The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 4 November 1956; Hungarian: 1956-os forradalom), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The uprising lasted 15 days before being crushed by Soviet troops on 7 November 1956 (outside of Budapest, firefights lasted until at least 12 November 1956). Thousands were killed or wounded, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.
The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956 in Budapest when university students appealed to the civil populace to join them at the Hungarian Parliament Building to protest the USSR's geopolitical domination of Hungary through the communist government of Mátyás Rákosi. A delegation of students entered the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their sixteen demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but were detained by security guards. When the student protesters outside the radio building demanded the release of their delegation, a group of police from the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) fatally shot several of the students. The siege of the Radio building began shortly after midnight and ended around 8 a.m. At that point, the revolutionaries broke into the building and treated the soldiers, officer cadets, and members of the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) found there as prisoners. ÁVH officer Major Fehér was executed with a shot to the back of the head.
Consequently, Hungarians organized into revolutionary militias to fight the ÁVH; local Hungarian communist leaders and ÁVH policemen were captured and summarily executed, and political prisoners were released and armed. To realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government from the Hungarian Working People's Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja). The new government of Imre Nagy disbanded the ÁVH (on 28 October), declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (on 1 November), and pledged to reestablish free elections. By the end of October, the intense fighting had subsided.
Although initially showing willingness to negotiate the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Hungary (having negotiations on 3 November), the USSR repressed the Hungarian Revolution on 4 November, and fought the Hungarian revolutionaries until Soviet victory on 10 November; repression of the Hungarian Uprising killed 2,000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet Army soldiers, and compelled 200,000 Hungarians to seek political refuge abroad, mostly in Austria.
Background
Second World War
During World War II, the Kingdom of Hungary was a member of the Axis powers in alliance with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Kingdom of Romania, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. In 1941, the Royal Hungarian Army participated in the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia (6 April 1941) and in Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941), the invasion of the USSR. By 1944, the Red Army was on the way to the Kingdom of Hungary, after first having repelled the Royal Hungarian Army and the armies of the other Axis Powers from the territory of the USSR.
Fearful of the Red Army's occupation of the Kingdom of Hungary, the royal Hungarian government unsuccessfully sought an armistice with the Allies, which was a betrayal of the Axis powers. The Germans launched Operation Margarethe (12 March 1944) to establish the Nazi Government of National Unity of Hungary; the short-lived puppet government existed for less than a year and Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945 after the Siege of Budapest.
Soviet occupation
At the end of the war, the Kingdom of Hungary was in the geopolitical sphere of influence of the USSR. In the political aftermath of the War, Hungary was a multi-party democracy, in which the 1945 Hungarian parliamentary election produced a coalition government composed of Independent Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and the Civic Party, headed by President Zoltán Tildy and Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy. Nonetheless, on behalf of the USSR, the Hungarian Communist Party continually used salami slicing tactics to wrest minor political concessions, which continually diminished the political authority of the coalition government, despite the Communist Party having received only 17 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election of 1945.
After the election in 1945, control of the State Protection Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság, ÁVH) was transferred from the Independent Smallholders Party of the coalition government to the Hungarian Communist party. The ÁVH repressed non‑communist political opponents with intimidation, false accusations, imprisonment, and torture. The four years of multi-party democracy ended when the Social Democratic Party of Hungary merged with the Communist Party and became the Hungarian Working People's Party, whose candidate stood unopposed in the 1949 Hungarian parliamentary election. Afterward, on 20 August 1949, the Hungarian People's Republic was proclaimed and established as a socialist state, with which the USSR then concluded the COMECON treaty of mutual assistance, which allowed stationing troops of Red Army soldiers in Hungary.
Based upon the economic model of the USSR, the Hungarian Working People's Party established the socialist economy of Hungary with the nationalization of the means of production and of the natural resources of the country. Moreover, by 1955, the relatively free politics of Hungary allowed intellectuals and journalists to freely criticize the Rákosi government's social and economic policies. In that vein of relative political freedom, on 22 October 1956, students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics had reestablished the MEFESZ students' union, which the Rákosi government had banned for its politically incorrect politics.
Stalinist Hungary
Initially, the Hungarian People's Republic was a socialist state headed by the Communist government of Mátyás Rákosi (r. 1947–1956), a Stalinist beholden to the USSR. To ensure ideological compliance within his Stalinist government, Rákosi used the ÁVH to purge 7,000 politically dissident Titoists and Trotskyists from the Communist Party of Hungary for being "Western agents" whose participation in the Spanish Civil War interfered with Stalin's long-term plans for world communism. Among the Stalinist governments of the Eastern Bloc, the Rákosi government of the Hungarian People's Republic was most repressive of political, sexual, and religious minorities.
In 1949, the Rákosi government arrested, tortured, and convicted Cardinal József Mindszenty in a show trial for treason against Hungary, for collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Holocaust in Hungary—religious persecution of Hungarian Jews and political persecution of Hungarian communists and anti-Nazis. In fact, Mindszenty had been an active opponent of the Nazi government, encouraged Hungarian Catholics not to vote for the Arrow Cross Party, and was imprisoned for this dissent by the Arrow Cross-led Government of National Unity.
Political repression
In 1950–1952, the ÁVH forcibly relocated more than 26,000 non-communist Hungarians and confiscated their housing for members of the Communist Party of Hungary, thus eliminating political threats posed by the nationalist and anti-communist intelligentsia and local bourgeoisie. According to their particular politics, anti-communist Hungarians were either imprisoned in concentration camps, deported to the USSR, or killed, either summarily or after a show trial; the victims included the communist politician László Rajk, the minister of the interior who established the ÁVH secret police.
The Rákosi government politicized the education system with a "toiling intelligentsia" who assisted in Hungary's Russification; thus the study of Russian language and communist political instruction were mandatory at school and at university; religious schools were nationalized, and church leaders replaced by communist officials.
Economic decline
In the early 1950s, the Rákosi government's socialist economics increased the per capita income of the Hungarian people, yet their standard of living diminished because of the compulsory financial contributions toward the industrialization of Hungary, which reduced workers' disposable income. The economic hardships that resulted were further exacerbated by bureaucratic mismanagement of resources, which resulted in shortages, and the subsequent rationing of food. Hungarian workers' disposable income in 1952 was two-thirds of that in 1938.
Besides paying for the Red Army occupation of socialist Hungary, the Hungarians also paid war reparations (US$300 million) to the USSR, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1946, the Hungarian National Bank reported that the cost of war reparations was "between 19 and 22 percentile of the annual national income" of Hungary, an onerous national expense aggravated by the hyperinflation consequent to the postwar depreciation of the Hungarian pengő. Moreover, participation in the Soviet-sponsored Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) prevented direct trade with the countries of the West, and also prevented the Hungarian People's Republic from receiving American financial aid through the Marshall Plan (1948). Socially, the imposition of Soviet-style economic policies and the payment of war reparations angered the peoples of Hungary, while the cumulative effects of economic austerity fueled anti-Soviet political discontent as the payment of foreign debt took precedence over the material needs of the Hungarian people.
International events
De–Stalinization
On 5 March 1953, the death of Stalin allowed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to proceed with the de-Stalinization of the USSR, a relative liberalization of politics that subsequently allowed most European communist parties and the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact to develop a reformist wing—within the structures of the philosophy of Marxism and orders from Moscow. Hence, the reformist communist Imre Nagy became prime minister (1953–55) of the Hungarian People's Republic, replacing the Stalinist Rákosi (1952–53), whose heavy-handed style of communist government had proved counterproductive to the USSR's interests in Hungary.
Despite not being prime minister, Rákosi remained politically powerful as the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, and so undermined many of the Nagy government's political and socioeconomic reforms; by 18 April 1955, he had so discredited Nagy that the USSR deposed Nagy as Socialist Hungary's head of state. Three months of plotting and conspiring rid Rákosi and the Hungarian Communist Party of Nagy, who was reduced to a political non-person. On 14 April Nagy was stripped of his Hungarian Communist Party offices and functions. On 18 April he was sacked as prime minister. Despite having been out of political favour with the USSR since January 1955, Nagy had refused to perform the requisite communist penance of self-criticism and refused to resign.
In February 1956, as First Secretary of the CPSU Nikita Khrushchev initiated the de-Stalinization of the USSR with the speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, which catalogued and denounced the abuses of power Stalin and his inner-circle protégés committed, in Russia and abroad. Therefore, the de-Stalinization of Hungarian People's Republic featured Rákosi's dismissal as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Hungary, and his replacement by Ernő Gerő, on 18 July 1956.
The countries of western Europe cooperated with the CIA's propaganda radio network, Radio Free Europe, to broadcast Khrushchev's speech to the countries of eastern Europe, expecting that it would destabilize the Warsaw Pact countries' internal politics.
The establishing of the Warsaw Pact
On 14 May 1955, with the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, the USSR established the Warsaw Pact with seven countries of the Eastern Bloc, including the Hungarian People's Republic. The geopolitical principles of the Warsaw Pact defence treaty included "respect for the independence and [the] sovereignty of [the member] states" and the practice of "non-interference in their internal affairs". Then, on 15 May 1955, a day after the USSR established the Warsaw Pact, the Austrian State Treaty established Austria as a neutral country in the geopolitical cold war between the US and the USSR. Austria's declaration of geopolitical neutrality allowed Nagy's government to publicly consider "the possibility of Hungary adopting a neutral status on the Austrian pattern".
In June 1956, the Polish Army violently repressed the workers' uprising at Poznań against the economic policies of the Polish People's Republic. In October, the Polish government appointed the politically rehabilitated, reform communist Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party to deal with the USSR, and, by 19 October 1956, Gomułka had negotiated greater trade agreements and fewer Red Army troops stationed in Poland. The USSR's concessions to Poland—known as the Polish October—emboldened Hungarians to demand from the USSR like concessions for the Hungarian People's Republic, which contributed to Hungarians' greatly idealistic politics in October 1956.
Uprising and Revolution
Political discontent
On 13 October 1956, a group of 12 students from the university faculties in Szeged met to play cards, and snubbed the DISZ, the official communist student union, by reestablishing the MEFESZ (Union of Hungarian University and Academy Students), the democratic student union banned by the Stalinist Rákosi government. The MEFESZ students distributed handwritten notes in classrooms to inform faculty and students of the time and place for the meeting on 16 October 1956. A professor of law was chairman of committee who formally reestablished the MEFESZ student union, with the proclamation and publication of a twenty-demand manifesto, ten about the MEFESZ, and ten anti-Soviet demands, e.g. free elections and the departure of Soviet troops from Hungary; days later, university students at Pécs, Miskolc, and Sopron followed suit.