declaring its willingness ‘to enter into the appropriate negotiations’ with the Hungarian leadership regarding the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungarian territory. But even as they made this concession they were getting reports of student demonstrations in Timisoara (Romania) and of ‘hostile sentiments’ among Bulgarian intellectuals sympathetic to the Hungarian revolutionaries. This was beginning to sound like the start of the contamination effect that the Soviet leaders had long feared, and it prompted them to adopt a new approach.
Accordingly, the day after it had promised to negotiate troop withdrawals, the Soviet Presidium was advised by Khrushchev that this was now out of the question. ‘The imperialists’ would interpret such a withdrawal as evidence of Soviet weakness. On the contrary, the USSR would now have ‘to take the initiative in restoring order in Hungary’. Soviet army divisions in Romania and Ukraine were duly ordered to move towards the Hungarian border. On learning of this, the Hungarian Prime Minister summoned the Soviet Ambassador (Yuri Andropov) and informed him that in protest against the renewed Soviet troop movements, Hungary was unilaterally renouncing its membership in the Warsaw Pact. That evening, at 7.50 p.m. on November 1st, Nagy announced on the radio that Hungary was henceforth a neutral country and asked that the UN recognize its new status. This declaration was widely approved in the country; the Workers’ Councils of Budapest, who had been on strike since the revolt began, responded by calling for a return to work. Nagy had finally won over most of those in Hungary who had been suspicious of his intentions.
The same evening that Nagy made his historic announcement, Janos Kadar was secretly spirited away to Moscow, where Khrushchev convinced him of the need to form a new government in Budapest, with Soviet backing. The Red Army would come in and restore order in any case; the only question was which Hungarians would have the honour of collaborating with them. Any reluctance that Kadar may have felt about betraying Nagy and his fellow Hungarians was overcome by Khrushchev’s insistence that the Soviets now knew they had made a mistake when they installed Gero in July. That error would not be repeated once order was restored in Budapest. Khrushchev then set off for Bucharest to meet Romanian, Bulgarian and Czech leaders and coordinate plans for intervention in Hungary (a lower-level delegation had met Polish leaders the previous day). Meanwhile Nagy continued to protest against the increased Soviet military activity; and on November 2nd he asked UN Secretary- General Dag Hammerskjold to mediate between Hungary and the USSR, and seek Western recognition of Hungary’s neutrality.
The following day, November 3rd, the Nagy government opened (or thought it was opening) negotiations with the Soviet military authorities about the withdrawal of troops. But when the Hungarian negotiating team returned that evening to Soviet army headquarters at Tokol, in Hungary, they were immediately arrested. Shortly afterwards, at 4 a.m. on the morning of November 4th, Soviet tanks attacked Budapest, followed an hour later by a broadcast from Soviet-occupied eastern Hungary announcing the replacement of Imre Nagy by a new government. In response, Nagy himself made a final radio address to the Hungarian people, calling for resistance against the invader. Then he and his closest colleagues took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, where they were granted asylum.
The military outcome was never in question: despite intense resistance, Soviet forces took Budapest within seventy-two hours, and the government of Janos Kadar was sworn in on November 7th. Some Workers’ Councils survived for another month—Kadar preferring not to attack them directly—and sporadic strikes lasted into 1957: according to a confidential report submitted to the Soviet Central Committee on November 22nd 1956, Hungary’s coalmines had been reduced to working at 10 percent of capacity. But within a month the new authorities felt confident enough to take the initiative. On January 5th, the death penalty was established for ‘provocation to strike’ and repression began in earnest. In addition to around 2,700 Hungarians who died in the course of the fighting a further 341 were tried and executed in the years that followed (the last death sentence was carried out in 1961). Altogether, some 22,000 Hungarians were sentenced to prison (many for five years or more) for their role in the ‘counter revolution’. A further 13,000 were sent to internment camps and many more were dismissed from their jobs or placed under close surveillance until a general amnesty was declared in March 1963.
An estimated 200,000 people—over 2 percent of the population—fled Hungary in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation, most of them young and many from the educated professional elite of Budapest and the urbanized west of the country. They settled in the US (which took in some 80,000 Hungarian refugees), Austria, Britain, West Germany, Switzerland, France and many other places. For a while the fate of Nagy and his colleagues remained uncertain. After spending nearly three weeks in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest they were tricked into leaving on November 22nd, immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities, and abducted to prison in Romania.
It took Kadar many months to decide what to do with his erstwhile friends and comrades. Most of the reprisals against young workers and soldiers who had taken part in street fighting were kept as quiet as possible, to avoid arousing international protest; even so there were international demands for clemency in the case of a number of prominent figures, such as the writers Jozsef Gali and Gyula Obersovszky. The fate of Nagy himself was an especially sensitive issue. In April 1957 Kadar and his colleagues decided to return Nagy and his ‘accomplices’ to Hungary to face trial, but the proceedings themselves were delayed until June 1958, and even then they were held in strict secrecy. On June 15th 1958, the accused were all found guilty of fomenting counter-revolution, and variously sentenced to death or long prison terms. The writers Istvan Bibo and Arpad Goncz (future president of post-Communist Hungary) received life sentences. Two others—Jozsef Szilagyi and Geza Lozonczy—were killed in prison before their trial began. Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter and Miklos Gimes were executed at dawn on June 16th 1958.
The Hungarian uprising, a brief and hopeless revolt in a small outpost of the Soviet empire, had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. In the first place, it was an object lesson for Western diplomats. Until then the United States, while officially acknowledging the impossibility of detaching Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, continued to encourage the ‘spirit of resistance’ there. Covert actions and diplomatic support were directed, in the words of National Security Council Policy paper No. 174 (December 1953) to ‘fostering conditions which would make possible the liberation of the satellites at a favorable moment in the future.’
But, as a later confidential policy document, drawn up in July 1956 to take account of that year’s upheavals, was to emphasize, ‘the United States is not prepared to resort to war to eliminate Soviet domination of the satellites’ (NSC5608/1 ‘U.S. Policy toward the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe’).
Indeed, ever since the repression of the Berlin revolt in 1953, the State Department had concluded that the Soviet Union was, for the foreseeable future, in unshakeable control of its ‘zone’. ‘Non-intervention’ was the West’s
Even if Western governments had wished to do more, the circumstances of the moment were highly unpropitious. On the very day that the Hungarian revolt broke out, representatives of France and Britain were at Sevres, in secret talks with the Israelis. France in particular was pre-occupied with its North African problems: as Christian Pineau, the Foreign Minister, explained on October 27th in a highly confidential memo to France’s representative on the UN Security Council, ‘It is essential that the draft resolution which will be put to the Security Council on the Hungarian question should not contain any disposition which may disturb our action in Algeria… We are particularly against the formation of a committee of inquiry.’ The British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Eden in a similar vein four days later, in response to a suggestion from the British Ambassador to Moscow that London appeal directly to the Soviet leadership to desist from intervention in Hungary: ‘I do not myself think that this is a moment for such a message.’
As Khrushchev had explained to his Central Committee Presidium colleagues on October 28th, ‘the English and French are in a real mess in Egypt’.[115] As for Eisenhower, he was in the final week of an election campaign—the day of his re-election saw some of the heaviest fighting in Budapest. His National Security Council did not even discuss Hungary until three days after the Soviet invasion; they had been slow to take the full measure of Nagy’s actions, notably his abandonment of one-party rule, in a country of little significance for US grand strategy (the recent crisis in Poland had received far more attention in Washington). And when Hungary did appear on the NSC agenda, at a meeting on November 8th, the general consensus—from
