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Wednesday, October 24 The first Soviet armoured units enter the capital about 3 or 4 a.m. The Soviet special envoys Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov arrive in Budapest during the day.
The rebels occupy the Radio. However, broadcasting is already going out from Parliament instead.
8.13 a.m.: The radio announces that the HWP Central Committee has confirmed Ernõ Gerõ in his post as first secretary. Imre Nagy is to be prime minister, with the incumbent András Hegedüs as his deputy.
8.45 a.m.: The radio announces a state of emergency. Production comes to a halt in Budapest and schools and colleges remain closed. The trains are still running. The water, electricity and gas supplies and telephone services operate more or less continuously during the coming weeks. The bakers ensure bread supplies.
Rebels occupy the Athenaeum Press about midday.
ÁVH men open fire on marchers in Roosevelt tér (5th District).
12.10 p.m.: Speaking on the radio, Nagy appeals for calm and an end to the fighting.
Fighting continues in the neighbourhood of the Radio. Fire breaks out in the natural history section of the National Museum during the afternoon, burning out part of it.
The first workers’ council in Budapest is formed at the United Incandescent Lamp Factory (Egyesült Izzó).
8.45 p.m.: János Kádár, speaking on the radio, terms the events a counter-revolution.
Groups of rebels form in Baross tér (7th and 8th districts), in the southern parts of the 8th and 9th districts, at the Corvin Cinema (8th District), and in Tompa utca (9th District) and Berzenczey utca (9th District).
Insurrectionists seize large quantities of arms from the Bem tér barracks (2nd District).
Soviet soldiers open fire on demonstrators outside Székesfehérvár Town Hall. Six lives are lost.
Extra Soviet troops are transferred to Hungary. Tass issues a statement in Moscow announcing the defeat of the ‘counter-revolutionary uprising’.
In Warsaw, it is announced at a mass meeting of several hundred thousand people that the Soviet troops deployed in Hungary will return to their barracks within 48 hours. [1]
October 24
The strong measures taken overnight (the curfew, the ban on assemblies, the state of emergency, and placing the armed forces on alert) helped temporarily to prevent the uprising in Budapest from escalating or spreading to the provinces. Although there were demonstrations in a few towns on the 24th, local party and military leaders remained in control of the situation. Most people were receiving only defective and sporadic information. They tended to remain as observers, trying to find out what was going on in the country. The curfew announced on the radio after nine in the morning kept the less committed people off the streets, but it could not stop employees following events at work, where groups discussed the developments with increasing boldness.
More tangible help for the rebels also reached Budapest. Demands were formulated in a small number of cases, and even in the provinces there were sporadic attacks on the advancing Soviet forces.
The bans and the state of emergency, backed by Soviet armour, failed to end the armed uprising. Indeed the rebels scored some significant successes on the 24th. Early in the morning, they took over a military recruitment centre in Csepel, one of the main industrial districts of Budapest, and the Athenaeum Press, where they set about printing leaflets. However, the important achievement of the armed rebels was not to capture an occasional public building and retain it for a few hours, but to keep the uprising alive, so that the show of force and even armoured attack by the Soviet regular army failed to sweep them away. The rebels held out against greatly superior Soviet forces, while suffering quite serious losses, and by doing so they raised the prospect of a political victory.
The delegates from the Presidium of the CPSU were briefed on the military situation in the early morning hours, and then had talks in the afternoon with a small group of HWP leaders. Mikoyan and Suslov agreed with the Hungarian leaders in hoping that the uprising could be suppressed in a matter of hours. As they said in their report to Moscow, ‘All the centres of the rebels have been dispersed and elimination of the main centre, at the Radio, is now taking placed [sic].’ Indeed they reproved the Hungarian leadership for exaggerating the danger in the information they passed to Moscow. The Soviet delegates’ optimism helped the Hungarian leaders to see hope in the situation, so that most of the discussion concerned what consolidation measures to take after the armed suppression of the revolt.
The respite after Soviet help arrived permitted Imre Nagy, in a speech broadcast about midday, to refer to his plan for radical reforms. It also meant that the authorities could refrain from applying the provisions of the state of emergency to rebels who had been caught. There was confidence that the remaining centres of resistance could be broken up overnight. So it was announced that the curfew would be lifted temporarily next day, to allow the public to buy food and the authorities to demonstrate that order had been restored.
Yet the country presented and perceived a quite different picture outside the charmed walls of the party centre. Ferenc Donáth and Géza Losonczy, elected at dawn to the Central Committee, realized that the party’s half-hearted, ambiguous decisions could never produce a situation that they could accept. The scarcely changed leadership was incapable of democratizing the country or even managing the crisis, and its inconsistent policies were sweeping the country towards an even greater catastrophe. The two put their assessment of the situation and their proposals for resolving the crisis in a letter to the Central Committee, adding that under the circumstances they saw no chance of joining in the work of the party leadership. In their view, the basic condition for progress would be for the party to make a radical break with its mistaken and criminal policy, and place Hungary’s relations with the Soviet Union on a new footing. As a foundation for all this, they called for far-reaching personnel changes. There was a temporary cooling of relations with Imre Nagy, whom they thought had left them and the reforms in the lurch.
Despite the delusions of the party leadership, the chances of victory, rather than defeat for the revolution were increasing during the day. After the CPSU delegates arrived, Nagy remained in the office and position he had gained despite the cautious, but clear disapproval of Khrushchev. During the early days, the Imre Nagy group did not follow its leader, did not bow down to the party leadership, and for want of the requisite guarantees, did not endorse the way order was being restored. The temporarily independent course taken by Nagy’s followers had its dangers. Divorced from those who shared his ideas, it was possible that Nagy might come under the influence of the hard-liners, or fail to pursue consistently the purposes that had prompted him to accept the position offered to him. However, it also left open the possibility that Nagy, influenced by his former associates, might return to the course he had been forced to abandon on the night of October 23, and stand again at the head of those struggling for consistent reforms. This is indeed what happened in the next few days.
Of course all further consideration of the political chances would have been irrelevant if the Soviet army had managed to sweep the armed rebels aside. In the event, they graduated into freedom fighters and held out. This left no room for restoring order with the help of limited forces. It obliged Moscow and the Hungarian communist leadership to choose between military intervention on the one hand, with its unforeseeable loss of life (and international repercussions), or a political solution on the other.
Another important contributing force to the revolution’s success emerged on October 24. The demands drawn up by the workers of Miskolc were accepted by the county first secretary of the HWP, Rudolf Földvári, who was a former Political Committee member, and he agreed to head the delegation delivering their 21 points to Imre Nagy. For the workers in one of socialist Hungary’s heavy industrial strongholds to make demands that matched the ones made by the people of Budapest weakened the arguments of those who tried to attribute all the events in the capital to the machinations of counter-revolutionaries. It was not a mob that was trying to impose their demands on the premier. Here was one of his fellow comrades putting forward a list of points, of which many could be read in programmes drawn up earlier by Nagy himself.
- ^ a b From the Hu Rev Research Inst. http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora2/index.htm