 1. 2. 3. yn 1956, ac mae'n gweithio'r fewnfyrdd yn y Reifolus, mae'n rhaid o'r rhan o'ch gweithio'r llwyddiad. Mae'n rhoi'r cyfrifysgau sydd wedi'i ynchai wneud yma, sy'n ei wneud i gyd yn yr hyn yn gwneud i gyfansio'r cyfrifysgau a i'r gwneud i gynhyrchu'r ei gwneud i'r union yw. Ac wrth gwrs, they were also a spectacular confirmation of some of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, his theories about the need for political revolution in the Soviet Union. Because this movement in 1956, it was not a movement for the restoration of capitalism. It was a movement for a genuine democratic healthy socialist state. Thank the USSR's response to that revolution was bloody and it was brutal and that response provoked crisis and splits in communist parties all over the world. This struggle, this movement of workers and young people in Hungary in 1956 does actually make these events a really classic study in the nature and the development of the Felly, rwy'n ddîl am ydych chi'n gweithio mewn cyfnodd yr yw'r meddwl hwnnw. Mae'r gwirionedd, ond, mae'n credu i'r ddwylliant yma, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio arall ychydig ac yn ystod y hongerion yn y rhan o'r 1956. Felly, ddwy'n gweithio arall y 1918, yma ar y First World War I, ym lawer Makes Friday on a platform from the first World War brought about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and obviously the corresponding social and economic turbulence that went with that. And part of that was the carving up of Hungary by the victorious powers from the first World War, and those powers carved up Hungary to the extent that the country lost two thirds of its land and one third of its Hungarian speaking population. y byddai'r ystyried y cwmaint oedd yng Nghymru, ym eich ganddyn ni wedi gweld yn ymddangos yng Nghymru nawr yn ymddangos, dyma sy'n 1906, yn ymddangos, y cymdeithas, ond y cymdeithas ymdano yn ôl, ond eich cymdeithas, ymddangos, a mae gennym eu bod yn y gwrthwyniadau cymdeithio yng Nghymru, ymddangos, ymddangos yng Nghymru, byddai'n 1906, ac mae'r gwneudio ymddangos ar yng Nghymru, while those demands were ignored by the Emperor, obviously. And as you can see the national question developed early and continued to develop after the First World War. And the national question in the Soviet Union as a whole and particularly in Hungary played an important part in the crisis between the Soviet Union in that long process that took place. ac mae'r Rhaegi Rhaegi yn ymgyrchol y 1956, ac mae'n gweithio i'n gweithio. Rhywbeth i 1918, dweud, y ffordd y dyfodol yn ymgyrchol o'r Ysgrifffordd Rhaegi, y ffordd y ffordd o'r Borjwar Llywodraeth wedi'i gweithio'r ysgol yn ymgyrchol yn 1918, ac mae'r rhaeg ffyrdd o'r Llywodraeth yn ymgyrchol yn 1919, a bypt o'r ffordd ynyr ymgyrchol bywyd yn typ pendantid ynnynon ymgyrchol y ac yn rhaid i'r ddweud eich mwyaf i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r Rhyw Llywodraeth. Gweithio Lennan, mellawn Cymru, Roedd y Pwg Paenol yn ysgrifeth Cymru yn edrych yn ei ddweud. Lennan yn ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, ond rhaid i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Yn ystod, mae'r cyllidau ymddangosol yn y cael gyfrifolol ar y cyfrifolwyr, yw'r ffordd bod yn ymerddio'r wrth gwrdd o'r gyflawn ar y llwydd. A'r gyflawn yma ar hyn yw mae'n meddwl i'r cyllid yn yw. A yn ystod o'r gwneud, ac yn ystod, gyda rhoi ymrheidlaethau rham, ar gyfer y Cymru, yn ysbryd â'r Llywodraeth, yr Argyll Llywodraeth hongerion, rwy'n mynd i'r buddapest, yn ymgyrch i'r cyflawn, ac yn ymgyrch i'r cyflawn ar hyn. Ac ydydd e'n nid i'r 19, oherwydd y Cymru wedi cael ei phaith. Ac oherwydd yn y ddweud o'r rhan o'r ffordd o wahanol. A bydd yma yw 1919, fel y gweithio, mae'r cyntaf wedi'i sianfrif yn iawn i'r ffordd. Mae'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd, bydd yma'r cwrddor, yn gynyddu horthu. Erddor horthu gaini'r ffordd, ac mae'n hefyd yn gwybodaeth in late 1919 and onwards on the basis of a bloody and brutal white terror. He allied the country with Hitler during the Second World War, he participated in the Holocaust and in the invasion of the Soviet Union. This was the nature of the Horthy regime in Hungary. This, of course, was a very harsh lesson for the masses of Hungary because they learned that this regime, this white terror, is white bonapartis to reactionary regime of 42, was all the Hungarian capitalism had to offer them. There's no kind of cosy centre ground, no nice bourgeois liberal government that could last. The history of the country ever since 1918 had demonstrated that the question facing the people of Hungary was one of socialism or barbarism. That's what these events prove to people. An y Ao, this goes some way to explaining why, in 1956, contrary to what the Stalinists set at the time and contrary, in fact, to what the imperialists what the western capitalist responsibility at the time. There was no mood in Hungary for a return to capitalism, because that would have meant a return to landlordism, a return to haughtheism This was imprinted on the minds of Hungarian people at that time. It was not a movement for a return to those conditions. Yn ystod y Gweithredu, rwy'n gweithio'r Rheddon yn ymweld y Rheddon, ond Stalin, rwy'n gweithio'r Gweithredu y Llywodraeth, yn ystafell i'r dweud yr Ystafell Llywodraeth yn ymweld y Llywodraeth, dwi'n ymweld yr Ystafell y Rheddon i'r dweud yr Ystafell. Ond, ond, ydych chi'n dweud yr Ystafell y Llywodraeth yn y Llywodraeth, That would have inspired the masses in Russia itself to re-establish the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, which would have been a threat to Stalin and his clique. So what they did, the Stalinists at first, they tried to keep Hungary within Russia's sphere of influence, but without touching the capitalist system. They tried to maintain capitalism in Eastern Europe at first. The Stalinists even formed a kind of sham coalition, a pretend coalition with a capitalist party in Hungary for a short time in the first few years after the war. But this method, this idea proved impossible because the fact was that the landlords and the capitalists, the vast majority of them, had retreated with the Nazis in the face of the advancing Red Army. And so trying to form a coalition with the capitalist parties was like trying to form a coalition with nothing. It was like grasping at smoke. There was nothing really there. Capitalism had, of its own accord, collapsed in Hungary. And eventually the Stalinists obviously had to accept this. So next, they began to turn Hungary into a miniature version of the USSR. Complete with a bureaucratically controlled planned economy, no workers democracy, and a very brutal secret police, the AVO. And in addition to that, whilst Hungary was nominally an independent state, every government department had Soviet advisers, Russians who were there to effectively tell the department what to do or to at least clear everything that the department was doing, and a red telephone, which connected them directly to the Kremlin. And many of the Hungarian leaders then, who came to power this time under the Stalinist regime, had spent much of the Second World War in Russia itself, in Moscow, being trained up in the schools that they had in Moscow for training up future leaders of communist parties all over the Eastern Bloc. So they were very heavily under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. So there's no doubt obviously that the move to a planned economy in Hungary was revolutionary in the sense that the economic foundations were completely changed. Landlordism, private ownership, these kind of things were abolished in place of a centralized planned economy. But this was not a revolution in the sense that we as Trotskyists would understand it in the way that Trotsky talks about a revolution in the history of the Russian Revolution. He says that the defining feature of a revolution is that the masses themselves enter the stage of history and take their lives into their own hands. This is not how the planned economy was established in Hungary at the end of the Second World War. It was done in a bureaucratic top-down manner. The early period of the Stalinisation of Hungary saw really the systematic pillaging of Hungary and countries all over the Eastern Bloc pillaging of those economies in favour of the USSR. In some cases, entire industries were uprooted and transported to the USSR. The overwhelming focus of the planned economy at that time was developing the industrial, Russia's industrial base basically. Consumer goods were sacrificed in favour of developing heavy industry, heavy machinery, this kind of thing. At the same time as this was taking place, the bureaucratic elite were accumulating massive privileges for themselves. Luxury holiday homes, limousines, much better food than what was available to ordinary people. Clothing, better housing, all this kind of thing. Whilst the economy is growing, even maybe not in consumer terms, but in general you look at the statistics, you can feel that the economy is developing. You can overlook inefficiency, bureaucracy, waste, privileges, inequality and this kind of thing. You can tolerate that to a certain extent. Of course, the mockery of Hungarian national independence that was being made by the Stalinists. Even that could be tolerated to a certain extent. As long as things seem to be developing, things seem to be at least on some level getting better. And of course, don't forget that the Soviets, by a lot of people, the Russians, the Red Army, they were welcomed as liberators in Hungary from the Horthy regime and the pro-Fascist regime that was there. So there was a certain amount of breathing space given to the Soviet Union. And of course it is also true, we shouldn't paint a caricatured and exaggerated picture, it's also true that advances were made in this period in fields like education, culture, public health. All of these things were improved, there were advances made in the living conditions and the working conditions of women, particularly in the form of things like equal pay, some socialised childcare. All these things did happen in the Soviet Union, these were advances, and so people were able to tolerate the regime to a certain extent. But of course, as Trotsky predicted, as Trotsky explained in his book The Revolution Betrayed, beneath the surface, the contradictions of bureaucracy and inefficiency that were inherent in the Stalinist regime were building up. Trotsky explained that any planned economy needs democracy, like a body needs oxygen, and that was lacking, and at a certain point the conditions of life, like there would be, there would be Christ's, the conditions of life would become intolerable, this is what Trotsky predicted. And so sure enough we come to 1953, this was the year that Stalin died and it was also, this Stalin's death coincided with a massive strike wave and street fighting in East Germany. There were riots in major cities all over Czechoslovakia, and there were even strikes and protests in Russia itself. And these were the first indications that the contradictions inherent within a bureaucratised, deformed worker state were coming to the surface. So the Soviet bureaucracy could feel the ground trembling beneath its feet, could feel things beginning to change, and so after a brief power struggle, Christchef took power and began a process of thought in the Soviet policy, a kind of a slight easing off of the repression that was taking place. He was aiming basically for reform from the top to prevent revolution from below. Now in Hungary in 1953 there was already significant industrial turmoil, there was appalling repression by the ABO, the secret police, and the hardline Stalinist who was in charge at that time, a guy called Rokosi, he had been in Russia during the Second World War, he had been trained up by the Russians. He was removed as Prime Minister in 1953 as part of this turn at Christchef's new policy of thawing out the Moscow policies. Rokosi was summoned to Moscow to be sacked, and actually there's an eyewitness account of the sacking which gives you an indication of how the Moscow bureaucrats were thinking. Christchef himself at this meeting he said the following to Rokosi, he said, you're decimating your people, you're covered in crimes, he said. If this continues your people will grab their pitchforks and pitch you out of the country. This is what the Soviet bureaucrats were worried about, and this is why they sacked Rokosi, they replaced him with a guy called Imre Nagi. He was someone who had been in Hungary during the war, so he came from a different background, he was seen in general as a liberaliser, and he took over from Rokosi. Now one example of this guy Nagi's liberal credentials, in his first speech as Prime Minister he spoke in the Hungarian parliament, and he referred to the population of Hungary in that speech, he referred to the population of Hungary as Hungarians. Now one MP who was there for that speech, there's an eyewitness account and he recalls the impact that just that word Hungarians had. He says since the liberation, since the end of the Second World War, the noun Hungarian had been eliminated from the official vocabulary. We no longer belong to an ethnic group, or at least we didn't acknowledge it, we were Hungarian workers, or the working people of the country, or the Hungarian bastion on the wall of peace, or anything else, but never simply Hungarians. He says it's difficult to explain, but Nagi's use of that word stunned us and filled us with joy all at the same time. So that gives you an indication of the brutality with which the national question was treated by the Stalinist regime, and that to a large extent defined part of the flavour of the 1956 revolution. But Nagi didn't just stop there with these references to Hungarians and so on, he proposed that forced collectivisation be abandoned, that political prisoners be released, that the AVO, the secret police, be downgraded in its importance, all these kind of things. For all these reasons, Nagi was basically the first person of a different shade to the kind of Stalinist grey bureaucracy. He was the first person to penetrate that bureaucratic clique, and he was therefore a point of reference for many healthy revolutionary elements in Hungary at that time. But of course we should recognise now that whilst his liberalising regime was very limited, he was still very much under the control of the Moscow bureaucracy, and you can see evidence of this in the fact that whilst political prisoners were released, many thousands more remained locked up whilst Nagi was Prime Minister. So his liberalising reforms were limited nevertheless, but of course at the time it was quite a big thing to be happening. Now by 1955 the Hungarian economy was in crisis thanks to all kinds of bureaucratic blunders that are inevitable in a planned economy without workers' democracy. And this was the case even with a reformer like Nagi as Prime Minister. Oil fields were being flooded because of a too rapid rise in production. Houses were being built deliberately below specification just so that people could meet the production targets and this kind of thing. The economy was not in a good state. And so in 1955 Christchef changed course, not just in Hungary all over the place, all over the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. But in Hungary he could see the ongoing shortcomings of the regime and he feared as well that if you give the masses a taste of reform, if you ease off a little bit on the repression, they'll begin to demand more. And if they demand more, the Soviet bureaucracy can't grant that without undermining their own position. And so in April 1955 Nagi was replaced with Rokosi. It was a direct swap from what had happened in 1953. Rokosi was back and Nagi was out. Now the transparency with which Moscow controlled the internal regime of Hungary was so obvious what was happening. No democratic control whatsoever. Christchef just says this is going to happen and that's what happens. And the unexplained and the rapid changes in policy and all the rest of it, this enraged the people of Hungary. Obviously it enraged the working class. Why can't we have control over our own state, over our own government? Now a real turning point then came in February 1956 because in the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which took place in that month in 1956, Christchef in a closed session denounced Stalin and denounced Stalin's crimes. And pointed out that Stalin was responsible for the gulags, for killing political prisoners, for monstress repression and all the rest of it. Basically in doing this Christchef was hoping to shift all the blame for all the problems in the Soviet Union onto one man. It's all Stalin's fault. Let's denounce him and then I won't get any blame myself. Obviously this is not a Marxist method. An individual in power represents more than just himself. He represents a class or a strata in society. Now this speech of Christchef was not supposed to reach beyond the walls of that Congress. It wasn't supposed to go beyond the delegates. But it was leaked into the public domain. And of course that caused a massive questioning, not only of Stalin himself, but of the whole Stalinist regime, the entire bureaucratic regime in Russia and all across the Eastern Bloc. And Hungary of course was no exception to this. And the whole country began to bubble with debate and discussion. A group of intellectuals known as the Potofi Circle began to meet and they began to discuss the idea of reform of the regime. Now obviously the secret police, the AVO, they infiltrated these circles, these discussion circles that were talking about reform. But interestingly to the horror of their commanders they came back from these meetings convinced of the need for reform. This is the secret police, the most brutal apparatus that the state had. Went to infiltrate meetings to spy on people and came back convinced of their ideas. They even signed a manifesto to that effect a number of AVO officers until obviously they were tortured into retracting their signatures. This was the nature of the regime. But really the crisis in the Soviet Union began to really accelerate after Chris Jeff's speech in February 56. Because in May 56 Russian tanks and troops were sent into Georgia to crush an uprising sparked off by austerity measures. June 56 in Poznan in Poland there was a massive strike wave that began there and then spread across the whole country. And obviously as in every revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation the bureaucracy was split over how to, the establishment was split over how to deal with this situation, this developing situation. Some favoured reform of the Communist Party and reform of the policies in order to re-establish the credibility of the Communist Party so that it would then be able to control the movement to a certain extent this was achieved in a place like Poland. Others favoured a much more hard line approach to crushing the movement and crushing all dissent. But the point is that in any situation like this when the working class gets on the move, when the situation begins to develop whichever line the ruling class or the bureaucracy take will be wrong because nothing really can stand in the way of a movement of that size so whichever way they turn they're going to make mistakes and things are going to go badly. So in Hungary the response was in July 1956 to remove Rokosi once again. He'd only just been put back in the year before but he was once again removed as leader of the country because he was so hated, so despised by the masses. But rather than replace him with someone like Nagy who had the respect of the more revolutionary elements Nagy was demoted even further and another hardliner was put in the place of Rokosi another Stalinist no different to him. So the point is that by October 1956 you've got a picture of the combustible material for a revolution having been built up over a long period of time with a particular acceleration since February 1956 all that was required then was a spark to settle that material alight and so we come to the 23rd of October when a protest was called by students in Budapest and this protest although it was called by students it incorporated wide political demands which attracted the workers out onto the streets as well now these demands included things like the rehabilitation of Nagy as Prime Minister they wanted him back in power they said they wanted the election of a new Communist Party leadership by a National Congress they want free elections freedom of the press, academic freedom these kind of demands and in addition to that country to what the Stalinists said at the time this was not an attempt to undermine the gains of the socialist planned economy because in fact one of the demands of this protest was friendship with the USSR but on an equal basis that was what they demanded, friendship but on an equal basis and the national question then as you can see was also present as you would expect they demanded for example the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and also that Hungary itself should be allowed to use make use of its own uranium stocks uranium was being exported to the Soviet Union and the other noticeable thing about this demonstration was the internationalism the main reasons that was called was explicitly in solidarity with the movement taking place in Poland at that time of Polish workers and so on so you can see the internet and say the idea the Stalinist slander this was kind of a reactionary nationalist movement is not the case it did have nationalist elements because of the way the Stalinists had treated the national question in Hungary but it was clearly not from a reactionary point of view now this protest on the 23rd of October was peaceful and it was attended by tens of thousands of unarmed men, women and children the first sign of what was to come was a speech on the radio by a guy called Gero the first secretary of the communist party and he denounced the protesters as agents of imperialism on the radio he said this he gave a very inflammatory provocative speech clearly he completely misread the situation on the ground in fact there are even reports of the AVO and the secret police in these kind of states the secret police is actually much more in touch with the real mood on the ground than the party bureaucrats who are ensconced in their offices miles away and there are even reports of the AVO officers listening to this speech and tearing their hair out saying this is it we're all going to be killed now he's completely misjudged the situation and he's going to provoke these people into an armed insurrection now sure enough as the demonstration gathered in a square outside the communist party newspaper's headquarters some of the AVO officers panicked and shot at the demonstrators now what happened next I've got a quote here what happened next was reported by a police lieutenant who was on the ground in the square who was reporting back to the chief of police of Budapest and so this explains what happened next after the AVO opened fire so the quote runs the lieutenant said comrade capaxi the people have weapons I asked for complete silence in the room I thought I'd gone mad I didn't quite get you could you repeat that comrade lieutenant sadly he gave his report a motorised army detachment had been passing and the soldiers had seen the AVO troops shooting at the crowd and the ensuing panic in an instant they were surrounded by angry passers-by who pleaded for weapons to defend ourselves against the murderers in the AVO the recruits, young peasants newly arrived from the countryside didn't take long to react they knew the cruelty of the AVO and had just witnessed a new example of it the smoke and powder of the fuselard were still in the air one soldier then two gave guns to members of the crowd others followed their example absolute silence reined in my office my associates stared at me frozen by the gravity of my voice and the sweat covering my face they knew it wasn't joyful news that I was getting this is the chief of police in Budapest talking and then he says call your men into the station I said barricade the doors and put out the lights gives you an idea of the power of the working class when they get on the move this enormous state apparatus this brutal state apparatus it's a thin air now splits in the state and especially the armed forces obviously are the hallmark of any revolutionary situation but what was remarkable in Hungary on that day 23 October 56 was the lightning speed with which things developed within one hour the crowd went from a peaceful demonstration demanding that a government minister come out and explain what was going on to them give an explanation they were angry, they wanted an explanation on the power they were arming themselves and engaging in street battles with the secret police by the end of the day then as you can imagine revolutionary consciousness was really developing quite rapidly and correspondingly the counter revolution was preparing itself and preparing to strike and so on that same night the night of the 23rd and the 24th of October 1956 the USSR invaded Hungary and mobilised its tanks and its troops to put down the revolution and by dawn Russian tanks were patrolling the streets of Budapest what they hoped is that just the presence of these tanks would quell the population would get everybody to go home and things would peter out on the contrary the resistance of the Hungarian working class and young people in particular was absolutely ferocious they poured into the streets en masse and fought the Soviet soldiers with everything and anything at their disposal their reports of 13 year old children hurling homemade Molotov cocktails at the tanks all of this obviously had a very profound impact on the Soviet troops themselves many of these troops had been told by their officers that they were going to put down a fascist uprising and then they saw 13 year olds in the streets fighting these troops and they didn't respond a fascist uprising doesn't have tens of thousands of people in the streets fighting with everything they have against advancing troops and so this obviously had a profound impact on these soldiers and again I'm going to quote again from Capaxi this Budapest chief of police one scene that he witnessed from the police station during the invasion he says apparently from the upper windows we saw an immense crowd arrive on the adjacent street from where we were we saw as the crowd could not three large Soviet tanks coming from the opposite direction straight towards the crowd it was like a nightmare the tanks arrived on the street the tank soldiers saw the crowd and the crowd saw the tanks they were nose to nose the tank stopped and stayed in place the crowd couldn't stop swarming around the tanks a boy pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and pushed something through the loophole it wasn't a grenade but a sheet of paper it was followed by others these sheets were tracked in Russian which started with a citation from Marx a people that oppresses another cannot itself be free we counted the minutes nothing happened then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little and the commander emerged slowly then he flung the turret open and perched himself on the top of his tank immediately hands reached out to him young people lept up on the tank a young girl climbed up and kissed him someone handed the commander the Hungarian tricolor and immediately the flag was fixed to the tank the crowd erupted in a frantic ovation the crowd sung the Hungarian national anthem and at the tops of their voices they cried long live the Soviet Army yet these were the same people who 15 minutes earlier had determinedly chanted Russians go home my deputy and I exchanged glances although we were soldiers the theory of our movement bypassed caste, nationality personal interest and prejudice a word from Marx passed through a loophole was stronger than a tank directed against the crowd gives quite a picture that this is what again you see even the Soviet troops not even Hungarian themselves melted this powerful apparatus melted into nothing in the face of the mass movement and so within a very short space of time all over Budapest all over the city the Soviet tanks turned their guns on the AVO secret police and defended the demonstrators against the secret police obviously the invasion had been beaten and the Soviets were forced to withdraw from that first invasion now in the days that followed under the pressure of the developing situation the workers and the peasants began to move instinctively towards workers control and democracy all throughout the country so committees of workers were set up in every town and city and these committees they called themselves national committees or revolutionary committees they didn't call themselves soviets because the Soviet Union had soiled that word but in reality they were soviets and the revolution then swept from the towns into the countryside the hated forced cooperatives were broken up and the incompetent bureaucrats who knew nothing about agriculture were kicked out the peasants organised themselves to send food to Budapest which was distributed free to help the revolution food coming in from the countryside provided by the peasants to support the revolution and despite the dismantling of the collective farms resolutions were passed all over the countryside that said that farmers would never accept the return of capitalism and landlordism so again you can see the real nature of this movement the radio station in Budapest was requisitioned by the workers to broadcast their demands and the news of their revolution to the whole world newspapers sprung up everywhere there were previously 6 newspapers in Hungary all of which were exactly the same thing the Stalinist line basically and within 2 days 25 new newspapers had been established and they were full with actual news with real living news of the movement the prisons were fully open not partially open like under Nagy in 53 but fully opened and people who had been assumed dead for years flooded onto the streets thousands of them and they discovered when they opened the prisons underground passages that spanned the entirety of Budapest the whole city there were these underground prisons and they could hear tapings even in the deepest research they could hear people tapping and they couldn't find their way to them that was the extent of the maze of these prisons underneath and some people they were never released because the counter-revolution struck before they could before they could get out but for a full week for slightly more than a week actually power lay with the workers and with their revolutionary committees not just in Budapest but all over the country the government itself the official government, the Nagy I'll come to that in a moment but the government was attacking its own people Moscow's bidding these committees were seen as the only legitimate real organs of government and what's more of course the only real armed force in the government the state couldn't rely on its own troops anymore so all power really did lie with these committees the committees were demanding that workers' councils in the workplaces be given full control of production that wages be increased and wage differentials be capped that a rapid programme of house building be undertaken basically a vision of a genuinely socialist society in the space of a week formed itself, was forming itself in people's minds now Nagy himself had been reinstated as prime minister but later on the 25th of October two days after this the very start of the revolution on the 25th Nagy was reinstated as prime minister frankly it was too little too late because with the revolutionary committees taking control and the AVO still repressing repressing people even under Nagy's leadership that Nagy government had no role to play no one was looking towards it had no base of support it was suspended in midair it represented nobody but itself now it's true of course that the revolutionary process was not an even one it was full of contradiction there were pro capitalist elements even who were present in some of the movements there were CIA trained operatives who hadn't been in Hungary they were funded and trained by the CIA a couple of thousand of them were sent in the Catholic Church tried to take advantage of the situation of course there were these reactionary elements there were some anarchist elements there were some very confused elements and naturally at the time the Stalinists all over the world seized on those isolated examples to tar the whole revolution with the brush of these individuals of these small groups and say this is a reactionary regime they referred to it as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 they refused to call it a revolution when in fact a revolution is exactly what it was but there's nothing Marxist about that method of analysis taking isolated examples and ripping them out of context we have to view the process as a whole and its direction of travel and that was clearly towards a democratic healthy socialist regime today in Hungary the revolution is actually claimed by the right wing in this way many the dominant force in Hungary or the dominant political ideas around the revolution are actually on the right and it's the right who say yeah this was a great anti-communist movement and so you can find in Hungary today in reaction to that there are left wingers in Hungary who don't think much of this revolutionary movement so where any of us doing political work in Hungary we'd have to bear that in mind it doesn't change our analysis of it actually as a result partly of the Stalinist slanders the weakness of the left in Hungary today and obviously the history that is put out by the west and the imperialists who have an interest in saying this was a movement for the restoration of capitalism all this has an impact today in Hungary which distorts the real picture nevertheless it was a genuinely socialist movement now after the defeat of the first invasion Nagy and others naively thought that they'd won they thought that was it that the Soviet Union had been beaten and things were going to only get better from there but Khrushchev and the Soviet bureaucracy they were not going to give in quite so easily because this was a movement that's threatened to sweep through the entire eastern block and even into Russia itself and so Khrushchev resolved to crush it mercilessly so in the middle of the night two weeks after the revolution started every city in Hungary every city, not just Budapest but every city was surrounded by Soviet tanks at four o'clock in the morning on Sunday the fourth of November the bombardment of every city in Hungary began now this second invasion was again carried out by Soviet troops but this time from the furthest eastern regions of Russia these troops had little to no connection with the Hungarian people in some cases not even a common language the troops were ordered to stay in their tanks not to speak to a single civilian in the country any Soviet troop any Soviet officer who showed any sympathy whatsoever for the Hungarian people was shocked there's an example of a Hungarian tank commander who refused that the Hungarian people were lying in the road to stop the tanks and this tank commander refused to drive over them he just drove round them instead and that tank commander was shocked for showing sympathy to the Hungarian people and these troops they were told that they were in Berlin again they were told that they were fighting fascists every possible measure was taken to prevent a fraternisation along the same lines as had happened in the first invasion there was an absolutely brutal slaughter that took place and the brutality of this invasion was supposed to smash the revolution in one blow but the Hungarian workers were not cowed quite so easily for four days and nights endlessly Budapest was bombarded by these tanks tanks patrolled the cities during the day and they pumped phosphorus into buildings to set them on fire and burn them to the ground they were firing shells at houses at point blank range and in response the workers of Budapest the soldiers of Budapest students, school kids, again 12 there's reports of 10 to 12 year olds being on the streets to fight the Soviets and they vowed to fight to the bitter end there's a British journalist who was at that time part of the Communist Party in Britain but as a result of these events left the Communist Party because he saw what the Soviet Union had done and how it had been distorted by the British Communist Party but he's written a book about these events that he, I'll quote from it about this final battle starting on the 4th of November he says the people ripped up the streets to build barricades and at night they fought by the light of fires that swept unchecked through block after block so by the 10th of November the fighting was over Nagy was out again he'd been replaced again this time by another hardliner he was out again he was out again he was out again he was out again he was out again this time by another hardliner called Yanos Kadar the resistance did continue that wasn't even the end of the fighting was over but the resistance continued there was a general strike all over the country but eventually that too petered out and by the time the smoke had cleared tens of thousands of Hungarian workers were dead and countless more were injured the USSR then tightened its grip on the country flooded Hungary with Soviet troops and stationed there on a permanent basis and Khrushchev also announced that to resolve the situation in Hungary he would shut their mouths with goulash as in provide even more reform from the top give them enough food that they would never complain again this was his policy so he was a kind of carrot and stick approach flood the country with troops but also give them enough food for their living standards and so on it was that approach that really formed the basis for the relative stability of the Kadar regime for the years into the future now the main conclusion to draw from all these events in October 1956 is that despite its defeat the revolution proved not in the theories and articles of Trotsky although we should all read them and obviously they are extremely valuable but it proved that there was an alternative to Stalinism that was not a return to capitalism and that was why the bureaucracy had to crush the revolution so mercilessly and it's also why in doing so the bureaucracy created this crisis for itself in communist parties all over the world it led to splits and demoralisations in the ranks of communist parties everywhere now that revolution it hardly lasted two weeks the workers were hardly in power for two weeks but in that time the workers went from a first radio broadcast the first broadcast they put out was a request for the UN to intervene in Hungary to sort things out obviously very naive but their final broadcast was a call for the workers of the world to unite shows how quickly consciousness changed and developed the point is that in a revolutionary situation every hour of every day can make all the difference and the organised presence in Hungary at that time of a genuinely Marxist leadership basing itself on the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky could have accelerated the attempts to spread the revolution across the eastern bloc could have armed the workers politically to prepare for a final showdown with the Soviet bureaucracy and all the rest of it unfortunately as we know the forces of genuine Marxism were extremely weak all over the world but especially in the Stalinist states at that time these events there were just one episode in the crisis of Stalinism in the Soviet Union the convulsions that shook Russia and its allies in this period were symptoms of as I said earlier a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Stalinism which is that a planned economy cannot survive without workers democracy Peter Fryer that journalist who I quoted just now he put it like this he said Stalinism is Marxism with the heart cut out dehumanised, dried, frozen petrified, rigid baron and eventually it was that contradiction then that brought down the Berlin Wall caused the USSR to collapse but by that time as we know the movement had been derailed hijacked in some places and the traditions of 1956 were smothered by the hollow ideas of liberalism and a return to capitalism I mentioned earlier Trotsky's definition of a revolution where the masses enter the stage of history and take control of their lives for themselves and Peter Fryer points out that Marx also defined a revolution and he said that it's a human protest against an inhuman life and the Hungarian revolution fits both those definitions of revolution precisely so today we are obviously continuing the struggle of the workers and the young people in Hungary in 1956 who were fighting for genuine socialism and so we need to learn the lessons that their history teaches us and above all we should be really inspired by their dedication to this struggle by the militancy with which they took it up and the sacrifice that was eventually required them