Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

237 Pages·2007·0.55 MB·English

by  Michael Korda

Journey to a Revolution
A Personal Memoir and History
of the
Hungarian Revolution
of 1956
M I C H A E L K O R D A
For Margaret, with love—
and for Morton L. Janklow,
my friend of more than four decades,
for his enthusiasm and our shared
love of history
Talpra magyar,
hí a haza!
itt as idő,
most vagy soha!
—Petőfi Sándor, Nemzeti dal
Arise, Magyars,
The country calls!
It’s now or never,
What fate befalls . . .
—Sándor Petőfi, “National Poem”
C O N T E N T S
Epigraph iii
Preface vi
1. The Idol with Feet of Clay 1
2. Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 15
3. Hungary and the Cold War 28
4. Salami Tactics 65
5. “Arise, Magyars!” 91
6. “Long Live Free, Democratic, and
Independent Hungary!” 111
7. Götterdämmerung on the Danube 157
8. A Much Fought-Over City 176
9. “Slaves We Shall No Longer Be!” 201
Acknowledgments 207
Notes 209
Bibliography 21
Index 213
About the Author
Other Books by Michael Korda
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
P R E F A C E
othing presents more difficulties than writing an objec-
N tive account of a great event in which one has participated
oneself. Being objective about the Hungarian Revolution of
1956 is hard enough to begin with—it is a kind of modern
David and Goliath story, except that Goliath won—but harder
still for somebody who participated in it, like myself, and who
was present at some of the major moments. The abbé Sieyès,
when asked what he did during the French Revolution, replied,
Je l ’ai survécu (“I survived it”). I suppose I can, at the very least,
make the same claim, but I also witnessed demonstrations of
almost unbelievable courage, of shameless political betrayal,
and of the kind of unrestrained military brute force and vio-
lence against civilians of which the twentieth century was so
full, and which do not seem to have ended so far in the early
years of the twenty-first.
Although there is no doubt that the events of October 1956
constituted a revolution, they swiftly became something else:
a war.
viii Preface
The revolution was spontaneous, popular, and embraced
every segment of society, including many members of the Hun-
garian communist party. It was a revolution against tyranny—
against a singularly brutal and despotic single-party government
that punished even the mildest dissent with extreme cruelty,
including torture and death; that methodically stifled every
form of self-expression and suppressed every individual impulse;
and that was more Stalinist than Stalin himself had been.
It was also a revolution against eleven years of alien, heavy-
handed, unyielding Russian domination and occupation. The
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 swept away the communist par-
ty’s control over every aspect of Hungarian life, and for a time
forced the army of the Soviet Union to retreat before an angry
armed body of “Freedom Fighters,” as they came to be known,
consisting of workers, students, Hungarian army personnel, and
ordinary civilians—men, women, and children. At that point
the Soviet Union launched a full-scale war against the Hungar-
ian people, suppressed the revolution, and handed the country
back to the hard-core Hungarian communist bureaucrats and
their feared and hated “security service.”
Fifty years after the revolution, we are living in a very differ-
ent world, one in which Hungary is a prosperous member of the
European Union and of NATO; in which the Soviet Union has
ceased to exist; and in which communism is virtually extinct
except in China and Cuba. It is therefore important to remind
ourselves of these events—for without the bravery of the men
and women who fought in 1956, we might today still be living
in the world of the cold war, of monolithic communism in east-
ern Europe, and of nuclear stalemate.
I hesitated for some time before deciding to include myself
in this account of the revolution, but it seemed to me that many