Iron Curtain (81 page)

In particular, these young (or youngish) intellectuals were all deeply disturbed by what they now knew had been the unjust arrest, imprisonment, and torture of their colleagues. In 1954, Nagy had begun to rehabilitate
political prisoners, and they were slowly trickling back to Budapest from prison, from Recsk, and from exile. Béla Kovács, the Smallholders’ Party leader, came back from the Soviet Union along with several colleagues in 1955.
⁶³
József Mindszenty was released from prison and placed under house arrest in a castle outside Budapest. Even
Noel Field was rehabilitated that year. Aczél and Meráy have described the deep emotions many Hungarian writers felt when they encountered old friends who had been in prison, suffering, while they were penning socialist realist fiction and winning prizes: “They were ashamed of what they had written and of what they had not written. Now they looked with disgust upon the volumes that they had once upon a time caressed with their eyes—the volumes that had won them the recognition of Kossuth Prizes; and they had no other desire than to unwrite them.”
⁶⁴

At the same time, many were also seeking to justify themselves, to make up for the damage they had caused, and to put their left-wing projects back on track. But this was 1956, not 1989, and not everybody was yet convinced communism was doomed to fail. As Eörsi put it, “They wanted to rehabilitate, together with their own guilty person, the credibility and the good scientific reputation of Marxism too.”
⁶⁵
Many turned back to the original texts of Marxism for inspiration and instruction, in Poland as well as in Hungary.
Karol Modzelewski, a student radical at the time—he was part of a group of activists who took over the Union of Polish Youth at the University of Warsaw in 1956—explains this dynamic very well: “We had learned that if a political system is bad, what should one do? Start a revolution. And we were taught, through all of those years, how to make a revolution … The workers
should do it, with the help of the intellectuals who bring the revolutionary consciousness to the working classes.”
⁶⁶

Modzelewski and his colleagues soon began agitating in Polish factories, hoping to create a more equitable economic system, just as Marx had advised: “It was like a myth turning into real life.”
⁶⁷
Hungarian intellectuals had the same idea, and for the same reason. As Eörsi wrote later, “That is the common trap of all quasi-revolutionary systems: the people begin to take seriously the real message of the officially declared ideology and the nationalized heroes of the system.”
⁶⁸

Paradoxically, ties between workers and intellectuals were reinforced by their experience of mistreatment under communism. These two social groups had been the most heavily targeted and manipulated by communist propaganda in the previous decade, and as a result, they had the most profound sense of disjunction and disaffection. If anything, Hungarian workers were even angrier than Hungarian students and Hungarian intellectuals. While writers and journalists felt guilty, the workers felt betrayed. They had been promised the highest possible status in the “workers’ state,” and instead they had poor working conditions and low pay. In the immediate postwar period, they had directed their anger at state factory bosses. But now they were inclined to blame the state itself. Miners in the 1950s “denounced the system and grumbled that despite the difficulty of their work the pay was low,” while industry workers in general believed they were exploited by “a bloodsucking government.”
⁶⁹
Though
Szabad Nép
had been scared away from reporting too closely on factory life a year earlier, the previously moribund Writers’ Association magazine,
Irodalmi Újság
(
Literary Gazette
), now picked up this theme quite frequently, printing interviews and letters from workers, such as this one from a blacksmith:

The Petőfi Circle meetings proved an excellent forum for interactions between the rejuvenated young intellectuals and their radicalized working-class counterparts. In the winter of 1955 the major Budapest factories began sending regular delegations to the meetings, and the demand for tickets soon exceeded supply, forcing the circle to meet at larger premises. The meetings were open and informal, even raucous at times, and they touched on issues of industrial and economic reform that were of interest to many. Still, they might well have become nothing but a forum for criticism and complaints, had greater events not intervened.

Unexpectedly, Khrushchev, now the general secretary of the Soviet communist party, was the man who pushed the students, the workers, and the Petőfi Circle participants much further and faster than they had ever expected to go. On February 24, 1956, with no forewarning, Khrushchev stood up in front of the
Twentieth Party Congress and denounced “the
cult of personality” that had surrounded the late Stalin:

This was Khrushchev’s famous “secret” speech—though thanks largely to the Soviet Union’s Eastern European friends, it did not remain secret for long. Polish officials leaked it to Israeli intelligence, which leaked it to the CIA, which handed it to
The
New York Times
, which published it in June.
⁷²
But even before that, Eastern European communists were poring over it for clues to Khrushchev’s thinking. The Soviet leader had lauded Lenin, attacked Stalin, and deplored the arrests and murder of Soviet party members and military commanders during the purge years of the 1930s, but his mea culpa was not complete. He had not mentioned other arrests and other crimes such as the Ukrainian famine, for which he himself was partly responsible. He had not called for economic reforms or institutional reforms. He had certainly not apologized for anything the Soviet Union had done in Eastern Europe, and he offered no clear proposals for change.

Nevertheless, it was in Eastern Europe where the most dramatic reactions ensued. The speech literally killed Bierut. The Polish leader went to
Moscow for the Twentieth Party Congress and—like Gottwald at Stalin’s funeral—died there of a stroke or a heart attack, presumably brought on by the shock. Lower down the hierarchy, many previously loyal party members were stunned. “People had trouble believing it,” remembered a Pole who was a junior army officer at the time. “The revelations about Generalissimo Stalin, leader of half the world … it was incredible.”
⁷³

Others were energized, even radicalized by the speech. At the end of May, a few months after the Twentieth Party Congress, the Petőfi Circle organized an open public discussion titled “The Twentieth Soviet Party Congress and the Problems of Hungarian
Political Economy.” Very quickly, that discussion turned into an “all-out denunciation of Rákosi’s megalomania; his policies of senseless industrial construction, forced industrialization, the proposed new Five-Year Plan and the lack of realism of his agricultural policy.”
⁷⁴
In early June, György Lukás, Hungary’s most famous Marxist philosopher, praised “independent thinking” and called for a “dialogue” between theologians and Marxists.

Two weeks later, a half-forgotten figure from the recent past stood up and gave the most devastating denunciation of all. On the evening of June 27, Júlia Rajk, aged forty-four and only six months out of prison, took the podium in a large, neoclassical meeting room in the very heart of Budapest. “I stand before you,” she told hundreds of members of the Petőfi Circle, “deeply moved after five years of prison and humiliation”:

The audience applauded, whistled, stamped its feet. A few nights later, another Petőfi Circle audience—by now expanded to 6,000 people, many standing outside on the street—gathered to discuss freedom of the press. They ended their meeting chanting, “Imre, Imre, Imre, Imre.” They were calling for the ousting of Rákosi—and the return of Imre Nagy.

They got half their wish. In the middle of July,
Anastas Mikoyan, one of Khrushchev’s closest confidants, paid an emergency visit to Budapest. Once again, the Politburo had received from
Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet ambassador to Hungary (and general secretary of the communist party thirty years later) disturbing reports of enemy activity in Hungary, of spontaneous discussions, of revolutionary youth. Mikoyan was sent to fix the problem. In the car on the way from the airport, he told Rákosi that “in the given situation” he must resign on grounds of ill-health. Rákosi did as he was told and flew to Moscow for “medical treatment,” never to return: he spent the final fifteen years of his life in the Soviet Union, most of it in distant Kirghizstan.
⁷⁶
But Mikoyan did not replace him with Nagy. Instead, the Politburo chose Rákosi’s faithful sidekick, the conservative, unimaginative, and, in the final analysis, incompetent
Gerő.
⁷⁷

More than fifty years have now passed since October 1956. Since then, the events of that month have been described many times, by many great writers, and there is no space here to summarize all of their work in detail.
⁷⁸
Suffice it to say that between July and October, Gerő tried desperately to mollify his countrymen. He rehabilitated fifty Social Democratic leaders who had been imprisoned. He effected a reconciliation with Tito. He reduced the size of the Hungarian army.

After much agonizing, he also allowed Júlia Rajk to hold a funeral for her husband. On October 6—the anniversary of the execution of thirteen generals who had led the Hungarian Revolution of 1848—Júlia and her son, László, stood solemnly, dressed in black, beside her husband’s coffin, waiting for Rajk to be reburied in Kerepesi cemetery alongside Hungary’s national heroes. Tens of thousands of mourners were in attendance at what was by all accounts a bizarre event. “It was a cold, windy, rainy autumn day,” one remembered. “The flames of the large silver candelabra darted about in a wild
danse macabre
. Mountains of wreaths lay at the foot of the biers.” Funeral orators praised Rajk—himself a murderous secret police boss, responsible for thousands of deaths and arrests as well as the destruction of Kalot, the other youth groups, and the rest of civil society—and denounced Rajk’s killers in the harshest possible terms: “He was killed by sadistic criminals who had crawled into the sun from the stinking swamp of a ‘cult of personality.’ ”
⁷⁹
Jenő Széll, the party official who had been so doubtful about
the communist party’s optimistic approach to elections, remembered the funeral as “ghastly”:

That evening, a few scattered demonstrations broke out. Some 500 students gathered around a statue of Hungary’s first constitutional prime minister, who had been executed by the Austrians in 1849. Though these meetings broke up peacefully, the city remained wary: “The solemn formalities of the funeral had reminded people, instead of making them forget, that
fundamentally
nothing had changed.”
⁸¹

The importance of the Rajk funeral was not immediately understood in Budapest, and it was certainly not understood in Moscow. On the contrary, in the first weeks of October the Kremlin’s attention was firmly fixed not on Hungary but on Poland, which was also descending into political turmoil. In June, 100,000 workers had gone on strike in the city of
Poznań. Like the East Germans before them, they had begun by demanding better pay and less rigorous work norms, but had rapidly started calling for “an end to dictatorship” and “Russians out.” They were dispersed, brutally, by the Polish army: some 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers fired on the strikers, killing several dozen people, among them a thirteen-year-old boy. Hundreds more were wounded. But Poles didn’t blame their compatriots for the violence. The Poznań deployment had been supervised by Marshal Rokossovskii after all, a Soviet citizen of Polish origin, and the orders to fire were issued by his deputy, also a Soviet citizen. The chief of the general staff was at that time a Soviet citizen too, as were seventy-six other senior “Polish” army officers.
⁸²
Inside the Polish communist party, a vocal group now began to call for the removal of the Soviet officers for good. In October, the Polish United Workers’ Party took the unilateral decision not merely to grant full
rehabilitation to the de facto leader of that group, Gomułka, but to make him first party secretary.