Then he went off to talk to the Poles (at Brest-Litovsk) and to Hungary’s neighbours. They were worried that a non-Communist Hungary would make trouble over the borders with the Hungarian minorities. In the 1920s and 1930s, there had been an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia against Hungary, known as the ‘Little Entente’, and it now made a shadowy reappearance. Khrushchev made an especial appeal to Tito, who made him fly to his country retreat on the island of Brioni, one of the Quarnero group at the head of the Adriatic, where storms frequently blew. He flew into a terrible one over the mountains, and then had to cross a wild sea: Malenkov was very ill. Tito — himself recently revealed to have been, like Nagy, a one-time agent of the NKVD — gave the Russians his support, and their troops would move in on Budapest again. It took several days of fighting for Budapest to be brought back under control, under a new government, Kádár’s, which started off with severe repression, while 200,000 people fled the country. Nagy was shabbily tricked into the Yugoslav embassy, with other leading figures, was promised asylum, and was kidnapped to Romania, where he was kept for two years in seclusion. Then, bizarrely, he was tried and executed — his remains thrown into an unmarked prison grave. He said, before his death, that history would rehabilitate him; the only thing he feared, he added, was that it would be his executioners who did the rehabilitating, and there he was completely right. His eventual rehabilitation, in 1989, was part of the Communists’ struggle to survive. But 1956 had another curious effect, that Moscow would from now on handle the Hungarians with a certain amount of care.
8. Europe and the Wider World
Hungarians in the West demonstrated outside Soviet embassies in protest at the crushing of Budapest; there was an exodus from Western Communist parties. However, there was never any question of Western intervention in the affair; on the contrary, it confirmed the existing borders. Besides, the rising in itself caused the Soviet hand to be less heavy. Khrushchev hoped that a more national character in the People’s Democracies would make them less unpopular, and for a time that did indeed succeed — even, eventually, in Hungary, the leader of which might well echo an old line of central European politics, that ‘I have no ambition in politics beyond the attainment on all sides of a supportable level of dissatisfaction.’ Khrushchev, for his part, was still full of himself. True, western Europe had not fallen — quite the contrary. But there was the rest of the world, and Moscow was now discovering it.
The justification for Stalin had been that semi-colonial backward peasant countries could remake themselves in a generation, through industry, and defeat the Western imperialists. Mao Tse-tung was applying what he took to be Soviet lessons, and in 1955 Khrushchev had been quite generous as regards help, though he stopped short at nuclear secrets. Progressive intelligentsia the world over took the Soviet example seriously, and studies of the whole subject in the West were dominated by E. H. Carr’s multivolume history of the Revolution. Carr, who had earlier written a book arguing that, since Hitler had power, Britain should side with him, now noted that Stalin had power, and that Britain should accommodate him. His account of the Revolution showed how that power had been obtained, and it took the whole experience of Five Year Plans and the collectivization of agriculture very seriously. He waved aside with contempt any suggestion that Russia in 1914 had not really been so backward after all; his history of the Revolution hardly bothers with the subject, and begins rather bewilderingly and at length with arguments between a few dozen socialists in exile. The Soviet example had acquired worldwide resonance; now Latin America was in the offing, and so also was the Middle East. Khrushchev went onto the world stage.
The Middle East, with oil, had an importance for the world that went far beyond its stage in development; and this was all the more so as the Suez Canal was still, in the 1950s, the essential artery for Western trade. British interests reigned over the oil, which was then very cheap (at around $1 to the barrel, there being seven barrels to the ton) and that made for prosperity in the industrial countries, where the motor car was both a cause and a symbol. The once great Ottoman Empire had collapsed in the First World War, replaced by supposedly national states. The only successful one turned out to be Turkey, based on the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia; the others were semi-colonies. In 1948 another nation state emerged, Israel, which had been carved out of Ottoman Palestine as a Jewish national home; it fought a war against Arab armies, and the native Arab or Palestinian population mainly fled. The implantation of Israel, as a Western outcrop, stood almost as a symbol of Arab weakness, but that was also shown in the French occupation of North Africa or the British semi-occupation of Egypt. The Europeans often took pride in what these occupations achieved, but they tended to co-operate either with a Westernized upper class or with minorities of various sorts, of which the Middle East contained a great many: Christian Copts in Egypt, Assyrian or Chaldean Christians in Iraq, Beduin in Transjordan, diaspora Greeks or Armenians throughout. They also introduced the deadly principle of nationalism and by 1950 that was gaining much ground. In the early 1950s the British and French were losing. In June 1956 the British withdrew the garrison from Suez.
The beneficiary was an Egyptian army officer, Gamel Abdal Nasser, whose ambition it was to put Egypt at the head of an Arab nationalist movement. He had emerged in 1952, when the monarchy was overthrown; at the same time the Iranian Mohammad Mossadegh seized British oil installations (he was, with CIA intervention, overthrown). Nasser now made trouble throughout the Middle East, and especially for the French in Algeria. In 1954 Algeria had erupted, and by 1956 there was a savage war there; he also interfered in Iraq, and its prime minister — very soon to be brutally murdered — told the British that they must get rid of Nasser or he would finish them: ‘It was life and death for the West as well as for Nasser.’ Intelligence did indeed reveal that Nasser had such a plan, and it would of course mean the elimination of Israel as well; he also had his eyes on the revenues of the Suez Canal, through which 80 per cent of western Europe’s oil had to flow. That would mean an Egyptian hand on the windpipe. The British tried to tame him. An anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact existed, linking a ‘northern tier’ of Middle Eastern countries; he was invited to join it. But he was well alive to the new possibilities that the Cold War had presented to countries such as his own. There was now a league of ‘non-aligned’ states, states that had in most cases been recently decolonized, and in 1955 their leaders held a conference at Bandung in Indonesia; preachy Indians loomed large, and so did Yugoslavia. These states now had votes at the United Nations, a body taken seriously, and could play on the guilt that many people in the rich West felt about their imperialist past. At this time, and partly because of the huge success of the Marshall Plan, the idea of government-to-government aid was dominant, and the Bandung countries looked for this. In Nasser’s case, the aim was for technology and specialists to construct an enormous dam on the upper Nile, at Aswan. It would control the waters, prevent devastating floods, allow irrigation of a much larger area on either side of the lower river, and so promote agriculture and especially cotton, which was a principal Egyptian export. Later on, the whole notion of government-to-government aid came into question, and so also did the notion of gigantic dams, but in 1956 both counted as ‘Progress’, and the British had themselves built the first Nile dam, in 1902. Nasser asked them and the Americans for finance, but in 1955 he also took weaponry from the Soviet Union (via Czechoslovakia — 200 planes, including MiG-15s and Il-28 bombers). The target was of course Israel, and Nasser meant to head a sort of counter-crusade, which would also have the effect of eliminating rivals such as King Abdullah in Jordan, who co-operated with the Israelis in the hope of reaching a sensible solution. He was indeed murdered.