The Gun

and Soviet soldiers were cut down. This was not a riot. Many civilians had resolved to fight.

One corps was not enough. Its units entered Budapest tentatively, without a full reconnaissance, unsure of their mission and what to expect. They could depend on the loyalty of neither the Hungarian army nor the regular police. Their armor lacked adequate infantry support, which rendered many patrols blind and vulnerable to ambush. Often Soviet soldiers located insurgents only by drawing their fire—the 1956 version of a perilous form of combat patrol, known among soldiers as the movement-to-contact. The circumstances gave the rebels unusual advantages for a force of their experience, and limited the Soviet soldiers’ ability to apply their superior equipment and firepower. In such conditions, the newly issued AK-47s could make little difference. But they did make an impression. In one of the few available Soviet accounts of the fighting, emissaries from the Kremlin sent an encrypted cable back to Moscow describing lopsided shooting. The emissaries, Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, told of skirmishes “between single provocateurs or small groups of provocateurs on the one side and our own machine gunners and automatic riflemen. Our own troops were firing more, responding with volleys to single shots.” Another translation of the cable, unearthed after the Cold War, summarized how Soviet firepower allowed a new generation of soldiers to fight. “Our men did more of the shooting. To solitary shots we replied with salvos.”⁴⁹

On October 24, the government fell. Nagy returned to office. He tried to balance conflicting pulls, working with the Kremlin while feeling the revolution’s ineluctable draw. The Kremlin escalated. On October 25, Soviet divisions from outside Hungary crossed the border. Hungary, a member of the Warsaw Pact, was being invaded by its fraternal mentor, which had pledged to protect it from invasion. The Soviet military had decided that it must destroy the Corvinists. A conventional idea was settled upon: A Hungarian army unit, working with Soviet armor, would storm the theater. Hungarian commanders protested, sensing there would be too much bloodshed for the troops navigating the narrow streets, and too much danger for civilians who lived in apartments lining the route. During the final briefing by a Soviet division commander, as the armor idled on Boraros Square, it emerged that the tanks were not equipped with compatible two-way radios. There would be no ready way for government forces to communicate. Hungarian officers refused to participate. The Soviet officers were stuck.

The bungling grew. The column’s lead tanks—three Soviet T-34s, the same class that Kalashnikov commanded during the war—departed alone for a reconnaissance.⁵⁰ Because they had no radios, no one could call them back, and no one knew what they faced once they clanked out of sight. Ninety minutes passed. Three T-54s—the Kremlin’s newest tanks—were sent to look for the wayward soldiers. An hour later, two T-54s returned. One was damaged. All the other tanks had been destroyed. The operation was a failure in every sense. The remainder of the column waited at the square into evening and the troops were told they would attack the next day. But by then the two sides had agreed to a cease-fire. The curfew was lifted that night. By October 30 the fighting died down. Elation swept the Corvinists. Soviet units were withdrawing. Nagy announced the end of one- party rule, and the new government pledged free elections. The rebels, by all signs, had prevailed.

In the quiet of a city exhaling, a quintessential sight of the past half-century appeared for the first time. Outside the shattered facades of the buildings, rebels roamed the streets, posing for news photographers. A few of them carried AK-47s. Which Hungarian rebel first captured an AK-47 and turned it against the army that created it cannot be said. Thousands of men fought in Budapest, and Soviet soldiers were repelled and forced to abandon equipment in many places, just as they left behind some of their dead. But the streets around the Corvin Theater were where the rebels’ images were made. The names of most of these men were not recorded. At least one had his back to the camera; his identity is anybody’s guess. But one man’s name was remembered: Jozsef Tibor Fejes, twenty-two years old, fresh-faced, sharp-eyed, purposeful, and seemingly unafraid.

On at least one day, Fejes dressed in a dark suit. On others, he was less formal. One picture showed him wearing trousers with their left knee torn. One item in his wardrobe was consistent: he wore a bowler, tilted to one side. Fejes was the worker who had been seen during the fighting wearing his hat. Kemenykalapos, his colleagues called him; the man in the bowler hat.⁵¹ Fejes’s roguish confidence made him a darling of the photographers, including Michael Rougier of Life, who snapped a crisply focused frame of the rebel facing the lens. In it, Fejes stood with other insurgents, an AK-47 slung beside his left arm. The AK-47 was destined to become a symbol of resistance fighters almost everywhere, a weapon with innumerable spokesmen. Fejes had nonchalantly assumed the requisite pose and begun to flesh out this historical role. He did so before Fidel Castro, before Yasir Arafat, before Idi Amin. He was years ahead of the flag of Zimbabwe, which would expropriate the AK-47 as a symbol. He was ahead of Shamil Basayev and Osama bin Laden, who would convert the product of an atheist state into a sign of unsparing jihad. Jozsef Tibor Fejes was the first of the world’s Kalashnikov-toting characters, a member of a pantheon’s inaugural class. He presents a complicated profile. On one level, his activities offered a fine example of the assault rifle’s almost instantaneous insinuation into modern ground war. On another, he provided an instructive case of how an untrained man with a fearsome weapon can blur right into wrong.

Who was he? Fejes came from a broken working-class family and had known hardship in many forms. He had been born in 1934 in Budapest, and his parents divorced when he was a toddler. He was raised in an orphanage before moving in during 1942 with a farmer’s family for seven years in Romania. He attended school through the fifth grade. Farming life did not suit him. He fled the countryside and was put into a juvenile correctional facility in 1949. Later, he became a metalworker and locksmith, landed a job as an apprentice, and grew into a fit young man, a survivor of Hungary’s leanest years. In 1956, Fejes returned to Budapest and found his mother. He lived with her only three days and then moved in with his father. He worked briefly at a shipyard, then at another business. He had survived abandonment, war, and incarceration and brought himself through to adulthood with scant help. He had a job. He might have had a chance, until the revolution changed his path.

Fejes turned out with the demonstrators as the protests began. He was present, by some accounts, for the toppling of the Stalin statue. By others he left work at noon on October 24 and attended demonstrations at the Yugoslav and American embassies, and chanted anti-Soviet slogans, including “Russkies Go Home!”⁵² Rumors moved through the crowds. Fejes heard one: that students had been arrested and taken to a police precinct. He joined a group to free them. At one precinct, they found no students. They changed plans. They demanded weapons at another police building, on Vig Street, where they “broke into the building and occupied it, seized all arms and weapons found there.”⁵³ Soon Fejes and the group rode a truck of guns to the Corvin Theater, where they joined the insurgency in its earliest hours. He and several other men entered a food store and retrieved, depending on who is to be believed, cheese, coffee, meat, biscuits, and three boxes of sugar, or roughly a half pound of meat and a bottle of beer, which he drank. Fejes was present throughout the fighting, often in a theater window but later beside the artillery piece at one of the theater’s doors. On the night of October 26, he said, he obtained his AK-47 when another fighter presented it to him in the alley. “My fellows explained to me how it worked,” he added.⁵⁴ The next day, during the fighting, he stole a Russian Pobeda wristwatch from the corpse of a civilian.⁵⁵

After the cease-fire, Fejes stayed active. He directed traffic. He guarded a Red Cross warehouse. At one point he argued with the police, who wanted to confiscate his weapon. He refused to give it up, saying he had captured it in the fighting. It was too much of a war prize, and in the context of the times, had been legitimately earned. The rules were loose. Lines of authority were unclear. Fejes obviously saw himself as legitimate. After the cease-fire agreement was reached, he and his father filed a request for a permit to own the weapon legally. He volunteered for the National Guard, as the Nagy government’s quickly deputized formation of paramilitary fighters was called. These actions suggested Fejes wanted to work within the law. But he was young and untutored in the rules and ways of war, and either his personality or his revolutionary certitude carried him too far. Judgment and caution deserted him.

On October 30, armed rebels were searching people on Rakoczi Square. They were emotional and intent, looking for members of the secret police. Several of them stopped a lean young man with flowing hair, a fine mustache, and a good chin. Their detainee was smartly dressed, with a sweater over his shirt and a neatly knotted tie. He had just stepped from his flat, which he shared with his wife. A search turned up a weapon and an identification card showing him to be an officer of the AVH. The rebels encircled him, cutting off escape. He was Lieutenant Janos Balassa, and he was trapped. What happened in the next seconds would be disputed. But at least two men pointed their weapons and opened fire. Witnesses said one was Fejes, who leveled his AK-47 and shot into the defenseless officer’s guts.⁵⁶ This was not combat. It was a curbside execution. In an instant, Lieutenant Balassa was dead, the AK-47 had been implicated in what would become a characteristic use, and the fate of Jozsef Tibor Fejes was sealed.