Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union. The uprising lasted 15 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 7 November 1956. Thousands were killed or wounded, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.
The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956 in Budapest when university students appealed to the civil populace to join them at the Hungarian Parliament Building to protest against the USSR's geopolitical domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Mátyás Rákosi. A delegation of students entered the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their sixteen demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but were detained by security guards. When the student protestors outside the radio building demanded the release of their delegation, a group of police from the ÁVH fatally shot several of the students. The siege of the Radio building began shortly after midnight and ended around 8 a.m. At that point, the revolutionaries broke into the building and treated the soldiers, officer cadets, and members of the ÁVH found there as prisoners. ÁVH officer Major Fehér was executed with a shot to the back of the head.
Consequently, Hungarians organized into revolutionary militias to fight against the ÁVH; local Hungarian communist leaders and ÁVH policemen were captured and summarily executed; and political prisoners were released and armed. To realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets assumed control of municipal government from the Hungarian Working People's Party. The new government of Imre Nagy disbanded the ÁVH, declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October the intense fighting had subsided.
Although initially showing willingness to negotiate the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Hungary, the USSR repressed the Hungarian Revolution on 4 November 1956, and fought the Hungarian revolutionaries until Soviet victory on 10 November; repression of the Hungarian Uprising killed 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet Army soldiers, and compelled 200,000 Hungarians to seek political refuge abroad, mostly to Austria.
Background
Second World War
During the Second World War, the Kingdom of Hungary was a member of the Axis powers – in alliance with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Kingdom of Romania, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. In 1941, the Royal Hungarian Army participated in the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. In the event, by 1944, the Red Army were on the way to the Kingdom of Hungary, after first having repelled the Royal Hungarian Army and the armies of the other Axis Powers from the territory of the USSR.Fearful of the Red Army's occupation of the Kingdom of Hungary, the royal Hungarian government unsuccessfully sought an armistice with the Allies, which was a betrayal of the Axis powers. The Germans launched Operation Margarethe to establish the Nazi Government of National Unity of Hungary; the short-lived puppet government existed for less than a year and Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945 after the Siege of Budapest.
Soviet occupation
At the end of the Second World War, the Kingdom of Hungary was in the geopolitical sphere of influence of the USSR. In the political aftermath of the War, Hungary was a multi-party democracy, in which the 1945 Hungarian parliamentary election produced a coalition government composed of Independent Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and the Civic Party, headed by President Zoltán Tildy and Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy. Nonetheless, on behalf of the USSR, the Hungarian Communist Party continually used salami slicing tactics to wrest minor political concessions, which continually diminished the political authority of the coalition government – despite the Communist Party only having received 17 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election of 1945.After the election in 1945, control of the State Protection Authority was transferred from the Independent Smallholders Party of the coalition government to the Hungarian Communist party. The ÁVH repressed non‑communist political opponents with intimidation and false accusations, imprisonment and torture. The brief, four‑year period of multi-party democracy ended when the Social Democratic Party of Hungary merged with the Communist Party and became the Hungarian Working People's Party, whose candidate stood unopposed in the 1949 Hungarian parliamentary election. Afterwards, on 20 August 1949, the Hungarian People's Republic was proclaimed and established as a socialist state, with whom the USSR then concluded the COMECON treaty of mutual assistance, which allowed stationing troops of Red Army soldiers in Hungary.
Based upon the economic model of the USSR, the Hungarian Working People's Party established the socialist economy of Hungary with the nationalization of the means of production and of the natural resources of the country. Moreover, by 1955, the relatively free politics of Hungary allowed intellectuals and journalists to freely criticise the social and economic policies of the Rákosi government. In that vein of relative political freedom, on 22 October 1956, students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics had reestablished the MEFESZ students' union, which the Rákosi government earlier had banned for their politically incorrect politics.
Stalinist Hungary
Initially, the Hungarian People's Republic was a socialist state headed by the Communist government of Mátyás Rákosi, a Stalinist who was beholden to the USSR. To ensure ideological compliance within his Stalinist government, Rákosi used the ÁVH to purge 7,000 politically dissident Titoists and Trotskyists from the Communist Party of Hungary, for being "Western agents" whose participation in the Spanish Civil War interfered with Stalin's long-term plans for world communism. Among the Stalinist governments of the Eastern Bloc, the Rákosi government of the Hungarian People's Republic was most repressive of political, sexual, and religious minorities.In 1949, the Rákosi government arrested, tortured and convicted Cardinal József Mindszenty in a show trial for treason against Hungary, for collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust in Hungary – the religious persecution of Hungarian Jews, and the political persecutions of Hungarian communists and of Hungarian anti-Nazis. Mindszenty had, in fact, been an active opponent of the Nazi government, encouraged Hungarian Catholics not to vote for the Arrow Cross Party, and was imprisoned for this dissent by the Arrow Cross-led Government of National Unity.
Political repression
In the 1950–1952 period, the ÁVH forcibly relocated more than 26,000 non-communist Hungarians and confiscated their housing for members of the Communist Party of Hungary, and so eliminated the political threats posed by the nationalist and anti-communist intelligentsia and by the local bourgeoisie. According to their particular politics, anti-communist Hungarians were either imprisoned in concentration camps or were deported to the USSR or were killed, either summarily or after a show trial; the victims included the communist politician László Rajk, the minister of the interior who established the ÁVH secret police.The Rákosi government politicised the education system with a toiling intelligentsia who would assist in the Russification of Hungary; thus the study of Russian language and communist political instruction were mandatory at school and at university; religious schools were nationalized and church leaders replaced with communist officials.
Economic decline
In the early 1950s, the Rákosi government's socialist economics increased the per capita income of the Hungarian people, yet their standard of living diminished because of the compulsory financial contributions towards the industrialisation of Hungary, which reduced the disposable and discretionary income of individual Hungarian workers. That poor economy was further diminished by the bureaucratic mismanagement of resources, which caused shortages of supplies, and the consequent rationing of bread and sugar, flour and meat, et cetera. The net result of those economic conditions, was that the Hungarian workers' disposable income in 1952 was two-thirds of the disposable income of Hungarian workers in 1938.Besides paying for the Red Army occupation of socialist Hungary, the Hungarians also paid war reparations to the USSR, to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1946, the Hungarian National Bank reported that the cost of war reparations was "between 19 and 22 per cent of the annual national income" of Hungary, an onerous national expense aggravated by the hyperinflation consequent to the post-war depreciation of the Hungarian pengő. Moreover, participation in the Soviet-sponsored Council of Mutual Economic Assistance prevented direct trade with the countries of the West, and also prevented the Hungarian People's Republic from receiving American financial aid through the Marshall Plan. Socially, the imposition of Soviet-style economic policies and the payment of war reparations angered the peoples of Hungary, while the cumulative effects of economic austerity fuelled anti-Soviet political discontent as the payment of foreign debt took precedence over the material needs of the Hungarian people.
International events
De–Stalinization
On 5 March 1953, the death of Stalin allowed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to proceed with the de-Stalinization of the USSR, which was a relative liberalization of politics that afterward allowed most European communist parties and the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact to develop a reformist wing – within the structures of the philosophy of Marxism and orders from Moscow. Hence, the reformist communist Imre Nagy became prime minister of the Hungarian People's Republic, in replacement of the Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi, whose heavy-hand style of communist government had proved counter-productive to the interests of the USSR in Hungary.Despite not being prime minister of Hungary, Rákosi remained politically powerful as the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, and so undermined many of the Nagy government's political and socio-economic reforms; by 18 April 1955, Rákosi had so discredited Nagy that the USSR deposed Nagy as head-of-state of Socialist Hungary. Three months of plotting and conspiring rid Rákosi and the Hungarian Communist Party of Imre Nagy, who was reduced to a political non-person. On 14 April Prime Minister Imre Nagy was stripped of his Hungarian Communist Party offices and functions and was sacked as prime minister on 18 April. Despite having been out of political favor with the USSR since January 1955, Nagy had refused to perform the requisite communist penance of 'self-criticism', and refused to resign as PM of Hungary.
In February 1956, as the First Secretary of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev initiated the de-Stalinization of the USSR with the speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, which catalogued and denounced the abuses of power committed by Stalin and his inner-circle protégés, in Russia and abroad. Therefore, the de-Stalinization of Hungarian People's Republic featured Rákosi's dismissal as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Hungary, and his replacement by Ernő Gerő, on 18 July 1956.
From the Western perspective, the countries of western Europe co-operated with the CIA's propaganda radio network, Radio Free Europe, to broadcast the speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences to the countries of eastern Europe, expecting that, as Secretary of the CPSU, Khrushchev's anti–Stalinist speech would substantively contribute to the destabilisation of the internal politics of the Warsaw Pact countries.