end of the month, at Poznan, working-class restiveness resulted in a huge anti-Soviet demonstration and a strike that was only crushed by tanks and security troops in thousands; over seventy people were killed, and hundreds wounded. It mattered that, in Poland, there was a very widely popular Church which had a long tradition of working-class Catholicism. The priests were politically, by implication, far more powerful in Poland than elsewhere in the bloc and they became important in the sequel. The Communists themselves did not even, for years, imprison the Cardinal, as had happened in Hungary, and only latterly kept him under house arrest in the southern mountains.
When the Poles met to elect a new Politburo on 19 October, they elected Wladyslaw Gomulka. He, back in 1948, had had some popularity (he was not a Jew, though his wife was), had been expelled from the Party for the usual heresies, and in 1951 was arrested (though, again, interned rather than purge-tried). Now he was brought back, to enormous waves of public enthusiasm, and when Khrushchev wanted an invitation to Warsaw it was refused. He came, uninvited, with a retinue of senior Soviet politicians and generals, in full-dress uniform; he threatened to order the troops into Warsaw. There was a high scene at the airport, but Gomulka won Khrushchev round: there would be yet another enormous Polish rising unless the Polish Communists were allowed to order things their own way. Khrushchev flew back to Moscow, still in two minds but in the end resigned. There was to be a Polish ‘national Communism’, with Gomulka in charge (and the Cardinal always there to advise prudence). There were tempestuous scenes in Poland, and they were transmitted to Hungary. On 23 October Budapest exploded as well, this time organized by the students. Thousands strong, they moved towards the parliament, and towards the radio station, where they wanted to be on air; they tore down the huge Stalin statue in the Varosliget. There was firing by the AVO that evening, but the police were overwhelmed and fled. The fact was that there was no Church to calm tempers; nor was there a Gomulka. The Hungarian Stalinists were hated, and Hungary as a country had faced vast humiliation, whereas, though Poland had been ruined, she had at least counted among the victors, and the Communists, though detested, had had their human face. Khrushchev detected that the Hungarian situation would be much more explosive and, though he did encounter criticism, moved in troops on 24 October. But they met resistance from Molotov cocktails and the like, and the Hungarian army went over to the rebellion. Gero speedily went, replaced by Janos Kadar, who, like Gomulka, had been a victim of the Stalinists, but the fighting went on, with hundreds of dead Hungarians and Soviet soldiers. Even Marshall Zhukov now thought that the troops should be withdrawn, and others in the Politburo agreed. On 30 October Khrushchev was ready to withdraw from Hungary altogether and issued a placating statement. But by then events in Budapest were out of control and a mob sacked the Party headquarters; the AVO men were identified by their light-coloured shoes, and lynched (hanged from the trees). Hungarian tanks defected and Nagy now said he would leave the Soviet alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, the head of ideology, were in Budapest, and Nagy also talked to them about a Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. Khrushchev had been very much in doubt up to that point, and now he began to see the dangers in further concession — as he said to Tito, it would mean ‘capitalists’ on the Soviet border. To begin with, the Chinese had been all for a Polish solution but Mao Tse-tung, too, urged force on the evening of 30 October, when he learned of the lynchings and on the 31st Khrushchev told the Praesidium that the USSR must restore order. Several days before, Khrushchev had noted that the British and French were embroiled in Suez and had said the USSR should not be similarly embroiled. But he went ahead. Mikoyan protested. Khrushchev just said that ‘bloodshed’ then would spare much worse bloodshed later on.
Then he went off to talk to the Poles (at Brest-Litovsk) and to Hungary’s neighbours. They were worried that a non-Communist Hungary would make trouble over the borders with the Hungarian minorities. In the 1920s and 1930s, there had been an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia against Hungary, known as the ‘Little Entente’, and it now made a shadowy reappearance. Khrushchev made an especial appeal to Tito, who made him fly to his country retreat on the island of Brioni, one of the Quarnero group at the head of the Adriatic, where storms frequently blew. He flew into a terrible one over the mountains, and then had to cross a wild sea: Malenkov was very ill. Tito — himself recently revealed to have been, like Nagy, a one-time agent of the NKVD — gave the Russians his support, and their troops would move in on Budapest again. It took several days of fighting for Budapest to be brought back under control, under a new government, Kadar’s, which started off with severe repression, while 200,000 people fled the country. Nagy was shabbily tricked into the Yugoslav embassy, with other leading figures, was promised asylum, and was kidnapped to Romania, where he was kept for two years in seclusion. Then, bizarrely, he was tried and executed — his remains thrown into an unmarked prison grave. He said, before his death, that history would rehabilitate him; the only thing he feared, he added, was that it would be his executioners who did the rehabilitating, and there he was completely right. His eventual rehabilitation, in 1989, was part of the Communists’ struggle to survive. But 1956 had another curious effect, that Moscow would from now on handle the Hungarians with a certain amount of care.
8. Europe and the Wider World
Hungarians in the West demonstrated outside Soviet embassies in protest at the crushing of Budapest; there was an exodus from Western Communist parties. However, there was never any question of Western intervention in the affair; on the contrary, it confirmed the existing borders. Besides, the rising in itself caused the Soviet hand to be less heavy. Khrushchev hoped that a more national character in the People’s Democracies would make them less unpopular, and for a time that did indeed succeed — even, eventually, in Hungary, the leader of which might well echo an old line of central European politics, that ‘I have no ambition in politics beyond the attainment on all sides of a supportable level of dissatisfaction.’ Khrushchev, for his part, was still full of himself. True, western Europe had not fallen — quite the contrary. But there was the rest of the world, and Moscow was now discovering it.
The justification for Stalin had been that semi-colonial backward peasant countries could remake themselves in a generation, through industry, and defeat the Western imperialists. Mao Tse-tung was applying what he took to be Soviet lessons, and in 1955 Khrushchev had been quite generous as regards help, though he stopped short at nuclear secrets. Progressive intelligentsia the world over took the Soviet example seriously, and studies of the whole subject in the West were dominated by E. H. Carr’s multivolume history of the Revolution. Carr, who had earlier written a book arguing that, since Hitler had power, Britain should side with him, now noted that Stalin had power, and that Britain should accommodate him. His account of the Revolution showed how that power had been obtained, and it took the whole experience of Five Year Plans and the collectivization of agriculture very seriously. He waved aside with contempt any suggestion that Russia in 1914 had not really been so backward after all; his history of the Revolution hardly bothers with the subject, and begins rather bewilderingly and at length with arguments between a few dozen socialists in exile. The Soviet example had acquired worldwide resonance; now Latin America was in the offing, and so also was the Middle East. Khrushchev went onto the world stage.
The Middle East, with oil, had an importance for the world that went far beyond its stage in development; and this was all the more so as the Suez Canal was still, in the 1950s, the essential artery for Western trade. British interests reigned over the oil, which was then very cheap (at around $1 to the barrel, there being seven barrels to the ton) and that made for prosperity in the industrial countries, where the motor car was both a cause and a symbol. The once great Ottoman Empire had collapsed in the First World War, replaced by supposedly national states. The only successful one turned out to be Turkey, based on the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia; the others were semi-colonies. In 1948 another nation state emerged, Israel, which had been carved out of Ottoman Palestine as a Jewish national home; it fought a war against Arab armies, and the native Arab or Palestinian population mainly fled. The implantation of Israel, as a Western outcrop, stood almost as a symbol of Arab weakness, but that was also shown in the French occupation of North Africa or the British semi-occupation of Egypt. The Europeans often took pride in what these occupations achieved, but they tended to co-operate either with a Westernized upper class or with minorities of various sorts, of which the Middle East contained a great many: Christian Copts in Egypt, Assyrian or Chaldean Christians in Iraq, Beduin in Transjordan, diaspora Greeks or Armenians throughout. They also introduced the deadly principle of nationalism and by 1950 that was gaining much ground. In the early 1950s the British and French were losing. In June 1956 the British withdrew the garrison from Suez.
The beneficiary was an Egyptian army officer, Gamel Abdal Nasser, whose ambition it was to put Egypt at the head of an Arab nationalist movement. He had emerged in 1952, when the monarchy was overthrown; at the same time the Iranian Mohammad Mossadegh seized British oil installations (he was, with CIA intervention, overthrown). Nasser now made trouble throughout the Middle East, and especially for the French in Algeria. In 1954
