New World a-Coming, Ch. 40
Os forradalom: The Hungarian Uprising (part 1)
Budapest, Oct-Nov 1956
The Twelve Days (part 1)
Rina speaks:
Before that autumn of ‘56, Rákosi’s thugs from the ÁVH—the secret police—were everywhere, and anybody could be targeted: for being a Trotskyist, or a western agent, or a queer like Ani and me, or a foreigner—also like us. People kept their mouths shut. Some lost their jobs or were arrested. Houses were confiscated. People disappeared. The university students were the loudest and the industrial workers were the toughest, but there were too few of them and they couldn’t get organized. There was no money at all, it seemed, and inflation was skyrocketing.
But then Stalin was dead and they said there was a new day coming in the satellites, and when Imre Nagy came to power, we had some hope again. Then they discredited Nagy and by April of ‘55 he was gone, or so we thought. But then Khrushchev denounced Stalin and we started to hope—again. That summer of hope, we were watching Poland, and even after the army shut down the workers’ uprising at Poznań, it felt like things were loosening. The Poles even got most of the Red Army troops out of their country, and the autumn was coming. Maybe things would be different.
Olenev speaks:
So in October of ‘56, a bunch of university types got together and decided to reactivate the Union of students that Rákosi had banned. There were professors among them, too, and some were in touch with us Bassandans—Cécile Lapin was still a professor of ethnology at Habjar-Lawrence, and even though she was foreign-born, she was such a formidable intellect and she’d been there so long that the commissars there didn’t mess with her. So the Hungarian MEFESZ students thought she might have insights. By the end of that month, they had the Sixteen Points draft that laid out the demands for liberalization, and they reached out to reformers in Poland as well. On October 23rd, there was a huge gathering near the Bem statue, and Veres read a proclamation demanding social and economic reforms. And then they sang the refrain from Petőfi’s Nemzeti dal—thousands of them:
A magyarok istenére Esküszünk, Esküszünk, hogy rabok tovább Nem leszünk
But—I don’t know—something snapped evening. Somehow the commissars decided that this time the protesters had stepped over the line. The crackdown came quick. Gerő broadcast a speech calling them criminals and demanding their arrest, and the crowd was so angry that they surrounded Magyar Rádió and tried to break in to take over the broadcast equipment. By now there were ÁVH troops surrounding the building. They had guns and tear gas, but some of the younger ones tore off their insignia and joined the protesters. And a few of the revolutionaries got into the building.
Rina:
Stokes led our little group of students. A few had pistols, and one young biathlete was carrying a rifle he’d taken off a dead ÁVH soldier outside: he looked like he knew what to do with it. We got into the front lobby and slammed the street doors. Ani had one of the machine guns we’d smuggled in over the border. Stokes was carrying a rucksack of radio gear—tubes and cables and a couple of microphones—and he was still wearing his sunglasses.
From the mezzanine above, an American voice shouted. “Stokes!” There was a compact, bearded man wearing a forage cap looking down over the balcony; he balanced a shotgun on one hip and gestured with an open palm directly toward us, then sweeping his arm to the right to indicate the staircase.
There was a crackle of rifle fire from beyond the doors, out in the Square, but Mississippi snapped in English, “Fuck that fighting with the levies. Leave it to the idiots who’re getting their asses kicked. Our job is the broadcast booth.”
Ani: Outside, there were shoving matches, and then there was tear gas, and some police cars were set on fire.
That’s what Gerő was waiting for; looking back, I think he was trying to bait the protesters into an action so he could clamp down. And that same day, he asked for Red troops to be sent in, and within two hours, Zhukov had given the order to occupy Budapest. It was a plot, I’m convinced: like the plot that scumbag Müllkippe tried in Bassanda to stay in power, after he’d contested the election of Kilotona—we only found out years later about all the stolen votes and manipulations, and it took us until ‘93 to get the bastard out in an open rebellion.
But that’s not the way it happened in Budapest. The Red tanks were outside the Parliament, and they had the bridges and crossroads. Yet there were enough in the resistance that the Reds couldn’t hold every city street or building, so they brought back Nagy to try to talk things down. We hadn’t wanted to fight with the Russians; hell, we’d been climbing on their tanks and handing them flowers and chocolate and asking them to support us—or at least not to shoot at us. It seemed to be working, at least with the soldiers. The officers, though: they wouldn’t talk to us and if we tried to take pictures, they’d confiscate our cameras.
We didn’t know just how much the Politburo in Moscow saw this as a test case: years later, we learned that they were afraid that, if we in Budapest succeeded with reforms, the dam might break elsewhere; like in Poland, there was a lot of unrest. They were convinced they couldn’t let it happen.
What we didn’t realize was just how far they’d go to stop it. Serov was commanding the troops—Red Army infantry and tanks, as well as the ÁVH thugs—in Kossuth Square, and around midday of the 24th, he’d had enough: he saw us up on the tanks talking and smoking with the crews, and he ordered what he later insisted were “warning shots.” But I saw my friends go down in that first volley, and I saw the tanks firing cannot shells into the Parliament building, and machine-gunning the crowd. No matter what the pig Serov claimed, they murdered us on purpose.
And then the dam did break: people were screaming and running and trying to get into the side streets, away from the soldiers’ guns. And I think a bunch of the students and workers were done with talking or begging; they grabbed guns from dead ÁVH and from soldiers who dropped their uniforms, and they decided the time for talking was over. And they fired back. Not effectively, and not well. But they were ready to kill the Reds who were trying to kill us.
Over that next five days, there were isolated firefights at street corners all over the city, and in the suburbs; we didn’t know what was happening in the countryside (as it turned out—not much; the peasant people weren’t much informed and they didn’t want any part of a fight with any army).
Olenev:
It was just a mess. People died for no reason, and god knows the revolutionaries killed some communists out of hand, too. After the massacre at Kossuth, those ÁVH bastards weren’t going to get much in the way of sympathy or mercy: if you were ÁVH and you turned down the wrong street at the wrong time of day, you were going to get blown up before you even realized you’d made a mistake.
Some of the National Guard units were coming over to the rebels: they broke Király out of jail, and when he took command of the Guard, he was effective enough that it looked, by the end of October, as if the Red Army was going to withdraw from the city, and maybe the country, altogether. Nagy was able to calm things down, and his government put forward a group of reform proposals that he thought the people would support, and it looked like maybe Hungary could move toward more autonomy, without any more bloodshed.
But it was all lies. The Kremlin lied to Nagy, too. They was massing Red Army forces all along the border, even though they insisted this was defensive only—for “Soviet security.” On November 3, Serov had a whole group of delegates arrested, and the next morning, Konev brought in five divisions, and by the end of the day, they had armor surrounding the capitol.
Etsy:
By the second week in November it was all over. They arrested Nagy, and called him a traitor, and they named Kádár to lead a new pro-Moscow government. Eventually they executed Nagy. The Colonel and the General and I had managed to get in over the border a month before, but even by November those US pricks in the Security Council wouldn’t take our side; we learned later it was because Nixon thought the US couldn’t support the Hungarians rising against the Soviets if at the same time they were condemning the Egyptian uprising against the British and the French. Hammarskjöld set up a UN commission about human rights, but the Soviets wouldn’t let them into the satellites to do any investigation. And the commission was doomed from the start: they chose Andersen to lead it, and he was a damned WWII collaborator. So there was never going to be a truthful official telling of the tale.
Meantime, thousands had been arrested and imprisoned, and hundreds of thousands fled to the west. A whole lot of westerners thought of themselves as Communists, but an awful lot of them left the Party after some of the truth leaked out in London and Paris.
Olenev was there with us, on the 23rd. She’d been on tour in Budapest with the BNRO and the dancers, and she was at the public demonstration. There was a firebrand young writer, who called himself Laszlo Olafia, and he stood on top of a car and read the students’ manifesto, which included the phrase “All peoples are free peoples.” Kariss recognized this as a Bassandan proverb (“Népek szabadon népek”) from the steppes. So she pushed her way to the front of the crowd, and she called to the young man David, është se ju? The boy leapt down from the car’s roof, and and I heard him say, Nënë, Nënë është se ju? And she embraced him: it was her son.
There were ÁVH informants all throughout those crowds in the square—the Colonel and I had been watching for them—and I saw Kariss and Davy catch one’s eye. He turned and grabbed another policeman—a uniformed one—and nodded toward our friends, and began to push his way toward them with the uniform in his wake. But he was still a few feet away, jostling between the people, when the Colonel stepped out into his path. I couldn’t hear whether the Colonel spoke, but even without speech, and dressed like a Budapest workingman, he was a threatening presence: taller than most Hungarians, bearded, and with long gray hair spilling out from under his cloth cap. I saw the plainclothesman’s eyes widen, and he opened his mouth to shout to the soldier behind him. But then I saw the Colonel’s right shoulder dip and move, and the ÁVH man’s face contorted, and the Colonel’s big left hand clamped over his mouth, and the shout died in his throat. There’d been no sound, but when the plainclothesman collapsed, the shocked soldier behind him started to raise his carbine toward the Colonel, and he shouted aloud.
So I brought up my Enfield revolver and shot him in the head. And almost instantly there was a flurry of shots, a rolling barrage that fanned outward from where we stood over the two dead soldiers. The crowd started to scream and move, like ripples in a pond when a big rock is dropped in. The Colonel took one long step and knocked aside Olenev’s big knife even as she raised it; I came up on his other side. Kariss looked up startled, clutching her son’s bicep with her other hand. The Colonel rapped out an order.
“Get these two out, and meet us at the rendezvous tomorrow evening. Stay low and don’t draw attention until then.”
Olenev:
We fought them. I managed to get Davy on a truck full of refugees fleeing to the East, and told him to travel quiet and to wait for me in Ballyizget. But I told the Colonel I wouldn’t leave.
For a week, with rifles and Molotov cocktails, we held them off, and we made them pay for every meter of pavement, every city doorway. Zhukov disarmed most of the army, but we irregulars—especially students and workers, and a few foreigners—kept up the fight. I know the Reds went into some of those working class districts cautiously, and came out a lot quicker, with their noses bloodied. There were war veterans in our ranks too, and they taught us how to fight on city ground. I saw dead T-34s on some of those streets in the 8th district, brought down by sticky bombs, with their crews machine-gunned or burned, and I saw a lot of dead civilians too…
[TO BE CONTINUED]