The Empty Boots
Stalin statues
sprang up everywhere in Eastern Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were
cult objects that demonstrated the almost mystical powers of Stalin. Hungary
was no exception. In December 1951 a large monument of Stalin was erected on
the edge of Városliget, the
city park of Budapest, as a
gift of the Hungarian People to Joseph Stalin on his
seventieth birthday. Stalin’s Monument stood 25 meters tall overall with eight
of the meters the height of the bronze statue. He was portrayed as a speaker,
standing tall and rigid with his right hand at his chest. The sides of the
tribune were decorated with relief sculptures depicting the Hungarian people
welcoming their leader. The Hungarian sculptor, Sándor Mikus, created the statue and was
awarded the Kossuth Prize, the highest distinction that can be attained by a
Hungarian artist.
Around the same
time Stalin was being celebrated, liberal Communists in Hungary began to
distance themselves from Stalinism.[i] Encouraged by earlier Soviet concessions to
Poland and Yugoslavia, they began to place less emphasis on heavy industry and
more on consumer goods. Moreover, Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister of Hungary,
took actions that further distanced the politics in Hungary from that of
Stalinism. He tolerated peasant resistance to further agricultural
collectivization. He also gave amnesty to some political prisoners, and even
abolished labor camps. These rapid changes frightened hard-liners who arrested
Nagy in 1955, and expelled him from the Party for anti-Soviet beliefs. The
hard-liners were too late however, as the movement for reform had already taken
root throughout the country. Reformers were further encouraged by fateful
comments made by Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1956. Krushchev denounced
Stalin, effectively admitting that Stalin's way of imposing control on the
Soviet bloc was perhaps too severe. This concession was significant, as Soviet
Party leaders rarely strayed from the Party view of history, which honored
Stalin and other leaders of the Communist Revolution.
Against this
backdrop of change, intellectuals and students formed groups that discussed
reform such as the compulsory instruction in Russian language and the
philosophies of Marxism-Leninism. The intellectuals went even further in
demanding the reinstatement of Imre Nagy. The movement gained momentum with
protests becoming more common and visible as some workers joined the
intellectuals. On October 23, 1956, the violence escalated. Protesters turned their anger on the Stalin’s
Monument. They demolished the statue of Stalin, leaving only
his boots in which they planted a Hungarian flag. Police responded
by firing into the crowd. Hungarian troops were sent in, but some refused to
fire, and even joined the protesters. Frantic, and faced with a revolt that
their own army was perhaps not able to control, the Hungarian Communist leadership
requested Soviet assistance. Thus began the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
In an effort to
appease the demonstrators, the Hungarian government renamed Nagy as Prime
Minister. They hoped that the Soviets would help them stop the protests, while
having Nagy as Prime Minister would be enough to placate the protesters.
However, once reinstated, Nagy continued his reforms. In an important symbolic
move, he freed Cardinal Jozsef Mindszentz, the former head of the Hungarian
Catholic Church. Mindszentz had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948 for
his opposition to the Communist leadership. Nagy went on to name a new
coalition government that included liberal Communists. Conscious of the fact
that he was defying Soviet wishes, Nagy alerted the Soviets that he was willing
to negotiate the governmental structure of Hungary. He also planned to end the
one party system in Hungary by adding non-Communists to the government. In a
move that angered the USSR even further, he called for further independence
from the Soviet Union. He also requested the removal of Soviet troops that had
been stationed in Hungary since the end of the Second World War. The situation
briefly stagnated as both sides waited to see what would happen next. By the
end of October, fighting had almost stopped and a sense of normality began to
return.
But on
October 31, 1956 Nagy broadcast that Hungary would withdraw itself from the
Warsaw Pact. The foreign minister of Hungary, Janos Kadar, left the government
in disgust and established a rival government in eastern Hungary supported by
Soviet tanks. Moscow responded to Nagy’s announcement on November
11th, when the Soviets arrested the new Hungarian Defense Minister, Maleter,
and his entire delegation of advisers. This arrest was strategically important,
as Maleter was perhaps the only individual capable of leading a coordinated
Hungarian defense. Early the next morning, the Soviets invaded, bringing in
twelve divisions consisting of 200,000 troops and 2,500 armored vehicles. The
Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to liberate it from what the Soviet
government called "fascist elements." The troops quickly gained
control of the airport and of the major bridges on the Danube, a major river
flowing through Budapest.
The Soviets
suppressed the uprising with brutality. Tanks dragged round bodies through the
streets of Budapest, even killing wounded people, as a warning to others who
were still protesting. The citizens of Hungary attacked the
Russian troops with small arms fire. The average citizen supported the rebels,
and frequently protected them from Soviet detection. For their part, the
Hungarian forces were at an even greater disadvantage. They had little or no
organization, limited small arms, and very few anti-tank weapons. Moreover,
they were greatly outnumbered, and faced not only the Soviet army, but also the
Hungarian secret police and the Hungarian Communist Militia. The stronger
Soviet army began to eliminate pockets of resistance one by one. This required
particularly destructive methods; any building from which the Soviets detected
enemy gunfire was completely destroyed. In a few short days, they quelled all
opposition. Fearing for his life, Nagy attempted to obtain asylum in the Yugoslav
embassy. He was unsuccessful and later arrested. He was tried in a mockery of a
trial, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave. By November
14th order had been restored. Kadar was put in charge. Soviet rule was re-established.
But the
Hungarians paid a high cost. When the Soviets left on November 14th, 25,000
Hungarians were dead, 20,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 had fled to the West.
Another 2,000 of the imprisoned were later executed. Only 700 Soviet troops
were killed in the conflict. The entire Eastern Bloc again tightened up as the
Soviets had shown how little reform would be tolerated. President
Eisenhower said “I feel with the Hungarian people.” J F Dulles, American
Secretary of State, said “To all those suffering under communist slavery, let
us say you can count on us.” But America did nothing more. It has
come to light that throughout the fighting, the reformers were encouraged by
radio broadcasts from western countries that aid would be forthcoming.
Believing they may be helped by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
countries, the rebels pushed on. However, occupied with the Suez Canal Crisis
and fearful of upsetting the Cold War balance, the West never intervened.
The Hungarian Uprising
represented both the pinnacle and the end of liberalization in the Soviet bloc
countries. It cemented the Soviet belief that force was the only way to hold on
to the Eastern Bloc, and the western belief that armed revolt in Eastern Europe
would not work. In fact, some of the remaining issues of 1956 have only recently
been addressed in Hungary, with the end of Communism. Thirty years after Nagy's
death, those attempting to publicly remember him were suppressed by police.
Ironically, thirty-one years after his death, the government sponsored a
funeral in Budapest and rehabilitated the memory of Nagy. In 1990, the
government began legal proceedings against members of the former Communist
Militia who were allegedly responsible for civilian deaths. This continued
attention to the uprising and to the memory of those who died underlines its
significance not only in Hungarian history, but for Cold War history.
Stalin’s
Monument holds a special place in Hungary’s history as ground zero for the
October Uprising of 1956 when police fired on protesters on that fateful day. Interestingly
the statue was never replaced and only the empty boots remained. Not until the last Soviet troops left Hungary
in 1991 would the boots be relocated to Memento Park in Szoborpark. Located six miles
southwest of the city center, Memento Park is a repository for communist era
propaganda statues in the Budapest area. Since 2005, a new memorial, The Memorial
to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence, resides in the place where Stalin’s Monument
stood in Városliget.
The empty boots
should be a metaphor for the empty promises of communism, a lesson fading from
today’s consciousness. The promises of communism can never become reality
because communism runs contrary to human nature and human dignity and violates
the laws of economics. It must resort to
control and violence in order to force its ideology on unwilling subjects. The
late Russian historian Robert Conquest wrote of the twentieth century, “Ideas
that claimed to transcend all problems, but were defective or delusive,
devastated minds, and movements, and whole countries, and looked like plausible
contenders for world supremacy. In fact humanity has been savaged and trampled
by rogue ideologies.”[ii] Communist regimes are responsible for a
greater number of deaths than any other political ideology, religion, or
movement, including Nazism. The
statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger,
deportations, and forced
labor. The twentieth century saw the death toll by Communist
regimes to be estimated at 100 million. Empty boots, empty promises, empty
shelves.
[i]
Marta Schaff, introduction
to Hungarian
Uprising Of 1956 (Ipswich, MA: Great Neck Pub, 2009), 1, Primary Search, EBSCOhost (accessed January
20, 2018).
[ii]
Robert Conquest, introduction to Reflections
on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000), xi.
No comments:
Post a Comment