Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Over the succeeding five days fighting broke out between students and workers wielding Molotov cocktails and Soviet tanks trying to negotiate the narrow streets of Budapest. Not a single instance was recorded of Hungarian troops fighting on the Soviet side against their fellow countrymen. Even the Soviet troops themselves seemed reluctant to push forward with the attack. As the U.N. report noted, “Soviet forces normally stationed in Hungary or Romania had been affected by their surroundings. . . . The civilians whom they fought included women, children, and elderly people. [Soviet troops] could see that the people were unanimous in their fight against the AVH and foreign intervention; that the men whom the Soviet Army was fighting and the prisoners who were captured were not fascists, but workers and students, who demonstrably regarded Soviet soldiers not as liberators, but as oppressors.”⁶

On the morning of October 24, Imre Nagy, having been readmitted to the party a week earlier, was elected to the Politburo and hastily appointed prime minister. It was a gesture designed to calm the crowds, which by then had broken the power of the AVH, while the Soviets were taking losses in the street fighting. The events of October 24 and 25 were extremely confused, and people did not know whether Nagy was actually in power or even whether he was fully on their side until later in the month. On October 25, Janos Kadar replaced Gero as first secretary of the party, and Gero fled to the USSR. Only on October 27 was Nagy finally able to form a government, into which he invited both Communists and non-Communists as ministers. The people of Hungary then accepted Nagy as their leader, having concluded that although he was a Communist he was also a good Hungarian. In the few days remaining to him, Imre Nagy ordered a cease-fire (which the insurgents honored), asked the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces from Hungary, ordered the AVH abolished, released all political prisoners, withdrew his country from the Warsaw Pact, and asked the international community to defend Hungary’s neutrality. This was obviously far more than Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders had bargained for or were prepared to countenance.

On November 4, 1956, at 5:20 in the morning, Nagy announced over Radio Budapest that Soviet forces in battle formation had invaded the city with the intent to overthrow the legal government of Hungary. This second Soviet attack, using troops from central Asia who had been led to believe that they were being sent to Egypt to fight against British and French “imperialists,” was swift and thorough.⁷ By eight A.M. that same morning, Soviet tanks were in control of the Danube bridges. Imre Nagy, Laszlo Rajk’s widow, and several other democrats and women and children sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. The Soviet Union promised them safe passage out of Hungary, but the bus taking them from Yugoslavia’s embassy delivered them not to the border but to the headquarters of the Soviet military command. They were never heard from again. In 1958, the Hungarian government announced that Nagy had been secretly tried and executed.

Janos Kadar entered the Hungarian capital in the baggage train of the Soviet invaders and re-created single-party rule under the Hungarian Workers Party. Kadar and the USSR announced to the world that they had successfully prevented an attempt “to overthrow socialism in Hungary and to restore the capitalists and landowners to power.” Kadar thanked the Soviet Union for its assistance in defeating the “reactionary forces.” All fighting in Hungary was over by November 6, although in the interim some 190,000 students, liberals, and intellectuals managed to flee the country via Austria. The Soviet Union also deported a large but unknown number of Hungarians to the gulags of Russia.

In Korea, the roots of the Kwangju rebellion went back to General Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état of 1961. The previous year, students protesting Syngman Rhee’s flagrant corruption and rigged elections had brought down his regime. However, the democratic government they created was ineffective. Park, a graduate of a Japanese military academy in Manchuria, staged a military coup. Once in power he announced as his goals the end of South Korea’s extreme dependence on American economic aid and restoring relations with Japan. His economic reforms succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, surprising the Americans in charge of Korean affairs, who despite the evidence from Japan refused to believe that authoritarian guidance of the market could produce high-speed economic growth.