Iron Curtain (82 page)

Alarmed, Khrushchev arrived in Warsaw on October 19. The visit was unplanned: he intended to prevent Gomułka from taking power. To underline
his point, he also ordered Soviet troops based elsewhere in Poland to start marching toward Warsaw immediately. According to several accounts, Gomułka responded with his own threats. He became “rude,” he blamed Soviet officers in the Polish army for creating public anger, and he declared that if put in charge he could easily control the country without Soviet interference. More importantly, he also ordered Interior Ministry troops and other armed groups who were loyal to him, and not to the Soviet-dominated army, to take up strategic positions around Warsaw where they prepared to defend him and his new government. A violent clash pitting Polish troops loyal to Gomułka against Polish troops loyal to Soviet commanders—the latter backed up by the Red Army—suddenly seemed possible.
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Khrushchev blinked first. “Finding a reason for an armed conflict [with Poland] right now would be very easy,” he told colleagues on October 24, “but finding a way to put an end to such a conflict later on would be very hard.”
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He decided reconciliation was the best policy—and eventually agreed to recall Rokossovskii, his deputy, and several other Soviet officers. In return, Gomułka promised loyalty to Moscow in matters of foreign policy and swore not to withdraw from the
Warsaw Pact.

Khrushchev might well have pushed for more. But he was once again distracted from Poland by events in Budapest, where reports of Gomułka’s return to power gave Hungarians hope of reinstating Nagy as well. Rajk’s strange funeral had removed any remaining barriers of fear: it was as if Stalinism had been symbolically buried along with his corpse. All during October, local Petőfi Circles had been forming across the country. Colleges and high schools formed their own democratic governing bodies and debating clubs too. The media reported all of this activity with gusto. One radio station interviewed some high-school “parliamentarians,” who said they “would like to travel and study contemporary Western literature.” They also thought university admissions should be decided by exams, not by party connections. Events in Poland were also reported with enthusiasm. When hundreds of thousands turned out in Warsaw to cheer Gomułka, one Hungarian journalist declared that “the trend of democratization has the full support of the large masses and, what is more important, the working-class.”
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Inspired by this news, 5,000 students crammed into a hall at Budapest Technological University on October 22 to vote themselves out of the League of Working Youth and to form their own organization. From 3 p.m. until
midnight they wrote a manifesto, a radical document that eventually became known as the Sixteen Points. Among other things, it called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, free elections, freedom of association, economic reform—and the restoration of March 15, the 1848 anniversary, as a national holiday.
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The students also agreed to meet the following day beneath the statue of General József Bem, a Polish commander who had fought with the Hungarians in 1848, and to demonstrate there in favor of their demands and in support of Polish workers.

Twenty-four hours later, there were at least 25,000 people in Bem Square and thousands more in the streets flowing out of it. They had marched to the Polish general’s statue from all over the city, in some cases sent on their way by recitations of a Petőfi verse said to have inspired the revolution of 1848:

As in Poznań the previous June, many were shouting “Russians go home!” As in Berlin three years earlier, the crowd sacked a Russian bookstore along the way and set its contents alight. One group broke off and headed for the radio station. There they laid siege to the building and demanded, “We want the radio to belong to the people!” When the station kept playing bland music, they began ramming the building with a radio truck. By nightfall, the crowd had moved on to Hero Square, where a giant bronze statue of Stalin had been erected four years earlier. After a few futile attempts to pull the statue down with ropes, a platoon of workers arrived with heavy machinery—the cranes were borrowed from the city’s public transportation department—and metal-burning equipment. They hacked away, the crowd chanted, and the statue began to shake. Finally, at precisely 9:37 p.m., Stalin fell.
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The Soviet leadership reacted with dismay, inconsistency, and confusion to the events in Budapest, as did the Hungarian regime.
Gerő panicked, called Ambassador
Andropov, and begged for Soviet tanks. Khrushchev sent tanks and then withdrew them. Nagy at first tried to pacify the crowds, initially telling them to go home and let the party elders deal with it. But when
Khrushchev changed his mind and sent Red Army troops pouring back over the border, Nagy switched sides, announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the
Warsaw Pact, and called on the United Nations to defend Hungarian neutrality.

The Western powers were equally at sea. The Hungarian service of
Radio Free Europe, based in Munich and staffed by angry émigrés, egged on the revolutionaries. But despite his earlier calls for the “rollback” of communism and the “liberation” of Eastern Europe, the hawkish American secretary of state,
John Foster Dulles, could do no better than send the Soviet leaders a message: “We do not see these states [Hungary and Poland] as potential military allies.”
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At the time, the
CIA had but a single agent inside Hungary, and he lost contact with the agency after the second Soviet invasion.
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In twelve brief days of euphoria and chaos, nearly every symbol of the communist regime was attacked. Statues were torn down and red stars removed from buildings. The citizens of Sztálinváros, having been coerced into naming their city after Stalin, spontaneously decided to change it back again. Along with about 8,000 other political prisoners, Mindszenty was released from the medieval castle where he had been kept in solitary isolation. Young Hungarians took over the national radio and renamed it Radio Free Kossuth, a name that echoed Radio Kossuth, the station on which the Hungarian communists had broadcast liberation propaganda during the war. “For many years our radio has been an instrument of lies … It lied by night and by day, it lied on all wavelengths,” they declared. “We who are before the microphone now are new men.”
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Across the country, radical workers borrowed an idea from Yugoslavia and began forming “worker councils,” which began to take over factories and expel the management.
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Instead of fighting the revolutionaries, Hungarian soldiers deserted the army in droves and began distributing weapons to their fellow citizens. One of the first senior officers to defect, Colonel Pál Maléter, was quickly named Nagy’s new defense minister. The Budapest chief of police, Sándor Kopácsi, also switched sides and joined the revolutionaries. Across the country, mobs lynched secret policemen and broke into secret police archives. Curious crowds broke into Rákosi’s villa too, and grew furious when they saw the luxurious furniture and carpets.

The aftermath was equally chaotic and appallingly bloody.
General Ivan Serov—the man who had “pacified” Warsaw and Berlin, and who had since been promoted to the leadership of the KGB—personally supervised the
arrests of Maléter and Nagy. The latter had sought asylum in the
Yugoslav embassy, was promised safe passage to Belgrade, and then betrayed. Both men were eventually executed, not on the orders of Khrushchev but on the command of János Kádár, the Hungarian leader who then ruled the country for the subsequent three decades. Miklós
Gimes kept up the resistance throughout November, as did many of the factory workers, before he too was arrested and eventually executed. Between December 1956 and the summer of 1961, 341 people were hanged, 26,000 people were put on trial, and 22,000 received sentences of five years or more. Tens of thousands more lost their jobs or their homes.
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Even so, strikes and protests continued across Hungary throughout December and January, especially in the factories. Mindszenty sought refuge in the American embassy, where he remained for fifteen years. Some 200,000 Hungarians fled over the border and became refugees.
György Faludy, the poet who had been imprisoned in Recsk, was one of them: “I had a wife and young son. I was afraid that if I stayed I would break, join the Communist party in order to survive and protect my family.”
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Across the rest of Eastern Europe and around the world, the Hungarian Revolution helped alter the international perception of the Soviet Union for good, especially in the Western communist parties. After 1956, the French communist party fractured, the Italian communist party broke away from Moscow, and the British communist party lost two-thirds of its members. Even
Jean-Paul Sartre attacked the USSR in November 1956, though he retained a weakness for Marxism long afterward.
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The excellent reporting from Hungary in 1956 helped create this reaction: some of the best journalists of their generation were in Budapest during the revolution, and arguably some of the best war photographers of all time. But the agonizing images were made more powerful by the fact that they had been so unexpected. Until it actually happened, few analysts—even fiercely anti-Soviet analysts—had believed that revolution was possible within the Soviet bloc. Both communists and anticommunists, with a very few exceptions, had assumed that Soviet methods of indoctrination were invincible; that most people believed in the propaganda without question; that the totalitarian educational system really would eliminate dissent; that civic institutions, once destroyed, could not be rebuilt; that history, once rewritten, would be forgotten. In January 1956, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate had predicted that, over time, dissidence in Eastern Europe would be worn down
“by the gradual increase in the number of Communist-indoctrinated youth.”
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In a later epilogue to
The
Origins of Totalitarianism
, Hannah Arendt wrote that the Hungarian Revolution “was totally unexpected and took everybody by surprise.” Like the CIA, the KGB, Khrushchev, and Dulles, Arendt had come to believe that totalitarian regimes, once they worked their way into the soul of a nation, were very nearly invincible.

They were all wrong. Human beings do not acquire “totalitarian personalities” with such ease. Even when they seem bewitched by the cult of the leader or of the party, appearances can be deceiving. And even when it seems as if they are in full agreement with the most absurd propaganda—even if they are marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right—the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken.

FOR MORE THAN thirty years, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist leaders of Eastern Europe kept asking themselves the same questions they had posed after Stalin’s death. Why did the system produce such poor economic results? Why was the propaganda unconvincing? What was the source of continuing dissent, and what was the best way to quash it? Would arrests, repression, and terror suffice to keep the communist parties in power? Or would more liberal tactics—a measure of economic freedom or a modicum of free speech—prevent future explosions more effectively? What changes would the Soviet Union accept, and where would the Soviet leadership draw the line?

Different answers were given at different times. After Stalin’s death none of the regimes were as cruel as they had been between 1945 and 1953, but even post-Stalinist Eastern Europe could be harsh, arbitrary, and formidably repressive. Władysław Gomułka’s Poland started out with liberal ambitions and popular enthusiasm, but quickly grew sclerotic, conservative, and eventually anti-Semitic. János Kádár began his reign in Hungary with a series of bloody reprisals, but later tried to win legitimacy and popularity by allowing
some free enterprise, travel, and trade. In the buildup to the Prague Spring in 1968, Czechoslovakia enjoyed a real cultural flowering—writers, directors, and playwrights won international acclaim—but after the Soviet invasion, the Czechoslovak government became one of the most thuggish in the entire bloc. In 1961 East Germany built a wall to keep its citizens in, but in the 1980s the regime quietly started allowing dissidents to leave in exchange for hard currency from the West German government. Both Romania and Yugoslavia tried at different times to carve out individual roles in foreign policy, distancing themselves from the rest of the Soviet bloc, but not necessarily in very meaningful ways.

Though always staying within the framework laid down by the Soviet Union, various Eastern European governments experimented by increasing the role of cooperatives or restraining the church, raising the numbers of secret policemen or allowing more freedom in the arts. Sometimes, the liberal reforms stayed in place: the Polish communists abandoned socialist realism after 1956, for example, and Hungary legalized joint ventures in the 1980s. At other times liberalization ended with violence. At the time of the Prague Spring, the Czechoslovak communist party under the leadership of Alexander Dubˇcek called for evolutionary reform, a decentralized economy, and a democratized political system. Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the reform movement a few months later, and Dubˇcek was removed from power. In August 1980, the Polish communist party legalized the Solidarity trade union, a grassroots movement that eventually grew to 10 million workers, students, and intellectuals. That experiment ended a year and half later, when the Polish communist party declared martial law, banned Solidarity, and put tanks on the street as well.