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Thursday, October 25 Soviet and Hungarian units reoccupy the Radio in the early morning hours. The first revolutionary newspaper appears under the title Igazság (Truth).
Rebels occupy the main police station in the 9th District.
Some 8000–10,000 people arrive in Kossuth tér between 10 and 11 a.m., where Soviet troops guarding Parliament fraternize with the protesters. At about 11.15 a.m., Soviet tanks arrive in the square and open fire on the crowd. The volley of firing takes 60 or 80 lives and leaves 100–150 injured.
12.32 p.m.: A communiqué from the HWP Political Committee is read out on the radio. Ernõ Gerõ has been dismissed and János Kádár appointed first secretary. Colonel Pál Maléter, in command at the Kilián Barracks (8th District), reaches a ceasefire agreement with the Corvin köz rebels.
The Abaturov Division arrives from Romania to reinforce the Soviet intervention troops.
The University Revolutionary Students’ Committee is established at the Arts Faculty of the Loránd Eötvös University.
Workers councils are formed at the Csepel Iron and Metal Works (21st District).
There is serious fighting at the junction of the grand boulevard (Nagykörút) and Üllõi út, in Corvin köz (8th District).
A group of rebels forms in Amerikai út (14th District).
A demonstration of people carrying ‘bloody banners’ takes place in Budapest, to protest against the Soviet intervention and the bloodshed in front of Parliament.
Rebels fire a mortar at the radio transmitters at Lakihegy.
The Borsod County Workers’ Council forms in Miskolc.
There are protests in several towns, including Dunapentele (Sztálinváros, Dunaújváros), Esztergom, Nagykanizsa, Ózd, Pécs, Szeged and Vác. Shots are fired on protesters in Gyõr. Soviet lorries are attacked while passing through Nyíregyháza and Várpalota.
Friday, October 26 Fighting occurs about noon in the Jutadomb area of the 20th (now 23rd) district. In the afternoon, rebels occupy the Csepel police headquarters (21st District).
4.13 p.m. The radio broadcasts a statement by the HWP Central Committee promising a new, national government, Hungarian-Soviet negotiations to be conducted on a basis of equality, elections for factory workers’ councils, pay rises, and economic and political changes.
5.32 p.m.: An amnesty declaration by the Presidential Council is broadcast. It applies to all who lay down their arms by 10 p.m.
A consignment of blood and medicines sent from Warsaw arrives at Budapest Ferihegy Airport. This is the first aid to Hungary from abroad.
Rebel groups are formed in the Thököly út-Dózsa György út area (7th District) and at Széna tér (2nd District). Rebels occupy Móricz Zsigmond körtér (11th District), and the Danuvia Arms Factory.
Demonstrations begin in Kecskemét during the morning. A volley fired by soldiers claims three lives. By evening there is a battle being fought between the rebels and the military, which fires shots on the Gypsy quarter from two MIG 15 fighter planes.
A revolutionary committee is formed in Baja, and a national council in Gyõr. A curfew is imposed in Pécs after continued demonstrations. Fighting continues between the army and the rebels in Dunapentele (Sztálinváros, Dunaújváros)
A workers’ council is established at the Komló Colliery Trust and a socialist revolutionary committee in Debrecen.
There are demonstrations in several provincial towns. They include Békéscsaba, Eger, Esztergom, Gyöngyös, Gyõr, Gyula, Kaposvár, Komárom, Komló, Miskolc, Mohács, Nyíregyháza, Oroszlány, Pápa, Siófok, Sopron, Szeged, Székesfehérvár, Szekszárd, Szentes, Szigetvár, Szolnok, Tatabánya and Veszprém.
Border guards at Mosonmagyaróvár fire on demonstrators, killing 52 and wounding 86. Soldiers fire on demonstrators from a tunnel just below the basilica in Esztergom, causing 15 deaths and at least 50 injuries. At Zalaegerszeg, police and party functionaries fire on the crowd. There are fatalities and injuries in Nagykanizsa when volleys are fired from the party headquarters.
Convicts at the Oroszlány and Tatabánya labour camps are freed. Insurrectionists attack the barracks at Tata at dawn. In the evening, demonstrators take over the count [1]
October 25
The radio broadcasts in the early morning of October 25 (the only regular source of news) took the aims and assessments of the Central Committee at face value and declared that the fighting was over. The bulletin at 4.30 a.m. announced, ‘The counter-revolutionary gangs have largely been eliminated.’ This was repeated in an official statement from the Council of Ministers two hours later: ‘The attempted counter-revolutionary coup has been eliminated! The counter-revolutionary forces have been routed!’ The radio went on to report that life was getting back to normal. Transport was running again. People had been called back to work. Pensions were being posted on time. One sign of the authorities’ renewed self-confidence was the behaviour of one of the senior officers at National Police Headquarters. Reckoning that the fighting was over, he gave orders for the pursuit of those who had fled to the provinces.
These moves by the party leadership were mistaken from the outset.
Russian soldiers by the Pest end of Liberty Bridge, on October 25, 1956
Further Soviet units were brought into Hungary from abroad, but even with the reinforcements, the Soviets found they were unable to mop up the resistance, notwithstanding the reports to the contrary. The Radio, in the heart of the city, remained in rebel hands. Indeed groups began to organize themselves on the 24th and 25th into rebel units with a more permanent character and composition, usually with a core of men who had known each other personally beforehand, for instance at work. The actions of particular groups or individuals began to have influence on their neighbourhoods as well. In short, the situation on the morning of the 25th differed fundamentally from the forecasts of the previous evening. This meant that lifting some of the emergency measures was not going to have the expected effect unless it was coupled with essential reforms (such as Gerõ’s dismissal). There was no other way of disbanding the rebels or dispersing an ever more sympathetic and supportive public.
Crowds poured into the streets when the curfew was lifted. Those venturing out found the opposite of what they had heard on the radio. The armed struggle was not over. The city was not overrun with looters—the goods were still there behind the broken shop windows. It was not a question of the Soviet army helping the Hungarian army to restore order. It was doing so with the support of ÁVH units, while many Hungarian soldiers were on the rebel side. Above all, the rebels were not hooligans or fascists, but workers, students, neighbours and friends. People took every opportunity to try to convince the Soviet soldiers, who had presumably been deceived, as they had. Everywhere the tanks on the streets of Budapest were surrounded by groups of gesticulating people trying to explain, in the sparse school Russian they had learnt in recent years, that this was not a fascist rising, but one that was national, democratic, and in decisive respects socialist as well. Many such attempts succeeded. Several groups of young people set off for Parliament in, or accompanied by a Soviet tank flying the Hungarian tricolour, to protest against the accusations being made against them, and against the man seen as most to blame for these and for the fighting: Ernõ Gerõ. Even without reliable news services, word about Soviet soldiers changing sides spread rapidly round the city, often in an exaggerated, generalized form. So it was an ever more jubilant crowd, self-confident and certain of victory, that gathered in Kossuth tér, outside Parliament, during the morning hours.
The forces deployed to defend the government buildings round Parliament panicked at what they saw. Far from the situation normalizing, as the authorities hoped, the square was filling with people, accompanied by armed men and armoured units. The flags and young demonstrators draped on the tanks made it difficult to decide whether these were Soviet or Hungarian units that had gone over to the rebels.
Demonstrators in Kossuth Lajos tér, before Parliament, on October 25, 1956
(photograph by Sándor Bojár)
General Serov, attending the HWP Central Committee meeting at the Akadémia utca party headquarters, learned of the developments immediately. He left the meeting, and after a while gave the order to fire. For Serov it was unacceptable that Hungarian units should change sides and Soviet soldiers fraternize with the enemy. The shots that rang out caused panic among the demonstrators and among the Soviet soldiers, who also began to fire. They fired in the direction from which the shots had come, but they also fired on the young people they had been fraternizing with moments before, in the belief that they had led them into a trap. The situation was further complicated when the Hungarian unit detailed to guard the party headquarters was embroiled in a gun battle with the Soviets, and the ensuing confusion claimed further victims. The massacre cost a hundred lives and 300 wounded.
Just as the wave of optimism had swept over the city before the blood bath in Kossuth tér, so the new message spread: ‘The ÁVO are killers, down with the ÁVO!’ The crowd of protesters fleeing from the square swelled into another demonstration, this time with blood on its banners. News of the events also spread quite quickly to the provinces, where feelings were also roused further.
News naturally reached the Akadémia utca party headquarters as well, often in an exaggerated form. Reports told of the continued armed struggles, the new mass demonstration, the fraternization with the Soviet troops, and of course the massacre. There was also food for thought in the increasing flow of information arriving from the provinces and from the Budapest factories. The most important aspect was that the relative calm had ended elsewhere in the country. Reports of demonstrations and strikes arrived from more and more places. It was increasingly apparent that the rest of the country was joining in with the protests and demands in the capital. This was more dangerous still, because the Hungarian regiments stationed in the counties had been weakened in the last few days so that large contingents could be sent up to Budapest. The events elsewhere in the country on the 25th included armed clashes, not just peaceful demonstrations. Several lorry-loads of young people set out from Miskolc to help the rebels in Budapest. On the way, they disarmed the police and the army recruitment centre at Mezõkövesd, and occupied the buildings of the local party committee and the local and district councils. Only by bringing in reinforcements from several other places could the group be dispersed. Some of those who returned to Miskolc were arrested, and this prompted on the following day a clash outside the county police headquarters, which degenerated into lynching. Reports of fighting arrived from many other parts of the country: Szentendre, Vác, Sztálinváros (now Dunaújváros) and elsewhere. The most serious clash occurred in the late afternoon at Várpalota. Demonstrators, after minor exchanges of fire, managed to take over the town, occupying the party committee building and winning the army and the police over to their side. Since the town lay on one of the Soviet army’s important lines of communication, the decision was inevitable: the rebels tried to stop the Soviet advance. Several Soviet units were held up by hastily erected barricades, and two lorries, carrying fuel and arms, were halted. The fighting lost the Soviets 13 men, including a major.
The party’s policy for handling the crisis was bankrupted by the events of October 25. The Hungarian military command, despite the Soviet aid, proved helpless to prevent the uprising from spreading and re-establish the order required for a political settlement. Even so, there was a group among those in power who continued to press for a military solution, urging tougher measures against the rebels, reimposition of a total curfew, and relentless application of the state of emergency. However, this hard line lost ground rapidly during the afternoon. The first blow came when Gerõ, on the proposal of the Soviet delegates, was relieved of his position as first secretary and replaced by János Kádár. Though Kádár did not count as a reformer, he was not considered as an opponent or hindrance to reform either. The other development that weakened the strength and determination of the authorities was the firing in front of Parliament. The confused and conflicting reports of the bloodshed intimidated some of the leadership, who became increasingly concerned that they could not control the disturbances and rightly scared that revenge and terror would be directed against them.
The Political Committee judged that the policy of a somewhat restricted use of force coupled with slight concessions had not worked and could not be continued, but it still proved unable to change it. Though the basis on which to do so had weakened, the intention of suppressing the uprising by force remained. So the Military Committee was strengthened and given absolute powers. However, the party leadership were looking ahead to the consolidation period, and could not accept that order should be restored solely by Soviet military force, although it became steadily clearer that it could not rely on the Hungarian army. As for the Budapest police, commanded by Sándor Kopácsi, they had played no part so far in restoring order. After talks with a delegation from the rebels and demonstrators, the police were presumably suffering from a moral crisis brought on by the Kossuth tér massacre when they released the political prisoners in their charge. Thereafter they progressed from being more or less passive bystanders to active participation in the events, and not on the side of the party leadership.
Ground was gained within the Political Committee by those who saw real reforms as the solution. The meeting during the morning of the 25th was attended for a while by Ferenc Donáth and Géza Losonczy. Another member, József Köböl, also moved closer to their position, proposing that negotiations on a complete withdrawal of Soviet troops should begin after order had been restored. This was strongly opposed by the Soviet delegates, who were present, but a reference to troop withdrawals found its way into Imre Nagy’s speech in the early afternoon, which the Political Committee had approved.
There were more and more factors making it urgent to undertake a radical reassessment of the situation. Apart from the futility of the military actions and the blood-bath in Kossuth tér, there were the reports reaching the party centre. Apart from the events in Budapest, attention also had to turn to the provinces, which were also becoming revolutionized, and to the way workers in large factories were taking up the rebel demands. The leadership of the HWP, which saw and professed itself to be the party of the working class, had to address the fact that it could no longer rely on the workers’ support in restoring order. On the contrary, the class it had seen as the main social basis of its power was turning against it, and there was a special poignancy about the disturbances taking place in two bulwarks of the provincial labour movement. At this point Imre Nagy received the Miskolc workers’ delegation headed by Rudolf Földvári. The importance of their negotiations was reflected in the coverage given to them on the radio, and in the Szabad Nép next day. Meanwhile news came from Miskolc that the Lenin Metallurgical Works had been represented at the mass meeting held in the university quarter. In other words, while the HWP was planning to involve the workers in the struggle (though still not daring to carry it out), the students, the originators of the crisis, had successfully done just that. A similar event took place in Pécs, once a stronghold of the Social Democrats, where miners and factory workers held a demonstration of sympathy outside the students’ hostel. Leadership of the afternoon protest was taken over by the university students, who managed to dissuade the workers from storming the ÁVH barracks and divert the demonstration to the city’s main square, Széchenyi tér, where they removed the red stars from public buildings.
So the impotent and inadequate policies of the party leadership were no longer just threatening to broaden the range of those turning against it. This was actually happening. The discontent had spread to the provinces, and the workers were giving increasingly active and organized support to the leadership’s opponents.
Although Soviet troops had retaken the gutted Radio building in Bródy Sándor utca that morning, the rebels made several other significant military gains. Party buildings in Csepel and the 18th District of Budapest were occupied, the Újpest police headquarters was disarmed, and the Vörös Csillag (Red Star) Printing Press was taken without a shot being fired by the crowd marching behind bloodstained banners.
New institutions designed to organize the revolution and support the insurgents began to form. A University Revolutionary Students’ Committee was established at the History Faculty of Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University, headed by Professors István Pozsár and János Varga. The first revolutionary newspaper, the Igazság (Truth), appeared with Gyula Obersovszky as editor. This end to the communist monopoly of the press marked a partial attainment of the rebels’ latest demands.
The afternoon session of the Central Committee could find no solution to the situation. By that time the main reason was no longer the leadership’s hesitation and false assessment of events, but the deepening division into two strongly opposing camps. For the moment, neither side had the strength to impose its will on the other, and thereby on the increasingly paralysed party apparatus, but each had enough strength to curb and obstruct the other’s measures. But the news that the uprising was spreading appeared like a spectre haunting the leadership, whose panic left it unable to take logical, clear decisions. Kádár, the new party leader, wavered, promising at once to bring in radical reforms (a real change of government) and to take tough, committed measures next day (crush the resistance). To strengthen the party leadership, he was even prepared to promise to Donáth and Losonczy, who were insisting on resigning, that they could put forward their views freely within the party, even though factionalism was strictly prohibited in the communist movement.
- ^ a b From the Hu Rev Research Inst. http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora2/index.htm