In Europe

offices of Air France in Algiers, dragging France into a humiliating war in which more than half a million Frenchmen finally took part. It was the year in which Indonesia cut final ties with the Netherlands, in which the British sent the Greek-Cypriot leader Makarios into exile, in which the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro landed in Cuba to start a revolution. It was the year of the fairy-tale marriage between Prince Rainier of Monaco and the American film star Grace Kelly, and of Elvis Presley's breakthrough with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. And it was, above all, the year of the Hungarian uprising.
    The images went all over the world, and for as long as the Cold War lasted the Hungarian rebellion was the symbol of the spirit of freedom against communist oppression. The truth was, as usual, much more complicated. After Stalin's fall from grace, the position of Hungarian leader Mátyás Rákosi, an old-school Stalinist, soon became untenable. He was replaced by an interim pope, but the man the Hungarians were really waiting for was the former president, Imre Nagy. ‘Uncle Imre’ was cut from the same cloth as Gomulka: a communist, a humanist and a patriot. He had actually taken part in the Russian Revolution and the civil war and had occupied a top position in the Comintern in Moscow for fifteen years. But all that work on behalf of the party had not, as his biographer Miklos Moln puts it, ‘succeeded in deadening the human essence within him, party politics did not make him forget “the ideal”.’ Yet he was also a loner, and a doubter. He lacked Gomulka's feeling for the masses, his toughness and vigour.
    The Hungarian Revolution began in the central hall of Budapest's Technical University. From 1955, it was the site of increasingly frank discussions on all manner of political issues, and the movement gained momentum after Khrushchev's speech on Stalin. Some of the students devoured the works of Western writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, others experimented with modern music and painting. In spring 1956, László Rajk was posthumously rehabilitated. In September, the first issue of a new, fiercely oppositionist weekly,
Hétfõi Hírlap
(Monday News) appeared, which the Hungarians fairly tore from the news-stands. On Sunday, 6 October, Rajk was solemnly reinterred. What was intended as an intimate gathering developed into a spontaneous tumult in which 200,000 Hungarians took part. As one of the early dissenters later recalled: ‘That was the moment we all realised that our protest was not simply an affair for a few communist intellectuals. Everyone, it seemed, was turning against the government in the same way.’
    In October, after Rajk's funeral and the successful rebellion in Poland, the students’ demands grew increasingly specific: democratic reforms had to be implemented in Hungary as well. Gomulka was their hero and Imre Nagy could play the same role in Hungary, although Nagy himself was not too enthusiastic about this. A demonstration was scheduled for Tuesday, 23 October, to underscore their ‘sixteen points’; the loyal party man Nagy was vehemently opposed. Later in the week, a huge conference was to be held, a kind of broad national debate about their demands. An armed rebellion was the furthest thing from their minds.
    It was only on the evening of 23 October, when things truly got out of hand, that Nagy let himself be convinced by the Politburo to address the huge crowd in front of parliament. ‘Comrades!’ he began. ‘We are no longer comrades!’ the crowd roared back. The next morning he spoke of ‘hostile elements’ who had turned against the popular democracy. One week later he declared that the Hungarian people, by means of ‘a heroic struggle’, had achieved a centuries-old dream: independence and neutrality. He had become, despite himself, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution.
    Later interviews showed that many students were deeply shocked by the way ‘their’ demonstration had degenerated into an uprising by roaming crowds ‘who acted like idiots’, incapable of ‘putting on the brakesthemselves’. Most of them realised from the start that this was bound to go wrong.
    By the end of the week, fewer and fewer revolutionary students were to be found among those fighting in the streets. Most of the combatants were working youths, hoodlums and vandals, tough kids from the poorest neighbourhoods of Budapest. A Hungarian doctor, who treated many of the wounded, said