The Kremlin’s Diagnosis? Hungarian Cancer

Now listen gentleman, (seven female readers) you know one of the recurring themes on this blog is how dangerous and destructive warfare can be especially if you get caught up in the middle of it when all you want to do is get some decent takeout food and curl up with a good book. Warfare is messy and let’s face it, highly inconvenient for the common schlub. Now as bad as garden variety war can be there’s another scenario involving war that can be just as bad and it’s this: When people are given a promise or led to believe that if they do X then Y will happen. In this equation X will be rising up against your communist overlords and Y will be military intervention on your behalf. It’s like when one of my childhood friends goaded me into finally standing up to that bully that terrorized my early years and when I finally smacked her, (him!) in the mouth my pal beat feet and was nowhere to be found when I frantically called for backup.

That’s what happened though, well sort of, when a large number of the peeps in Hungary decided they’d had enough of communism in general and Soviet domination in particular. It all happened in 1956. Let me put down a sub floor though before we start laying down tile. Back during World War Two the Hungarians were allied to the Axis and came into military conflict with the Russian Red Army. After the war they became allied to the Soviet Union (Jesus Hungary, will you just once pick the right side!) though not before a brief period of multiparty democracy. There was a minority Marxist-Leninist party in Hungary that quietly whittled away at the government and wrestled concessions in a piecemeal manner known in the racy world of political science parlance as (get your best jokes ready) Salami Tactics  which coincidentally happens to be the name of the first screenplay I ever wrote (full disclosure, it went straight to video. I still have four cases of VHS copies available if you’re interested). So anyway, the Hungarian communists eventually gained enough power to take control of the state and side with the Soviets.

I don’t think I need to go into a great amount of detail as to why the majority of the people were unhappy with this situation. You know the program: Domestic spying, torture, crazy economic plans, stagnation (no silly, not the United States and also not marriage) it was communism. The government became officially communist under the leadership of Matyas Rakosi and then he went about terrorizing and purging with his secret police the AVH which in translation meant, get ready, the State Protection Authority. Could any name be more fitting for a statist police force? Orwell would have blushed and refused to use such a seemingly obvious name in one of his novels. True to their adoration of Stalin the government set up an economic five-year plan that sought to increase Hungary’s industrial output by a mere 380%. When that surprisingly didn’t work things got really bad and rationing and shortages became the norm.

So by 1956 the seeds had taken root and the revolution began. The thing started out as a student revolution back when students still used to do those kinds of things. They marched through Budapest to the Parliament building and also seized a radio station in an effort to broadcast their demands. This group was detained by the AVH and when another group showed up demanding the detainees release things fell apart and the group was fired upon. Meanwhile people toppled a statue of the recently dead Stalin leaving only his empty boots on the base of the statue. Hungarian flags were then placed in his boots. Not the most photogenic scene but it got the point across. Word got out and next thing you know you have a country-wide revolt which led to the collapse of the government. A new government was formed that vowed free elections and the intention of pulling Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. Okay, so far so good though of course there was quite a bit of violence which is hard to avoid when you’re doing a little revolutionizing. The people began to form militias to fight the AVH forces though they would find later that they would be fighting a much larger foe. (If you can guess who I’ll send you a coupon from 1998 for a free case of Red Dog…. cans)

Yeah, the Soviets were less than thrilled with all the goings on in Hungary as it was the first serious challenge to their domination of eastern Europe (besides a little fussiness by the Poles) since the end of World War II. They rolled the tanks into Hungary to make it crystal clear that there would be no breaking away from the mother ship and suddenly the revolution took on a very real, international flavor. But there was dissension at the highest levels of the Kremlin as both Krushchev and World War II hero Marshal Zhukov were both a bit leery about hammering the Hungarians in a military fashion. The Soviet government issued a statement that seemed to say they were willing to negotiate with the new Hungarian government and possibly pull the troops out of the country. The very next day though, for reasons that are still murky, the Soviets reversed course and decided that they would need to crush the revolution, no doubt at least partially for fear that the country may go capitalist and possibly cause unrest in other Warsaw Pact nations or in the U.S.S.R. itself. Within two weeks it was all over. A modern, mechanized army had squashed a popular resistance movement which had more spunk than weapons and leadership. Thousands lay dead, many thousands more would be rounded up, tried, and often executed. An interesting side note is how this anger between Hungary and the U.S.S.R. led to the infamous Blood in the Water, water polo match between the two countries at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne Australia. I guess when it comes to über-competitive, politically tinged sports violence Euros carry out their thuggery in the pool and in speedos.

But remember five paragraphs ago when I said this post concerned someone doing X and expecting Y to happen? Well that’s where we’re going now as I talk about Radio Free Europe which beside being a good (not great) R.E.M. song is also the name of the radio broadcast system, funded by the CIA, which tried to influence Cold War thinking in eastern Europe by broadcasting anti-Soviet programs that could be picked up and listened to by those living in the eastern bloc. There’s some murkiness as to what exactly RFE said before, during, and after the revolution but at least some people, Tim Weiner in his book Legacy of Ashes especially, have argued that the radio broadcasts bolstered the people in their rise against the Soviets, vaguely promising some type of assistance, only to allow the revolutionaries to be crushed as Western help never came. Granted, in retrospect, you’d have to be one naïve Magyar to think that NATO was going to come gamboling into Hungary to help you fight the Soviet military, but apparently those radio broadcasts had some people believing that was exactly what was going to happen and they didn’t have the luxury of viewing things in retrospect as they were busy getting their asses handed to them in real time.

The CIA no doubt wanted to destabilize the Soviets and their hold on eastern Europe just as the KGB was trying to undermine the Western powers, but I’ve got to tell you, if you ever want to overthrow your government….. (nervous laughter…..not me NSA) you need to be damn sure there’s some serious help coming from over the next hill before you take the plunge. Listening to the radio or any form of media, and taking what is said as truth and then acting on it can prove to be pretty dangerous.

H.R. Gross