The Hungarian Revolution, still a stirring rhapsody of freedom, 50 years later
UNITED NATIONS — Autumn’s falling leaves amid the brilliant varnished landscape are sadly soon hidden by early afternoon shadows and cooled by chill winds. Late October evokes many melancholic things, one of them being those extraordinary events of a half century ago, when the Hungarians bravely and proudly wrote a new a chapter in man’s quest for freedom. The Hungarian Revolution, an anti-Soviet uprising which began in Budapest October 23rd 1956 and then continued until mid-November, was marked by an almost giddy optimism and quest for liberty, and perhaps a political naïveté that somehow democracy would work out despite the frightful odds against it.
As with most monumental events, they started with a simple demand; solidarity with worker protests in Poland. Student demonstrators went to the Parliament, statues honoring poets, and then on to the Radio station. One observer said cynically of Radio Budapest, “It lied at night, it lied during the day, it lied on every wavelength.” The crowd soon descended upon the huge Stalin statue in Heroes Square before toppling this seven ton Marxist idol and smashing it on to the cobblestones of one of Europe’s great cities. The Soviet garrison was fought to a standstill before soon withdrawing. But the Russian pullout was a ruse. Moscow was playing for time to rotate armored combat units.
The imagery lingers. Imre Nagy the Premier and reluctant rebel who quit the communists and rallied to freedom’s cause, Catholic Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, the respected Primate, freed from prison only to soon again have to take refuge in the American Embassy, and the iconic Freedom Fighter, the proud, rumpled, and tough fellow with the beret who would fight the Russians until the death. Time Magazine honored him, “Hungarian Patriot, Man of the Year.” The Hungarian flag itself, whose communist crest was ripped from the red/white/green banner as if to spiritually tear the heart out of a hated tyranny.
Despite the free Hungarian government’s passionate pleas to the outside world for help, despite the frantic debates inside the United Nations Security Council to forestall and then to stop the Soviet counterattack on November 4th, and despite world-wide cheering for the Hungarian David, the brute power of the Soviet tanks smashed back into the Hungarian capital, with the force of Goliath. That same fateful weekend the world’s attention was also challenged by the Suez crisis in Egypt.
The Free Hungarians fought tenaciously in the streets against the Soviets, but the force of Moscow’s bludgeon put the people of Hungary between the hammer and the anvil; they would be remolded back into a Socialist People’s Republic. There was no choice. The world could protest. The UN could pass resolutions. But the Soviets used pure terror to smash the largest of the protests to rock their Empire in central Europe.
The steams of refugees pouring into neighboring Austria, and then on to America, Canada, Australia, and many other places created a humanitarian crisis evoking a silent testament to the willingness of Hungarians to live in their People’s Republic, governed by communist collaborators and ruled by Moscow’s cold dictat. By the 1970’s and 1980’s the system had evolved into “goulash communism” as to fend off another revolt by allowing the escape valve of fake consumerism. Until 1989 when the freedom tsunami swept central Europe from the Baltic to Berlin to Budapest and Prague, Hungary was said to be the “happiest barracks in the Soviet Bloc.”
But the symbols of 1956 are as stirring as any cold marble monuments to a historic event. The magnificent neo-gothic Parliament and memorials, Radio Budapest on Brody Sandor Street, Plot #301 in a Budapest cemetery the resting place of so many heroes, including Imre Nagy and countless other condemned by Janos Kadar’s kangaroo courts. Cardinal Mindszenty rests in the magnificent Basilica at Estergom the well-spring of the Hungarian Nation a millennium ago. And yes, the freedom frontier in Austria, ironically the first place the iron curtain was torn down.
For a proud land who rejoined history after 1989, allowing a truly free political system, a surge of economic opportunities, an impressive level of prosperity soon emerged. Such achievements moreover have been reinforced by membership in NATO and the European Union. As I wrote on many re-visits to Hungary the long shadows of 1956 remain but are nonetheless penetrated by shafts of light.
Sadly clouds have gathered again. The country is politically polarized. Hungary’s current elected Socialist government, whose roots rest among many repackaged and reinvented former communists has come under siege after a comment by Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany regarding his government’s faked achievements; “we lied in the morning, we lied in the afternoon, and we lied at night.” The cynical remarks sparked an outrage with demonstrations calling for his resignation forming at the Parliament and at the TV station. A very different era and set of political circumstances, but the ghosts still linger. Indeed even the legacy and the commemorations of the Freedom Fight are disputed and claimed by both sides.
Nonetheless, Hungary’s 1956 Freedom Rhapsody, written in bravery, in blood, and in an unbending desire to keep the flame of freedom burning brightly, remains a masterpiece in the concert of liberty!
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