On the night of October 23, 1956, Budapest workers cut a twenty-six-foot bronze Stalin down to his boots; five days after Imre Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, Soviet tanks came back to crush the revolt

By the evening of October 23, 1956, the crowd outside Hungary's parliament in Budapest numbered somewhere past two hundred thousand. What none of them had was a plan for what came next.

How a rally for Poland became a Hungarian uprising

The day started as solidarity with somebody else's politics. Poland's Communist Party had just forced through a reform government under Wladyslaw Gomulka over Moscow's objections, and university students in Budapest wanted to say so in public. They gathered that afternoon at the statue of Jozef Bem, a Polish general who had commanded Hungarian troops in the 1848 revolution (and had fought for Poland's own uprisings before that), and read out sixteen demands: free elections, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, freedom of the press, and the return of Imre Nagy to government.

By late afternoon the crowd had split. One column headed for parliament. Another went to the state radio building, Radio Budapest, to demand the sixteen points be read on air. The hardline Stalinist running the government, Erno Gero, refused.

What happened at the Stalin statue

Around the same hour, a separate crowd went after a twenty-six-foot bronze Stalin erected on Heroes' Square only five years earlier. Ropes weren't enough to bring it down: factory workers arrived with cutting torches and sliced through the ankles instead, and by nightfall nothing was left on the pedestal but a pair of empty boots. A replica of them stands today at Memento Park, the open-air museum outside Budapest where Hungary keeps its retired Communist statuary.

Why the radio station shooting changed everything

At Radio Budapest, a student delegation went inside to negotiate and did not come back out. The crowd outside grew louder and angrier; when a rumor spread that the delegation had been arrested, the AVH (the secret police guarding the building) opened fire from the upper windows.

Historians mark that moment, not the earlier crowds, as the start of an armed revolution. Soldiers sent to reinforce the AVH began handing their rifles to the people they had been sent against. By the next morning, Soviet tanks already stationed near the capital were rolling through the streets, and fighting had spread from students to factory workers, off-duty soldiers, and in places the police themselves.

Could Washington have helped?

The United States never intervened militarily, and the argument over how much it implied it would is still unresolved.

Radio Free Europe, funded by the CIA and broadcasting into Hungary from Munich, covered the fighting around the clock. By every documented account it never instructed listeners to expect American troops. What it did do, in a tone the Wilson Center's later review of the broadcasts calls urgent to the point of recklessness, was cover an uprising the way a network covers a fight it expects its own side to win: Hungarians who tuned in came away believing help was on its way. Konrad Adenauer, then West Germany's chancellor, said publicly afterward that the accusations against RFE were unfounded, and the Council of Europe reached the same conclusion; American and European newspapers at the time argued the opposite. The full broadcast transcripts survive, and the argument still hasn't fully closed, because what a frightened population hears is not always identical to what was said.

Whatever Washington intended, its attention was elsewhere. On October 29, Israel invaded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and Britain and France joined the following week to seize the Suez Canal: a crisis that put two of America's oldest allies on the opposite side of a United Nations vote from Washington, in the same week Hungary needed the Security Council undistracted. The two crises never got separate hearings.

Did the revolution ever have a chance?

For about a week, it looked like it might.

Soviet troops began withdrawing from Budapest on October 30. Nagy, reinstated as prime minister, formed Hungary's first multi-party government since 1948 and, on November 1, announced the country was leaving the Warsaw Pact, declaring neutrality and appealing directly to the United Nations for protection.

The UN never voted on it. Before dawn on November 4, a far larger Soviet force, an estimated 200,000 troops and 2,500 tanks by later counts, moved back into Hungary. Nagy broadcast a brief final message announcing the attack and took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; fighting in pockets of Budapest went on for several more days before it was over.

The death toll has never been settled precisely. Hungarian records compiled over the following years put it at roughly 2,500 to 3,000 dead, alongside an estimated 700 Soviet soldiers killed, and the Hungarian figure is almost certainly low: a government with every reason to minimize its own casualties kept the books, and an unknown number of the dead were never registered or exhumed. Nagy was arrested despite a promise of safe conduct out of the embassy, tried in secret two years later, and hanged on June 16, 1958. He was buried face down in an unmarked grave in a corner of a Budapest cemetery, where he stayed for thirty-one years.

What Hungary does with October 23 now

Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, arrangements the fighters of 1956 had no realistic path to reach in their own lifetimes.

The date carries a second layer of meaning most outsiders never learn. On October 23, 1989, Hungary's last Communist-era parliament proclaimed the Third Republic from a balcony overlooking the same square the crowds had filled in 1956, timed deliberately to land on the uprising's anniversary. Both anniversaries now share one public holiday, and both get invoked every year, sometimes by rival political camps holding competing rallies within sight of each other, each claiming the students at Bem's statue as its own.

Seven months before that republic was proclaimed, in June 1989, Nagy and four others executed alongside him were reburied with full state honors in front of an estimated crowd of a quarter million people, broadcast live across a country still governed, on paper, by the party that had hanged him thirty-one years earlier. Few moments in the fall of Communist Europe compressed a government's collapse and the reversal of one of its own verdicts into a single afternoon quite like that one did.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Hungarian Revolution of 1956," "Stalin Monument (Budapest)," "Imre Nagy," and "Suez Crisis"
• Britannica, "Hungarian Revolution"
• Hoover Institution, "1956: Hungarian Revolution" (Hoover Institution Library & Archives)
• Wilson Center, "Role of Radio Free Europe in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956" (Cold War International History Project)
• Hungary Today and About Hungary, reporting on October 23 commemorations and the 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy