1956 in the History of the 20th Century (2.)

They were understandably much more cautions, and if they spoken up, they did so with restraint. There was also a certain self-restraint and self-censorship in the Revolutionary celebration of freedom. This was the reasoning that Hungary’s neighbours, and even the Soviet Union, would find an independent Hungary more acceptable if it was at least socialist. These thoughts were no doubt influenced by the example of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The dynamics of the events and the short duration of the Revolution did not even give time for the demands to be elaborated, let alone for them to clash with any differing views. Consequently, anything that might have required longer development was completely absent. (No detailed ideas on the economy or economic policy, or foreign policy programme, for example, were put forward. The demands of leaving the Warsaw Pact and neutrality were no more than a revolutionary response to the appearance of Soviet tanks in Budapest on 24 October. The declaration of 1 November was also a reactive move: a response to the preparations for the second Soviet invasion.)

The last great, peculiarly Hungarian political ideological current, that of the “folk writers", had never formed into a coherent political programme (the closest it got was István Bibó’s writings between 1945 and 1948). Neither was it a determining force in 1956, although the folk/third-way ideas had been a defining experience for the politically-conscious age group who were most active in the Revolution. In 1989, the historian Mária Csicskó and political scientist András Körösényi were probably right in saying that 1956 was the only time during the 20th century when this set of utopian notions came somewhere near the ground.

We might venture another explanation. By the middle of the 20th century it was clear – and 1956 also partly showed – that all totalitarian responses to the crisis of the century were unacceptable. Certain of their elements, which had arisen at various different points in their development, had become part of the system, or had fallen out of it, and in 1956 seemed to be adaptable for a new arrangement which was in its essence anti-totalitarian. Such were direct democracy, collective ownership or the planning/caring state, which could be conceived as corrections to crisis-ridden market coordination and liberal democracy.

It cannot be known how much the 1956 political formula, if it had come to fruition, would have been reminiscent of that of 1945, or of 1947, or how much it would have resembled the post-1990 political map of Hungary. The political debates among the Revolutionaries in emigration, and then after the transition, were defined by a failed, not a victorious, revolution, and cannot be regarded as a reflection of the real 1956 political divisions. The 1956 Revolution in Hungary did not produce a definite political formula. But such may nevertheless exist, in its positive political legacy. That is why the 1989-90 democratic transition could draw on the memory of 1956, because it wanted exactly the same thing. As long as the dismantling of the Kádár system was on the agenda of the transition process, this spiritual connection between the old efforts and the new agents of transition was particularly strong. In this respect, the new Hungarian democracy is the heir to the 1956 Revolution, and that is something subsequent debates cannot change.

The world – a 19th century revolution in the 20th century

Péter Kende, writing in 1995, expressed the international significance of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as: 1. The Revolution shook the Soviet empire, hitherto thought unassailable; 2. It deflated the Soviet political and philosophical dogma and exposed the myths surrounding the Soviet Union which were was widespread in Western intellectual circles and had been nourished by the Second World War victory; 3. Hungary provided a model for popular anti-totalitarianism revolutionary movements.

Although the Hungarian Revolution sparked confusion and a mood of crisis in Moscow and the regimes of loyal Soviet satellites, its final outcome, far from shaking the Soviet Union, made clear that the post-war status quo was not facing any imminent challenge from the United States and the West, despite the fervent Cold War rhetoric. When the Soviet Union revised its relations with the satellites, it was not reacting to 1956, but applying insights that emerged after the death of Stalin. Some historians see 1956 as disrupting and delaying a process of evolution whose end they envision as a kind of positive scenario, a “Gorbatschow act" three decades before the event. The fact is that the Hungarian Revolution did slow down the process of destalinisation in the post-1953 Soviet struggle for power, but only for a very short time; six months later Khruschev purged his political opponents. That was the period when the Soviet Union reached its “zenith", gaining some advantage in the arms race, and making more productive attempts at internal modernisation and reform than at any time before the 1980s.

Despite the blows it indisputably dealt to the concepts of Marxist socialism, the Hungarian Revolution appears to have been just one of many important stages in a long process of disillusionment. The Prague Spring of 1968, and the left-wing student movements in Western Europe and America, demonstrated that criticism of the bureaucratised, imperialist Soviet Union was not inconsistent with new ideas on how Marxism-Leninism might be implemented. Various phenomena of the Hungarian Revolution – the Workers’ Councils, the reform communist and socialist writers and politicians, and the Communist Imre Nagy and his government – also reinforced these hopes.

Nevertheless, Péter Kende’s theses are correct, but in the indirect rather than the direct, mechanical sense; on the level of tendencies taking effect over the long term. Quite simply, after 1956, things could not go on as before. The phenomenon of the Hungarian Revolution made everybody think again, even those who had risen up against the Soviet system, and certainly those who were striving to keep the system alive or even expand it. The strengths inherent in a subjugated society, the fearful memory of the open clash with it, and the terror of 1956 left its mark in all subsequent decisions. At the half-way point, 1956 set off an invisible process whose results showed up later, at the end of the century. In this sense, it is the moral power and example of 1956 which gives the above statements their truth, and puts beyond question the Revolution’s significance in world history. It is paradoxical that the often-dissonant debates in Hungary about the Hungarian Revolution have prevented these conclusions from being seen as clearly at home as they are abroad.

*Excerpt from M. János Rainer’s essay 1956 a 20. század történelmében (“1956 in the history of the 20th century"), from the book “Tizenhárom nap, amely…" (“Thirteen Days that…", MoD Military History Institute and Museum, Budapest, 2003).