“Even though its outcome was a tragic defeat, in which at least 20,000 Hungarian workers were killed and countless others injured, imprisoned and forced into hiding or exile, it nevertheless was undoubtedly the most significant pointer to future developments in the Stalinist states since the consolidation of the bureaucracy around Stalin in the 1920s. It was the most vivid confirmation of the perspectives of Trotsky, that the workers under Stalinist dictatorship, far from accepting their conditions or demanding a return to capitalism, would move in a political revolution to take power into their own hands. The tremendously inspiring events of the Hungarian October are full of lessons for the workers of Eastern Europe and the whole world.”
Looking back on the 1950s, i.e. a time when American’s most cynical anti-communists were painting the decade as the world’s final stand against an all-encompassing (but in many cases imaginary) monstrous-unitary communism, European communism was actually being challenged on numerous fronts.
Earlier in the decade, Tito had already taken Yugoslavia onto its on course. Under Tito, Yugoslavia would come to have a primary position in the non-aligned movement
Albania would eventually soon find its way into Chinese orbit. Click here.
These events took place in the 1950s as Khrushchev’s took-over of the Kremlin, and the end to Stalinism had finally led to questioning in Europe of the universalist paradigm for communism. It was no longer held as a truism that communism needed to be seated firmly in the Soviet Union to exist.
“The whole of the Eastern Bloc was awash with discontent. The floodgates had begun to burst even as early as 1953 with a massive strike wave and street fighting in East Germany. In Plzen and Prague, Czechoslovakia there had been riots. In the Hungarian industrial towns of Csepel, Ozd and Diosgyor the masses had come onto the streets in protest against the conditions. Even within the Soviet Union there had been strikes and protests amongst the prisoners within the labour camps. In May 1956 vast numbers of Russian troops and armoured vehicles were sent into Tiblisi, capital of Georgia, to crush an uprising sparked off by austerity measures. In June 1956 the workers of Poznan, in Poland rose. Inevitably this also had an effect on the young people inside the state forces.”
A common image in Eastern (and Western) European communist circles was that the Soviet Union’s bigwigs were eating fat while communist parties and peoples outside the Soviet Union were having to scrounge on what the Soviet occupations left behind. Click here.
In short, from the time of the death of Stalin through the collapse of the Soviet Union 45 years later, Eastern European peoples and states were often looking either for economic or political freedom—and some were willing to challenge the Russian Bear to do it.
Often, though, as was the case in Hungary in 1956 and in then Czechoslovakia in 1968, both the people and anti-Soviet portion of the communist party leadership had been forced to back down.
NOTE: It was almost always anticipated that the rise of the independent union, Solidarnosz in the 1980would lead to such a crackdown. Howevr, miraculously, in a period of three years, 1982 to 1985, the Soviet Union saw an unprecedented four leaders. Click here.
This meant that Solidarnosz or Solidarity in Poland was allowed to grow--even in time of martial law. This unprecedented topsy-turvy situation in the Kremlin enabled both Hungary and Poland to move towards the West in terms of political economic orientation. Click here.
Certainly, by 1982, Hungary was doing many things that no other communist state had done before. For example, that year Hungary became the first COMECON nation to enter both GATT and the IMF. (COMECON was roughly the Eastern European equivalent to the rise of the European Economic Community in the West.) Soon Hungary’s trade with non-COMECON states, especially West Germany and Austria, outgrew its trade within COMECON.
“Goulash (Hungarian) Communism”, as it grew from 1956 onwards, was marked by greater concern for the material well-being of its citizens. In short, over the decades in evolutionary fashion, Hungary’s communism was “mobilized to better satisfy consumer demand by providing a more extensive assortment of goods.” This included allowing limited numbers of market mechanisms to function rather freely in Hungary.
I witnessed many scenes of this market-opening communism first hand as I arrived by train in Budapest in September 1987.
In fact, the city was much more opulent than the wealthier capital of East Germany (namely East Berlin) which I had already visited several times. However, unlike in East Germany poverty in Hungary’s development was not hidden from foreigners. One saw it by the homeless in the railway stations.
Loads of retirees and entrepreneurs met foreigners coming from Vienna on the trade trying to hook passengers up with fun holiday happenings and rooms or homes for rent.
At the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna, I had met two Jews from Latin America, and we had decided to stick together and try to book a room or an apartment. Alas, we had arrived late on a Saturday afternoon and most tourists had already come through the station.
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