As often happens with public action, Hungarians chanted diverse, and often mutually exclusive, mottoes. The activists were also a motley crew, including hoodlums.
The figure "1956" loomed behind the drama. Hungary possesses a dynamic civil society, which exploded with indignation at the revelation that the government was telling it fairly tales-an instance of politics shrugging off morals. The public thirst for the truth is a legacy of the 1956 tragedy, a lesson Hungarians learned by heart.
Every official national mythology includes legitimate events that cement the nation together. In Hungary, that event took place on October 23, 1956-the day that 100,000 people turned out to demonstrate in Budapest. That was when Soviet troops entered the Hungarian capital, and Imre Nagy, a Marxist-Leninist turned patriot, was appointed prime minister. The unrest developed into a revolution.
The events in Hungary of 50 years ago were also a landmark in Russian history-a day no less crucial and sinister than August 21, 1968. That was when Soviet troops entered Prague. Their deployment might have been meant to prevent a repeat of the events in Hungary. Soviet leaders hesitated on both occasions over whether to use force. Hard-liners prevailed on both occasions out of fear that satellites would break away, robbing the U.S.S.R. of its more or less monolithic geopolitical and ideological influence zones, and that the communist political system would become more moderate.
Soviet rulers were loath to allow Hungary to shift to a multi-party system. At the same time, they did not want to spoil the global impression created by The Thaw, which aimed to rid the country of Stalinist tyranny. On October 30, 1956, however, the public uprising got out of hand and took on a pronounced anti-communist slant. Hungary announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The re-appearance of Soviet troops became inevitable.
Russia shares dramatic chapters of its history with Hungary and the Czech Republic and, for that matter, with certain other East European countries. Its national penance includes reappraising those chapters. The Hungarian tragedy of fifty years ago has not been in the center of the Russian public stage lately-yet in February 2006, the Russian president laid wreaths at a monument to the 1956 victims. That was when he said the memorable words: "To be sure, we had many problems in the past. The 1956 events were among them. President Boris Yeltsin invoked them in 1992 to denounce what Soviet leaders did then. Contemporary Russia is not the Soviet Union, but we-all of us-feel morally responsible for those events. It is our duty now to remember the past as we look into the future."
The tragedy killed more than 2,500 Hungarian civilians and over 700 Soviet officers and men. All of them fell victim to a big geopolitical gamble and to the fear of change that obsessed the Soviet regime. Any geopolitical motives, even the most ambitious, are certainly not worth the human lives sacrificed on their altar. That is the principal lesson the bloody autumn of 1956 taught the world.
