Revolution in Hungary

Scan page 8

1981 marks the 25th Anniversary of Hungarian workers' uprising, which brutally suppressed by the tanks of JIM FARNHAM looks at the lessons heroic struggle which has served as a mark of the post-war fight for the revolu ary overthrow of Stalinist rule.

Toppled of Stalin-symbol of workers' struggle Hungarian demonstrators burn portrait of Stalin Kremlin bureaucracy. THE POWER struggle in the Soviet Union following the death of Joseph Stalin March 1953 was more than a simple matter of succession: it marked a crisis of political control which reached an agonising climax in the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

Militant working class opposition to Stalinist oppression grew throughout the early years of the decade and it found more space as divisions within the ruling bureaucracies became clearer and resulted in vacillating contradictory strategies within the Stalinist states.

The bureaucracies of Eastern Europe were totally dependent on the USSR for their power; inevitably they were demoralised and weakened by the purges and paranoia which followed Yugoslav bureaucracy's 1948 bid for independence from As the Soviet bureaucracy struggled through the crisis of this period (particularly on how to control the working class-whether through a continuation of Stalin's terror or a programme of economic and social reform) the satellite rulers were made particularly vulnerable.

When Moscow sneezed, Budapest and Warsaw caught cold-were in danger, moreover of succumbing to pneumonia. The conflicting signals from the Kremlin made them confused and irresolute.

And the working class, which had no need of Kruscher's 'secret speech' denouncing Stalin to make them aware of the truth of his three decades of dictatorship, were showing every intention of claiming changes beyond anything dreamed of by Kruschevite reformists.

Berlin strike The first unquestionable =E0: signal came three Ite: Stalin's death, =25 Gerans. where a strike Incar bratally crushed uprising.

But the reformist wing of the Polish CP, under Gomulka. better organised and prepared than their Hungarin equivalents were to prove, was able to come to a deal with Kruscher and to abort the threatening Polish the was the of a ionrevolution with a combination of reforms and repres sion.

But in Hungary it took tens of thousands of lives to destroy the workers' revolution that began on the streets of Budapest on October 23, 1956.

In a liberal echo of the Sinic lies that the HungarantiDE JE T5 37003 SEE ThE ¿ Isemeni di the HungarJan intelligentsia and students, reaching for intellectual freedom' and the other 'freedoms' that decorate bourgeois democracy.

Many intellectuals and students did rally to the revolution; for the most part, though, the intelligen sia had rallied to the growing Opposition movement incorporating reformist elements among the bureaucracy-centred on Imre Nagy.

Before October, this Opposition was the loudest and most obvious symptom of resistance to oppresssion, acting in the space created by an irresolute government and an increasingly militant working class.

But during and after the struggles of October most of the Oppositionists were lert in the antechambers of Parliament-bewildered and indignant at the revolutionary reality which was rising above their plans for an orderly reform of Stalinism.

October ail November saw a genuine working class revolution, originating in the misery and oppression of the masses. It was born in the factories and mines, and fought by workers on the stree s and in the independent councils they created.

Student demonstration Yet the immediate, definitive start to the revolution was made by the students of Budapest. Their meeting on 22 October included a resolution that went beyond the timid reformism of the Writers Union and the intellectual Peror Circle.

Ther the sess Joinel b: 0020z 55* and; : water = E= fighting: an Insurecio. The enormous statue of Stalin, glowering over lhe city, was toppled -but only when workers arrived with acetylene torches.

That incident is in many ways a sufficient illustration of the revolution and its essentially proletarian nature.

By the following day, Budapest was a theatre of war: Soviet troops entered the city in the early morning, as they were to enter all the industrial centres of Hungary as the revolution spread.

Workers and youth armed themselves from arms stores and barracks: the Hungarian army, from the earliest stages, seems mostly to have handed over its weapons shen it was unsure is de. Increasingly, the car: aruld come over to 3e a= =*:he a orkers.

Feine bands eneRged the Soviet lanks and the loathed political police. the AVH, in the streéis. More or less organised, inadequately armed, these bands had at their service a determination and i courage born from the strength and solidarity of 44T==0 a class fighting for its human needs.

One commander recalls a tram conductress in his fighting group, who kept her hand grenades in the pouch used for carrying tickets and money. She lobbed three grenades at a Soviet tank and missed. "Then she must have got mad. A Russian officer appeared in a turret for a moment. She ran forward, clawed her way onto the tank, but to make sure she waited until she had almost reached the turret before she blew up the tank -and herself."

Thr 1 ne nungarian vuicaucracy brought to power Imre Nagy (pronounced Imreh Noyj-the darling of the reformists, and a man whose large personal prestige among the masses was to diminish steadily in those bloody revolutionary days.

Nagy promised muchon condition that the workers would abandon their weapons and bring to an end the general strike that had halted Hungary's factories. The government even recognised the factory councils-it hoped to restrict them by bringing them under the influence of the bureaucracy's trusties.

But the workers were reaching for power, though they were only beginning to realise it, asothe national insurrection grew into a proletarian revolution. Workers' councils in the factories had proclaimed workers' control there.

Workers in the streets were fighting to control their lives, learning that this meant control over government and all political matters as well as over the economy. Their delegates, they knew, were not in Nagy's coalition cabinets of 'National Unity' ', but in the factory and regional councils.

Dissolve Parliament From the most militant of these came the response that was to be the expression of the general mood: Nagy would be supported-to the extent that he adopted the workers' programme. The National Council' of the city of Miskolc, as well as demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and an economic programme to satisfy the demands of "workers, students, miners and soldiers" , demanded thathe government must propose the formation of a Revolutionary National Council, based upon the workers councis of the various departments and Budapest, and composed of democratically elected delegates from them. At the same time the old parliament must be dissolved!?"

Nagy, always the prisoner of his own Stalinist bureaucratic politics, now became the hostage of the révolution. As a reformist, he was

----- pull-quotes -----

the military might of Soviet invasion, many months and