Revolutions Remembered 

On 4 November 1956, from the Budapest Parliament building surrounded by Soviet tanks, Minister of State István Bibó, the last remaining representative of the legal Hungarian Government, issued a final public statement. He called on the Hungarian people to use every means of passive resistance against the 'occupation force and the puppet government it may install', and beseeched the Great Powers and the United Nations to 'intervene wisely and courageously for the freedom of my subjugated people'. The appeal fell on deaf ears. Western passivity duly confirmed Soviet supremacy over eastern Europe. Bibó would later declare that Hungary's predicament had become the scandal of the world.

Striving for legitimacy, the regime installed by the Soviets after the crushing of the revolution - led by Janos Kádár - depicted the revolution as a 'fascist counter-revolution', inspired by 'imperial agents' and 'traitors'; this 'correct' interpretation of events remained the party line on 1956 for over 30 years. The brutal dashing of hopes raised in the revolution and the tangible gap between the official interpretation and the real nature of '56 combined to foster a profound cynicism and apathy about political life. The revolution became taboo, the events distorted by official lies and, in time, shrouded in silence. The result was a kind of a 'social memory-loss'.

The Kádár regime based its legitimation on a 'social contract': in return for a tacit acceptance of exclusion from decision-making, the population was offered more, albeit still very limited, opportunities for material self-enrichment in the private sphere. The preservation of mass political apathy and the smooth operation of such a system therefore necessitated massive state investment in consumption, which had a deeply distorting long-term effect on the economy. Though the system was comparatively tolerant, making everyday life relatively endurable, '56 remained its Achilles heel. Only the collapse of state-socialism made free and public discussion about the revolution possible.

When the Parliament of the Hungarian Republic, after the first legal and democratic elections in over four decades, began its legislative work in May 1990, it enshrined official recognition of the historical significance of the revolution of 1956. October 23, the day of the outbreak of the revolution and also the day of the proclamation of the Hungarian Republic in 1989, was declared a national holiday.

Hungarian public life is still, however, burdened with the legacy of 1956. The long-running row about Prime Minister Gyula Horn's role during and after the revolution has intensified with the recent, and flatly denied, allegation that he was a member of the militia at Nyugati Pályaudvar which summarily executed five 'anti-communists'. The continuing urge to uncover the truth about '56 is hardly surprising following decades of falsified narratives. It is an attempt to fulfill the historical task Bibó assigned to the Hungarian people: 'to honour and safeguard - against slander, forgetting and fading - the banner of their revolution'.

The Hungarian revolution exploded the ideological fiction of Marxist-Leninist democracy. 1956 was the historical moment when the Soviets appeared, if not for the first time, but for western left-wing sympathizers and fellow travellers, most openly and unequivocally, as murderous oppressors. The anti-totalitarian character of the massive uprising not only broke the Communist party's hold on power but almost immediately found expression in pluralistic and democratic institutional forms. As György Litván asserts, in the best account to date of the events and the ensuing repression (The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 ), the uprising was an example of a revolutionary mass movement - characterized by the denunciation of lies and the will to speak the 'truth' - challenging the totalitarian system from inside with the aim of recovering elementary rights and freedoms abrogated by the dictatorship. The ideals of the revolution of 1956 survived in the public imagination and took on special symbolic significance during the 'transformation' of 1989.

The transition to democracy in Hungary has not been unproblematic. However, nothing can diminish the enormity of the fact that, in the words of Litván, himself a participant in '56, 'by the end of the second millennium Hungary [had become] an independent parliamentary republic. This may be a modest statement, but sufficient to justify a certain sense of satisfaction'.

Eszter Pál is a PhD candidate at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Bernard Rorke is a PhD candidate at CSD.