WHEN Soviet party leader Nikita Kruschev denounced the crimes of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, he triggered off a severe crisis for the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe. Workers revolted in the Polish city of Poznan. In Budapest in Hungary a mass student demonstration in solidarity with the Polish workers led to armed clashes with the authorities.
The Soviet army intervened on 24 October and installed a new government under the 'reform-communist' Imre Nagy. But the demands of the masses became more radical. And as the working class began to organise itself independently in Workers Councils, the Nagy government was forced to concede the popular demands for greater democracy and independence.
The Soviets then intervened a second time on 4 November to crush the Nagy government. The armed resistance of the working class against the puppet regime of Janos Kadar continued for months before it was eventually defeated. Joe Singleton recalls the events of the Hungarian revolution some twenty five years ago.
IMRE NAGY, the 'reform communist', was installed as head of the Hungarian government by the Soviet intervention of 24 October. He immediately agreed to the imposition of martial law, approved by the Russians, denouncing, 'the small number of counter-revolutionaries who have launched an armed attack on our peoples republic'.
The main organised support for Nagy in the party came from the journalists around the party paper and the intellectuals. The Petofi Circle, which played a prominent part before the uprising in organising among the intellectuals, was a circle of the CP youth organisation in Budapest.
Another inner-party group which supported Nagy was the small group of intellectuals around Georg Lukacs. The latter were not in any sense, however, an organised political group and remained somewhat aloof from events both inside and outside the party. Lukacs joined the Nagy government after the first invasion.
The intellectuals had very little contact with what was going on inside the working class. The populist-nationalism and peasant orientation of the Nagy group fitted well into the traditional ideological bent of the radical Hungarian intelligentsia. They were by and large disoriented by the popular uprising on 24 October.
The politics of the Nagy group, and certainly of Nagy himself, evolved in a rapid manner after Nagy took over the government. They oriented on the one hand towards the peasantry and on the other towards the old bourgeois parties of pre-1945 which at this point were powerless components of the CP-dominated Peoples Patriotic Front.
Miklos Krasso, a young party intellectual at the time who played a role in the formation of the workers' councils, describes the Nagy group in this way:
'Imre Nagy had his court where these awful former Stalinist hacks collected, who then became anti-Stalinists and professional anti-communists after 1956. And partly the populists who were formerly in the National Peasants Party and then cabinet ministers in the Stalinist period. The Lukacs group had this cultural and, to my mind, political line, while the Imre Nagyists had this demagogy with the posters calling on ''Patriots'' and this absolute obsession with the peasants as if the workers didn't matter.'
It wasn't until after the second invasion on 4 November, when they were already defeated, that the Nagy leadership attempted to establish some links with the working class.
When the Nagy group came to power, the old Stalinist leaders were completely discredited and fled from Budapest in Soviet planes. Kadar replaced Gerö at the head of the party.
From then until the crushing of the Nagy government by the Soviets on 4 November the two main forces in the struggle, the 'reform communists' and the working class, began to move more in unison. At the same time the distinct political interests of both groups diverged more clearly.
The Nagy government, by calling for a Russian withdrawal and for a multi-party system, placed itself in tune with the basic demands of the insurgent masses and the working class. For this reason the workers supported the Nagy government.
But as the workers began to organise themselves independently in councils, first in the factories and then in the districts and the capital city itself, they began to develop a programme of demands and organs of popular power which had little in common with the popular coalition plans with which Imre Negy hoped to salvage the basic hierarchy of power and the 'nation'.
When Soviet tanks occupied Hungary on 4
November and installed the puppet regime of Janos Kadar, all the various bourgeois and right wing forces that had hoped to profit from the revolution disappeared almost overnight. The Nagy current disintegrated, its leadership finding refuge in the Jugoslav embassy.
It was then that the working class entered the scene as the only real force capable of defending the revolution. In fact it was only after the invasion that the Hungarian workers began to politically organise themselves as a class against the Stalinists.
The disarray of the central power after 24 October made it possible for the workers to organise themselves independently of the Nagy government, especially in the provinces, but also later in Budapest. Already on 24 October a workers' council was formed in the United Lamp Factory in Ujpest, an industrial centre to the north of Budapest. There were 10,000 workers in this factory.
In the days that followed councils were set up in most of the major factories in and around the city. Delegates from councils in 24 large enterprises met on 31 October. They formulated a 9-point programme setting out the rights of councils, which included:
*The factory belongs to the workers.
*The supreme authority in the factory is the democratically elected workers' council.
*The workers' councils appoint the director of the factory.
*The director is accountable to the workers' council.
*The workers' councils decide on all matters involving projects, wages, foreign contracts and credit.
*The council decides on all questions of hiring and firing.
When the Russians invaded on 4 November the councils called an immediate general strike which was total and lasted for one month.
Although the strike was the main weapon in the hands of the workers, the statistics show that it was also the working class that put up the greatest armed resistance to the invasion. The fighting lasted until 11 November in the traditional working class stronghold of Csepel.
Another statistical publication records that: 'The greatest number of deaths during the armed combat was recorded in the 8th (22 per cent), 9th (14 per cent) and 7th (13 per cent) Districts.' These are among the principal working class areas of Budapest. And finally: 'According to the figures supplied by the hospitals 80-90 per cent of the wounded were young workers, while students represented 3-5 per cent.'
After 4 November the Kadar regime knew that the armed resistance was not the main problem. Kadar's policy was to pursue a long term political struggle with the workers' councils as a preparation for a final confrontation. As long as the councils refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Kadar government this confrontation was inevitable.
But in the meantime the regime took a conciliatory pose. In his programme broadcast on 4 November Kadar declared that: 'On the basis of the broadest democracy workers' management should be realised in all factories and enterprises.'
Point 11 of this programme stated that: 'Democratic elections will be guaranteed in all existing administrative bodies and in the revolutionary councils'. On 15 November he told representative of the workers' councils: 'We surrender the party's monopoly: we want a multi-party system and clean and honest elections.'
The workers however maintained the general strike. The Soviet military also dealt directly with the Workers' Council, going over the head of the CP and ignoring the so-called coalition parties. On 14 November, 10 days after the invasion, a mass assembly of delegates elected a Central Workers' Council for the city of Budapest.
It drew up a programme which declared, 'our unshaken loyalty to the principles of socialism. We regard the means of production as collective property which we are at all times ready to defend'. It drew up a set of demands which included:
*non-recognition of the Kadar government and the return of Imre Nagy.
*release of all political prisoners.
*withdrawal of Soviet troops.
*an end to the false information in the media.
*a multi-party system which recognises parties 'that base themselves on socialism'.
The period after the invasion was one of continuous struggle between the Workers' Council and the Kadar regime. The radical intelligentsia came more and more to recognise the central role played by the working class.
Shortly before it was dissolved by the Kadar regime the Revolutionary Council of Hungarian Intellectuals, whose president was the famous composer Zoltan Kodaly, issued a declaration of 'complete solidarity with the workers councils' which recognised that the working class was 'the strongest mass force capable of defending the achievements of the revolution'.
Finally the Nagy leadership, including Lukacs, which was still in the Jugoslav embassy, issued a statement which recognised the importance of the councils: 'The central government of the Hungarian Peoples Republic should first and foremost rely for its support on the workers' councils.'
The growth of the working class movement after the invasion and the escalating confrontation with the illegal Kadar regime was also accompanied by the beginnings of debate and political differentiation inside the workers' movement itself. This political differentiation had a lot to do with the different backgrounds and experiences of the workers who played leading roles in the struggle.
About half of the delegates to the Workers' Council were young workers in their early twenties. They had grown up in post-1945 Hungary, and had internalised and taken for granted the many social transformations that had taken place during the previous 10 years.
The other main group in the leadership consisted of older worker militants that had been active in the workers' movement under the Horthy regime before 1945. Many were skilled workers and often members of the old Social Democratic Party.
The political role of the workers' councils as organs of workers' power were not clearly recognised from the beginning. The demands of the factory councils often dealt mainly with the question of the running of the enterprises. The district and regional councils were however clearly more political organisations.
Likewise all of the councils raised political demands — for a multi-party system, for free elections, and so on. The leader of the Central Council was Sandor Bali. Bali was one of the older militants from the pre-war Metalworkers Union, a social democratic stronghold.
He argued: 'We know quite well that the workers' councils can't be political organisations.... We know that the workers' councils will become the directing organs of the country's economy, and of course we welcome this. But we don't want to commit the same mistake that the party made in the past, when it was at one and the same time the master of the country and of the factories, and the only organisation representing the interests of the workers. If we make the same mistake then we'll be back where we started.'
On 22 November the government passed a decree which attempted to limit the Council's authority to economic matters. Then on 27 November Kadar denounced the councils as 'counter-revolutionary'.
During the revolution many of the councils had dismissed factory directors. Now the struggle began in the factories as the Kadar regime sought by repressive and intimidatory measures to reinstate the sacked directors.
This confrontation strengthened those who argued that the councils should play a more political role. As one of the council leaders, Miklos Sebestyen, later wrote: 'The time had now come... to assert ourselves as a political force recognised as such by the people'.
Plans were underway to establish a national Workers' Council for the whole country, but from the end of November outright repression increased considerably and threw the workers' councils on the defensive. When the Budapest Central Council decided to bring out its own newspaper to counter the lies of the official media the police raided the printing premises and seized all copies.
At the beginning of December some 200 members of various councils were arrested and on 9 December a majority of members of the Central Council were arrested and a government decree declared the Budapest Central Council dissolved.
The response of the workers was a general strike throughout the country which was probably the biggest in Hungary's history. The government then declared a state of emergency. On 1 January the Soviet leaders visited Budapest and a few days later the death penalty was extended to striking or inciting to strike.
On 15 January 1957 the Budapest Central Council issued its final appeal to the workers: 'Because of the terror, and the death penalty for even distributing leaflets, the Council exhorts the workers to spread all news concerning the underground by word of mouth. Sabotage and passive resistance are the order of the day.'
Sabotage and passive resistance continued throughout 1957 but the councils had been broken. They were finally dissolved by government decree on 17 November 1957.
The repression organised by Kadar was ruthless. At least 2000 people were executed and more than 20,000 imprisoned. Political parties were forbidden, the revolution was now declared to have been a 'counter-revolution' and the leader of the 'reform communists', Imre Nagy, was executed.
Thus ended the Hungarian workers' first attempt to create a socialist alternative to Stalinism.