The United States and the Hungarian Revolution: The Death of Rollback

[Apologies for the endnotes being Roman numerals, but they auto-converted when copied from the original text.]

The year 1956 was a tumultuous year on the international stage, but this proves particularly true when studying United States foreign policy at the time. It was a year of many unknowns for the United States, as while the Cold War had already gained momentum in the wake of the Korean War, U.S. policy was still in its developing stages for coping with the new postwar order. The Eisenhower administration had the legacy of Truman’s eponymous doctrine to work with, however questions still lingered over how that doctrine, that the United States would support any nation being threatened with takeover by an armed minority (implicitly meant to refer to Communists), would be implemented. Although the Truman Doctrine was initially a major step towards containment policy, as espoused by George Kennan in his 1946 Long Telegram,ⁱ in 1956 the policy of rollback was still popular in many Washington circles. Rollback was popularized within the United States government by NSC-68, a document published in 1950 by the National Security Council that called for unprecedented peacetime military spending and an increasingly coercive and confrontational attitude towards the Soviets.ⁱⁱ Rollback was essentially the policy of pressuring the Soviets out of Eastern Europe, possibly through military means, and, in effect, liberating the nations that had previously been “liberated” by the Soviets at the end of the Second World War. At the time of its writing, NSC-68 speculated on the development of Soviet thermonuclear capabilities;ⁱⁱⁱ by 1955, however, the Soviets had tested their first air-dropped thermonuclear weapon, and had bombers capable of reaching American targets.^iv This complicated matters significantly for American strategic planning and diplomatic policy, and made rollback appear increasingly less likely. In 1956, the United States had a tenuous, but stable, relationship with the Soviet Union. Stalin’s death in 1953 had opened inroads for an understanding to be reestablished between East and West, and by February 1956 the Soviet leadership officially renounced expectations of “imminent war” with the West.^v Khrushchev had worked to consolidate his power in the wake of Stalin’s demise, and had reoriented the Soviet Union through his de-Stalinization efforts such that it appeared peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers would be, in some way, possible. Six months after the renunciation of Stalin’s long-standing paranoia, however, came a shock that terrorized the Soviet leadership, and left the Eisenhower administration stunned: on October 23, 1956, the powder keg that had been simmering in Hungary exploded with incredible ferocity. What had started during the day as mass student demonstrations quickly spread throughout Budapest, and escalated between eight or nine o’clock that night into open combat in front of the state broadcasting headquarters.^vi What ensued was a period of tension between the Soviets and Americans, and the events that transpired in Budapest sent shock waves through both Moscow and Washington. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 came at a pivotal point in time in the United States-Soviet relationship, and it had a lasting impact on the United States’ relationship with the Soviet Union and its satellites, particularly in the development of containment policy and the abandonment of rollback and liberation as strategic goals.

There are several factors that contributed to the ferocity of the Hungarian Revolution, but there are two factors which stand out considerably from the myriad of background influences. The first was the repressive rule of Hungary’s “Little Stalin,” Matyas Rakosi, which was characterized by purges^vii and economic instability and stagnation.^viii The second, in the immediate run-up to the outbreak of fighting in Hungary, was the appointment of a reformist in Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, as the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Gomulka was able to negotiate a troop reduction agreement with the Soviets, which emboldened Hungarians who were resentful of the continued military occupation of their nation by the Red Army.^ix Following the death of Stalin, and with the support of the Soviet Presidium, Imre Nagy, a moderate reformist, was appointed Premier in Hungary on July 4, 1953; early in his tenure Nagy introduced numerous changes to the country’s economic system.^x Rakosi, however, maintained his post at the head of the Party, and the two clashed frequently.^xi Rakosi was eventually able to win back the favor of the Soviet Presidium, which put Nagy’s liberal tendencies under intense scrutiny by Moscow. Nagy suffered a minor heart attack, attributed to stress, in January 1955, effectively removing him from his capacity as Premier.^xii Nagy was expelled from the Hungarian Politburo and Central Committee three months later.^xiii Nagy, however, would be redeemed. Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the so-called “Secret Speech,” in February 1956, although not published in the Eastern bloc, denounced Stalinism and the “cult of personality.”^xiv Rakosi, as a pupil of Stalin, was in trouble. After months of internal conflict, mainly between the intelligentsia and Rakosi’s Stalinist Politburo, Rakosi was dismissed from his post at Khrushchev’s request on July 18, 1956. Erno Gero, a close associate of Rakosi’s, replaced him as General Secretary.^xv The buildup of discontent centered around the character of Imre Nagy, who the nation thought of as their only hope to deliver them from the repression of the current government. When news of the reinstatement of Gomulka in Warsaw reached Budapest, the Hungarians immediately wondered: “why can the same not happen here?” The shakeup of the Hungarian Communists’ leadership, as well as the installation of a liberal-leaning government in Poland, gave the Hungarians the audacity to begin asking these sorts of questions.^xvi Nagy was aware of the coming storm, and when news of the demonstrations reached him at his country home on the morning of October 23, he made his way back to his villa on Orso Street in the center of Budapest. That evening, Nagy arrived at the Parliament building in Budapest where an angry mob armed with torches shouted for his reinstatement as leader. Nagy convinced the people to return to their homes peaceably, and they begrudgingly obliged him.^xvii News, however, arrived of shots being fired outside the headquarters of the state radio station. The violence quickly escalated: rebels raided state armories, and policemen and soldiers who were averse to fighting their own countrymen laid down their weapons. The rebels demanded Nagy be installed as both Premier and General Secretary of the Party. This put Nagy in a very precarious position as Moscow’s eyes were drawn to him.^xviii

The United States was keenly aware of the brooding sentiments among the Hungarian population during this period. A report was prepared in January 1956, one month prior to Khrushchev’s secret address, for U.S. Army Intelligence by Georgetown University. It examined Hungary’s suitability as a “potential theater for Special Forces operations.”^xix The report acknowledged that Hungary had widespread dissidence, with popular support of the regime estimated at less than 10% of the population in 1954. It also concluded, however, that the nature of dissidence in Hungary did not pose an immediate threat to the state’s health.^xx Passive resistance, the report asserted, was “perhaps more common in Hungary than in any other European satellite,” but there was no evidence to suggest active partisan activity or organized resistance against the Communist regime.^xxi The Georgetown report was also cognizant of the problem surrounding the youth in Hungary, who would become the driving force behind the uprising later that year. “Contrary to early predictions of Communist success in the indoctrination of youth,” it states, “the whole youth program has been far from successful, and the resistance of youth is one of the most serious problems facing the Communists.”^xxii The report attributed the lack of active, organized resistance movements and partisans to a problem of geography, which is also why it concluded that Hungary, despite its high levels of discontent and passive resistance, was not suitable for U.S. covert operations. The report stated that the nature of Hungary’s geography, as a landlocked and mostly flat nation, did not lend itself well to the execution of covert activities, as there were few places for operatives to conceal themselves.^xxiii

Mention of unrest in Hungary was again raised in American foreign policy circles days before Rakosi’s dismissal as Premier in July 1956. On July 12, the National Security Council met to create a new draft policy statement toward Eastern Europe: NSC-5608. In the minutes to the meeting, Vice President Nixon is quoted as saying that he would be “most reluctant” to follow any policy that followed George Kennan’s line that “there was essentially nothing we could do about the unhappy status quo now existing in the Soviet satellites.”^xxiv Nixon asserted that it would be a great error to use terms in the draft that would potentially discourage democratic elements in the Eastern bloc. The Vice President himself, in a sense, supported rollback, at least rhetorically, to buck the hold of the Soviet Union over its satellites. During the meeting, Nixon commented that it “wouldn’t be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of U.S. interest,” if the Soviet Union were again to come down hard on the satellites of Eastern Europe. He clarified, though, that it would be more desirable for the ongoing trend of liberalization in Soviet-satellite relations to continue.^xxv Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, younger brother to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, responded to Nixon’s mention of another possible Soviet crackdown by pointing out “indications of considerable unrest in Czechoslovakia and Hungary,” and said that U.S. attention had been diverted from these developments by the more “spectacular events” in Poznan, referring to the revolt in Poland that ultimately resulted in the re-installation of Gomulka to power in Warsaw.^xxvi The conversation at this meeting of the NSC foreshadowed the events of autumn 1956, but the U.S. intelligence community did not predict the uprising. Because it was not suitable for operations, Hungary remained largely under the radar.

It is apparent, judging by the Vice President’s comments, that, up until this point, rollback was still considered a feasible and, perhaps, a preferable option when compared to containment. In fact, when the Eisenhower administration took the reigns from Truman in 1953, statements made by the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, suggested a more aggressive American foreign policy on Eastern Europe. Dulles promised to support an “explosive and dynamic” policy of “liberation.”^xxvii The rhetoric, however, did not match the substance of the administration’s policies: in 1954, Eisenhower decided that no moment “would be right to start a war,” and asserted that the United States would only retaliate against Soviet aggression. Both Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson and Secretary of State Dulles came to argue for containment, but a tension developed within U.S. foreign policy by the time the uprising of 1956 exploded. On the one hand, the United States had not changed its rhetoric, and actively encouraged the Eastern European states to break away from the Soviet hegemony. On the other hand, the United States privately refused to offer any sort of military support to states which did attempt to run the gauntlet of Soviet resolve. What resulted was a U.S. foreign policy characterized by psychological operations, inflammatory propaganda, and covert operations to disrupt Soviet control.^xxviii While the notion of rollback was popular in Washington, there was little enthusiasm for actually trying to implement it: the risk of open armed confrontation with the Soviets resulting from it was too high for the administration to seriously consider it. While the administration more or less formally rejected rollback as a viable policy in 1953 with the adoption of NSC-174,^xxix the spirit of liberation was still popular. Rather than propose forceful liberation of Eastern Europe, the Eisenhower administration continued to pursue the goals of rollback through covert means. The rhetoric associated with liberation from Dulles and other high-ranking officials continued, and it sent ambiguous messages to the populations of the Eastern bloc nations. These ambiguous messages had disastrous results in Hungary, where the people expected more support from the United States once their revolution had begun.^xxx

Because of both the affirmation from the report prepared by Georgetown that fostering a resistance movement in Hungary via covert means was untenable and the ambivalence of the Eisenhower administration towards the liberation of the Eastern European states, the United States was, in a sense, caught with its pants down when shots erupted in Budapest. American strategic planners had been completely unprepared for the possibility of armed rebellion and street fighting against the regime, and the ferocity of the rebellion quickly caught Moscow’s attention. On the night of the outbreak, the Soviet Presidium held an emergency meeting. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, then Soviet Minister of Defense, delivered the following assessment of the situation in Hungary: “A demonstration by 100 thous. in Budapest; the radio station is on fire.” All members of the Presidium except Anastas Mikoyan, Minister of Foreign Trade, approved of Khrushchev’s suggestion to send troops to put down the uprising.^xxxi The next day, on October 24, Soviet tanks were blockading the streets of Budapest.^xxxii Eisenhower was quick to denounce Soviet intervention, and he expressed sympathy for the Hungarian people. On October 26, the NSC was convened to formulate a strategy to forestall a major Soviet crackdown. The U.S. decided to attempt to negotiate a settlement, knowing that its own options were limited. The arrangement called for a neutral state, along the lines of Austria or Finland, to be established in Hungary.^xxxiii From the start, Eisenhower ruled out military intervention in support of the rebels, and even ruled out a CIA proposal to covertly drop arms and supplies into Hungary.^xxxiv American officials, along with the British and French, had brought the issue before the United Nations Security Council on October 28. On October 29, however, much to the dismay of the American government, hostilities broke out on the Sinai peninsula at Suez. The British and French joined the conflict, to the chagrin of the Americans, on October 31, and moved for the issue of Hungary to be presented to a special session of the UN General Assembly which would cover both crises.^xxxv The Americans blocked their efforts, however, and both crises remained on the Security Council’s agenda.

The U.S. was confident that its negotiation strategy was proving successful: on October 30, Marshal Zhukov spoke in favor of withdrawing Soviet troops from Hungary.^xxxvi Convinced that the threat of a Soviet crackdown was averted, the Eisenhower administration focused on the pressing Suez Crisis. French and British actions behind the scenes of Suez had infuriated Dulles: “Just when the Soviet orbit was crumbling and we could point to a contrast between the Western world and the Soviets, it appeared the West was producing a similar situation.”^xxxvii On November 1, just as the focus was shifting towards Suez, the Soviets reversed their previous decision. Negotiations between the Soviets and Nagy had proven fruitful, and an agreement had been reached both for the independence of Hungary and the removal of Soviet troops, as encouraged by the United States.^xxxviii The Soviets, however, reversed this agreement days later, just as life was returning to normal in Budapest. The Soviets were concerned that, if the Hungarians were to leave the Warsaw Pact, as Nagy intended, what would keep the Czechs or Poles in line?^xxxix Nagy had essentially forced the Soviets’ hand, and on November 4, 1956, the second Soviet intervention began. The first intervention had been relatively small, and was carried out by troops already stationed in Hungary; the second was an outright invasion.^xl With a flick of its paw, the Russian bear was able to crush the revolution and install a new regime under Janos Kadar.

Throughout the crisis, American rhetoric had encouraged the Hungarian rebels to continue fighting for their freedom. This was the tragic side effect of America’s “liberation” propaganda: while the U.S. government assured the world that it was committed to the goal of an independent Central and Eastern Europe, it did not publicly advertise the fact that it was not committed enough to risk a military engagement with the Soviets. The rhetoric, however, convinced the fighters on the ground otherwise.^xli The crisis, as it developed prior to the second Soviet intervention, was in some ways exacerbated by Western influences such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which delivered messages of encouragement to the fighters. A survey of fleeing refugees in 1957 indicated that one-half of U.S.-bound refugees expected American intervention on behalf of the rebels because of the content broadcast over the radio.^xlii American officials, however, were well aware of the fact that the Hungarians, without some sort of cease-fire or compromise, were fighting a suicidal battle. No effort was made to suggest to the Hungarians that Dulles felt they did not have a chance; even after the second invasion on November 4, the RFE and VOA broadcasts urged the rebels forward.^xliii

After the Soviet invasion on November 4, American diplomatic circles still did not yet count themselves out of the Hungarian crisis. A telegram from the American Ambassdor to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, was forwarded through the U.S. Embassy in Paris to President Eisenhower. In it, Luce made a passionate plea for Eisenhower to make some sort of public move in support of the Hungarians, making the following comparison: “Franco-British action on Suez is a small wound to their prestige but American inaction about Hungary could be a fatal wound to ours.”^xliv In a move mirroring the previous attempt by the French and British, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge unilaterally submitted a draft resolution to the General Assembly to condemn the Soviet actions in Hungary, thus circumventing the Soviet veto on the Security Council.^xlv By this time, however, the Suez crisis had put the United States in a remarkably awkward position. Richard Nixon explained after the conflict: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.”^xlvi Eisenhower very boldly ordered the French, British, and Israelis to withdraw from Egypt, both to distance the United States from a blatant imperial power-play and to try to refocus world attention on Hungary.^xlvii He also had to prevent the Soviets from threatening intervention in the Middle East, and to do so he invoked the Soviet invasion of Hungary. On November 5, the Soviets offered that the United States and Soviet Union join forces to put an end to the Suez Crisis. The implied threat in the rejection of this scheme, which the Soviets surely expected, was unilateral intervention by the Soviets.^xlviii Eisenhower instead issued a public statement that asked the states of the Middle East: “Do you want the Soviets in the Middle East doing what they are now doing in Hungary?” The statement committed the United States to maintaining the United Nations mandate, and implicitly threatened the Soviets that any unilateral action over Suez would not be tolerated. That evening he asked for a preliminary consultation with congressional leaders in case he was forced to ask Congress for a declaration of war, and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean was put on full alert.^xlix This all occurred on the eve of the 1956 U.S. Presidential election; the Hungarian Revolution was effectively crushed, but tensions had reached a record high. On November 7, amid Eisenhower’s landslide victory in the election, a cease-fire in Suez was declared, and fears of Soviet intervention began to fade.^l The UN General Assembly had voted to issue ultimatums to both the Soviets in Hungary and the combatants in Egypt; only in the latter case did the involved parties heed the will of the UN.

Ultimately, the revolution in Hungary was crushed wholly under the Soviet jackboot in an unprecedented display of force. Not since the Second World War had the Red Army’s fury been unleashed in such a monstrous display; at the peak of the invasion on November 4, over 200,000 Soviet troops and 4,000 tanks were streaming into Hungary.^li The United States was ultimately powerless to stop the onslaught with force, considering it lacked sufficient conventional forces in Eastern Europe, as well as the means to transfer said forces to Hungary without violating either Czechoslovak territory or Austrian neutrality. Additionally, Eisenhower was, wisely, unwilling to risk a military confrontation with the Soviets, especially a nuclear exchange. The remarkable violence which the Soviets used to suppress the uprising showed the United States firsthand the lengths that the Soviet Union would go to preserve its hegemony in Eastern Europe. This realization, combined with Eisenhower’s ultimate inaction in Hungary, effectively hammered the last nail in the coffin of rollback doctrine: the doctrine of liberation proved to be a “deadly sham.”^lii Although actual military intervention had been ruled out from the start, liberation of the Eastern European states was abandoned as an ultimate strategic goal. The invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, and the refusal of the West to involve itself more heavily beyond rhetoric, also caused many to come to the realization that, despite common illusions, a system of Eastern and Western spheres of interest, based on the acceptance of a post-war settlement, did exist, and was in practice.^liii While the Suez Crisis threatened the cohesion of the North Atlantic Alliance, the brutality of the Soviet response also legitimized the need for it. NATO was founded to counter Soviet aggression in Europe, and while Hungary was, ostensibly, already within the Soviet sphere of influence, the Soviet assault was the realization of the aggression that NATO feared. The Soviet Presidium acknowledged this: Matvei Saburov reminded his colleagues during the deliberations to renew the assault on Hungary that action against the rebellion would “vindicate NATO.”^liv It became obvious to the NATO powers that the Soviets would not be leaving Europe anytime soon, and that significant changes in Eastern European regimes were contingent upon significant changes within the Soviet ruling establishment. This would prove true come 1989, when Gorbachev’s release of the satellites resulted in the fall of each of their Communist governments. Until that time, however, the United States used the lessons it learned in 1956 to commit itself to implementing containment worldwide. The invasion of Hungary confirmed that the Soviet threat to Europe was real, and fundamentally changed the outlook of the United States when encouraging dissidence in Soviet satellites. From 1956 onward, the United States was consciously aware of the violence the Soviets were willing to perpetrate as the memories of Hungary lingered on the West’s conscience.

 

i Robert Griffith and Paula Baker, Major Problems in American History Since 1945 (Boston: Wadsworth, 2007), 39-42

ii Ibid., 51-54

iii Ibid., 52

iv John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 68

v Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 94

vi Paul Zinner, Revolution in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 239-240

vii Paul Kecskemeti, The Unexpected Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 18-19

viii Ibid., 40

ix Ibid., 142-143

x Tibor Meray, Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin, trans. Howard Katzander(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1959), 17

x iIbid., 21

xii Ibid., 28-29

xiii Ibid., 32

xiv Zinner, 203

xv Ibid., 214-215

xvi Meray, 60-61

xvii Ibid., 80-82

xviii Ibid., 87-91

xix Hungary: Resistance Activities and Potentials, Project No. 9570, prepared by Georgetown University, 5 January 1956, 3
<http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/doc1.pdf&gt;

xx Ibid., 5

xxi Ibid., 4

xxii Ibid., 11

xxiii Ibid., 23-24

xxiv Minutes of 290^th NSC meeting, July 12, 1956, 12 July 1956, 2
<http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/doc2.pdf&gt;

xxv Ibid., 4

xxvi Ibid., 4

xxvii Laszlo Borhi, “Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction? U.S. Policy and Eastern Europe in the 1950s,” Journal of Cold War Studies, no. 1.3(1999), 88-89

xxviii Ibid., 69-71

xxix Ibid., 89

xxx Ibid., 90

xxxi Working Notes from the Session of the CPSU CC Presidium on 23 October 1956, 23 October 1956, Wilson Center Cold War International History Project, 1956 Hungarian Revolution Collection

xxxii Meray, 96-98

xxxiii Borhi, 98-100

xxxiv John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 302

xxxv Csaba Bekes, “The Hungarian Question on the UN Agenda,” Hungarian Quarterly (Spring 2000)

xxxvi Borhi, 100

xxxvii Ibid., 101

xxxviii Meray, 160-161

xxxix Ibid., 198-199

xl Ibid., 236-237

xli Ibid., 115-116

xlii Borhi, 81

xliii Ibid., 109

xliv Clare Boothe Luce, Telegram From the Embassy in France to the Department of State, 4 November 1956
<http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v25/d165&gt;

xlv Csaba Bekes, “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics,” Wilson Center CWIHP Working Paper No. 16, 23
<http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB4E.pdf&gt;

xlvi Borhi, 105

xlvii Wm. Roger Louis, “Dulles, Suez, and the British,” John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, ed. Richard Immerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135

xlviii David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 245

xlix Ibid., 246

l Ibid., 258-289

li Ibid., 239

lii Diggins, 302

liii Bekes (CWIHP), 6

liv Zubok, 117