[...]

One of the most repellent features of totalitarian regimes is the immanent need for terror in legitimising their power. In the case of the trial against Imre Nagy and his associates, indeed in the entire campaign of post-1956 retribution, this meant the need to demonstrate that 1956 was a counter-revolution of direst nature as otherwise there could be no explanation for the inability of "the people's power" to defend itself or why it had been thought necessary for the Soviet Union to intervene. Nagy, who had been in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and had witnessed the Stalinist show trials, was well aware that on the basis of the indictments alone, would be death sentences. The "principal" defendant (i.e. himself) would certainly not be allowed to live. Partly for that reason, he was oblivious to threats. Maléter was another defendant who simply refused to accept he was guilty of any offence, perhaps trusting that his innocence would be established in the course of the hearings. The demeanour of the others is best illustrated by something Miklós Vásárhelyi wrote subsequently:

The trial was not given the go-ahead in 1957, even though all necessary preparations had been completed. The Soviet leadership asked for it to be postponed because Khrushchev was fending off a bid for power by Stalinist hardliners led by Molotov. The last thing he wanted, for both domestic- and foreign-policy reasons, was a trial of Imre Nagy. In addition, the report presented by a five-man commission of inquiry into the "Hungarian question" and adopted by a special session of the UN General Assembly with a considerable majority in September 1957, had concluded that the events that had started in Budapest on 23 October 1956 were a popular uprising which had flared up spontaneously. After a summit meeting of the Communist Parties in Moscow, on 21 December 1957, a closed session of the MSZMP's Provisional Central Committee, on Kádár's prompting, decided to "let legal proceedings run their natural course". Kádár was distinctly edgy at the time. In answer to questions from the leaders of the British Communist Party he had snapped: "If I did not have the interests of world communism at heart, the Imre Nagy gang would have been six feet under long ago."

[...]

for them the principle on which the whole concept of the trial rested—namely, that disrupting Party unity and Party strife might open the way to counter-revolution, and hence to the restoration of bourgeois democracy and capitalism—was not something that could be dismissed out of hand. They themselves also recognised that in late October and early November 1956 certain tendencies to counter-revolution had emerged. When most of the defendants admitted guilt, what they were really admitting was their de facto responsibility for what had happened: they had not acted with deliberate intent, but they had been mistaken, their political acumen had failed, and hence they had unwittingly harmed the cause of socialism. The one exception here was Imre Nagy. He argued that during the few days the revolution had lasted it was common ground that the uprising had been provoked by the dictatorial obduracy of Hungary's own Stalinists, their insensitivity towards the popular expression of a desire for democracy, and it was their blindness that had endangered the chances for preserving democratic socialism. Preserving that had guided the Reform Communists of the revolution's leadership, and Imre Nagy stuck by this claim to his last breath.

[...]

András Mink,
a historian, is Deputy Director of the Open Society Archives in Budapest
and editor of the monthly Beszélő.