The long-accepted account of the Hungarian national uprising that followed ran along heroic lines. In 1848 there had been a great revolt against the Austrian empire, and it had had an operatic quality — barricades, student demonstrations, public rhetoric, epic poems by writers and, behind the scenes, calculations by clever aristocrats. Updated, this meant the masses, bare hands against tanks. This was legend: manipulative noblemen had been at work. The same, in much different form, happened again: 1956 was a stage revolution that got out of hand. The Stalin speech in February 1956 was supposed to have been secret, but Khrushchev did not mean or expect this to remain the case, and the rumours of it spread. Upsetting Rákosi meant organizing some well-placed demonstration against him, and a useful forum was the Writers’ Union. Under Communism, writers were a privileged breed, with special restaurants and guaranteed royalties, and their union was a natural home for writers who knew that they were not in the first class. It was also heavily bureaucratized by the Party. On the anniversary of the start of the 1848 uprising, a national day, some students — their union, too, heavily bureaucratized — laid a national flag at the statue of the great poet of 1848, Sándor Petőfi. The writers followed, with a carefully worded resolution as to the need for this or that alteration of the Party’s ways. Rákosi, dented, carried on, but the new developments were obvious enough. Then came news of events in Poland, which stimulated the opposition to continue.
The Stalin report had given the visiting Polish leader, Bolesław Bierut, a heart attack; of which he died. Khrushchev went to the funeral, and stayed for the election of Bierut’s successor. He tried both to excuse his own Stalinist past, and to explain how the monster had ruled; when someone anonymous broke out with a ‘no’, Khrushchev retorted, quite accurately, that that kind of objection, to a Soviet leader, would have been unthinkable before his, Khrushchev’s, report, and, ‘as the saying goes, the fool becomes smart afterwards’. Khrushchev then vastly alarmed his Polish audience when he praised Stalin’s imposition of a quota — 2 per cent — for Jews in important places, including the universities. What, in a very muddled and offensive way, he was doing was to make his audience elect as leader a ‘national’ and non-Jewish figure. They did not know what to do; the interim successor figures toyed with change, and events then brought on a crisis. Tito had arrived in Moscow early in June and at the end of the month, at Poznan, working-class restiveness resulted in a huge anti-Soviet demonstration and a strike that was only crushed by tanks and security troops in thousands; over seventy people were killed, and hundreds wounded. It mattered that, in Poland, there was a very widely popular Church which had a long tradition of working-class Catholicism. The priests were politically, by implication, far more powerful in Poland than elsewhere in the bloc and they became important in the sequel. The Communists themselves did not even, for years, imprison the Cardinal, as had happened in Hungary, and only latterly kept him under house arrest in the southern mountains.
When the Poles met to elect a new Politburo on 19 October, they elected Władysław Gomułka. He, back in 1948, had had some popularity (he was not a Jew, though his wife was), had been expelled from the Party for the usual heresies, and in 1951 was arrested (though, again, interned rather than purge-tried). Now he was brought back, to enormous waves of public enthusiasm, and when Khrushchev wanted an invitation to Warsaw it was refused. He came, uninvited, with a retinue of senior Soviet politicians and generals, in full-dress uniform; he threatened to order the troops into Warsaw. There was a high scene at the airport, but Gomułka won Khrushchev round: there would be yet another enormous Polish rising unless the Polish Communists were allowed to order things their own way. Khrushchev flew back to Moscow, still in two minds but in the end resigned. There was to be a Polish ‘national Communism’, with Gomułka in charge (and the Cardinal always there to advise prudence). There were tempestuous scenes in Poland, and they were transmitted to Hungary. On 23 October Budapest exploded as well, this time organized by the students. Thousands strong, they moved towards the parliament, and towards the radio station, where they wanted to be on air; they tore down the huge Stalin statue in the Városliget. There was firing by the AVO that evening, but the police were overwhelmed and fled. The fact was that there was no Church to calm tempers; nor was there a Gomułka. The Hungarian Stalinists were hated, and Hungary as a country had faced vast humiliation, whereas, though Poland had been ruined, she had at least counted among the victors, and the Communists, though detested, had had their human face. Khrushchev detected that the Hungarian situation would be much more explosive and, though he did encounter criticism, moved in troops on 24 October. But they met resistance from Molotov cocktails and the like, and the Hungarian army went over to the rebellion. Gerő speedily went, replaced by János Kádár, who, like Gomułka, had been a victim of the Stalinists, but the fighting went on, with hundreds of dead Hungarians and Soviet soldiers. Even Marshall Zhukov now thought that the troops should be withdrawn, and others in the Politburo agreed. On 30 October Khrushchev was ready to withdraw from Hungary altogether and issued a placating statement. But by then events in Budapest were out of control and a mob sacked the Party headquarters; the AVO men were identified by their light-coloured shoes, and lynched (hanged from the trees). Hungarian tanks defected and Nagy now said he would leave the Soviet alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, the head of ideology, were in Budapest, and Nagy also talked to them about a Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. Khrushchev had been very much in doubt up to that point, and now he began to see the dangers in further concession — as he said to Tito, it would mean ‘capitalists’ on the Soviet border. To begin with, the Chinese had been all for a Polish solution but Mao Tse-tung, too, urged force on the evening of 30 October, when he learned of the lynchings and on the 31st Khrushchev told the Praesidium that the USSR must restore order. Several days before, Khrushchev had noted that the British and French were embroiled in Suez and had said the USSR should not be similarly embroiled. But he went ahead. Mikoyan protested. Khrushchev just said that ‘bloodshed’ then would spare much worse bloodshed later on.