I was a 12-year-old Dublin schoolboy when the Hungarian Revolution erupted in the late autumn of 1956. One of Dublin’s evening papers led with the headline “Blood flows freely in burning city.” We found this very exciting.
In the pre-television age, our schoolboy impressions were based on newspaper reports and photos, radio bulletins and cinema newsreels. One of the latter was particularly striking.
Filmed in Budapest, it featured a freedom fighter creeping up on a Soviet tank, popping a Molotov cocktail down the gun barrel, and racing away as the whole thing went up in flames. We loved to revisit that image in the schoolyard. It was like a movie, with the bonus of being real.
Although the root cause of the uprising can be traced to Joseph Stalin’s post-Second World War imposition of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, history records a couple of more immediate prompts.
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev catalogued Stalin’s crimes at the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. That sent shock waves around the communist world. With Stalin dead, Khrushchev’s motivation may have been to rescue communism from Stalinism’s poisoned path. But there were unanticipated repercussions.
Communism was supposed to be scientific and error-free. But as historian John Lewis Gaddis said, “A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption.” If the emperor was suddenly revealed with no clothes, then maybe the march of history wasn’t inevitable after all.
Then came unrest in Poland, which culminated in the Polish Communist Party bringing the previously purged Wladyslaw Gomulka back to power. Khrushchev didn’t like it, going so far as to threaten the Poles with the Soviet Army before backing down and accepting the new government. It seemed as if Moscow’s grip might be loosening.
Hungary was the next flashpoint and the country was in full revolt by late October. For a heady moment, the Soviets appeared to back away and the rebels seemed to have won. There was even talk of Hungary quitting the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led military alliance established in 1955.
But within a few days, Moscow’s reluctant acceptance of Hungarian events changed. The Poles may have been behaving with unwelcome feistiness, but Gomulka was still a reliable communist. What the Hungarians were talking about potentially went much further.
So the Soviet Army re-entered Budapest on Nov. 4 and put down the rebellion in relatively short order. There was plenty of brutality in the process. Estimates of Hungarian deaths run into the thousands.
Meanwhile, Ireland had no problem deciding where its sympathies lay.
For one thing, the narrative of brave Hungarian rebels fighting against a stronger foreign foe resonated with Ireland’s interpretation of its own national experience. We could, we thought, see ourselves in the faces of the freedom fighters dying in the streets of Budapest.
There was also the anti-communist imperative associated with the devout Catholicism of the day. Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, the imprisoned primate of Hungary, was an appropriately visible symbol of religious resistance.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Ireland agreed to accept a token number of the approximately 200,000 Hungarian refugees who had poured across the border into Austria.
However, good intentions notwithstanding, it didn’t work out particularly well.
Enthusiasm was high when the first of the 541 refugees arrived in late November. There were church-gate collections for money, and donations of medical supplies, food, blankets and clothing.
But 1956 Ireland was a relatively poor country. Winters were cold and damp, unemployment was high, and large numbers of its own people were emigrating in search of a better life. The bottom line was that Ireland offered few prospects for refugees, many of whom didn’t speak English.
So disillusionment soon set in on all sides. Unhappy with their conditions, the refugees went so far as to launch a hunger strike and Irish public opinion chilled. By the late summer of 1958, most of the refugees had moved on, many to Canada.
As it invariably does, reality insisted on a reckoning. The excitement was gone and only the messy consequences remained.
Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well perhaps a little bit.
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