Hungary

1956

In 1956, Hungarians rose up in revolt against Communist and Soviet power. They were led by a man named Imre Nagy who was the prime minister at the time. Nagy was hanged for his actions and tossed into a prison grave. Finally, in June 1989 (what a year!), he was given a solemn funeral in the largest square in Budapest, and a hero’s burial. Over 100,000 people showed up for the ceremony. The memory of what happened in 1956 still fresh.

That revolt cost an estimated 30,000 lives.

The Soviet Army tried to control the protests, the demonstrations. They cracked down on the journalists, the academics, the students … all to no avail. The revolt kept escalating, gathering speed and momentum. (Like what is going on in Iran now. Who knows how it will end.) There would be no good end to this. The year was 1956. The Cold War was in full bloom. The Communists were not going to give an inch. So the Soviet Army feigned a withdrawal from all the hotspots in Hungary. People noticed the troops were gone, they were no longer being watched and persecuted. So they relaxed. The dissidents and loud-mouthed intellectuals and journalists came out of hiding. And on November 4, 1956, the Soviet Army launched a surprise attack and completely crushed the uprising. The tanks rolled through Hungary, harassing and terrorizing the population. There were crazy Stalinist show trials, tons of people were hanged and tossed in unmarked graves. People forced to rat each other out, torture, murder, executions, reprisals. The spirit of Hungary was crushed, along with the revolution. It’s like the country went into a deep depression after that, a clinical depression which still lingers to this day.

Moscow then secretly put Janos Kadar in full charge of the country. He had actually been freed from prison by Mr. Nagy. Kadar dominated Hungary from 1956 until 1988, when he was deposed. UNBELIEVABLE. It sounds to me like he was a Soviet puppet, but I’m just guessing.

The funeral for Nagy in 1989 was one of the sparks which lit the match which ignited the entire world of Europe to throw off their Communist dominators. You cannot obliterate a people’s memory. You cannot tell them who to care about. You cannot say, “No no no no, Nagy really wasn’t for YOU … he was a pawn of the Communists … Love KADAR…LOVE KADAR.” People are NOT that stupid. I am thinking of Iran again. The Shah (the last Shah, anyway) could not make the Iranian people love him and get behind his plans for their country. No matter how hard he tried, he had not captured the hearts and minds of his people. You cannot fake the kind of devotion and mania the Iranians had when Khomeini returned to Iran. This sort of devotion can be dysfunctional, and terrifying, like all of the Aryan youths marching around screaming “Heil, Hitler!”, or it can take on a more benign form.

Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary, a Communist himself!, did not want the country to be crushed and dominated by Communism. He did not want the citizens of Hungary to be dogged by secret police wherever they went. He stood up for them, he spoke up for them. He paid for this with his life. The Hungarians love him. He is their hero. Their voice.

The outpouring of love over 30 years later at Nagy’s funeral was baffling to the Communist Party, which continued to try to control things in Hungary. But they were increasingly losing it. They refused to rehabilitate Nagy’s memory. And wipe the slate clean.

But here is the New York Times article (or an excerpt from it), describing what happened at this memorial service in June, 1989.

Thirty-one years after he was hanged and his body thrown into a prison grave, Imre Nagy, who led the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination, was given a solemn funeral today … The ceremonies were organized by the opposition, which worships the former Prime Minister as a national hero, but four leading members of the ruling Communist Party came to pay tribute … The four top party officials …left before a succession of eulogies to Imre Nagy that were unsparing in their condemnation of the Communist Party and its ally, the Soviet Union.

Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor …

Victor Orban, a spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Mr. Nagy as a man who, although a Communist, “identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and the dictatorship of a single party.” …

Sandor Racz, who led the Budapest Workers’ Council during the uprising and spent seven years in prison, condemned the Soviet Army and the Communist Party as “obstacles for Hungarian society”. … He said the party was “clinging fearfully to power,” although it was clear that “what it failed to achieve in the last 44 years cannot be remedied now.” He continued, “They are responsible for the past. They are responsible for the damaged lives of Hungarians.”

Budapest experienced a day full of anomalies and contradictions. No state funeral could have been more solemnly and publicly marked or held in a more prestigious settling, but for the Hungarian Governemtn and the ruling party, Mr. Nagy and the four companions who were sentenced to death and now reburied with him remain traitors and counterrrevolutionaries…As recently as earlier this year, Mr. Grosz still ruled out Mr. Nagy’s rehabilitation. On the 30th anniversary of the hangings last year, the police broke up with considerable violence a small tribute organized by dissidents on a Budapest square.

It was an anomaly also that the Soviet Union and Hungary’s other Communist friends sent diplomats, but not their ambassadors, to attend the ceremony, although it had no official character that would have obliged them to be there. But other Communist countries — China, North Korea, Romania, and Albania — stayed away.

The Heroes Square ceremony was staged, in one more irony, by the son of another executed Communist, Laszlo Rajk, who was Interior and Foreign Minister. Mr. Rajk, a loyal Communist, was hanged after a show trial in 1949 at the height of the Stalinist period. The younger Laszlo Rajk, an architect and movie set deisgner, draped the neoclassical facade of the art museum and a tall column in the center of the square’s vast expanse fully in black and white, traditional mourning colors among the Hungarians of Transylvania, annexed by Romania. He devised strikingly modern wood and metal structures as a setting on which to display the five coffins, as well as a sixth, empty one commemorating the more than 300 victims of judicial retributions after the uprising. Tall, flaming torches stood between the coffins, and a permanent rotation of honorary pallbearers — including widows, children, and other relatives of the five victims being buried — flanked them …

Today, after the wreath-laying and eulogies, a procession of hearses, followed by cars and buses, set out for the huge public ceremony next to the prison where the hangings took place … Beyond them, in an adjoining field full of mainly unmarked graves, a tomb had been dug for Mr. Nagy. His daughter had requested that he be laid to rest amid the bulk of those who paid with their lives for following his lead.

Two actors read in alphabetical order the names of the 260 victims, who were executed from 1956 to 1961, their occupations and their ages. At each name, a torchbearer stepped forward, held high the flame and replied, “He has lived in us; he has not gone.”

When the name of one of the five was called, surname first, in the Hungarian fashion, like “Nagy Imre, Prime Minister, 62 years,” his coffin was carried to the grave and a friend delivered a eulogy. Then, supporting one another, his nearest relatives stepped to the grave to put down flowers and stand, with bowed heads, allowed for the first time to mourn in public, together with those who share their grief.

The images in this article give me chills. After that, the power of the Communist Party continued to erode throughout the summer. The party leadership elected a four-man presidency, and then it stripped one of the four (who had succeeded Kadar as party leader) of all authority. The party liberals were rising, and suddenly: other parties outside the political system started sprouting up. Parties of dissidents, cultural activists, ecologists, cultural nationalists. These parties all started shouting for pluralistic free elctions. They shouted for them to occur in 1990. No more “some day”, no more “we’re working on it.” It was 1989. They wanted the elections in 1990. And indeed, elections were scheduled by 1990, and secretly the Communist Party members in Hungary began talking amongst themselves about how to liquidate the party’s assets, and change its name (so they could participate in the free elections as well).

Incredible. And that’s it for Hungary.

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