 to 1955, it preferred the anti-Stalinist Nagy. From 1955 to 1956, it once again supported the Stalinist Rákosi. But then, in the summer of that year, it dropped the Stalinist Rákosi again, without reinstating the anti-Stalinist Nagy... Still, I was encouraged, even delighted. Moscow had forced Rákosi, the bald murderer, to pack up and become an exile in the Soviet Union. At the same time, more and more Hungarians, mainly in Budapest, had begun to believe that something had to give, something good had to happen. The only specific expectation I can now recall was that the Communist Party would readmit Nagy to its ranks and, eventually, he would be returned to his position as the country's prime minister. Good things began to happen to me, however. In August 1956, I wrote a radical article that the editors of the weekly Muvelt Nép immediately accepted for publication and published on page 3 at the beginning of September. The article dealt with the teaching of foreign languages at high school and university levels. I was very proud of myself for being the first in the country to argue publicly that students should have a choice of taking Russian, English, German or Frenchrather than being required to take Russian. I received a few congratulatory notes. Long before Bob Dylan, the times they were a-changin'.
Also in August, Iván Boldizsár, the editor who always landed on his feet, was "rehabilitated" and authorized to start Hétfői Hírlap, a new weekly appearing on Mondays. (Boldizsár was the founding editor of The New Hungarian Quarterly in 1960.) The idea was to bring out a Sunday evening paper with an anti-Stalinist agenda - and with extensive summaries on its last page of the afternoon soccer games. On their way home from the stadiums, Boldizsár explained to me, the fans always stopped in their favourite tavern to argue about the teams and curse the referees. By the time they finished their second or third fröccs of wine and soda and ran out of arguments, they would want to read Hétfői Hírlap with news of the other games and of politics as well. I badly wanted to work for the new paper.
Within a few weeks, a special committee of the Journalists' Association "rehabilitated" me, too, stating after a two-minute hearing that my dismissal in 1955 was without cause. The hearing took place less than a month before the Revolution began. The chairman of the committee was Géza Losonczy, one of Nagy's two or three closest associates.
The Revolution that began on October 23 and ended at dawn on November 4 caught me by surprise and left me confused. The first day, I marched with thousands of university students through the streets of Budapest, going from Pest via the beautiful Margaret Bridge to Buda, shouting slogans about independence from the Soviet Union and solidarity with Poland, where promising changes were under way. We demanded Nagy's return to the country's leadership. By evening, the joy I felt during the afternoon march gave way to apprehension. Witnessing the first shots at the Radio Station, I did not understand what was going on. I was baffled by the sudden appearance of young fighters. Who were these people? Where did their weapons come from? It took me another day or two to begin to sense something that was both curious and confusing: that the movement for the reform of the system was being pursued simultaneously with a revolution against it. I recall being both very excited and somewhat uneasy about what was happening around me.
I was puzzled by Nagy and remained so for about a week. On October 23, during the battle at the Radio Station, the Party coopted him by making him a member of the Politburo and by returning him to the prime minister's office that he had occupied from 1953 to 1955. That was the good news. The bad news was that for almost a week he either vacillated or acted as if he were a hardline member of the Old Guard. His Marxism and party discipline blinded him to the ongoing revolution. He allowed Ernő Gerő, Rákosi's alter ego, to serve as the Party's first secretary and then approved Gerő's replacement by János Kádár, a centrist on the Communist political spectrum who would soon betray Nagy.
For five long days, the new government was composed almost entirely of discredited party hacks, at a time when Nagy, with the whole country behind him, could have consolidated his authority. With most non-Communist politicians of the 1945 - 47 coalition era in exile or forgotten - and no non-Communist counterelite available to fill key positions - Nagy was the only credible politician on the scene. Yet, instead of taking advantage of new circumstances, he failed to surround himself with his own reformist supporters. For too many days, he did not respond to the demands of the street. Listening to Moscow's high-level emissaries, the Politburo members Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, and his hardline Hungarian Communist colleagues, Nagy was insensitive to the mighty winds of radicalism outside party headquarters, where he spent day and night with his one-time comrades, recent critics and current enemies. My disappointment in Nagy was matched by my ambivalence about the young insurgents I encountered on the streets of Budapest. I certainly shared their demands for independence and freedom, and I was exuberant about witnessing the fall of Stalin's hideous statue. Yet, I was also troubled by and upset about individual acts of violence that I saw almost every day. Although these awful incidents usually occurred in response to provocations by remnants of ÁVH thugs, hanging these creatures on lamp posts was not my idea of change or justice. The other thing that bothered me was the apparent belief among the insurgents that everything was now possible. To my mind, it was one thing to shout "Russians, Go Home!" - as I did, too; it was something else to liberate Hungary by trying to defeat the Soviet Union. I felt that their demands were excessive, that they were going too far too fast. Put another way, I was put off by the freedom fighters' admirable but dangerous romanticism as much as I was put off by Nagy's inability to understand and then lead the Revolution that was under way.
For these reasons, and embarrassingly, I did not do very much at all for several days. I wrote a brief article, listened to the radio, read the papers and talked with friends. I had a potentially dangerous encounter with a group of armed revolutionaries who occupied my weekly's printing shop. When news of the occupation reached our office, one of the editors asked me - because I was young, I suppose - to go downstairs to the printing shop and convince the insurgents to leave. My legs trembling, I told them Hétfői Hírlap was on their side. They took a look at the last issue I carried with me, we shook hands, and they left. No problem. After a frustrating week of hope and despair, the Soviet government issued a conciliatory statement - published on October 31 but made available on October 30 - that promised negotiations for the removal of Soviet forces from Hungarian territory. Nagy, encouraged by the Soviet declaration, announced the end of oneparty rule. Since Mikoyan and Suslov, the two Soviet Politburo members, were in Budapest, I took it for granted that Nagy had made his dramatic announcement with the Russians' approval. Listening to him on the radio, he sounded confident.
What I did not know then was that, having withdrawn most of its military from Budapest, Moscow was sending new troops to eastern Hungary from Soviet territory; in short, some were leaving, but others were coming. As Nagy more or less successfully kept the details of ominous Soviet troop movements out of the papers to avoid panic, I believed the Soviets were leaving. By November 1, I was beginning to think the Revolution was victorious and Hungary would be free and independent. That was the day when Nagy embraced a major popular demand by declaring Hungary's neutrality and pledging the country's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. I did not know that Nagy's declaration - an act of desperation - was largely in response to the arrival of new Soviet troops in eastern Hungary. In less than twenty-four hours, between October 30 and 31, the Kremlin had completely changed its mind. By accepting at face value what was being said in Budapest and in Moscow rather than paying attention to what was being done in eastern Hungary, I revealed my lack of political experience. So did everyone else I knew. We lived in a dream world during the first three days of November. Budapest was calm. I was happy. I was proud to be Hungarian! Nagy had needed time to find himself, my friend Radó said, adding that compared with the French Revolution ours was quite nonviolent. It dawned on me that I had over-reacted both to Nagy's initial timidity and to the freedom fighters' excessive radicalism. I was witnessing a momentous historical event marked by instances - many instances - of sacrifice, courage and integrity. I began to phrase a report in my head about a store on Lenin Boulevard that was not looted, even though it was ripped open during the fighting. Seeing camaraderie around me lifted my spirits and spiked my ambivalence.

Ifelt that way, in particular, during the third great day of freedom - Saturday, November 3 - when my editor told me to spend the day at the mighty Parliament Building. Little did I know that it would be the last day of free Hungary. A young reporter of barely twenty-two, I explored the sumptuous, labyrinth-like corridors and hallways of this outsized, glorious building on the Danube (built at the turn of the century), finding nothing unusual or newsworthy there. What I knew or thought I knew was that somewhere in the building Hungarian and Soviet negotiators were discussing the withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Hungarian territory and they were making progress. I was told the talks would continue and possibly conclude in the evening. By Sunday, I believed, my country would regain its independence, achieving the twelve-day-old Revolution's major objective. By Monday, with the city's buses and trams scheduled to run again, I hoped I would not have to walk so much anymore. It did not cross my mind that the date and the place would so very soon - at dawn the next day - earn a page in history for deception and disgrace.
What caught my attention were two Western television crews getting ready for Prime Minister Nagy's midafternoon press conference. I had never even seen a television set, let alone a crew in action. Having been isolated from the West both physically and psychologically all my life, I was puzzled by the lights and the cameras, unable to figure out how something filmed here would be seen in living rooms far away. I jotted down a few words about this curious thing called television, wondering how to explain it to my readers the next day. I worried that I would not have anything else to report.
My editors at Hétfői Hírlap had sent Péter Halász and myself to the Parliament Building to cover the day's events. A senior correspondent, Halász was to do the serious political stuff, while I was assigned to write a szines - tidbits of mood and colour, political gossip, brief items about the atmosphere. Our deadline was Sunday noon; the paper was to hit the streets at dinnertime. As it happened, neither Halász, nor I could file our stories. No paper was published on Sunday. Hétfői Hírlap never appeared again.
Strange as it may now seem, I suspected nothing as I walked the corridors of the Parliament building on November 3, trying to catch a glimpse of Nagy - I did not succeed - and trying even harder to collect colourful tidbits of all the comings and goings for the report I expected to file the next day. Midafternoon, when I learned that Nagy's press conference was cancelled, I remained calm. He must be busy, I thought. His two deputies - Géza Losonczy, the man who chaired the Journalists' Association's special committee that had rehabilitated me in September, and Zoltán Tildy, the country's non-Communist president in 1946 - 48 - showed up instead. Their plea to Moscow for good neighbourly relations was as pointed as my inability to comprehend their message to us, which was that the situation was desperate. Why did I not listen more carefully? I was present at the government's last, historic press conference, and I failed to decode either the words or the body language that strongly suggested the Russians were coming. My behaviour was strange, because all my life, living under authoritarian and totalitarian rule, I had to read between the lines - a skill one learns when the press is not free.
That Sunday - on November 4, 1956 - Soviet troops, having reached Budapest, captured the Parliament. I could not have been more surprised. Caught up in the prevailing mood of euphoria, I did not believe - I did not want to believe - that the post-Stalin Soviet leadership would crush the Revolution. Denying the existence of bad news, I suffered from what social scientists call cognitive dissonance. Others might call it stupidity.
At 5.30 a.m. on Sunday, one of my cousins called to say I should turn on the radio. Right away. When I did, the voice on Radio Free Kossuth was familiar and the speech short: "This is Imre Nagy speaking, the president of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic. Today at daybreak, Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legitimate Hungarian government. Our troops are in combat! The government is at its place. I notify the people of our country and the entire world of this fact." Speaking from a studio in the Parliament Building, Nagy read his foursentence declaration for the first time at 5.20 a.m. It was repeated several times, and I listened to it several times, but I could not figure out what he was actually telling us. Are we at war? Is this the end? I was confused, stunned and despondent. In the next hour or so, the station also broadcast various appeals for Western help, and then it went dead. Meanwhile, Nagy and his immediate family, together with more than a dozen officials and their families, accepted the Yugoslav Embassy's offer of asylum. As I learned many years later, that offer, made in collusion with the top Soviet leadership, was intended to trap and neutralise Nagy's government.
Two weeks after Moscow crushed the Revolution, I left Hungary, going first to Austria and a few weeks later to the United States. I became one of some 182,000 refugees from Soviet-dominated Hungary.

My parents, though I was their only child, did not discourage me from leaving. They stayed up all night before I left, watching me as I wrote a few notes of farewell to relatives and friends and put a few belongings together for my escape from uncertainty to uncertainty. Emerging from the kitchen, my mother came around to stuff her freshly baked sweets - the best in the world - into my small backpack. "Look up Uncle Sanyi in New York," she said. At dawn, when it was time to say goodbye, my father tried to hold back his tears but he could not. "Write often," he said, his voice quavering with emotion. We embraced. We kissed. As I left, they stood on the small balcony of our Barcsay Street apartment and waved. I walked backwards as long as I could see them, hoping they could also see me for another few seconds. (As I recall this scene some fifty years later, holding back my tears as my father once tried to do, I still see them waving on the balcony, and I always will.) I did not fully appreciate until much later - when I had my own children in America - how unselfish my parents were to let go of me.

...

I find it particularly telling now that Moscow and even Washington came to see the failure of the Hungarian revolt as something of a success. The Soviet Union claimed to have saved Hungary and the cause of socialism from Western machinations - even though Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist momentum, with its promise to reform the bankrupt Communist movement, was arrested after the Soviet intervention. It was hardly a mark of Soviet success that only Soviet force could sustain Communist rule in Hungary, and by implication, elsewhere throughout Central and Eastern Europe. As for the United States, it claimed the free world's moral victory over Communism despite that fact that its inability to assist Hungary - by advancing at least one diplomatic proposal, for example - spoke louder than its anti-Communist propaganda. True, the United States soon and abruptly abandoned the hollow slogans of liberation and rollback, but Washington never came clean by publicly acknowledging the damage it had done. "Poor fellows, poor fellows," said President Eisenhower privately of the Hungarians as he campaigned for re-election. He added, pathetically: "I think about them all the time. I wish there were some way of helping them."
As for the Hungarians, members of the so-called "democratic opposition" - few in number, but persistent and quite realistic in their assessments of 1956 - preserved the revolt's memory in their samizdat publications in the 1970s and 1980s, but a seemingly large majority of the population suffered from collective amnesia during the era of somewhat more moderate "goulash communism" after 1962 or so. Meanwhile, Hungarian exiles in the West kept the issue of Soviet domination on the agenda of Western chancelleries. The connecting tissue between Hungarian bravery in 1956 and the 1989 collapse of the Communist regime was the ceremonious reburial of Nagy and his associates in historic Heroes' Square in Budapest, in June 1989. With communism on its last legs, many Hungarians recalled that their sacrifices had not been in vain.
Yet, in 2006, fifty years later, most Hungarians have yet to come to terms with the complexities of what they did or did not do and what actually happened in 1956. Words like defeat or failure or loss seldom appear in public discourse because in the popular imagination the Revolution was victorious - until it was betrayed by an uncaring world. This conclusion reflects one of the recurring myths of Hungarian political culture: that those who bravely fight for hopeless causes and lose deserve more admiration than those who opportunistically seek, and obtain, small gains.
With the rise of angry divisions in Hungarian society since 1989, moreover, current political considerations have come to distort popular explanations of who did what in 1956 and why the revolt failed. Reading history backward has become an integral part of a deeply polarised political scene. Today's ex-Communist socialists identify with Nagy and claim to be his heirs - and of 1956 - as if their predecessors had had nothing to do with suppressing the revolt, supporting the Soviet intervention and, in 1958, organizing the juridical murder of Nagy and hundreds of revolutionaries. By contrast, today's anti-Communists - some of them political impostors and turncoats who, before 1989, cooperated with the Communist regime - minimize Nagy's Communist past, disparage his associates and passionately deny the Revolution's socialist goals. 
Alas, the behaviour of Hungarians - and Americans - in 1956 does not lend itself to simple explanations. Consider the answers to these questions: Was Nagy at one point a Stalinist true believer and a Soviet secret police informer? Yes. Was he a genuinely popular - if also a Communist - prime minister between 1953 and 1955? Yes. Were many of his supporters disillusioned Communists who had once loyally served Stalinist causes? Yes. Did they prepare the ground for an anti-Soviet revolution? Yes. Was Nagy both a patriot and a Communist during the revolt and in captivity afterward? Yes. Did he and his associates lead that revolution ineffectively, even incompetently - but to the best of their ability? Yes. As for the United States, did aggressive Soviet behaviour after the Second World War call for vigorous U.S. countermeasures? Yes. Did the U.S. government hope to liberate the Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe? Yes. Did Washington prepare for the moment when some sort of diplomatic or economic, let alone military, assistance would be requested? No. Did key officials in the White House and elsewhere believe the slogans they uttered, or were they hypocrites? A few were true believers, most hypocrites. Did U.S. propaganda mislead the Hungarians? Yes. Did the United States let them down? Yes.
Even the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia displayed uncommonly complex characteristics in the 1950s, when, at times, bad guys did amazingly good things, too. Khrushchev brutally suppressed the Hungarians, while Yugoslavia's Tito, that shrewd hypocrite par excellence, conspired with the Kremlin, notably with Khrushchev, to ensnare and capture Nagy. Of these two scoundrels, Tito also pursued an independent Communist course that helped destroy the unity of what used to be international communism, while Khrushchev pursued an anti-Stalinist course at home that made life in the Communist world, especially in the Soviet Union, more bearable for millions of people.
Trying to cope with such a political muddle, I find the key players - notably some Hungarians and Americans - to have been both idealistic and self-serving, naive and cynical, brave and cowardly, agreeable and obstinate, principled and opportunistic. It is in this incongruous mixture of human and political qualities that readers of this book should expect to find new insights about the uplifting spirit and tragic outcome of the 1956 Hungarian revolt. To understand what happened and, especially, why the revolt failed, the celebration of valour should be accompanied by a recognition of ambiguities and inconsistencies. Contrary to Count Klebelsberg's advice cited at the beginning of this chapter, responsible scholarship should try to deprive people - Hungarians, Americans or Russians - of their historic illusions.
I have come to believe that, in 1956, a stronger dose of realism could have made a difference. For the tragic failure of the revolt - a product of excessive romanticism in Budapest, unwarranted belief in the power of rhetoric in Washington, and especially the confusing signals from Moscow that eventually yielded to the imperial impulse - could have been circumvented by more gifted and less idealistic leaders in Moscow, Washington and Budapest who knew both what was desirable and what was possible.

 

Charles Gati
is a senior adjunct professor in European Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. In the early 1990s, he was a senior member of the U.S. Department of State's Policy Planning Staff. Prior to that, he was a professor at Union College and Columbia University. In 1987, Dr Gati was the first recipient of the Marshall Shulman prize for his book, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc. The above text is taken from Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt C 2006 Charles Gati, all rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press.