On 23 October 1956, students marched from the Technical University in Buda across to the Parliament in Pest. By nightfall a crowd had pulled down the Stalin statue in Városliget, cutting it off at the ankles and leaving the boots on the plinth. Within days the government had collapsed, the secret police had fired on unarmed demonstrators, Soviet troops had entered the city and then withdrawn, and Hungary had announced it was leaving the Warsaw Pact.
Twelve days later it was over.
How it started
Hungary after 1949 was run by Mátyás Rákosi, who called himself Stalin’s best pupil and meant it. Show trials, a secret police force — the ÁVH — with a reach into every workplace, forced collectivisation, and an economy bent towards heavy industry it had no use for. Several hundred thousand people were subject to some form of police proceeding in a country of nine million.
Stalin’s death in 1953 loosened things. Imre Nagy, a reform communist, became prime minister and slowed the worst of it, then was removed in 1955. Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956, and the Polish protests of that October, made the situation combustible.
The students’ sixteen demands, drawn up on 22 October, asked for Soviet troop withdrawal, free elections, freedom of the press and Nagy’s return.
The twelve days
The demonstration on 23 October was peaceful. That evening, ÁVH guards fired on a crowd outside the Radio building on Bródy Sándor utca — the bullet marks are still in the walls — and the uprising became armed. Workers’ councils formed across the country. Soviet units already in Hungary were fought to a standstill in the streets by teenagers with petrol bombs, particularly around the Corvin cinema in District VIII, where the alley layout suited defenders.
Nagy returned as prime minister, announced a multi-party system, and on 1 November declared Hungarian neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
The West did not intervene. Radio Free Europe had for years broadcast material that many Hungarians heard as a promise of help, and no help came. The Suez crisis was occupying Britain and France in exactly the same days.
On 4 November the Soviet army returned in force — thousands of tanks, a full operation. Organised resistance in Budapest was broken within a week, though strikes continued into December.
The reprisals
Around 2,500 Hungarians were killed and 200,000, some two per cent of the population, left the country. Some 22,000 were sentenced, and 229 were executed, Nagy among them in 1958 after a secret trial. He was buried face-down in an unmarked plot in the New Public Cemetery.
János Kádár, installed by the Soviets, ran Hungary for the next thirty-two years. After the initial terror he settled into what became known as goulash communism: a tacit bargain in which the state relaxed its grip on private life, allowed small private enterprise and a decent standard of living, and in return nobody mentioned 1956. It was the most comfortable country in the bloc and the least willing to discuss its own recent past.
1989
On 16 June 1989, Imre Nagy and four others were reburied at Heroes’ Square before a crowd of a quarter of a million. A young Viktor Orbán, then a liberal activist, used the occasion to demand Soviet troop withdrawal. Four months later the Republic was declared, on 23 October — the anniversary, chosen deliberately.
Where to see it in Budapest
The House of Terror at Andrássy út 60 was the ÁVH headquarters and is the obvious place, though it is a partisan account and worth reading around.
Memento Park holds the replica Stalin boots and the statuary that came down in 1989.
The Corvin köz in District VIII has a memorial to the fighters who held it. Kossuth tér, outside the Parliament, has an underground memorial to those shot there on 25 October. Bullet holes remain visible on buildings around Bródy Sándor utca and elsewhere if you look up.
The flag with a hole cut out of the centre — the communist arms removed — is the emblem of that autumn, and you will see it on 23 October, which remains a national holiday.
Why it matters to how Budapest feels
Two things follow from 1956 that a visitor will notice.
The first is that Hungary’s relationship with monuments is unusually complicated, and you can see the argument in the street. The Liberty Statue on Gellért Hill kept its figure and lost its inscription. The Soviet war memorial on Szabadság tér is still standing and is still contested every few years. The statues that came down went to a field rather than a furnace. A country that has rewritten its public sculpture this often develops a certain scepticism about all of it.
The second is the long quiet of the Kádár years. Between 1963 and 1989 Hungary was materially the most comfortable country in the Eastern bloc, and the price was an agreement not to discuss what had happened in 1956 — not in schools, not in print, not usually at home. Several generations grew up with a hole in the middle of the national story. The intensity with which Budapest now marks 23 October, and the number of memorials put up since 1989, is what filling that hole looks like.
Reading and watching
Sándor Márai’s diaries cover the period from exile. The Bridge at Andau by James Michener is a contemporary account by a journalist who was at the Austrian border as the refugees crossed. For film, Children of Glory dramatises the Melbourne Olympics water polo match played weeks after the invasion, when the Hungarian and Soviet teams met and the water turned red.