Péter Hahner
A Fitting Commemoration
Attila Szakolczai (ed.): 1956. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2006, 775 pp.
...
To what sort of hidden regularity can one
ascribe the fact that once dictatorial regimes
have broken the back of a country's people,
they then proceed to put the language on the
rack? Has anyone examined the jargon used
by the Communist party as thoroughly as
Victor Klemperer analysed the Nazis' use of
language? It would be well worth doing so,
because there were some Communists who
were simply incapable of speaking
grammatically or who at other times were
overcome by a mania for coining new words.
Khrushchev, for example, attacked Rákosi by
saying "What is making headway in your
country is barge politics!" Oh yes, that was
precisely what was wrong with Rákosi- his
confounded barge politics. The documents
that are collected here bring out very well
that it was not just a struggle between
political factions that was being fought out
in Hungary between 1953 and 1956, but also
a battle by writers and journalists for rational
thinking and proper expression- against the
primitive use of the language of entrenched
stupidity and devious malice.
It is fascinating to read the answers that
György Marosán gave in response to
questions put to him by the workers of the
Cable and Wire Rope Works: "I shall make a
report about this matter to the Politburo.
This sounds like the voice of the enemy." In
other words, this representative of the
"Workers' Party" is threatening to inform on,
and calling enemies, the very workers in
whose name he is supposed to be wielding
power. How elegant, shrewd and manly of
him. And then we have the truly famous
promises. For instance, Kádár's reassuring
radio talk about how Imre Nagy and his
associates wished to leave the country, and
"as the government of the People's Republic
of Romania was willing to grant them
asylum, they departed to Romanian territory
on November 23rd. We have promised that
we shall not start criminal procedures
against them for their past grave actions that
they too have acknowledged after the event.
What is more, we shall keep our word." Fine
words, yet somehow words they failed to
keep. The evident concern for legality is also
touching: when the Soviet comrades recommend
to Kádár and Ferenc Münnich that
they set up a "revolutionary military people's
tribunal", the Hungarian leaders were of the
opinion that they would have difficulty getting
the presidential council to accept that as
legal. In their view, a simple court martial
would be "a judicial organ having sufficient
authority in the eyes of the people for a
sentence of death by hanging or shooting to
have the necessary effect on the country". It
is sobering to become acquainted with such
meditative flights of the one-time leaders
who governed Hungary for decades and
whom some are still willing to praise even
now. The writer István Eörsi, who in
innumerable articles exposed the base on
which Kádár's consolidation rested, was
right to say that in vain do the lies come to
light, in vain does it become blindingly
obvious that the emperor has no clothes;
there will always be someone who reckons
that the tailoring at the back looks snazzy.
I am unable to adopt the same ironic tone
when it comes to writing about the documents
that stem from the days of the Revolution
itself. All I can say is that while reading
them, I suddenly felt hot and cold chills
all over. It is simply impossible to study
this event dispassionately as one can the
constitutional debates of Hungary's Reform
Age in the 1830s and 40s, or the country's
1867 Compromise with its Habsburg rulers.
Many of us live on the sites of the events,
knew the actors personally and have our own
experiences of the consequences. It is our story
too. Generations of French historians had
been arguing over their own Revolution for
two centuries before François Furet could
declare in the title of one of his essays that
"The French Revolution is Over", because the
majority on both the left and the right had
reached agreement on which of the Revolution's
accomplishments they were able to accept.
One wonders when it will be possible to
say the same about the Hungarian Revolution.
The illustrations in the volume have been
judiciously chosen, avoiding as they do the
familiar photographs that have been
published innumerable times in favour of
less well-known, and all the more telling,
shots. Thus, the portrait of Ernô Gerô and
his icy, toad-like gaze or Voroshilov's dullwitted
face are every bit as unforgettable as
the shot of a Hungarian officer painting the
Kossuth coat of arms onto his tank, or one of
the corpse of a nurse lying in Rákóczi
Avenue, with her opened ID booklet carefully
placed on her chest. And how many
genuinely happy, smiling faces are to be seen
among those taking part in youth assemblies;
one wonders what became of them a few
months later. Another successful idea was to
juxtapose two Time covers: the first, from
1956, is of a Hungarian freedom fighter, the
magazine's "Man of the Year"; the second,
from 1957, is of a smile-wreathed Khrushchev.
The two pictures are a good reflection of the
contradictory aims of a section of the
Western press, which wanted to have it both
ways, both by paying homage to the Hungarian
revolutionaries who had been left in
the lurch but also making a friendly gesture
towards the Soviet leadership. They were
just as quick to forget that Vice-President
Richard Nixon called Khrushchev "the butcher
of Budapest". The pictures also demonstrate
how methodically the Russians blew
Budapest to bits in 1956. As Uncle Kohn, the
eternal figure in Budapest Jewish jokes put
it: "Well, I never! It's a good thing they were
our friends. Just think how it would have
been if they were our enemies!"
The second part of the book includes
personal memoirs, which in more than a
few cases are just as shattering as the documents.
The editor has been at pains to
ensure that readers are given a comprehensive
picture in both geographic and
political terms. Thus, alongside Budapest, one also has the chance to learn about the
sometimes no less harrowing incidents that
took place in the provinces, and a voice is
given to those who opposed the Revolution
as well as those who supported it.
I was delighted to find that articles by
Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron are included
among the pieces by foreigners who
wrote on the revolution, though I rather
missed one by Albert Camus, who wrote an
unforgettably moving foreword to a book
that refuted the accusations levelled against
Imre Nagy. Sadly, there were too few Western
European left-wingers and liberals who
were not duped by Soviet propaganda, for
even a few lines to be quoted from the more
famous. I am likewise sorry that the editor
chose to restrict his choice of literary texts
to prose, for I simply cannot believe that
Gyula Illyés's emblematic poem, "A Sentence
about Tyranny", and other, in those days
sensational poems, would have "strained
the space constraints" referred to in the
book's Introduction.
It was gratifying, however, to find
snippets by Imre Szenes, Ervin Hollós and
Co., as it will not harm today's young to
learn something about the voices of
"official" Hungary in the years between
1956 and 1989. To take just one example, a
passage by János Berecz, who in 1966 was
elected to the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences on the strength of a work he wrote
about the 1956 "counter-revolution" and
went on to climb ever higher in the Party
hierarchy during the Seventies and Eighties:
"Hungarian workers demonstrated with
many deeds that they looked on the Soviet
soldiers as their helpers and comrades.
There was more than one case where
squads of factory guards provided armed
support for actions by Soviet soldiers, or
hurried to the aid of hard-pressed smaller
Soviet units." There's nothing to beat
international collaboration, is there?
To sum up, it is fair to say that Attila
Szakolczai and his assistants at Osiris offer readers a thoughtfully edited and reliable
reference work which makes for a riveting
read and boasts a superlative set of illustrations.
There are appropriate footnotes to
draw readers' attention to lapses in
memory or deliberate "misrepresentations"
by those who are recalling events, and the
long, detailed bibliography is a good guide
to the ever-growing 1956 literature. It is to
be welcomed that the index of names
includes potted biographies of the leading
figures and more famous personalities. And
it is a mark of the care taken in editing that
I did not notice a single misprint in a
volume of nearly 800 pages.
Péter Hahner
is Chair of the History Department at Janus Pannonius University in Pécs.
He has published and edited books on modern French and American history.
