Seventy years ago, a clash between Hungarian students and police outside a Budapest radio building began one of Europe’s major revolutions. A 17-year-old student later said no one thought the gathering would end in revolution. By the next morning an atmosphere of revolution hung over the city. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets, built barricades and fought the secret police and tanks. Workers struck, seized workplaces and set up their own grassroots bodies as an alternative political power.
The students had planned the 23 October protest in solidarity with Poland, where workers were fighting their own Stalinist regime. The account traces the crisis to the years after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Eastern Europe’s ruling bureaucracies split between those who wanted to keep his methods and reformers who wanted easier repression and less stress on heavy industry. Imre Nagy was installed as a reforming prime minister, then forced out in 1955. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev removed Matyas Rakosi, who was replaced by Erno Gero. Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s methods and the cult of personality shook the region’s rulers and opened space for people to question the system. Writers, journalists, professionals and junior officers showed discontent first. The Petofi Circle, tied to the party youth organisation, held debates, and anger was also growing in workplaces.
At 12.53pm on 23 October the music on Radio Kossuth stopped. The host read a communique from Interior Minister Laszlo Piros banning public meetings and demonstrations until further notice, in order to assure public order. Deputy interior minister Mihaly Fekete then lifted the ban for a student meeting at Polytechnic University. The station reported that employees and communists in his ministry had “rallied to the side of honest Hungarians in the interests of change”. At 2.23pm listeners were told that Piros had withdrawn the ban, and that party first secretary Erno Gero would speak at 8pm.
Shortly before 3pm students gathered at the statue of Petofi, a poet of the 1848 revolution, then marched to the Bem statue. Peter Veres, president of the Writers’ Association, read a seven-point programme. He accused party leaders of organising to restore the terror of Stalin and Rakosi. The points demanded free, secret-ballot elections, factories directed by workers and technicians, trade unions that represented the Hungarian working class, and posts for Nagy and his allies. About 50,000 people, mainly students and writers, crossed the Danube and marched on parliament. Workers who had finished their shifts joined them. By 8pm more than 200,000 people were on the streets.
The students’ Sixteen Point Manifesto went further than the writers and demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops, where the writers had sought a review of treaties. The crowd cheered Nagy, then whistled him down. A newspaper reported that he said the historical situation was complicated and that everyone should go home and wait. On the air, Gero accused the students of “barefaced lies” and “hostile slanders” against the Soviet Union and asked workers whether they wanted a socialist democracy or a bourgeois democracy.
The crowd split. Thousands tore down the giant Stalin monument with hammers, iron pipes and other tools. An eyewitness told the Manchester Guardian that the monument was broken into countless pieces. Another group marched on the Radio Kossuth building and demanded that their demands be broadcast. At 10.30pm a delegation that entered to negotiate was seized by the AVH secret police. The crowd tried to storm the doors while police threw tear gas. The AVH opened fire with machine guns, and a murdered protester lay in a pool of blood. The next day protests and strikes spread through the major towns and cities.
In Budapest many of the 1,200 police officers came over to the revolution. The army, largely working-class and peasant conscripts, was paralysed as soldiers disobeyed orders. General Gyurko’s Third Army Corps did go into battle, using Russian MiG jets against crowds in Tiszakecske and Kecskemet and killing hundreds of protesters, while also facing insubordination over a broader airborne campaign. Gero’s last act was to request Russian tanks in Budapest. Within 72 hours a mass insurgency spread across the country. In the capital, young people, including schoolchildren, fought street to street. Soldiers and officers, including Colonel Pal Maleter, joined the revolution and turned their guns on the Russians.
Nagy was appointed prime minister on 24 October and Janos Kadar became first secretary. The government hoped reforms would restore the bureaucracy’s legitimacy and bring the movement under the reformers’ control. Workers’ councils applied pressure from another direction. The first was set up on 24 October at the United Electric factory, which employed 10,000 people. A young worker told the Observer that on 23 October they had talked at work about wages and the writers’ meeting, joined the students afterwards, and that the factory revolt the next morning was spontaneous and led by young workers.
Councils and factory committees then spread through Budapest workplaces and neighbourhoods, especially in Ujpest, Obuda, Angyalfold and Csepel. District workers’ councils were set up there between 29 and 30 October. The next day delegates from 24 plants held a Parliament of Workers’ Councils of Budapest. They resolved that a democratically elected workers’ council was the factory’s supreme body, that it would elect the director and the highest employees, and that the director was responsible to the council in every matter concerning the factory.
Miskolc was the second-largest centre. On 27 October local radio said the town had for two days been under the leadership of the workers’ council and student parliament, which later linked with others in the Borsod County Workers’ Council. In Gyor the AVH fired on a relatively small demonstration on 24 October. Strikes spread, state authority collapsed, and the National Revolutionary Committee took its place on 26 October. In Szeged, a town of about 10,000 people, factory councils and student groups formed a People’s Revolutionary Council on 30 October. In many places the councils formed national-guard militias to defend themselves from Soviet forces and the security police. The account describes Hungary at that point as the situation Lenin called dual power.