Hungary since 1945

Árpád von Klimó, Kevin McAleer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367884369
• eBook ISBN: 9781315397405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Lying on the political fault line between East and West for the past seventy-five years, the significance of Hungary in geopolitical terms has far outweighed the modest size of its population. This book charts the main events of these tumultuous decades including the 1956 Uprising, the end of Hungarian communism, entry into the European Union and the rise to power of Viktor Orbán and the national-conservative ruling party Fidesz.

1 1956 – key event in Hungarian postwar history

There are only a very few things about which people are unanimous with regard to the events that took place between 23 October and 4 November 1956. Among these is that those events were of national and world-historical importance. Indeed, what is today officially known in Hungary as “the revolution and struggle for freedom” is the event of recent Hungarian history – an episode that for a short while made the country the focus of the world’s attention. “That capital year in the history of communism,” summarized François Furet, “had two consequences: the bloc began to disintegrate and its unified myth lost its credibility.” The first aspect concerns Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, and the second the numerous intellectuals and workers in Eastern and Western Europe who were sympathetic toward the Soviet Union, not least because of Stalin’s triumph over Hitler. Both of these factors changed in a fairly abrupt fashion in the autumn of 1956.

At first glance, an interpretation of 1956 would seem to be very simple – the white and black hats would seem to be so clearly assigned: A world power of titanic dimensions employs its massive military might to suppress a popular protest movement in a small Central European country, topples a government head that they themselves had placed in power shortly before, and transfers power to an unscrupulous functionary who proceeds to exact bloody revenge against thousands of dissidents. Small wonder that the world was overwhelmingly pulling for the Hungarian freedom fighters, even if Western Europe and the United States never seriously considered fighting alongside these Hungarians in order to decisively change the status quo in Eastern Europe. And another thing is clear: The precise meaning of those events of 1956 is still vehemently debated, in particular ever since 1989. In 2010, Viktor Orbán called 1956 “the unfinished revolution,” the “ongoing struggle” that ended only with the landslide victory of his party. At the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary in 2016, he emphasized that in 1956 Hungarian freedom fighters had “changed the course of history,” which suggests that the dramatic changes of 1989 were less important. However, both dates are closely related.

1956 and Hungary’s changeover to democracy in 1989

As the Finnish historian Heino Nyyssönen wrote, “ ‘1956’ was resurrected in 1989 and was part of the change of system.” Nothing confirmed this more than the tremendous importance placed on the memorial ceremonies in the summer of 1989 for Imre Nagy, the two-time prime minister who came briefly to power for the last time in the wake of the 1956 insurrection and was hanged in 1958 after a secret trial. Three years later, his remains were taken from the prison and hastily buried under cover of darkness in plot no. 301 on the extreme periphery of Budapest’s sprawling New Central Cemetery – an action designed to impede memorials and ultimately extinguish his memory. It was also an action that was consonant with a 1953 decree from the Council of Ministers, according to which the corpses of executed “traitors” were to be interred in anonymous graves.

At the end of the 1980s, however, a hard-drinking grave-digger blabbed the secret of plot no. 301. It was with the help of certain party functionaries that members of Nagy’s family and representatives of the opposition were able to successfully stage a commemorative service for Imre Nagy on 16 June 1989, the thirty-first anniversary of his execution, in which hundreds of thousands were in attendance; and later to formally reconsign his remains to plot no. 301, which had meantime been converted into a monument. Several million people viewed the formal ceremony on television. In Hungary, it was the largest and most important public rally of that critical year of 1989, with all important opposition politicians having a chance to speak. The youngest of them was Viktor Orbán, who became famous by demanding that the Soviet troops withdraw from the country.

Imre Nagy the “traitor” had become a “national martyr.” What the Communists had called “counterrevolution” for the past three decades was now renamed “revolution and fight for freedom.” As if in a novel, it was on the very same day that Imre Nagy and the other executed revolutionary leaders were officially rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the Hungarian People’s Republic that the man who had ordered Nagy’s execution, party boss János Kádár, died (7 July 1989). The story of the remains of Nagy and his rehabilitation is not the sole instance of vain attempts to stifle memory and impede commemorations – which only in the long run heightened the meaning and importance of the figure being honored – and shows how central 1956 was and is in modern Hungarian history and the national culture of memory.

For this reason, it is well-advised that we first examine the events and memory of 1956 before plunging into any overview of Hungarian history after the Second World War. In fact, there is no other event to better illustrate the complexity of those issues we presented in the introduction with regard to Hungary’s (self-assigned) place within Europe. The Hungarians’ rebellion against the Stalinist dictatorship in their own country – which should be seen in relation to other insurrections that took place within the Soviet sphere of influence, namely those in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1953, and particularly that in Poland in the summer of 1956 – was regarded as challenging the peace of 1945, which was based on a division of the continent into two ideological blocs. And it is precisely for this reason that those demands posed by the demonstrators of 1956 turned up again in 1989 – demands for democracy, national independence, the pull-out of Soviet troops and Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The 1956 demonstrations for greater freedom issued in a rebellion against the imposed Sovietization of Hungary. At the time, this was perceived by many Hungarians as a kind of political and cultural “Shunting of the East,” which is why the demand for a “Return to Europe” in the 1980s could be linked to a reevaluation of 1956. But a closer look at the events of autumn 1956 shows that the goals and questions were never so clear-cut.

What happened in the autumn of 1956?

There was no preconceived blueprint for the events that unfolded at the end of October and the beginning of November in Hungary. The events in Szeged, Debrecen, Salgotarján and numerous other cities and villages – and the way in which they were experienced – depended on their particular oral or graphic transmission, resulting in numerous stories and anecdotes that often contradict one another. The history of 1956 changes according to the particular events related and the particular actors involved. Whether it be the activities of workers and the revolutionary councils in factories and communes; or the counsels and resolutions of rebellious students and Budapest intellectuals, some of whom were or would become historians; or the spontaneous streetfighters, sometimes aptly referred to as “boys from Pest,” adolescents from the eastern part of the Hungarian capital (Pest) who came primarily from the lower classes or “fringe groups” and in whom right-leaning politicians later detected a specifically “Magyar love of freedom”; or the political and military elite and their more or less secret counsels and resolutions – in short, depending on circumstances and individuals, the Hungarian Revolution takes on an entirely different form and meaning. Yet even the actions of single groups – for instance, the streetfighters who “had nothing more to lose,” as János M. Rainer and Bernd Rainer Barth wrote – could be assessed in entirely different ways: “Their leaders were demonized by the vengeful state [as ‘Fascists’] in its propaganda, whereas the memoirs of the actors involved draw a hagiographic picture of the roles that they played.” Added to this is the fact that despite innumerable studies of 1956, there are still a great many aspects or portions thereof that remain completely ignored or not yet sufficiently researched – for example, the significance of justice and violence, of notions of manhood, of concepts of honor and morality – without an understanding of which the behavior of many actors is difficult to explain.

In what follows, I will be taking a close look at two aspects that are central for understanding 1956 in comparison to similar events within the Soviet hegemonic sphere: first, the communication of the momentous events in the Hungarian media, while also taking a look at media abroad; and second, the meaning of the national culture of memory, which can help explicate the inner logic and dynamics of the Hungarian Revolution.

The Stalinist single-party dictatorship that had been brutally imposed in 1948/49 was showing small stress-fractures by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953. These cracks in the superstructure were owing to dissonance in the higher echelons. In Hungary, this weakening of the state party was greater than in any other state under Soviet influence because the Hungarian party elite were particularly dependent on the Soviet Union. For one, the Communist base among the population was fundamentally weaker than, for example, in East Germany or Czechoslovakia; on the other hand, the opposing forces were weaker than in Poland. Leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party consisted almost entirely of “Muscovites” – functionaries who were in Soviet exile during the war. When the chiefs at the top of the Soviet party disaggregated into two camps, this split was transposed directly to the Hungarian party leadership. Even outsiders were well aware of the power struggle between the new governmental head Imre Nagy – who sought to decelerate the Sovietization process, ease ideological indoctrination and curb coercive measures – and Mátyás Rákosi, the dictator from 1948–1953, who had only been partially disempowered, remaining head of the party.

According to Miklós Molnár, it was Imre Nagy’s “warm, patriotic tone and his partly professorial, partly provincial style of speaking” that made him “the first popular communist politician.” Like Rákosi, Nagy became a Communist as a Russian prisoner of war in the First World War and remained in the Soviet Union until 1945. Rákosi demoted him in 1948/49 for criticizing forced collectivization, and so after Stalin’s death, Nagy could be presented to the public as an opponent and “victim” of the “false” course and a true party loyalist as well. But complicating matters for the divided party leadership was the fact that one could still not shelve the country’s economic and social recovery – which had been the case in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and where there had been riots and unrest in 1953 (see Chapter 4). Rákosi was therefore able to partially deprive Nagy of power by the end of 1955. The party crisis continued to smolder. Acting as a catalyst was news from the XX Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, where Khrushchev had sensationally denounced Stalin’s crimes and his “cult of personality,” as well as from the demonstrations taking place in Poznán in June 1956. The Hungarian party’s split into reformers and orthodox now seemed impossible to impede, and this appeared to weaken the dictatorship, which was based on a rigid single-party system with central leadership. Even the official party press could no longer paper over the differences within the leadership.

So the Soviets sidelined Rákosi, forcing him into Soviet exile, and then appointed as party leader Ernő Gerő, who had been the second highest functionary of the Stalinist period. But Gerő could not bring the discussion regarding reform under control and was unable to present the party as a self-contained and unified bastion of power. Without the terror tactics that had been liberally employed until 1953, discipline in the party ranks was not so easily maintained. Writers and students were particularly active in the spread of opinions that only slightly strayed from the party line. In the summer of 1956, they were even permitted to hold unprecedented public discussions regarding the political mistakes made by the party hitherto. This was considered a safety valve for the discontent of a small portion of the public that would subsequently be reintegrated into the party. Yet this limited public continued to expand and its criticism became harder to contain. It was at this point that many pinned their hopes on the rehabilitated Imre Nagy, recalling his reform measures of 1953, in particular the liberation of thousands of arrested persons and stopping the forced collectivization of agriculture.

It was against this background that the Budapest burial of the functionary László Rajk (executed after a Stalinist show trial) on 6 October 1956 spontaneously developed into a public demonstration in which over 100,000 took part. In honoring this victim of Stalinism, it made little difference that under Rákosi, the Interior Minister Rajk had sent thousands to jail and internment camps and that he was complicit in numerous murders, for at the graveside ceremony there was something else at stake. Many of the demonstrators conjoined Rajk’s reinterment with a national day of remembrance for the generals of the Hungarian revolutionary army who were executed by Austrian troops on 6 October 1849, and also included in the commemoration was remembrance of the shooting of Batthyány, prime minister of the March Revolution, on the same day in Pest. With these actions, the students, intellectuals and their comrades-in-arms placed the 1956 protests firmly in the historical context of Hungarian national wars of liberation, which were indeed part of a broader European emancipation movement that primarily took its cues from France and Italy. Rajk’s execution was seen as an injustice against the nation and its strivings for freedom, very similar to the injustice of a century previous.

With these national-historical links in the minds of protestors, the demonstrations of 1956 took on a deeper meaning than the East German protest rallies on 17 June 1953. In contrast to Hungarians, it never occurred to anyone in the German Democratic Republic to link the protest against the single-party dictatorship to a history of German national wars of liberation. For one, although there had indeed been wars of national liberation in Germany as well as revolutions in 1848, there was not the same strong national consciousness of such as in Hungary. Hungary’s Communist Party, by contrast, had used strong national memories of the revolution of 1848/49 for their anti-German propaganda as early as 1944 and later for their anti-Western propaganda. Now the idea of a national war of liberation was being turned against the Stalinist elite themselves. Thus, a state-radio commentator described the atmosphere of a student assemblage as “hot like once in March” – with every Hungarian listener knowing that he was alluding to March 1848. And now the national poet Petőfi – who’d gone missing, probably killed, in the 1849 battle against Tsarist troops – went from being a “harbinger” of the Stalinist “revolution” (as the propaganda between 1948 and 1953 had it) to a national freedom fighter once more. Therefore, the council of Budapest students also chose the poet’s monument on the banks of the Danube as the point of departure for the demonstration on 23 October 1956. The weakness of the regime became yet more apparent when the Interior Ministry forbid the demonstration via a radio announcement at 1:00 p.m. that very same day – and at 2:23 p.m. it retracted the prohibition since the masses were already beginning to assemble in spite of the government. Sándor Kopácsi, Budapest’s chief of police, had already beforehand ruled out the use of live ammunition against the demonstrators.

The philosopher Ágnes Heller reported on the procession of demonstrators on 23 October 1956:

We arrived punctually at the Petőfi monument and joined the procession of demonstrators, who moved slowly in the direction of Bem tér. All at once I sensed it – this was a revolution. An event of which we had only read in books. We yelled out one slogan after another, testing the crowd’s reaction. “Imre Nagy in the government, Imre Nagy in the government!” Someone said: “Imre Nagy heading the government, Imre Nagy heading the government!” A great improvement. We tried to see how far we could go with it: “Independence for Hungary!” All this time we’re marching along. “Free elections!” You couldn’t tell who was yelling out the increasingly provocative demands – and who cared? The crowd became a chorus of voices. The delirious rapture conveyed by each slogan lasted until another took its place, one more intoxicating than the other. In this fervor of enthusiasm it was fantastic to see how we went from one fever pitch to the next, carried along by waves of excitement.

The demonstration was accompanied by national songs and poems, and many who marched in the crowd falsely supposed that there was suddenly a harmonious bond between the people, their nation and its history. When, at the urging of the crowd, Imre Nagy directed a few words to the marchers in front of the parliamentary building and addressed them as “Comrades,” he was whistled and booed. He tried again with “Brothers, Sisters!” which was better received than that form of address closely associated with the system and which no longer suited the patriotic mood of the 200,000 assembled demonstrators.

A bit later, a delegation of students attempted to enter the building of the state radio station and asked that their demands be read over the air. Several persons were seriously wounded when the crowd which had gathered in front of the building was fired upon by state security officials who were in the building. It was at this point that some of the demonstrators got their hands on weapons, and that the first members of the police and army joined the demonstrators or gave them access to weapons so that dozens of armed units were formed.

One of the most spectacular and symbolic actions of 23 October was the toppling of the gigantic Stalin memorial on the square, specifically designed and set aside for the colossus. Pictures of the falling giant circulated in the press all over the world. The masses of people on the street applauded this deed of angry young men who brought down the tyrant’s likeness with a tractor – which had been the symbol of Stalin’s forced collectivization. There were further armed clashes soon thereafter. In the next few days, sixty demonstrators died as state security officials opened fire on them before the parliamentary building.

Portrayals of the Revolution of 1956 often concentrate solely on the events that unfolded in Budapest, which were also those that went round the world via the media. But events in Budapest were in fact preceded and sparked by unrest in the provinces. For instance, it was students at the University of Szeged who founded an “Independent Hungarian Student and University Organization” (MEFESz) and put forward a catalogue of demands. The first three individuals wounded in the Revolution were in Debrecen, where a crowd of some 20,000 or 30,000 people were fired upon by officials at the police headquarters where the crowd had gathered. The spontaneously formed revolutionary councils in every part of Hungary sent hundreds of delegations to Imre Nagy. Even if the majority of army units stayed in their barracks and waited to see how events would develop, some went over to the insurrectionists. In the space of just a few days, the new premier saw how the newspapers, political parties and organizations became more pluralistic, and how there were more and more independent newspapers and hitherto prohibited political parties emerging or being newly formed. The censor and supervisory bodies were quickly dissolved, the spectrum of opinion expanded, and increasingly radical demands were raised. Nagy reacted with further reshufflings of his cabinet. He took politicians from other parties in the government – such as the Smallholder Party or the National Peasants Party or universally respected college professors like István Bibó or Georg Lukács. Yet at no point was Nagy able to exercise any influence on the spontaneous movements in the country. In contrast to the situation in Poland in the summer of 1956, a compromise between Communist reformers and hardliners that would have kept the Communist Party in control had become impossible. Hungarians had begun to fight against what many had experienced as “Russification” that threatened the very existence of their nation.

Intensifying the situation was also the fact that there was a miscalculation when it came to the reactions of the superpowers. At first Moscow waited to see if Nagy would succeed in consolidating the situation and solidifying the power of the party and state. In the chaotic situation of 23 October, Gerő’s request for military aid from the Red Army was still not being acceded to by Khrushchev; it was only the next day, on the night of 24 October, in the wake of incoming reports from Soviet Defense Minister Zhukov from Hungary, that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to a military intervention supported by the Chinese party but also by Tito. The Soviets had lost their faith in the Hungarian party leadership. At the same time, they misunderstood the propaganda coming from Radio Free Europe, fearing a possible intervention by the United States. As Johanna Granville has shown, the psychological warfare pursued by the United States was informed by a strategy based on a false but all too widespread image of the “Eastern Bloc” as a rigid, inflexible and uniform monolith; it failed to perceive the complex and sensitive interconnections within the Soviet sphere of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 1956 – key event in Hungarian postwar history
• 2 The Hungarian state: caesuras and continuity
• 3 Foreign policy: from World War II to the European Union
• 4 From capitalism to the planned economy and back again: economy and social policy
• 5 Social structures and mobility
• 6 Lifestyles in transition
• 7 Ethnic homogenization and minority policy within Hungary and neighboring states
• 8 Churches and religion
• 9 Hungarian politics since 1989
• References
• Index