THE NEW COURSE IN THE GDR AND HUNGARY

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1 G R Swain and N J Swain Eastern Europe Since : COMMUNISM RENEWED? Between 1953 and 1956 the twin processes of de-stalinisation and Soviet Yugoslav rapprochement opened up the possibility of renewal for the communist states of Eastern Europe. With Khrushchev pressing the East European leaders to undo the injustices of the purge trials, and Tito urging them to adopt the Yugoslav system of workers councils, there were moments when it looked as if a very different style of communism might emerge. After Stalin s Cominform purges, genuine reform in the political system of Eastern Europe was unlikely to occur, as it were, from within: it was the existence outside of an alternative socialist system, coupled with the genuine desire of Khrushchev to bring Yugoslavia back into the family of socialist states, that made the prospect of renewal genuine. So long as Khrushchev wanted to bring Tito back into the fold, he was prepared to negotiate with him about the nature of socialism and the future of Eastern Europe. It was this unique circumstance which opened up the possibility of a reversal of Stalinist policies; the tragedy for those communists who espoused such a reformist vision was that, deep down, Tito was as committed as Khrushchev to the Leninist concept of the leading role of the Communist Party and, therefore, to a system which allowed power to be concentrated in the hands of an unelected bureaucratic caste. THE NEW COURSE IN THE GDR AND HUNGARY Although Stalin s crimes would not be fully denounced until the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, the Soviet leadership began the process of reassessment as soon as the dictator had died. In spring 1953 it was Stalin s Security Chief Lavrentii Beria and the Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov who took the lead in pushing for reform. While Stalin was only criticised obliquely, many of the policies associated with him, particularly in the field of foreign policy, were quietly

2 abandoned. Thus by the end of May the Soviet Union had re-established diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia and Israel and pushed the North Koreans to adopt a softer negotiating stance, thus preparing the way for the armistice of July. It was in this context that the future of Stalin s other act of anti-western confrontation, East Germany, was discussed. On 22 April the Soviet Political advisor Vladimir Semenov was recalled from Berlin for consultations and discussion of a detailed review of the state of East Germany recently undertaken. On 27 May the Soviet Communist Party s ruling Presidium discussed the situation, and debated the proposal of Beria that the Soviet Union should cut its losses and abandon East Germany. The proposal was rejected, but the same meeting decided that a radical overhaul of the SED and its policies was needed, possibly even a leader other than Ulbricht. Semenov returned to Berlin on 28 May and informed Ulbricht he was needed in Moscow. Both Ulbricht and Semenov had talks in Moscow on 2 4 June, and on 5 June both returned to inform the SED what was expected of it. 1 The message was that the pace of socialist construction should be dramatically slowed, collectivisation put on hold and an effort made to woo the middle class. It therefore completely contradicted the policy pursued by the GDR throughout the previous year. Since summer 1952, at the Second Party Conference, Ulbricht had committed the Party to building socialism. This involved increased exports to the Soviet Union, higher taxes and cuts in consumption. At the same time, the ongoing campaign to collectivise agriculture was accelerated. As a result the number of people leaving the GDR doubled in autumn 1952 and doubled again in spring However, far from abandoning the policy as these problems mounted, Ulbricht determined to press ahead and in May announced that production norms would be raised by 10 per cent at the end of June. The dramatic volte-face insisted on by Moscow would not be popular with many party workers, and Semenov insisted that there should be no preliminary plenum of the SED Central Committee to prepare the ground. The New Course was launched at once with a communiqué from the Politburo on 9 June which spoke openly of the mistakes of the past, cancelled price rises and restored ration cards to those deprived of them on class grounds. A fuller statement came in Neues Deutschland on 11 June, but the lack of adequate preparation for such a momentous change soon made itself felt. The most contentious issue was that of the increase in labour norms. On 14 June

3 4000 political prisoners were released and an editorial in Neues Deutschland suggested that these revised norms were part of the old hard line which should be abandoned; but the same issue of the paper carried articles praising workers ready to meet the new norms. On 16 June the matter seemed to be clarified when the trade union paper Tribune made clear that there was to be no change of policy as far as the norms were concerned. 2 On 15 June the first building workers in Berlin went on strike, and it was waving copies of the Tribune article that the next day they marched first to the trade union headquarters and then to government offices where they received only vague words of reassurance. They resolved to reassemble on the 17th and march through the city once again. As more and more workers joined them, the authorities began to panic. When at midday the demonstrations were so great that traffic was blocked, warning shots were fired. At Soviet tanks appeared on the streets. At 1.00 p.m. a state of emergency was declared by the Soviet occupying authorities. By the evening, the Soviet troops had regained control in Berlin, following the total failure of the GDR s own police force to maintain order. And Berlin was not the only town affected. Violent clashes with Soviet forces also took place in Magdeburg, Halle and Leipzig. In Görlitz an alternative democratic government was formed, while in Bitterfeld the government offices were seized. Elsewhere, the demonstrators appeared to have milled aimlessly on the streets, unsure how to put their power of numbers into effect. All over the GDR, however, the situation was totally out of the control of local functionaries, with most demonstrators acting without any strategic plan or sense of purpose; power rested only on the presence of Soviet tanks. Some 21 demonstrators died, 7 were later sentenced to death as ringleaders, and over 6,000 were arrested. The economic demands of the strikers were immediately conceded; the political demand for free elections was not. 3 In the initial aftermath of the strikes, the Party leadership prepared a report which would have radically changed the way the Party operated by removing the post of Party general secretary, then held by Ulbricht. 4 This threat to Ulbricht s position was removed when, at precisely the same time as the report critical of Ulbricht was being drawn up in Berlin, in Moscow Khrushchev rallied support for the ouster of Beria. Arrested on 26 June, he was formally disgraced at the Soviet Communist Party s Central Committee Plenum on 2 July on the charge of having plotted the surrender to the imperialists of the German Democratic Republic. In this climate Ulbricht could

4 hardly be disgraced. Instead it was those pressing for reform who were expelled from the leadership at the end of July on the charge of being secret supporters of Beria. Although the strikes in East Germany were the most dramatic evidence of the strain Stalin s policies had put on those East European countries so rapidly incorporated into the Soviet bloc, the workers of East Germany did not act in isolation. At the end of May 1953 the Czechoslovak government introduced a currency reform and the workers response was immediate; by the first week in June there were strikes in many towns. Disturbances in Prague, Pilsen and Ostrava were even reported in the censored Czechoslovak press. The trouble began on 1 June, when Pilsen workers aware that the currency reform meant a 20 per cent cut in real earnings tore down portraits of Stalin and Gottwald. Reports sent by the Czechoslovak leaders to the Soviet ambassador reveal that the disturbances reached a peak on the night of 3 4 June and on the morning of the 4th, when activists from Czechoslovakia s former political parties started organising petitions. By tapping phone calls and arresting labour activists the authorities prevented the movement spreading to politically sensitive areas; plans had been drawn up for a strike on the Prague tram network. As well as the stick of arrests, there was the carrot of concessions; the government agreed to drop plans for even more punitive laws restricting labour mobility. 5 Strikes also occurred that June in Hungary where real wages had fallen by 18 per cent since The Hungarian Party leaders, like those of the GDR, were summoned to Moscow. At talks held on June, Beria took the lead in criticising the way Hungary was being run; the economy was in crisis, peasants were resisting collectivisation and 15 per cent of the population were in prison. Breaking a private understanding given to Rákosi on the eve of the visit that he would retain the post of prime minister, Beria proposed that, while Rákosi could stay on as Party leader, the new prime minister should be Imre Nagy, the former minister of Agriculture who had been expelled from the Politburo in 1949 for opposing the pace of Hungary s collectivisation campaign. Although this division of responsibilities would ultimately weaken Nagy s position, it was a clear element of the Beria Malenkov strategy that the powers of the Party over the economy should be restricted and that government agencies should have precedence of Party agencies. When Nagy suggested that Rákosi might resist reform, Beria threatened to break his back if he did. After the return of the delegation from Moscow the Party held a Central Committee Plenum on June and over the summer of 1953 and for the next 18 months, all

5 major initiatives were taken by the new Prime Minster, Imre Nagy. On 4 July he addressed parliament to propose a radical New Course for Hungary: in line with Malenkov he stressed the need for consumer goods, telling the plenum we failed to realise the basic economic law of socialism the constant raising of the standard of living of the population. Dissatisfaction amongst the working class, he believed, was increasing and the link between the working class and the Communist Party was in danger of being broken. 6 By far the most radical element of Nagy s programme, only hinted at in his June speech, was his desire to revive the popular front as a new focus for democracy within the country. Only at the end of 1948 had the Hungarian Party leadership got around to creating the sort of popular front from below prefigured at the Cominform Founding Conference of September The Hungarian People s Independence Front, as it was renamed on 1 February 1949, comprised members of the Hungarian Workers Party (the name adopted by the communists and socialists after their merger), the Smallholders Party, and the National Peasant Party, plus the trade union organisation, women s organisation and youth organisation. Since only 13 members of the 43 member National Council represented groups not controlled by the communists, it rapidly became a rubber stamp and by 1951 it had almost ceased to operate. When elections were held in May 1953, only the communists were referred to in literature produced by the People s Independence Front. 7 Nagy proposed scrapping the People s Independence Front and replacing it with a new Patriotic People s Front. Consciously or not, Nagy found himself raising the very same issues that had exercised Kardelj and Djilas when they decided to rename the Yugoslav People s Front the Socialist Alliance of Working People. Nagy s interest in breathing new life into the old popular front organisation was part of a broader concern for the role of democracy in a socialist society. Nagy described the function of the Patriotic People s Front as being to create a federation supported by the masses, with a base far wider and more extensive than the alliance of workers and peasants; this, he suggested, could only be done by making patriotism respectable, fusing the ideas of democracy and socialism with patriotism, and thus involving all in democratic life. This was not to be another propaganda machine for the Party, but a genuine attempt to democratise the government. 8 Nagy envisaged a completely new organisation, made up of individual members free to set up their own independent branches as they thought fit. Such an organisation

6 would clearly allow non-party members a significant influence over the political life of the country, and it is hardly surprising that party hard-liners such as Rákosi asked Nagy what he understood by the leading role of the Communist Party if such a scheme were ever introduced. Nagy always insisted, at this time at least, that he accepted the leading role of the Party. Indeed, on more than one occasion, as the Patriotic People s Front was gradually established, Nagy acted to slow the process to prevent the Party being bypassed; but his vision of how the Party s leading role might be exercised was quite unlike that of Rákosi and Stalin. He accepted that initiatives within the Patriotic People s Front could come from outside the Party, and the Party would have to respond to them: the Party would not simply use the Patriotic People s Front to tell other groups what to do as had happened in the past. Rákosi had never reconciled himself to defeat. He started a whispering campaign that Nagy was Beria s man and therefore needed to be removed from power to bring Hungary back into line with the Soviet Union. When the Hungarian leadership was summoned to Moscow on 7 July 1953 to be told of Beria s arrest, Rákosi at once asked for the New Course to be revoked; even though it was not, he was quick to tell a meeting of Party activists in Budapest on 9 July that Beria s arrest made it clear that it had been a mistake to issue the New Course in the name of the government and not the Party. He was doubly determined to resist any changes to his simplistic view of what was meant by the leading role of the Party. To him, Nagy was risking national danger by allowing any sort of political activity outside the Party; it simply revived the activity of the enemy. He fought tooth and nail to restrict the influence of the Patriotic People s Front and was successful in persuading the Politburo to limit the way in which individuals could participate in it. 9 These and other issues connected to the economic aspects of Nagy s reforms, were debated at length by the Central Committee in October So bitter had the quarrel between Rákosi and Nagy become that Rákosi tried to prevent Nagy s speech to the plenum from being published in the Party newspaper. In an all too brief moment of triumph Nagy got his speech published but in doing so made the fatal mistake of publicising the dispute within the party leadership by saying how difficult he found it to work with Rákosi. Three days later, on 23 October 1954, he attended the opening ceremony of the First Congress of the Patriotic People s Front where he was rapturously received. 10 There then followed the first tentative experiment in a new democracy. In November 1954 local elections were held. This time, although there remained only

7 one electoral list, it had been drawn up by the Patriotic People s Front not the Party, and people had the option to vote against those selected. The experiment was not welcomed by Rákosi who had spent November in the Soviet Union and returned to talk about counter-revolutionary developments in the Patriotic People s Front. And in a way he was right, for Nagy had no qualms about making Géza Losonczy, imprisoned for political offences between 1951 and 1954, the deputy editor of the daily paper published by the Patriotic People s Front. 11 It was Nagy s great tragedy that the economic reforms introduced by Malenkov in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1953 had been ill thought out. The problems they provoked were used by Khrushchev to further his own career and marginalise Malenkov. In this new Moscow climate the Hungarian Politburo passed a resolution in December 1954 warning of the danger of Right opportunism ; on 8 January 1955 the Soviet leadership received both Rákosi and Nagy and tore a strip off Nagy. To hard-liners he was a reincarnation of Bukharin who had opposed Stalin s industrialisation policy in the late 1920s, but even to Malenkov his decision to write openly about disagreements among the leadership showed a non-bolshevik attitude to party work. Moscow agreed with Rákosi that a Right deviation existed and in February 1955 Malenkov was sacked as Soviet prime minister. Malenkov s sacking was seized on by Rákosi who used it to justify a vicious attack on Nagy and all his political and economic reforms. At a Central Committee Plenum on 4 March, Nagy was condemned as the leader of the Right deviation ; he was expelled from the Politburo and Central Committee in April when he refused to issue a self-critical statement, and excluded from the Party itself in December 1955, although it later emerged that Moscow had never endorsed the decision on exclusion. 12 TITO, KHRUSHCHEV AND DE-STALINISATION For all the negative consequences the fall of Malenkov had on Hungarian reform politics, it greatly strengthened the position of Khrushchev who at once re-addressed the twin problems of Stalin s political legacy and relations with Yugoslavia. A year after the Soviet Union s proposal that diplomatic relations be restored, Khrushchev had written to Tito suggesting that the time had come to bury the hatchet. In this letter of June 1954 Khrushchev had suggested that since the Soviet Union had executed Beria, the man responsible for engineering the East European purge of Titoites, and

8 the Yugoslavs had expelled Djilas, the man responsible for the most trenchant Yugoslav attacks on the Soviet Union, a basis now existed for restored relations. Tito replied that the cases of Beria and Djilas simply could not be linked in this way, and that the prerequisite for reconciliation was a public statement from the Soviet side. 13 After the demotion of Malenkov, Khrushchev overcame any objections he and the Soviet Politburo might have had about eating humble pie and on 14 May Moscow and Belgrade announced that Khrushchev, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and Foreign Trade Minister Anastasii Mikoyan would arrive in Belgrade on 26 May. There, at Belgrade airport, Khrushchev read out a statement expressing the Soviet Government s sincere regret for the accusations and insults of the Stalin years, and expressing the hope that they could sweep away the bitterness of that period. Those responsible for fabricating the materials on which these allegations had been made had been dealt with. 14 The statement was carefully drafted: it condemned the Cominform resolution passed in Budapest in November 1949, and thus all the charges of murder, espionage and fascism heaped on the Yugoslav regime during Stalin s last years; but it did not condemn the July 1948 decision to expel the Yugoslavs from the Cominform for ideological errors. Equally ambivalent was the Declaration signed at the end of the talks on 2 June 1955: this spoke of mutual respect and non-interference in one another s internal affairs, and of co-operation between public organisations of the two countries to exchange socialist experience ; but it was not an agreement on inter-party cooperation. 15 Yet this, it seems, was precisely what Khrushchev, if not his fellow Politburo members, wanted. At the talks Khrushchev bent over backwards to win Tito over. The first day simply showed the gulf between the two sides: Khrushchev tried to skate over the affair as a misunderstanding brought about by Beria s misinformation, while Tito insisted that the root cause had been Greece and Stalin s percentages agreement with Churchill. On the next day, to move things forward, Khrushchev appealed openly to Tito s anti- Stalin sentiments, and began a long monologue about Stalin s crimes, the role of Beria, Stalin s attacks on Khrushchev himself, the details of the plot hatched by Khrushchev and Bulganin to depose Beria, and the details of the charges against Beria. Confiding such domestic secrets to the leader of a once hostile fascist power could only be justified in terms of fellow communists facing up to a common problem, something which must have flattered Tito, creating the impression that the two men might play a common role in reforming communism. 16

9 If Khrushchev seemed to be looking for help from Tito in his campaign against Stalinism, Tito was also glad to have Khrushchev s support. The cost of the break with Stalin had been phenomenal, not only had there been industrial losses in the order of 429 million dollars, but between 1948 and 1950 defence expenditure had tripled. As a result, after the deals with a US bank in September 1949 and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in October 1949, Yugoslavia had been increasingly involved in borrowing from the West. This dependence on Western loans began to worry Tito in the spring of 1953, and was another of the issues raised at the time of the Brioni Plenum in June During 1953 and 1954 Tito was impatient at the slow pace at which the Soviet Yugoslav rapprochement was developing. 18 Once the 1955 Declaration had been signed, Tito spoke enthusiastically about his new partner: the Soviet Union had agreed to cancel debts and aid Yugoslavia, without demanding the crippling interest charges insisted on by the West; a common language with the Soviet Union had been found. We shall not, for the sake of anyone s pleasure, wage a war not even a propaganda war against the Soviet Union and other East European countries, he said. The current Soviet leadership, he went on, were new men: men who do not wish the delusions, false moves, and actions of the past to be repeated; men who wish to start along another road for the benefit of themselves and of the whole world; men who wish to prove that they are not what they are rebuked as being by the West, but are just leaders of a socialist country. 19 Rapprochement with Tito was bitterly resisted by conservative circles within the Soviet leadership, especially by Molotov. While at the July 1955 Plenum of the Soviet Communist Party Khrushchev and Bulganin bubbled with enthusiasm for these real fighters, people who had spent their whole lives fighting for Bolshevik principles, Molotov stuck to the line that the Yugoslavs had initially been guilty of a nationalist deviation, and since then had drifted away from Marxism Leninism to a point where they were indistinguishable from right socialists. Molotov insisted that while Beria had made things worse after Molotov s dismissal as foreign minister in 1949, the logic of blaming it all on Beria was to accuse Stalin himself which could not be allowed. However, it was precisely Stalin whom Khrushchev proposed to blame. In these acrimonious exchanges Khrushchev told Molotov bluntly and repeatedly that the full Politburo had never discussed the break with Yugoslavia, it had simply been agreed between Stalin and Molotov without other Politburo members being consulted.

10 Early in 1956 Khrushchev had overcome Molotov and the conservatives and in February 1956 summoned the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party at which he read his secret speech denouncing Stalin s crimes since the early 1930s. Then, on 18 April 1956, the Cominform, the organisation originally set up with Tito s blessing but then used to vilify him, was formally dissolved. 20 On 2 June 1956 Tito arrived in Moscow for a three-week visit and was fulsome in his praise for Khrushchev: we believed that the time would come when everything that kept us apart would be transformed and that our friendship would acquire new and firm foundations. That time had now come, thanks to the Leninist policy of the government and the Soviet Party [and] the courageous and far-sighted policy of the collective leadership of the USSR. On 20 June the Moscow Declaration was signed restoring relations between the Yugoslav and Soviet Parties. 21 There was, however, a stumbling block in the process of rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Stalin had been replaced by Khrushchev, but elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Stalinist leadership remained largely intact. Tito s concerns were limited to those leaders of surrounding countries. He quickly came to terms with Gheorghiu-Dej in Bucharest (indeed it has been suggested they were actually secretly in contact with each other even during the height of the Cominform s attacks on Yugoslavia), and he took particular pleasure in seeing the former Bulgarian Party leader Vulko Chervenkov forced to announce his resignation as the country s premier in the presence of a visiting Yugoslav parliamentary delegation. 22 The problem was Hungary. There had, of course, been a change of leadership under Nagy, but that had been negated by the neo-stalinist counter-revolution staged by Rákosi in March Rákosi was a particular thorn in Tito s side. It was not just that the Rajk trial had been aimed at Yugoslavia, but that Rákosi had played such an active role in the Rajk purge process. He told a Soviet security advisor early in 1950 that for more than a year he had spent the greater part of every day dealing with the trials. Nor had he restricted his activities to Hungary. In summer 1950 he told a visiting Romanian communist: Look, in every party there are traitors. There were in ours, and there were in Bulgaria, where they tried Kostov. There are also traitors in Czechoslovakia and I told Gottwald Gottwald, be careful! So there must be traitors in your party as well. You have to look for them. Tito felt personally affronted by the Rajk trial; after the verdict had been announced he went in person to the Hungarian Embassy to hand in a protest

11 note. Yet Rákosi s sins in Yugoslav eyes went beyond the Rajk trial. From spring 1949 onwards the terrorist groups of Yugoslav émigrés preparing to overthrow Tito were based in Hungary; in July 1949 Rákosi urged the Cominform to agree to launch an armed struggle, for with propaganda alone we will not remove the Tito clique ; while in January 1950 he moaned to a Soviet security official that not enough was being done to support the Yugoslav émigrés. When signing the Moscow Declaration in June 1956, as well as praising Khrushchev, Tito denounced the Hungarian leadership: these men have their hands soaked in blood; they have staged trials, given false information, sentenced innocent men to death. They have dragged Yugoslavia into all these trials, as in the case of the Rajk trial, and they now find it difficult to admit their mistakes before their own people. 23 Khrushchev promised Tito he would act against Rákosi, but then his conservative opponents staged a comeback. Although the Soviet emissary Mikhail Suslov visited Hungary around the end of June and János Kádár was brought into the Politburo, Rákosi was not removed.the reason was this: at the end of June all Eastern Europe was shaken by the riots which broke out in the Polish town of Poznan, and hardliners in the Soviet leadership turned on Khrushchev, alleging his anti-stalin policy and his reconciliation with Tito were responsible and risked the break up of the whole system. For a while Khrushchev was unable to assert his authority and the Soviet Politburo agreed to ease things for Rákosi. 24 Far from quietly disappearing from the scene, he chaired a meeting of East European leaders in Moscow which resulted in a letter being sent to all East European Parties on 13 July questioning the ideological basis for a reconciliation with Tito. Less than a week later, Khrushchev was in a position to assert himself once again, although not as radically as he had at first hoped. In a trade off with the conservatives, he persuaded them that Rákosi had to go, but did not push his original proposal to appoint Kádár, Tito s favoured candidate who had been imprisoned by Rákosi in Instead, Khrushchev agreed to Molotov s proposal that Rákosi should be replaced by Ernő Gerő, one of Rákosi s closest associates; Kádár was made a Central Committee secretary. On 18 July 1956 Khrushchev sent Mikoyan to Hungary to tell the Party Plenum then in session that Rákosi must be sacked. To rub in the significance of the message, Mikoyan went straight from Budapest to Belgrade to report on what had taken place. Three weeks later, on 9 August 1956, Tito invited Khrushchev to pay a private visit to Yugoslavia in September. 25 Together, Khrushchev and Tito seemed to be planning the renewal of communism.

12 THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1956 After his removal from power, Nagy began to reformulate his ideas in a document called On Communism, which he hoped would eventually form the basis for his rehabilitation by the Party, and copies of which he sent both to the Kremlin and the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. Like the Yugoslav communists had done when they began to reconsider the meaning of communism, Nagy went back to Marx s own writings. There, in some of Marx s writings about the First International, he found guidance on how socialists and socialist states should relate to each other. In particular he was struck by Marx s ideas about the need to defend the most simple basic laws of morals and justice, which must rule the relations between private individuals, and which must also be the chief laws governing the contacts between nations. This simple message of morality and justice was, Nagy added, the basis for the 1955 Belgrade accord between Khrushchev and Tito, which recognised that all nations would find their own roads to socialism. By being forced into the straitjacket of the Soviet model, Hungary and the other peoples democracies had steadily lost the popular, democratic attributes they had once had, and become increasingly dependent on the use of force. The only way forward, Nagy continued, was to develop towards socialism by systematically decreasing the use of force [and] utilising democratic forms and methods in the interest of close co-operation on the widest possible scale with the masses of working people. On the international level, it meant working for the international recognition of Hungary s neutrality, on the Austrian pattern. Nagy s description of the behaviour of the communist bureaucracy was reminiscent of that of Djilas. Power is increasingly being torn away from the people and turned sharply against them... the people s democracy in which power is exercised by the working class... is obviously being replaced by a Party dictatorship... [in which] power is not permeated by the spirit of socialism and democratisation but by a Bonapartist spirit of minority dictatorship. The origins of this Bonapartism Nagy considered to have been when the clique headed by Rákosi... crushed the basis of Hungary s young democracy and liquidated our people s democratic forces and the democratic partnerships of socialism. Decoded, this meant returning to the situation of 1948 or earlier when non-communist parties had played a meaningful role in Hungarian politics. 26

13 After his dismissal Nagy became the focal point for an intellectual circle of political dissidents. The most active of these groups was the Petőfi Circle, formed in 1954 as a discussion group within the Communist Youth League. While active throughout 1955, the Circle really began to develop after Khrushchev s secret speech in February 1956 and Rákosi s reluctant admission at the end of March that the Rajk trial had been based on provocation and was a miscarriage of justice. The Circle s most spectacular event was related to this admission: on 18 June it organised a public meeting addressed by Rajk s widow. Then, on 27 June, a second mass meeting was organised which demanded the restoration of Nagy s government. That these were no longer isolated acts by individual intellectuals was clear from the strike wave that hit Budapest in the wake of the Poznan riots. 27 Rákosi tried to respond to this growing opposition to his regime with repression. He banned the Petőfi Circle and summoned a Plenum of the Central Committee at which he presented a list of some 400 opposition activists whom he believed should be arrested, with Imre Nagy at its head. But it was at this Plenum that Mikoyan arrived from Moscow and dismissed Rákosi; he then flew on to Belgrade and on his return journey visited Nagy on 21 July. 28 The new leadership, headed by Gerő, began by reviving some of the spirit of Nagy s economic programme and proposing the reactivation of the Patriotic People s Front, bringing out of obscurity Zoltan Tildy to join its presidium. The Gerő administration also called for improved relations with the Yugoslav League of Communists. This was something Gerő found very difficult to do. Over the summer he had frequently complained to the Soviet ambassador in Budapest that the Yugoslav experience of socialism was being seized on by the party s opponents and that a whole Yugoslav agency was working hand in glove with dissident Hungarian intellectuals. He continued to moan about the Yugoslavs, especially when in August he convinced himself that they had taken up the case of Nagy, a conviction justified in part when the Yugoslav press on 23 August openly called for Nagy s readmission to the party. Complaining all the while about the activities of Yugoslav diplomats, Gerő accepted on 1 September that he had no choice but to meet Nagy and discuss with him how he might be readmitted to the party. Yet, despite this deep hostility to the Yugoslavs, Khrushchev s wider ambitions gave him no choice but to seek a reconciliation with Tito. 29 On 19 September Khrushchev paid his private visit to Yugoslavia, and Tito returned with him to the Crimea on 27 September, where he stayed until 5 October. In

14 the course of these two holidays Tito and Khrushchev had ten days of talks, without any intermediary, interspersed with swimming, hunting and similar delights. Hungary was high on the agenda of topics covered, and Khrushchev summoned Gerő to join them in the Crimea on 2 October. Tito was cautious about endorsing the new leadership, but after he learned that Nagy had been approached again and invited to reapply for Party membership an invitation was extended to Gerő and Kádár to visit Yugoslavia in the middle of the month. Nagy was invited to appear before the Hungarian Politburo and, despite Gerő s fears that he was intent on taking Hungary down the Yugoslav road, he was accepted back into the Party on 13 October, the eve of Gerő and Kádár s departure for Belgrade on the 15th. 30 Another of the terms put down by Tito for reconciliation with the Hungarian communists was the reinterment of Rajk s body. This rather macabre ceremony was held on 6 October and was rapidly transformed into a massive demonstration by the opposition. In spite of the decision to ban the Petőfi Circle in July, it had, by the autumn, blossomed to become a nationwide opposition network, and seized on the opportunity presented by the reburial. Over 200,000 people took part in that demonstration, with a small group of breaking away from the mass of demonstrators and gathering outside the Yugoslav Embassy to cheer Tito and praise Yugoslav socialism. The Yugoslav press had consistently taken up the cause of the Petőfi Circle. The fact that the police took no serious action against the demonstrators emboldened the government s opponents. A fortnight later, on 22 October, students at the Budapest Technical University, supported a little reluctantly on this occasion by the Petőfi Circle, called a demonstration for the 23rd which would demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the formation of a Nagy government, amidst rumours that the Central Committee was preparing to take such a step. That demonstration, at first banned by the government and then permitted after it had started, marked the start of the Hungarian Revolution. As it progressed through the city more and more people joined it. Tens of thousands marched to the Radio Station to demand that it broadcast their demands. Frustrated when this was refused, most demonstrators moved to gather in Parliament Square. The Politburo began to lose its nerve and called on Nagy to address the crowd and appeal for calm. This placed Nagy in a dilemma: by turning to him, the communist apparatus he knew so well had brought him back into the fold and would restore him to the post of

15 prime minister; yet as someone who believed that communism could be renewed only if it turned to the people, he had to win popular support, not just the support of the Party apparatus. He was already concerned that conservative groups in the party would try to use him simply as a figurehead to buy time, and he turned down the initial requests to address the crowds. Always a poor speaker, he read out a text he had prepared, even though he recognised that it misjudged the public mood. His speech on 23 October got the balance between party and popular support wrong. He did not realise that the Hungarian flags with the communist emblem torn out which the demonstrators were carrying meant what they symbolised; his appeal to comrades was met with the reply we are no longer comrades. 31 This was a rude shock for Nagy, although he had anticipated as much. Writing on the eve of the October events Nagy had stressed: today probably a return to the policy of the New Course and the application of the June [1953] principles... could still check the growing crisis and avert catastrophe. But it is doubtful whether a return to the June principles would suffice as a solution tomorrow.... Before long there is a danger that the masses, having lost their faith, will reject both the June way and the Communist Party, and it will become necessary to make a much greater retreat in order to keep the situation under control. And that is precisely what proved to be the case. Any chance that Nagy s appointment alone could restore the situation was destroyed when Gerő, who arrived back from Belgrade on the 23rd, used a radio broadcast to denounce the demonstrators in precisely the same terms that Rákosi would have used. Furious demonstrators returned to the Radio Station to demand the right to reply to Gerő s abuse, and as the authorities tried to defend the Radio Station the first bloody clashes occurred. Gerő then appealed for the intervention of Soviet troops. The Soviet politburo heard the request on the evening of the 23rd and, despite Mikoyan s pleas not to do so, decided to send in the requested troops; Molotov endorsed the move with the prediction in Nagy s hands Hungary will shake lose. Thus as victorious Budapest workers established control over the Radio Station on the morning of 24 October, Soviet tanks began to pour into the city, starting four days of bitter fighting. As a communist brought up on Party procedures, Nagy was powerless to influence the events of that night. Although he had been called on to form a government, he was at that stage a simple Party member; to be a prime minister he would have to be a member of the Politburo. So while Gerő took the fateful decision to call on Soviet

16 troops to support the government, Nagy waited for the Central Committee to gather and co-opt him to the Politburo. Thus Nagy had no say in the decision to call in Soviet troops, nor in the hysterical radio broadcasts referring to hostile elements and a small number of counter-revolutionaries who were fomenting unrest. Nagy had to await the arrival of Mikoyan, on the evening of the 24th before any progress could be made. Then on 25 October, with Mikoyan s agreement, Kádár replaced Gerő as Party Secretary. Only then was Nagy in a position to execute the great retreat about which he had so recently written, and which would now be far more difficult to implement given the involvement of Soviet forces. 32 On 26 October, with the support of Losonczy, who became the editor of the Patriotic People s Front daily, the only paper to keep appearing regularly through the crisis, Nagy called on the Patriotic People s Front, not the Party, to recommend the composition of a new government which included the former leader of the Smallholders Party Zoltán Tildy. Nagy was at first supported by his Politburo and by the two Soviet advisors sent from Moscow, Mikoyan and Suslov. When the Hungarian Politburo met over the night of October, in the presence of Mikoyan, the lead was taken by Kádár who had been appointed to head the Party s emergency directorate, tasked to oversee affairs until proper Party elections could be held. Kádár and Mikoyan backed Nagy s proposal for a ceasefire followed by negotiations on the withdrawal of Soviet troops, even though both Mikoyan and Suslov had complained that this issue had been raised without consulting the Soviet side and in the face of their determined objections. The Hungarian Politburo even accepted Nagy s wording, which referred to those opposing the Soviet troops not as counterrevolutionaries but a democratic movement which swept our whole nation in order to secure our independence, which is the only basis of a socialist democracy. But Mikoyan made clear that this was to be the extent of the concessions; the party should now show resolution for if they make a new set of concessions tomorrow then it will not be possible to stop it. Although Nagy told the Hungarian Politburo that he intended to head the huge powerful people s force in order to control it, it rapidly became apparent to the Kremlin that concession was following concession. The ceasefire, ordered on the afternoon of 28 October, did not end the fighting. As Mikoyan reported on 30 October, many rebels were refusing to comply and were insisting that they would only hand in their weapons when all Soviet troops had left the country; Nagy refused

17 to allow force to be used against those unwilling to comply. In Moscow the conservatives were increasingly alarmed, but despite making critical noises about Mikoyan s concessions when the Soviet Politburo held its first serious discussion of the crisis on 26 October, accepted that there was little to be done but to wait and see. Suslov returned to Moscow to address the Politburo session on the 28th and persuaded his colleagues to back Nagy s government. That remained the case even after Mikoyan s report on the 30th that the situation was getting worse, communists were being killed and Nagy seemed to be losing control. Thus, despite its qualms, the Soviet Politburo decided to go ahead and issue the Declaration on Friendship and Cooperation between the Soviet Union and other Socialist States. This document sought to regularise the stationing of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe by providing a framework in which various anomalies could be cleared up. Soviet troops had withdrawn from Czechoslovakia in 1945 and Bulgaria in 1947, but had remained in Poland, to protect lines of communication with occupied East Germany, and Romania and Hungary, to protect lines of communication with occupied Austria; after Austria s reunification in 1955, the formation of the Warsaw Pact had allowed Soviet troops to stay in Hungary and Romania, ostensibly by mutual agreement. The Declaration offered Nagy legitimate grounds on which to discuss the future of Soviet troops in Hungary and was an important part of implementing the agreement reached on 28 October. However, later on the 30th, after the decision had been taken to issue the Declaration, the Soviet Politburo received the news that Nagy had decided to restore multiparty democracy and had established a so-called narrow cabinet which, while it included Kádár, also included Béla Kovács, imprisoned in the Soviet Union from 1947 to 55 for his counter-revolutionary activities; Molotov commented bluntly that a counter-revolutionary government had been formed and confirmation of this seemed to come with the lynching of secret police officers in Republic Square. The next day, on 31 October, after talks with Rákosi and Gerő, who had settled in Moscow, the Soviet Politburo decided to reconsider its assessment and drop the idea of withdrawing troops, scheduling military intervention for 4 November and appointing a new provisional government headed by Ferenc Münnich, a former Hungarian ambassador to Moscow, who had already been lobbying for just such a government to be formed. Whether this decision was taken before or after Mikoyan learned from Tildy that the Smallholders Party was determined that Hungary should leave the Warsaw Pact remains unclear. When Mikoyan arrived back in Moscow in

18 person on 1 November he tried to reopen the decision to intervene, arguing that force would not help the situation and talking to the Nagy government over the next fortnight could yet turn the situation around. Unfortunately, Suslov, his fellow emissary, took the opposite approach. Although he dismissed the view of the security service that Nagy was a counter-revolutionary, he felt Nagy s government could not withstand the revival of inter-party struggle, and that leaving Soviet occupation was the only way to ensure the maintenance of a sympathetic government in Hungary. Faced with a division of opinion among its Hungary experts, the Politburo opted to stick by the decision to intervene militarily. Nagy and his government at once sensed a change of mood. On 1 November, at Tildy s suggestion, they declared Hungary neutral and later in the day demanded to know from the Soviet ambassador why Soviet troops were still in active operations. Nagy threatened to pull Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. Kádár, who also attended this meeting with the Soviet ambassador, was unhappy with this threat and later that night accepted Münnich s proposal that they should fly to Moscow. When the two of them attended a meeting of the Soviet Politburo on 2 November, it was Kádár who made the greater impact. 33 SOVIET YUGOSLAV INTERVENTION On 4 November, less than a week after its publication, the Soviet Union tore up its own Declaration and its invasion of Hungary began; Nagy s great retreat was at an end. However, the chances of its success were not as remote as hindsight might suggest. While Stalin s system of communism was rejected by the mass of workers, socialist ownership was not: the leaders of the Socialist Party and Smallholders Party in Nagy s coalition government rejected the idea of capitalist restoration, as did the most powerful organisations thrown up by the Hungarian Revolution, the workers councils. Before the start of the revolt Tito had urged Gerő and Kádár to establish workers councils and the government first approved their formation on 26 October. Originally it was hoped that they might operate through the intermediary of the existing trade union structure, but working-class pressure prevented this from happening. By 27 October spontaneous working-class action had put many enterprises in the hands of their workers, and on 30 October the coalition government recognised the workers

19 councils, and other revolutionary committees, as local sources of power. 34 In the course of their desperate struggle against Soviet tanks, workers councils always insisted the collective ownership of the means of production should be exercised through them. 35 Clearly the desire to form workers councils in Hungary was partly influenced by developments in Yugoslavia. What Hungarian workers knew of the Yugoslav system of workers self-management was inevitably distorted, since it had mostly been described to them by a hostile Stalinist press. However, by the simple device of believing the opposite of what the press told them, workers would have a clear, if rather idealised understanding of what was happening in Yugoslavia. If it was evident that in the Stalin Tito dispute Tito had been right and Stalin wrong, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that the Yugoslav system of socialism might, in fact, be better than the Soviet one. Then, as Yugoslav Soviet relations improved, some direct contacts between Hungarian and Yugoslav trade unions were established, and the role of the workers councils in Yugoslavia was given some coverage by the Petőfi Circle. Participants in such meetings noted much later that all who wanted a reformed socialism in Hungary in 1956 saw Yugoslavia as the model state. 36 Unfortunately, the reality of workers self-management in Yugoslavia and the degree of Party control over workers councils that Tito had enforced after the Brioni Plenum of 1953 was only dimly appreciated in Hungary, as everywhere else. Tito personified anti-stalinism and the possibility of a renewed communism; but deep down, Tito was a true Leninist when it came to the question of the leading role of the Party. Just what this meant for the future of communism in Eastern Europe would be shown in the role played by Tito during the Hungarian Revolution and subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary. From the moment the Hungarian crisis began, Khrushchev was determined to involve Yugoslavia in its resolution. On 25 October he received the Yugoslav ambassador and told him that the Soviet Union was ready to answer force with force. The Soviet Government was unanimous: it would try to work for a political solution, but if that were not possible force would be used; the ambassador had the clear impression that Khrushchev was very pessimistic about the chances of a political solution. Then, on the evening of 2 November, Khrushchev arrived at Tito s holiday island of Brioni and from seven that evening until five the next morning briefed Tito about the plan to invade Hungary, which had already been endorsed by the other East