Revolutionary and Counter-Revolution in Hungary 1956 Peter Fryer, Gerry Healy, Bob Pitt, June 2015

8/8/2019 Revolutionary and Counter-Revolution in Hungary 1956 Peter Fryer, Gerry Healy, Bob Pitt, June 2015

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In Defence ofTrotskyism

No 16

£1 waged, 50p unwaged/low waged, €1.50


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Revolutionary and Counter -Revolution in Hungary 1956

2 Where We Stand

1. WE STAND WITHKARL MARX: ‘The eman-cipation of the workingclasses must be conqueredby the working classes

themselves. The struggle forthe emancipation of the working class means not astruggle for class privilegesand monopolies but forequal rights and duties andthe abolition of all classrule’ (The International

Workingmen’s Association1864, General Rules).2. The capitalist stateconsists, in the last analysis,of ruling-class laws within ajudicial system and deten-tion centres overseen by thearmed bodies of police/army who are under thedirection and are controlledin acts of defence of capital-

ist property rights againstthe interests of the majorityof civil society. The workingclass must overthrow thecapitalist state and replace it

with a workers’ state basedon democratic soviets/

workers’ councils to sup-press the inevitable counter-

revolution of private capi-talist profit against plannedproduction for the satisfac-tion of socialised humanneed.3. We recognise the ne-

cessity for revolutionaries tocarry out serious ideologicaland political struggle asdirect participants in thetrade unions (always) and inthe mass reformist socialdemocratic bourgeois work-ers’ parties despite their pro-capitalist leaderships whenconditions are favourable.

Because we see the tradeunion bureaucracy and theirallies in the Labour partyleadership as the most fun-damental obstacle to thestruggle for power of the

working class, outside ofthe state forces and theirdirect agencies themselves,

we must fight and defeatand replace them with arevolutionary leadership bymobilising the base againstthe pro-capitalist bureau-cratic misleaders to openthe way forward for thestruggle for workers’ power.4. We are fully in supportof all mass mobilisations

against the onslaught of thisreactionary Con-Lib Demcoalition. However, whilstparticipating in this struggle

we will oppose all policies which subordinate the

working class to the politi-cal agenda of the petty-bourgeois reformist leadersof the Labour party andtrade unions5. We oppose all immi-gration controls. Interna-tional finance capital roamsthe planet in search of prof-it and imperialist govern-

ments disrupts the lives of workers and cause the col-lapse of whole nations withtheir direct intervention inthe Balkans, Iraq and Af-ghanistan and their proxy

wars in Somalia and theDemocratic Republic of theCongo, etc. Workers have

the right to sell their labourinternationally whereverthey get the best price. Onlyunion membership and payrates can counter employers

who seek to exploit immi-grant workers as cheap la-bour to undermine thegains of past struggles.

Socialist Fight produces IDOT. It is a partof the Liaison Committee for the FourthInternational with the Liga Comunista,Brazil and the Tendencia Militante Bol-

chevique, Argentina.Editor: Gerry Downing

Assistant Editor: John BarrySocialist Fight: PO Box 59188, London,

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3 Hungarian Tragedy

Preface to the 1986 reprint

Afirst-hand account of the Hungarian Revo-

lution and its crushing by the Soviet intervention. Peter Fryer was correspondent for the

Daily Worker (Now Morning Star) a newspaperunder the control of the Communist Party ofGreat Britain. His experiences in Hungary andthe censoring of his reports led to Fryer’s resig-nation from the paper and party. Any writer whose first book is thought to be

worth reprinting after 30 years, for a new genera-tion of readers, is bound to feel a sense of pride.But my pride in the reappearance of Hungarian

Tragedy does not blind me to its flaws. This littlebook was written in a week. Or rather, it poureditself on the page white-hot. It bears the marks ofhaste, emotion and disillusionment. It is not freefrom naivetés and purple passages. There are twoerrors of fact: the ‘North-East district secretary’quoted in the Introduction was in fact theDurham area secretary; the interview withCharles Coutts took place, not on November 2,but the day before.

Yet, for all its faults, this book does tell thetruth about the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Totell that truth was, I thought, my duty to theHungarian workers who had fought and died soselflessly and whose gallant struggle, so brutallysuppressed, I had witnessed.

For telling the truth in this book I was expelledfrom the Communist Party. Thirty years later, theproblem discussed in the Postscript – the regen-eration of the world communist movement – is

still unresolved. This problem has proved morestubborn, and more contradictory, than anyonecould have foreseen. It is the key problem of ourepoch, and the future of humanity depends on itssolution.

Some of the Hungarians referred to in thesepages were soon to fall victim to Stalinist repres-sion. Attila Szigeti slashed his wrists with hisspectacles, then jumped to his death from his cell

window. Géza Losonczy went on hunger strike.

His health had been shattered in Rákosi’s jails, where he had suffered a lung haemorrhage; when

his new captors carelessly pushed a feeding tubedown his windpipe, he died.

Another victim was the ‘outstandingly shrewd, well-informed and intelligent Hungarian com-munist’ who is quoted in Chapter 3. His name

was Miklós Gimes. He was a very brave man. Hetook his wife and child to safety in Vienna duringthe uprising, then went back to Budapest to facearrest. He was hanged in 1958 with Imre Nagy,Pál Maléter, and József Szilágyi, after the shame-ful farce of a secret trial. The whole business wasfinished, and the murderers were washing theblood off their hands, before the world labourmovement had been given the slightest chance toprotest. Gimes and his three comrades refused to

compromise. They went to their deaths withoutconfessing to ‘crimes’ they had not committed. They died as they had lived: sworn enemies ofcapitalism and Stalinism alike.

Though I only met him once, Gimes’s integrity

and passion, his fierce love of truth and justice,made a powerful impression on the young man Ithen was. He represented all that was best inHungary. I dedicate this new edition of Hungari-an Tragedy to his memory

Peter Fryer

Pál Maléter


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Obituary

Terry Brotherstone

Peter FryerCommunist journalist who told thetruth about Hungary 1956Friday November 3, 2006The Guardian

The death of Peter Fryer aged 79, comes 50years to the week since his honest reportingof Hungary’s 1956 revolution for the Daily

Worker (now the Morning Star ) split the

Communist party of Great Britain, andchanged his own life. A loyal CP membersince 1945, and a Worker journalist for nineyears, he immediately wrote a short, passion-ate book Hungarian Tragedy in defence ofthe revolution — and was expelled from theparty.

Fryer’s book has been compared to JohnReed’s Ten Days that Shook the World on

the Bolshevik uprising of 1917. A few daysbefore he died, Fryer heard that Hungary’spresident had awarded him the Knight’sCross of the Order of Merit of the Republic,in recognition of his “continuous support ofthe Hungarian revolution and freedom fight”.

Sent by the then Worker editor, JohnnyCampbell, to report on a “counter-revolutionary” uprising, Fryer’s loyalty was tocommunism, Marx’s “truly human society”,not to the CPGB’s Stalinist line. Realisingthat he was witnessing a popular uprising ofstudents and workers, he sided with the revo-lutionaries. His dispatches were savagely edit-ed, then suppressed.

In 1949, Fryer had covered the HungarianStalinist regime’s show trial of Hungarianparty leader, László Rajk. In good faith, hereported Rajk’s “confession”— made with the

promise of being spared, but resulting in hisexecution — as proletarian justice. So, when

the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s revela-tions about Stalinism at the 1956 Soviet Partycongress were followed in Hungary by Rajk’scynical “rehabilitation”, Fryer’s engagement

with the CPGB’s crisis was personal. The“doubts and difficulties” shared by manymembers, for him meant confronting the parthe felt he had played in Rajk’s murder.

Held up at a border town on the road from Vienna to Budapest, Fryer saw his first deadbodies — 80 people shot during a demonstra-tion. It was his turning-point. Attending theelection of a workers’ council at a state farm

was the last straw. An apology that it wastaking all day because “we have absolutely noexperience of electing people” made himthink: “So much for ‘people’s democracy’.”

In late October 1956 there was a lull whichfollowed from the brief Soviet withdrawal

and ended with the Soviet army’s return toBudapest on November 4 to crush the revo-lution. During that period Fryer offered toedit an English-language paper, and he wasproud to read, in a 1961 Hungarian emigrébibliography of the revolution that this was“of capital importance as regards the charac-ter of the insurrection: the only foreign jour-nalist who decided to act for the sake of

Hungary was a Communist”. Hungarian Tragedy played a big part in


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Hungarian Tragedy, (1956)

First Published: December 1956,by Dobson Books Ltd, BritainSource: October 1986 by New

Park Publications Ltd [ISBN 086151 072 6] Transcription: Rolf Vorhaug(http://www.vorhaug.net/politikk/hungarian_tragedy/) Additional markup for the Marx-ists Internet Archive by David Walters & Einde O’Callaghan. Copyright: © Index Books Ltd,London, Britain. Online here

with permission.‘A people which enslaves others

forges its own chains’. Karl Marx‘The victorious proletariat canforce no blessings of any kindupon any foreign nation without

undermining its own victory byso doing’. Frederick Engels‘If Finland, if Poland, if theUkraine break away from Russia,there is nothing bad about that. Anyone who says there is, is achauvinist. It would be madnessto continue the policy of the Tsar Nicholas ... No nation can

be free if it oppresses othernations’. V. I. Lenin

Preface to 1986 Reprint Intro-ductionI. Arrival in Hungary2. Magyaróvár3. Background to October

4. How The Revolution Began5. Györ6. Bábolna7. Budapest8. Revolution And Counter-Revolution9. The Second Soviet Interven-tion10. What Now?Postscript

https://www.marxists.org/archive/fryer/1956/dec/index.htm

the CPGB’s fierce internal discussions whichfollowed the Soviet invasion and led up to itsEaster 1957 Hammersmith congress. But theparty proved irredeemable. By then Fryer

was working with the Trotskyist “club” of

Gerry Healy (obituary December 18 1989),for which he edited the weekly Newsletter and co-edited Labour Review . These publi-cations represent one of the few attempts byBritish Trotskyists to engage in serious dia-logue and for a while they attracted a widerange of authors. The narrow-minded, and sometimes brutal,

authoritarianism Healy substituted for Marx-

ist politics soon drove Fryer away. For quar-ter of a century, he lived another life, writingon the history of Portugal, Grundyism, cen-sorship, and, above all, black history andmusic.

His best-known book, Staying Power (1984), on the black presence in Britain wasfollowed by Rhythms of Resistance (2000),

which makes a significant contribution to thestudy of the impact of African music in Latin

America. The son of a Hull master mariner, he won

a scholarship to Hymers college in 1938. The

young Fryer was impressed by the localCommunist party’s opposition to Sir OswaldMosley’s British Union of Fascists. But he

was an anarchist until, inspired by the Red Army, and “a patriot of the Soviet Union”,

he joined the Young Communist League in1942.

He also gravitated towards journalism nota-bly at the Yorkshire Post. But his CP mem-bership and the paper’s Tory politics provedan unstable mix and on the last day of 1947he joined the Daily Worker.

In the late 1980s the expulsion of GerryHealy from what had become the Workers’

Revolutionary Party allowed Fryer to returnto the political dialogue left unfinished 30years earlier. Fryer wrote a splendid columnfor the often rather earnest weekly Workers’Press.

In his last few weeks, he had a success as apianist playing blues at the Caipirinha jazzbar in Archway, north London.

He is survived by Norma Meacock, hispartner, and their son, two daughters andthree grandchildren.Peter Fryer, journalist, born February 18 1927;died October 31 2006


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The question of the origin of the Hungar-ian revolution was discussed in Chapter

Three. It was argued that the revolution wasnot a well-prepared plot by counter-revolutionary forces, but a genuine upsurge ofthe overwhelming majorityof the Hungarian people,for whom life had becomeintolerable – an upsurgeprepared for by the pastthirty-seven years andcalled forth in particularby the blunders, crimesand trickery of the Stalinistleaders of the CommunistParty. There are some who

would accept this view,and who would deplore

the initial Soviet interven-tion, but who would de-fend the second Sovietintervention as a regretta-ble, but bitter, necessity. Three arguments are

advanced to support this defence. In the firstplace it is said that the Nagy government asreconstituted on Saturday, November 3, had

moved considerably to the Right, and was onthe point of sliding still further to the Right,since it included people who wanted notmerely to neutralise Hungary but to restorecapitalism and landlordism. Secondly, it isheld that a growing danger of counter-revolution, the increasing activity of reaction-ary forces throughout the country, which theNagy government was powerless to check,made Soviet intervention imperative.(Cardinal Mindszenty’s broadcast on theevening of November 3 is usually cited as

proof.) Thirdly, the defenders of the secondSoviet intervention claim that White Terror

was raging in the country, and that promptaction by Soviet troops was needed to savethe lives of Communists. I propose to try to

answer these arguments inturn.

The character of the NagyGovernment on the eve ofthe Soviet attack, and thepositions taken up by theparties represented in it,have been analysed byDaniel Norman in an arti-cle in Tiibune of Novem-ber 23, 1956, to which I amindebted for some of thetranslations below. The

‘Inner Cabinet’ of threeCommunists and four non-Communists had been re-placed by a Governmentconsisting of two repre-sentatives of the Socialist

Workers’ (Communist) Party, three each fromthe Social-Democratic Party and the Small-holders’ Party, two from the Petöfi (National

Peasant) Party and – what Norman does notmention – one representative of the revolu-tionary committees, Colonel Pál Maléter, whosat as Minister of War, and who was one ofthe two delegates arrested by the Russians.

The suggestion seems to be that this changemeant a certain swamping of the Com-munists, and that the non-Communists in thecoalition could not be trusted to retain Social-ism, but would pave the way for fascism. To which it must be answered first, that this

coalition was more truly representative of the

Hungarian Tragedy

By Peter Fryer

Chapter 8 Revolution and counter

revolution

On October 31, in aspeech to the inaugural

meeting of the Pécsbranch of the Smallhold-ers’ Party, Béla Kovácssaid: “No one must dreamof going back to the worldof counts, bankers andcapitalists: that world isover once and for all. A

true member of the Small-holders’ Party cannotthink along the lines of1939 or 1945”.


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Hungarian people than any government Hun-gary had known since 1947: it was a real peo-ple’s front government, and, if the matter hadbeen put to the test, would undoubtedly haveenjoyed the trust of the national committees;

and, secondly, that statements by responsibleleaders of the three non-Communist parties inthe coalition gave no grounds whatever forbranding them as enemies of Socialism. In thefirst issue of the new Népszava, on NovemberI, the Socialist leader Anna Kéthly had writ-ten: The Social-Democratic Party ... has won its

chance of living, and it has won this from a

regime which called itself a popular democra-cy, but which in form and essence was neitherpopular nor democratic. We greet with pro-found respect the heroes who have made pos-sible the rebirth of the party, thousands ofyoung intellectuals and workers who havefought, starving and in rags, spurred on by theidea of a free and independent Hungary ...Freed from one prison, let us not allow the

country to become a prison of another colour.Let us watch over the factories, the mines andthe land, which must remain in the hands ofthe people. (My italics – P.F.)

On October 31, in a speech to the inauguralmeeting of the Pécs branch of the Smallhold-ers’ Party, Béla Kovács said:

“No one must dream of going back to the world of counts, bankers and capitalists: that world is over once and for all. A true memberof the Smallholders’ Party cannot think alongthe lines of 1939 or 1945.”

On November 3 Ferenc Farkas, general secre-tary of the Petöfi Party, and one of its mem-bers in the Nagy government (the Daily

Worker on November 5 described this partyas ‘semi-fascist’) said there were a number ofpoints on which the Government was unani-mous, including the following:

“The Government will retain from the Socialistachievements everything which can be, and

must be, used in a free, democratic and Social-ist country, in accordance with the wish of thepeople.

We want to retain the most sincere and warm-est friendly economic and cultural relations with every Socialist country, even when wehave achieved neutrality. We also want to es-tablish economic and cultural relations with theother peace-loving countries of the world.”

The demand for neutrality, which Nagy sup-

ported, was no evidence of a slide to theRight, nor of ‘open hostility ... to the SovietUnion,’ nor of ‘repeated concessions ... to thereactionary forces’, as that shameful statementof the Executive Committee of the BritishCommunist Party, issued only twelve hoursafter the Soviet attack began yet thoroughlyapproving it, sought to make out. If Yugosla-

via could choose its own path to Socialism

without joining one or other bloc, why couldnot the Hungarian people, too, have both


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neutrality and Socialism? I am in completeagreement with Norman’s conclusion that, farfrom being ‘reactionary forces’, the partiesassociated in the Coalition Government ofImre Nagy on the eve of the Soviet attack‘were the only forces capable of dealing withthe dispersed fascists, little groups of fascistsor plain hooligans who had made their appear-ance lately among the revolutionary mass andperpetrated crimes condemned by everyoneamong the insurgents. Their number was notgreat. They had no possibility of organisingthemselves. Only a government which had thebacking of the overwhelming majority of the

Hungarians, as Nagy’s last government had,could have detected and dealt with them.’ This brings us to the second question. Were

reactionary forces becoming more active? Ofcourse they were. Was there a danger of coun-ter-revolution? It would be senseless to denyit. The night I reached Vienna, November 11,I was told by Austrian Communists how 2,000Hungarian émigrés armed and trained by the

Americans, had crossed over into WesternHungary to fight and agitate. But the dangerof counter-revolution is not the same thing asthe success of counter-revolution. And be-tween the two lay a powerful and significantbarrier, which I for one was prepared to putmy trust in: the will of the Hungarian peoplenot to return to capitalism. As Bruce Renton

wrote in The New Statesman and Nation onNovember 17:

Nobody who was in Hungary during the revo-lution could escape the overwhelming impres-sion that the Hungarian people had no desire orintention to return to the capitalist system.

And remember that these people who wantedto retain Socialism and improve it had arms intheir hands; they were armed workers, armedpeasants, armed students, armed soldiers.

They had guns and tanks and ammunition.

They had splendid morale. They were morethan equal to any putsch, if one had been at-

tempted. But they were never given thechance to prove it. It was none other than theCommunist Party paper Szabad Nép which onOctober 29 indignantly rebuffed Pravda’s arti-cle The collapse of the adventure directed against the

people of Hungary. What happened in Budapest, said Szabad

Nép, had not been directed against the people,

it had not been an adventure, and it certainlyhad not ‘collapsed’. The demands were de-mands for Socialist democracy. Pravda’s claimthat the insurrection had been instigated by‘Western imperialists’ was ‘an insult to the

whole population of Budapest’. It was notimperialist intrigue which produced this‘bloody, tragic, but lofty fight,’ but the Hun-garian leadership’s own ‘faults and crimes’,and, in the first place, its failure to ‘safeguard

the sacred flame of national independence’. And Szabad Nép answered in advance the crythat counter-revolution obliged the SovietUnion to intervene:

“The youth will be able to defend the con-quests which they have achieved at the price oftheir blood, even against the counter-revolutionaries who have joined them. (Thestudents and workers) have proved that they

represent such a political force as is capable ofbecoming a guiding and irreplaceable force ...


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From the first moments of the demonstrationand fighting they declared many times – and inthe course of the fighting they proved it – thatthey were not against popular rule, that they were neither fascists nor counter-

revolutionaries nor bandits.” As for the Mindszenty broadcast of Novem-ber 3, the lengthy ex-tracts quoted by Mervyn

Jones in Tribune(November 30) makenonsense of AndrewRothstein’s claim that it‘issued a programme ofcapitalist restoration’, and

John Gollan’s descriptionof it as ‘the virtual signalfor the counterrevolu-tionary coup’. Mindszen-ty on the whole support-ed the Nagy Govern-ment, and his one refer-ence to private owner-ship came in a sentencebeginning: ‘We want aclassless society’! As

Jones said, the speech was ‘reminiscent ... of aLabour Party policystatement’. There is one further

proof of how false was the claim that the So- viet troops went into action against reaction-

aries and fascists, and that is the indisputablefact that they were greeted, not with joy, asthe Soviet communiqués claimed, but with the

white-hot, patriotic fury of a people in arms;and that it was the industrial workers whoresisted them to the end. ‘Soviet troops are re-establishing order ... We Soviet soldiers andofficers are your selfless friends’, said the So-

viet communiqué of November 5. It was the

proletariat of Hungary, above all, that foughtthe tanks which came to destroy the revolu-

tionary order they had already established inthe shape of their workers’ councils. In mydispatch of November 11, I asked:

If the Soviet intervention was necessary toput down counterrevolution, how is it to be

explained that some of the fiercest resistanceof all last week was in the

working-class districts ofÚjpest, in the north ofBudapest, and Csepel, inthe south – both pre-warstrongholds of the Com-munist Party? Or how isthe declaration of the

workers of the famoussteel town of Sztálinvárosto be explained: that they

would defend their Social-ist town, the plant andhouses they had built withtheir own hands, againstthe Soviet invasion?Not only was no answer

forthcoming to thesequestions, but the ques-tions themselves neversaw the light of day. TheStalinists in control of theDaily Worker backed theexport of Socialism inhigh explosive form

against the bare-handed heroism of ‘Red Cse-pel’. They took their stand on the wrong side

of the barricades. The third argument in favour of Soviet in-

tervention is that there was ‘White Terror’raging in Hungary, and that for the SovietUnion to have refused to intervene wouldhave been ‘inhuman’. Leaving aside the stilluncertain question of whether anyone ever didappeal to the Soviet Union to intervene, let usmake quite sure what White Terror is. just as

Red Terror is the organised, systematic repres-sion by a proletarian dictatorship of its coun-

If the Soviet intervention wasnecessary to put down coun-terrevolution, how is it to beexplained that some of thefiercest resistance of all last week was in the working-classdistricts of Újpest, in the northof Budapest, and Csepel, in thesouth – both pre-war strong-holds of the Communist Party?Or how is the declaration ofthe workers of the famous steeltown of Sztálinváros to be ex-

plained: that they would defendtheir Socialist town, the plantand houses they had built withtheir own hands, against theSoviet invasion?


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ter-revolutionary opponents, so White Terroris the organised, systematic repression by abourgeois dictatorship of its revolutionaryopponents.

Heaven help Andrew Rothstein and those

others who call the state of affairs in Hungaryon November 1, 2 and 3 ‘White Terror’ ifthey ever come face to face with real White

Terror. In ten days the Versailles army whichsuppressed the Paris Commune of 1871slaughtered between20,000 and 30,000 men,

women and children,either in battle or in

cold blood, amid terri-ble scenes of crueltyand suffering. ‘Theground is paved withtheir corpses’, gloated

Thiers. Another 20,000 were transported and7,800 sent to thecoastal fortresses. That

was White Terror. Thousands of Com-munists and Jews weretortured and murderedafter the suppression ofthe Hungarian SovietRepublic of 1919, andhideous atrocities tookplace at Orgovány andSiófok. That was White Terror. In 1927

Chiang Kai-shek massacred 5,000 organised workers in Shanghai. That was White Terror.From the advent of Hitler to the defeat offascist Germany untold millions of Com-munists, Socialists, trade unionists, Jews andChristians were murdered. That was White

Terror. It is perfectly true that a section of thepopulation of Budapest, outraged to the pitchof madness by the crimes of the secret police,

was seized with a lust to exterminate Com-munists. It is true that the innocent suffered

as well as the guilty. This is a painful and dis-tressing fact. But to describe the murder of anumber of Communists (which all observersagree was confined to Budapest) as ‘White

Terror’ necessitating Soviet intervention is to

describe events in Hungary in a one-sided,propagandist way. How many innocent Com-munists were murdered in Budapest? Twenty?Fifty? I do not know. But certainly fewer – far, far fewer – than the number of AVH men

who were lynched. At the Agony of Hungary exhibi-tion in London, and in allthe hundreds of photo-

graphs I have seen, there was not a single oneshowing a lynched Com-munist. But there weremany showing lynched

AVH men in their uni-forms. [1] There was onesequence showing a wom-an in civilian clothes being

molested by a crowd, whoaccused her of being an AVH spy. The captionstated that the crowd lether go.Now the only circumstan-tial evidence for the mur-der of Communists is thatput forward by André Stil

in an article translated in World News of No-

vember 24. Stil arrived in Budapest on No- vember 12, nine days after the second Sovietintervention. His article was published in Hu-manité on November 19. Even bearing inmind the assertion of Coutts and others Ispoke to that forty of those killed in the Bu-dapest Party headquarters were AVH men, itis impossible to find Stil’s account of thetreatment of the seven Communists whom he

names anything but convincing and horrible. Yet Stil is obviously performing the disa-

In the provinces only the AVH was physically attacked.

(New Statesman, November17) I had seen no counter-revolutionaries. I had seenthe political prisoners liberat-ed ... I had seen the execu-tioners executed in the furyof the people’s revenge ...But there was no ‘White Ter-ror’. The Communists walked free, the secret police were hanging by their boots. Where then was this counter-revolution, this White Ter-ror? (Truth, November 16)


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greeable task of a propagandistmaking the most of a small numberof atrocities. His need to have theattack on the Party headquartersbegin on October 30 makes him

antedate the Soviet withdrawal fromBudapest by three days; he de-scribes ‘the vandals attacking theliberation monument built upon theGellért Hill’, whereas in fact themain figure was not attacked; and,

worst of all, he mentions the AVHand its crimes in the following curi-ous and oblique way:

Many of those who were there did notat first believe that the Party and itsactive members were being attacked,but that the attack was directed to the mem-bers of a secret police about whom the most unlike- ly stones were being told. (my italics – P.F.)

I have met Stil and have a great personal re-spect for him, as comrade, journalist, novelistand militant, but I should be dishonest if I didnot say that the words I have italicised areunworthy of him. The truth about the ‘White

Terror’ has been told by Bruce Renton: In the provinces only the AVH was physicallyattacked. (New Statesman, November 17) Ihad seen no counter-revolutionaries. I hadseen the political prisoners liberated ... I hadseen the executioners executed in the fury ofthe people’s revenge ... But there was no‘White Terror’. The Communists walked free,

the secret police were hanging by their boots. Where then was this counter-revolution, this White Terror? (Truth, November 16)

The arguments in favour of the second Sovietintervention do not hold water. But even ifNagy had been making concessions all alongthe line to fascism, even if counter-revolutionhad succeeded, even if White Terror had beenraging, it must be said, and said openly and

with emphasis, that from the standpoint ofSocialist principle the Soviet Union would still

not have been justified in intervening. TheSoviet aggression against Hungary was notmerely immoral and criminal from the stand-point of the Hungarian people. It was a clearand flagrant breach of what Lenin called ‘thatelementary Socialist principle ... to which

Marx was always faithful, namely, that nonation can be free if it oppresses other na-tions’. November 4, 1956, saw the leaders ofthe Soviet Union defy Lenin’s warning neverto ‘slide, even in trifles, into imperialist rela-tions with the oppressed nationalities, therebyundermining entirely our whole principle ofsincerity, our principle of defence of thestruggle against imperialism’.

Note1. On November 14 the Daily Worker pub-lished under the headline The White Terror inHungary a photograph of ‘the body of alynched Communist Party member in one ofthe wrecked Budapest Party offices’. Anotherphotograph of the same corpse was in thepaper’s possession, but was not used, showingclearly that the lynched man wore AVH uni-

form.


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Introduction

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is thetouchstone of revolutionary politics

today. At the time of the Hungarian uprising in

November 1956 there were many trends and

individuals in the working class movement who were only too ready to denounce theabomination and excesses of the Soviet andHungarian Stalinists and pay homage to thegrandeur and pathos of the Revolution.

Some protested in the name of a spuriousmiddle-class Humanism, some others object-ed because their anti-communist susceptibili-ties had been outraged and a few, like Isaac

Deutscher, hung tight-lipped from a precari-ous and undignified diagonal drawn betweenthe Soviet tanks and the barricades of theRevolution.

Only a small minority of people led by theInternational Committee of the Fourth Inter-national defended, unconditionally, the Hun-garian insurrection in the name of Interna-tional Socialism and fought for the realiza-tion of the programme of political revolutionfirst advanced by Leon Trotsky in his strug-gle against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Revolutions, like wars, expose all that isfilthy, treacherous and compromising in the

working class. And so it is with the Hungari-an Revolution, the first, but by no means thelast, political revolution of its kind. With animplacable logic it has exposed not only themanifest rottenness of he Stalinist system but

also – and more important – it has revealedto many Communists the corrupt and two-

faced nature of pseudo-Marxism, betterknown as Pabloite revisionism, representedby the United Secretariat in Paris and theSocialist Workers’ Party in New York.

It is sufficient to say that none of thesegroups, for all their verbal pretensions of anti

-Stalinism, could summon enough politicalcourage and integrity even to commemoratethe 10th Anniversary of the Hungarian Revo-lution.

On the contrary, so far have these gentle-men travelled from Trotskyism to Stalinismthat their supporters in Belgium did not seeanything wrong in calling the police(unsuccessfully) to haul down the British

Young Socialist banner proclaiming solidarity with the Hungarian Revolution, which wasraised at the Liege demonstration againstNATO and the Vietnam War in October1966! The events of the last decade show conclu-

sively that the only political allies of the Hun-garian working class and the best defendersof the programme of the political revolutionis the International Committee and the par-

ties which it leads. There is no other. (1966)

STALINSIM IS DEAD BUT STA-LINISM LIVES.

That is the message spelt out in letters ofblood by the Hungarian people. The labour movement of the world is right-

ly shocked at the brutality and ruthlessness of

the Soviet armed forces. But this fact mustnot permit us to be taken off guard for one

Revolution and Counter

Revolution in Hungary

Gerry Healy, (November 1956)Originally published as A News Letter Pamphlet in November 1956.Copied with thanks from the Gerry Healy Archive.

Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On -Line(ETOL).


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13

moment by world imperialism and its agents.Stalinist rule has always been associated withpersecution and murder, both inside andoutside the Soviet Union. Eden and Eisen-hower have never protested when revolu-

tionary opponents of the regime have beensmashed. They helped to whitewash andjustify the Moscow trials through the bookand film Mission to Moscow written by Ameri-can ex-ambassador Joseph E. Davies. Boththe British and American governments re-fused asylum for the great revolutionary Le-on Trotsky when he was being houndedfrom one country to another by Stalin’s

GPU.If these gentlemen shed tears for Hungarytoday it is not for the workers and peasants

who have born the brunt of the fight againstStalinism but for their fascist and landlordfriends. What happened in Hungary, as we shall

see, was a revolution for national independ-ence and democratic rights. Connected withthis was a series of demands passed by thetrade unions.

1. Workers’ councils in every factory toestablish workers’ management and radicallytransform the system of state central plan-ning and directing.

2. Wages to be raised immediately by 10 to15 per cent and a ceiling (about £106 amonth) fixed for the highest salaries.

3. To abolish production norms except infactories where the workers or workers’councils wish to keep them.

4. The 4 per cent bachelor and childlessfamily tax to be abolished; the lowest retire-ment pensions to be increased; child allow-ances to be raised with special reference tothe needs of large families.

5.Speed up house-building with the state,

co-operatives and other organisationslaunching a powerful social movement to

mass produce houses.Negotiate with the governments of the

Soviet Union and other countries in order toestablish economic relations that will ensuremutual advantages by adhering to the princi-

ple of equality. (From Daily Worker, Octo-ber 27, 1956) [1] The backbone of this movement was the

demand for the withdrawal of all Soviettroops from Hungary. The imperialists wereagainst this type of revolution. On the sameday, October 27, the New York Times,mouthpiece of American big business, de-clared:

“The view prevailing among UnitedStates officials, it appeared, was that

John Foster Dulles (above 1953), speaking in Washington, defended the legality of the presence of Soviet troops in Poland under

the Warsaw agreement. “From the standpoint of international law and violation oftreaties,” he said, “I do not think you canclaim that it would be a violation of a treaty.”

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#n1https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#n1https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#n1


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‘evolution’ towards freedom in EasternEurope would be better for all concernedthan ‘revolution’, though nobody wassaying this publicly.”

The New York Times returned to thistheme the next day, October 28, when itdeclared that the problem of western imperi-alism is “how to encourage the nationalistand libertarian spirit in the satellites withoutflaming it into a large scale revolt. As if not to be outdone by the New York

Times the London Daily Worker, echoingMoscow, declared on October 25: “Onlyfalse friends resort to the gun ...”

Five days previously, John Foster Dulles,speaking in Washington, defended the legali-ty of the presence of Soviet troops in Polandunder the Warsaw agreement. “From thestandpoint of international law and violationof treaties,” he said, “I do not think you canclaim that it would be a violation of a treaty.”

Mr Dulles was fully aware at the time hemade that statement that a revolution was

under way in Hungary and that Hungary wasalso a party to the Warsaw agreement. Hoton the heels of Mr Dulles came R. PalmeDutt of the British Communist Party.

“The Soviet armed forces”, he wrote,“were legally in Hungary by agreement underthe Warsaw Pact.” ( Daily Worker, Novem-ber 10)

In a cable from Washington by its corre-

spondent Philip Deane, the London Ob-server, November 11, 1956, reports that:“High Administration sources say that theUnited States has tried to let the Russiansknow, without being provocative, that Berlinand Austria will be defended by Americanforces, Hungary, meanwhile, has been official-ly and finally abandoned to its fait.”

And Basil Davidson, one of the last journal-ists to leave Hungary, reports that, speaking

of the American financed propaganda stationRadio Free Europe , one revolutionary said:

“I wish I could shut its ugly mouth. It lied tous just as the Russians lied to us.”

Neither the Soviet bureaucrats nor the impe-rialists and their representatives, Palme Duttand Foster Dulles, care two hoots about the

working people of Hungary. They were both,for different reasons, opposed to the revolu-tion, and in each case supported their ownparticular agents and not the movement ofthe Hungarian people as a whole.

How the Revolution BeganOn October 23, a large group of unarmedstudents gathered outside the Budapest radio

station and demanded that their 17-pointprogramme of democratic demands bebroadcast. After the police opened fire thegovernment, dominated by Erno Gero, anotorious Kremlin hack, promptly called forSoviet troops.

On Wednesday, October 24, Russian tanksand artillery fired on demonstrators in Buda-pest killing and wounding hundreds of men,

women and children. It was these actions which sparked off the revolutionary armedresistance. During the next day, October 25,armed rebellion broke out. Workers on Cse-pel island in the Danube took up weaponsagainst the security forces. Radio Budapestannounced this as a rebellion of the workingpeople. Absolutely no mention was made attime that this was the work of armed gangs

and the counter-revolution. The spearhead of the whole struggle was ageneral strike. In cities and towns under theircontrol the rebels set up councils of workers,soldiers and students. The first to down tools

were the railway workers. They were quicklyfollowed by workers from factories andplants. The strike was directed by a ‘Central

Workers’ Committee.’ At the same time Imre Nagy, who had

previously been jailed, was installed as prem-ier to help win back popular support.


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On October 29, a paradeof workers’ delegations fromthe provinces presented itsdemands to the new govern-

ment. They demanded theremoval of Russian troops,unconditional amnesty forrevolutionists and the releaseof all political prisoners. According to reports, the

peasants were passive at thebeginning. The New York

Times of October 30 quot-

ed some insurgent leaders who attributed the failure ofthe army as a whole in theearly days to the fact that they were for themost part “farm boys”. According to thesame reports it (the army) had given themsmall arms. These insurgent leaders declared:

“The peasant is conservative by nature andtherefore passive. But the workers have

fought with us, even the workers from ‘redCsepel’ which contains the biggest concen-tration of industry in Hungary.”

By October 29 revolutionary workerscouncils had taken control of several largetowns. These included Gyor, Szombathely,Sopron and Papa, Kaposvar Viszprem, Pec,Miskolc, Szolnok, Szeksbard and Ma-gyarovar.

On the same day Miskolc radio stationbroadcast in the name of the workers’ coun-cils of Borsod Province. In another industrialtown, Sopron, the streets were patrolled bygroups of three: one soldier, one student, one

worker. The uprising was symbolisedthroughout by the unity between the work-ers, soldiers, and students – clear proof that it

was a popular revolution in which the work-ing class occupied the vanguard positions.

Finally, if there is any further doubt on this

point, just read over the dispatch sent onNovember 3 to the Daily Worker by itscorrespondent Peter Fryer who was sent toHungary to get the FACTS. His first job wasto interview Mr. Charlie Coutts, anothermember of the British Communist Party,

who was there for three years editing World Youth, the paper of the Stalinist-dominated WFDY in Budapest. Here are extracts fromthe interview. Mr. Coutts reported as follows:

“The Hungarian uprising – the result ofeight years pent-up feeling – arose from therefusal of Communist leaders to make realchanges after the 20th Congress.

“The people did not oppose everythingthat happened in their country since 1945.

They had wanted to build socialism in Hun-gary. They established the basis but they werenever allowed to build their own socialism onit. After the 20th Congress of the SovietCommunist Party everyone expected there

would be a complete change. There weresome timid changes but nothing that met theneeds of the situation”, said Mr. Coutts.

“In both the Communist Party and its

youth organisations there were people whohad not joined either on principle or because


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of political under-standing but toadvance theircareers. They hadjoined for moneyand for power.

There was no freediscussion at allinside the Party. Itfollows fromthis”, Mr. Coutts

went on, “that inorder to maintainits position theParty leadership

had to use thesecurity police

which was createdin 1948. The Par-ty as a whole, andParliament of course, had no control over thesecurity police at all. They had copied the worstfeatures of the Soviet security police as it wasunder Beria.”

Mr. Coutts said it was only after Soviet troopsentered the fight that it became a nationalmovement, with the two main demands,“Russki go home” and “Abolish the

AVH” (security police). Mr. Coutts said that from the Thursday on-

wards the security police became completelyisolated. Everyone’s hand, including honestCommunists, was against them. Much of thefighting from the Thursday onwards was simp-ly to kill off the security police.

“I have seen the hatred against them ex-pressed in the most terrible scenes”, said Mr.Coutts. “I saw an AVH man clubbed to theground with a rifle butt then literally kicked andtorn to pieces.”

The Daily Worker Stands by StalinismIt would be difficult to find an occasion in his-tory when there was a more discredited politicalparty than the British Communist Party. Hav-

ing served Stalin loyally for well nigh 30 years,and justified his most brutal crimes, the men

who lead the CPGB [2] are incapable of offer-ing anything but a classical Stalinist answer for

the events in Hungary – and as always this hasled them to the most ridiculous positions. Hereis the record:

“Counter-revolution in Hungary staged anuprising in the hours of darkness on Tuesdaynight.” ( Daily Worker, October 25) The same edition carried an article entitled

The Hell that was Horthy’s . Whilst factually itcontained material that was accurate, its pur-pose was to smear the revolution that had be-gun in Hungary as “fascist inspired”. The Daily

Worker stuck more or less to the counter-revolution theme for several days. In this it wasfaithfully supporting the line taken by Pravda,the Kremlin’s mouthpiece, which right fromthe start denounced the Hungarian events as“counter-revolutionary”. Then came the formation of the Nagy gov-

ernment and the repudiation of Pravda bySzabad Nep, the Stalinist paper of the Hun-garian workers’ Party. In strong language it



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17

denounced a Pravda dispatch which was head-ed Collapse of the anti- peoples” adventure in Hungary

– as a “mistake” “What happened in Budapest,” says Szabad

Nep, “was neither anti-people nor an adven-

ture, and it did not collapse. The slogans onsocialist democracy were the loudest, not thoseof the reactionaries nor of counter-revolutionaries. The revolutionary people ofPest and Buda want freedom, people’s free-dom, a life without despotism, terror and fear,more bread and national independence. Wouldthis be ‘anti-people adventure’?” asks the paper. The first point in the Hungarian revolution-

ary demands of 1848 was national independ-ence.

“Today also this is the first point. What hascollapsed and can truly be called anti-people isthe reign of the Rakosi-Gero clique.”

Saying that the Hungarian nation wantedindependence, and that this was the first amongits demands, the article continued:

“Let Hungary be free. Let it be an independ-ent country, and let it live with its neighbour

the Soviet Union in peace and friendship onthis basis.”

This scared the Daily Worker editors, espe-cially as it was rumoured that the Soviet armedforces were being withdrawn. They felt thatperhaps it was Moscow policy to let the Nagygovernment get on with things, so they I beganto change the line, and what was previously

denounced as counter-revolutionary they now Irecognised as having perhaps been“revolutionary” after all. The editorial on Tues-day, October 30, remarked:

“In the course of the struggle in Hungary manysections of the working class people have putforward proposals which are justified, whicharose from the bitter experiences of the pastperiod, and which the government, the Party andthe people should work in unity to implement.

This is not a sign that the majority of Hungari-ans want to return to the days of landlordism

and capitalism, as the western press would likeus to believe.

“Whatever deep resentment and burning criti-cism exists as a result of mistakes and wrongssince the end of the war, communists and social-

ists in Hungary and outside know that to at-tempt to put the clock back would be the worstpossible disaster for the Hungarian people.”

Diplomatic language to be sure, but a decisivechange from its editorial on October 25. If wehad relied upon the Daily Worker for ournews and policy on Hungary, we would beforced to reason something like this. FromOctober 25, to somewhere in the region ofOctober 30 the Hungarian events were counter-revolutionary; then they began to change torevolutionary. This was, by implication,acknowledged in the publication of the dis-patch by Peter Fryer (quoted above) on No-

vember 3.On Sunday, November 4, Soviet tanks in

large formations opened fire on Budapest andother cities. It was now clear that the rumoured

withdrawal of Soviet troops was a smokescreen

behind which massive troop and tank for-mations for an all-out assault were mustered.Immediately these forces went into action theDaily Worker changed its line, and on Novem-ber 5 proceeded to support the intervention ofthe Red Army, again denouncing the Hungari-an events as “counter-revolutionary”. What is clear from all this is that the British

Communist Party leadership and the Daily

Worker have one simple guide to help them work out their policy, and that is “watch Mos-cow and the Red Army and support them un-der all conditions. When Gero called upon the Red Army to fire

upon an unarmed population the Daily Work-er denounced the Hungarian events as counter-revolutionary; when it appeared that the Nagygovernment was being supported and the Red

Army withdrawn, these same events becamerevolutionary, and when once more the Red

Army returned to the attack they again became


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18 counter-revolutionary. Where in the worldcould be found a more glaring example ofStalinist reasoning?

Stalinism and Counter-Revolution

in Hungary The events in Hungary after the end of the war were similar to what took place in allEastern-European countries with the excep-tion of Yugoslavia. In 1945 the revolution

was bureaucratically carried out through theintervention of the Red Army. The Hungari-an Stalinist Party was hoisted into power, notthrough thepopular inter-

vention of themasses, but up-on orders fromStalin in Mos-cow. The Russian

Revolution in1917 establishedthe complete

overthrow ofthe Czarist re-gime by thedemocraticpower of the

workers andpeasantsthrough their soviets. In the early days theydefeated the internal forces of counter-

revolution not so much by force of arms asby argument and policy. The Soviets weresupported by the overwhelming majority ofthe Russian population. That is why the Rus-sian Revolution was a comparatively peacefulaffair, with only a handful of people losingtheir lives. The real struggle and loss of lifebegan when Winston Churchill and is armiesof intervention endeavoured to restore theold ruling class. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin and his

bureaucracy captured power in the BolshevikParty and destroyed all democracy and oppo-sition. This was the beginning of Stalinism – the rule of a powerful bureaucracy safeguard-ing the privileged positions they had gained asa result of the revolution. Though this bu-

reaucracy rested upon the nationalized prop-erty relations established by the revolution, itsrole from the start was predominantly coun-ter-revolutionary, in that its first considera-tion was to protect itself and its positions ofpower. Since it rested on the property rela-tions of the October Revolution, it was al-

ways forced todefend this eco-

nomic base fromattack by theimperialists, andthis was donenot by revolu-tionary appealsbut throughtypical bureau-cratic and mili-

tary methods.For instance,during the sec-ond world war itdenounced allGermans as fas-cists; never once

did it make a revolutionary appeal as Leninand Trotsky did during the Russian Revolu-tion and the war of intervention. It reliedsolely upon military means and the help

which it received from the British and Ameri-can imperialists.

Stalin dealt ruthlessly with all those on theleft such as Trotsky who sought to re-introduce Lenin’s revolutionary policy. AsKhrushchev remarked, he (Stalin) coined thephrase “enemies of the people” and this be-came a substitute for all discussions. You

either agreed unreservedly with Stalin or you were an imperialist agent of fascism. It was


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19 under those conditions that the Moscow frame-up trials were organised in the 1930’s, the ob-ject being to direct opposition away from thebureaucracy by creating a diversion along thelines that the forces of imperialism were prepar-ing to take over in the USSR. From all this the

Soviet workers were left with no choice but tosupport Stalin. Indeed we know that the victimsof the trials themselves, having become com-pletely demoralised, actually agreed to tell thesemonstrous lies because they felt, in their de-moralisation, that this was the only way theycould defend the gains of the revolution. [3] To Stalin, Hungary was a buffer zone of mili-

tary importance only – but having decided to

intervene in 1945, he had to face a number ofproblems: the chief problem being the fact thatHungary was a capitalist state, and in order togear its economy to that of the Soviet Union he

was forced to destroy the capitalist propertyrelations and replace them with state owner-ship.

Insofar as this was done, it was supported bythe overwhelming majority of the working class

who, directly of indirectly, participated in theevent. The Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow andtheir Hungarian agents never for one momentrelaxed their tight hold over this movement.Power in Hungary was maintained in a similar

way to that maintained in Moscow. The Rajktrial was staged for similar reasons to those ofthe Moscow trials. The regime was propped upby the secret police. The tragic story of 61-year-old Dr. Edith

Bone, an ex-member of the British CommunistParty who was jailed by the Hungarian Stalinistsconfirms this in most concrete form:

I had been in the cellar cells for over twomonths”, she says, “when the police decided todeclare their real purpose. I was taken again tothe third floor.

“There had been many big industrial accidents inHungary, due to the lack of higher skilled techni-

cians, and the workers were getting restless. Thecommunists needed a scapegoat. Britain was to

be that scapegoat. I was to ‘confess’ that I was asecret agent, sent by the British Intelligence Ser- vice to organise sabotage. I was to be given a listof names, and was to say yes, these men were thesaboteurs. I was to ‘confess’ all this at a publictrial and in return, said the police, I would get a

light sentence of four years. This sentence, theypromised, would be reduced to two, and I wouldserve them in good conditions.” ( I suffered and I accuse , Daily Express, November9, 1956)

And if any loyal Stalinist should think that thisis a pack of lies let the Daily Worker put himright. In its issue of November 3 appears theeditorial statement: “The Daily Worker ex-presses its condemnation of the inhuman treat-

ment of Dr. Edith Bone and our deep sympa-thy with her in the ordeal to which she hasbeen subjected.” This bureaucratic transfer of power had an-

other side to it. In politically expropriating theHungarian working class, it enabled the rem-nants of the old ruling class to find an effectivecover for counter-revolutionary work amongstthe masses who more and more became hostile

to Stalinism. Since the workers were not per-mitted to deal with the old capitalist elementsthrough democratic organs of power such asthe Soviets in Russia in 1917, the basic classstruggle remained unresolved. Stalinism inHungary was like a repressive lid which since1945 had clamped itself down upon the wholenation, rightist and leftist elements alike. When the revolution finally blew the lid off,

events in Hungary expressed themselvesthrough the centre Nagy government as a stateof dual power. Right-wing, capitalist inspiredand peasant elements demanded recognition, as

well as representatives from the revolutionary workers. This was also the case inside many ofthe workers’ councils, and it was similar to whathappened in the Russian Soviets immediatelyprior to the revolution. This situation is alsodescribed by Peter Fryer of the London Daily

Worker in his interview with C. Coutts, No- vember 3, 1956:



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20

“A great number of political groups were nowactive in Budapest and the rest of Hungary. The air was thick with manifestoes rangingfrom those who wanted to defend collectiveownership, to those who were against it but

could not say so yet, and therefore put thepeople’s genuine national demands in an anti-socialist way. What the outcome was going tobe nobody could say with certainty. The revo-lutionary committees in the factories, and therevolutionary workers’ councils had no overalldirection and aim, no overall basis of policy.

“I don’t want to minimise the danger of thereturn of the émigrés”, said Mr. Coutts. “Butif the revolutionary committees can hammer

out some form of unity around the basic de-mands for an independent, democratic andsocialist Hungary, then all attempts at counter-revolution will be defeated.”

Mr. Coutts believed the working class wasnow without an organised leadership.

“There are dangers of terrorism against individual communists. In fact, that has begun.But in spite of everything there will be a Partythat will identify itself with the Hungarianrevolution and will be forced now to win theHungarian working class for revolutionism onthe basis of conviction.”

We can see therefore that by November 3the situation was crying out for genuine so-cialist leadership and that, according toCoutts and Fryer, it was possible that thiscould have come from the working class. Onthe other hand, the centrist government of

Nagy was swinging steadily to the right,thereby encouraging capitalist intervention. At this juncture the labour movement of

the world is able to see clearly what has hap-pened in the Soviet Union since Khrush-chev’s speech. [4] Stalin is dead but the bu-reaucracy which he personified continues torule. They have been forced here and thereto retreat by the mass pressure and the hos-

tility of the Soviet people (Khrushchev’sspeech was one example of this), but such

retreats are one thing – giving power back tothe working people is quite another. Longago in 1927 Stalin, referring to his rulingclique, explained that they could only be re-moved by civil war. The present bureaucracy

in the Soviet Union will never liquidate orliberalise itself out of existence. It will onlybe removed finally by the actions and strug-gle of the Soviet people led by a conscioussocialist leadership.

In typical bureaucratic style, the Sovietbureaucracy turned its armed might, not onlyagainst the capitalists and Cardinal Mindzen-ty elements in the Nagy government, but

against the revolutionary people as well. Theusual stooge government of Janos Kadar wasset up and the shooting began. No socialistprogramme was presented by the Russians – just giant T34 tanks and masses of armour.

The Soviet troops who were in Hungary when hostilities began and who, according toCoutts and Fryer, fraternised and discussed

with the Hungarian people, appear to have

been withdrawn. Fresh troops replaced themand the attempt to restore bureaucratic rule,as in 1945, commenced. The tragedy of Hungary today is that the

brutal war begun by the Soviet troops is nolonger directed against the capitalist ele-ments, but against the revolutionary forces.

The most stubborn resistance comes fromthe industrial areas; a general strike continuesdespite the reports that 20,000 have beenkilled. The Kadar regime has no basis what-soever, and is distrusted by everyone. This isshown by what the Manchester Guardian describes as the “helplessness of the regime

when it was forced to admit that the freeforces may have been inspired by ‘genuineand honourable motives’ in taking up arms.”Hitherto it had been calling the forces fascistand counter-revolutionary. (November 11,

1956) Again, on November 9 the Manchester



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21

Guardian reported:“The Minister of theInterior, FerencMuennich, todayissued instructions to

all Hungarian troopsto remain in theirbarracks, thus prov-ing that none isfighting on the Rus-sian side. They wereordered to dissolvetheir revolutionarycommittees, which were formed during thefirst Hungarian crisis. Civilian revolutionary

committees were told that they must ejectcounter-revolutionary elements. Political‘advisers’ will be appointed by the govern-ment and attached to them.”

In other words, the struggle is now to takepolitical power away from the working class,and replace it with the “Kadar” clique. The hirelings of the British Communist

Party and the Daily Worker have scouredeverywhere for some factual information,

which would prove that capitalist elementscontrol the situation in Hungary, but littleappears to have been found apart from thespeech of Cardinal Mindzenty, and as soonas this is quoted it immediately defeats itself.For the fact remains that if the capitalist ele-ments have such a mass base, why did thecardinal have to take refuge in the Americanembassy? Capitalist agents there are, to be

sure, but the movement right from the start was predominantly revolutionary, and it isthis fact which must guide the Labour Move-ment.

Hungary and British Labour The responsibility for the emergence of capi-talist elements in Hungary, and for the warnow being waged to crush the revolutionary

workers, rests entirely on Stalinism, and

those who defendits policies insideand outside theSoviet Union. Foran example of this

type of individual,listen to Mr. D.N.Pritt.“Anyone”, he says,“who joins in theshouting againstthe Soviet Union at

the moment is helping the American rulingclass and bringing the third world war near-

er.” ( Daily Worker, November 9, 1956.)Simple, isn’t it? You are either for Russia

right or wrong, or with the imperialists. This is the line which Messrs. Pritt, Palme

Dutt, Gollan, Pollitt and the rest of them [5] peddled in order to justify the Moscow trialsand all the horrors which Khrushchev re-

vealed in his speech. The fact that Mr. Pritt, who has never publicly commented on

Khrushchev’s speech, has emerged from hislegal hole in order to repeat the same line,illustrates how the old Stalinist hacks in Rus-sia and elsewhere are preparing for a lastditch stand.

Fortunately, Mr. Pritt’s return to the “old vomit” is not being followed by many mem-bers of the CPGB and readers of the Daily

Worker. In the same issue Gabriel, its car-toonist for twenty years, resigned over Hun-gary. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the leadingintellectuals in the CPGB, demands that theSoviet troops be withdrawn. Another reader,Ken Jones from Bristol, writes:

“We owe it to our Hungarian and Polishcomrades, as well as to ourselves, to settleaccounts with all responsible for providingus with such a grotesque caricature of thereal developments in Poland and Hungary

over the past five years.” British labour must stand by the working



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22

people of Hungary and help them defendtheir revolution. This can only be done pro-

vided we expose and fight any attempts bythe imperialists in the west to exploit thesituation in order to restore capitalism. Wemust support the demand not only for theimmediate withdrawal of the Red Army, butfor the withdrawal of all the imperialist ar-mies in Western Europe as well. There is a movement afoot by right wing

Labour leaders to cover up their disagree-ments with the Tories on Suez and slip intonational unity behind the capitalists over

Hungary. This must be pitilessly exposedand fought. All monies, food parcels, andmedical supplies which are collected by thelabour movement should be distributed inHungary by the representatives of our move-ment. They should not be left to imperialistagents who will utilise them in an effort toraise the prestige of the capitalist countries.Labour can help Hungary only if it does its

work independently of all Tory forces.Labour must organise itself if necessary to

prevent British fascists and their Toryfriends from launching a witch-hunt eitheragainst members of the British CommunistParty or members of the Labour Party.

There is a danger of this taking place here asit has in France. We must be on our guard.No matter how we detest Stalinism, we mustpreserve the democracy of the movement. All members of the Communist Party and

Young Communist League should immedi-ately demand a special Congress to repudiatethe leadership’s line on Hungary. STAY IN

THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND FIGHT

IT OUT. The people of Hungary do not want to

return to capitalism. They want to preservethe system of centralised planning and stateownership, and get rid of Stalinism forever.

This we must support with all our might. At the same time, the people of Hungary

must deal with capitalist elements in theirown ranks. That is their job, and we are sure

they can do it. The socialist and communistmovement in Hungary must win its right to

Imre Nagy's Statue on the Square of Martyrs in Budapest.


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23

govern not through the indulgence of theMoscow bureaucracy – its guns, planes andtanks, but by means of a socialist policy

which will secure for it the support of theoverwhelming majority of the people. There

is no other road for Hungary – or for the working people in any country.DOWN WITH IMPERIALISMDOWN WITH STALINISMLONG LIVE THE HUNGARIAN SO-CIALIST REVOLUTION

November 1956

At the end of his article, Healy includes the

following reports in the pamphlet as appen-dices under the general heading What the Sta- linists Did NOT Report .STRANGEST WHITE TERROR INHISTORY The Kadar Government has issued the

third volume of its “White Book” on lastautumn’s “counter-revolution”. It gives a listof communists who were killed by freedomfighters. There are 201 names on the list – and it

turns out that 166 of them were members ofthe AVH, the hated security police. Of theremainder, 26 were party officials or in theservice of the AVH. The Kadar regime has been claiming that

‘white terror’ was raging in Hungary on theeve of the second Soviet intervention andthat thousands of communists were lynched

by mobs.Of the 2,829 persons who were imprisoned

by revolutionaries between October 23 andNovember 4, over 2,000, it turns out, weremembers of the AVH. The number of communists and socialists

executed by the Kadar Government since therevolution was repressed is reliably reportedto exceed 201 – and the number held in jail

far exceeds 2,829.( The Newsletter, Vol. 1 No. 18, September

7, 1957)

MORE HUNGARIAN COMMUNISTIN JAIL THAN UNDER HORTHY There are more Hungarian communists in

Kadar’s prisons than were imprisoned underHorthy. They include such veterans of the Hungari-

an working-class movement as Zoltan Vasand Geza Losonczy; communists and intel-lectuals Tibor Dery and Gyula Hay; theyoung novelist Tardos; the journalistsHaraszti and Gimes; the young communistGabor Tanozos, secretary of the Petofi Cir-

cle; the communist officers Maleter andKopacsi; the communist student leadersMarkus, Janos Varga and Pozsar.

Hundreds of communists have been exe-cuted by Kadar’s AVH. Among them are thecommunist journalist Gabor Follv, the com-munist poet Istvan Eorsi, Maleter’s lieuten-ants Praszmayer and Kabalacs, Istvan Ang-yal, the leader of the revolutionary youth ofthe Ninth District of Budapest, Balint Papp,the leader of the party’s youth organisation inDunapentele (Sztalinvaros)

Kadar’s police have, however, at last founda real live white terrorist, whom they haveput on trial for killing progressive people. Heis 70 years of age, and his crimes date from – 1919. Why he was not punished between1945 and 1956 has not been explained.( News Letter, Vol. 1 No. 6, June 1957)

Editorial Notes1. The Daily Worker was the paper of theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).It later became The Morning Star. – Ed. 2. Communist Party of Great Britain.3. The accused agreed to make false confes-sions. – Ed. 4. In 1956.

5. Leaders of the British Communist Party.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f1https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f1https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f2https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f2https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f3https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f3https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f4https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f4https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f5https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f5https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f5https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f4https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f3https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f2https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1966/11/hungary.htm#f1


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A T THE END of 1955, Gerry Healy’spolitical fortunes were at a low ebb. The

split with John Lawrence two years earlier hadcost Healy half his membership, includingleading trade unionists and most of the youth.1 His submission to the Labour right wing’s banon Socialist Outlook had left him without a pub-lic organ, while the Group’s press had been

bankrupted by a libel action, forcing it intoliquidation. The Bevanite movement, on which Healy had pinned his political strategy, was in decline after Labour’s defeat in the May1955 general election. And his attempt to winan industrial base by organising the Blue Un-ion breakaway on the docks had ended in fail-ure. Healy’s only success that year was therecruitment of the ‘Marxist Group’ from theLabour Party League of Youth.

One of its members, Ellis Hillman, recallsthat by early 1956 Healy had become ‘very,

very demoralised. There were points at whichone began to wonder whether Gerry wasthinking of chucking the whole thing in. Iclearly remember him looking through the

window at Sternhold Avenue and desperatelyasking his Executive Committee: “What thehell are we doing here? None of you are pre-

pared to take any initiative whatsoever. I haveto do everything !” It was a genuine cry of des-pair’.2

Healy was saved by the crisis which brokeout in the Stalinist movement in 1956. TheCPSU 20th Congress in February, and thesubsequent leaking of Khruschev’s ‘secretspeech’ denouncing Stalin’s crimes, was fol-lowed in November by the bloody suppres-

sion of the Hungarian revolution, an actionfully supported by the British CP leaders. As a

result, the Communist Party of Great Britainlost about a third of its 30,000 members.

While most of these ex-CPers renouncedMarxism or abandoned politics altogether,Healy was able to win a number of importantrecruits (perhaps as many as 200) to theGroup. Two of them – Cliff Slaughter and

Tom Kemp – were to remain with Healy until

his expulsion from the WRP almost 30 yearslater.It is necessary, however, to demolish the

myth that Healy’s successful intervention inthe CPGB was made possible ‘on the basis ofthe 1953 split’ in the Fourth International, orby ‘the clarification which had been achievedthrough the struggle against Pabloite revision-ism’.3 In fact, Healy’s initial response to the20th Congress was the purest ‘Pabloism’. Bas-

ing himself on Mikoyan’s speech to the Con-gress attacking the ‘cult of the personality’,Healy announced to a stunned London areaaggregate of the Group that the political revo-lution had now begun in the Soviet Union andthat Anastas Mikoyan represented the Reiss(i.e. the revolutionary) tendency in the bureau-cracy!4 Healy quickly retreated from this posi-tion. But his only published reaction to the

1956 Congress, while emphasising that therestoration of democratic rights in the SovietUnion required ‘a successful struggle againstthe bureaucracy’, stopped short of spelling outthe need for a political revolution to over-throw the Stalinist regime.5 The Group’s impact on the CPGB crisis was

the product not of any political clarity on Sta-linism, but of Healy’s considerable organisa-

tional skills. His ability to spot a political op-portunity and go for it with everything he had,

THE RISE AND FALL OF GERRY HEALY

By Bob Pitt,

Chapter Four


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which in other situations led to grossly oppor-tunist results (if not outright betrayals), in thiscase enabled real political gains to be made.

With characteristic energy and pugnacity,Healy now directed all the Group’s resources

towards the CP. Labour Party work was tem-porarily put on the back burner and Groupmembers who had spent the best part of adecade pretending to be left social democratsfound themselves agitating openly as Trotsky-ists at CP meetings. ‘I don’t think there can beany doubt about this’, Hillman states. ‘It wasHealy’s attack that broke the morale of the CPafter the 1956 Congress.’6

An early recruit to the Group was Notting-ham CPer John Daniels who wrote in to Trib- une explaining that he had begun a‘fundamental criticism’ of Stalinism and offer-ing like-minded comrades a suggested readinglist which ranged from Arthur Koestler to Le-on Trotsky.7 John Archer immediately repliedon behalf of the Group, steering Daniels awayfrom anti-Communist writers and towards the

revolutionary critique of Stalinism contained inThe Revolution Betrayed .8 This exchange led toDaniels visiting Archer in Leeds for a discus-sion, and soon after he became a member ofthe Group.9 Healy himself was to make a par-ticularly effective use of literature in his politi-cal assault on the Stalinist movement. In thefollowing period he would visit hundreds ofCP dissidents, providing them with a basicreading course in Trotskyist writings.10

In the course of 1956 Healy managed to raisethe finance for a new printing press.11 Thesefacilities, modest though they were, played acrucial role in cementing political relations withPeter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent inHungary during the revolution. Having re-turned to Britain to find that his sympatheticreports on the workers’ uprising had beenspiked, Fryer turned to the capitalist press to

publicise his story and this was used by the CPleadership to justify his expulsion from the

party. Healy arranged a meeting with Fryer andoffered to print his appeal against expulsion, anoffer which Fryer gratefully accepted. Healyalso organised a series of meetings for Fryer to

explain his case to the labour movement.12

With the new press, in January 1957 Healy was able to relaunch the journal Labour Review in a new, larger format explicitly aimed at theCommunist Party milieu, with John Danielsand veteran Healyite Bob Shaw as co-editors.

The journal was instrumental in attracting fur-ther CP rebels to the Group, notably the histo-rian Brian Pearce,13 who was able to contributea number of pioneering articles on the Stalinistdegeneration of the CPGB.

In his pamphlet Revolution and Counter Revolu- tion in Hungary , Healy urged dissident CPers to‘immediately demand a special Congress torepudiate the leadership’s line on Hungary.STAY IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY ANDFIGHT IT OUT’.14 This, indeed, was the ap-proach adopted by the CP oppositionists, andin April 1957 a special party congress, the first

in the CPGB’s history, was held in Hammer-smith. Healy organised a major intervention.

Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’ in 1956 denouncingStalin’s crimes, was followed in November bythe bloody suppression of the Hungarian revo-

lution, an action fully supported by the BritishCP leaders. As a result, the Communist Partyof Great Britain lost about a third of its 30,000members.


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Fryer’s appeal, published in pamphlet form asHungary and the Communist Party: An Appeal

Against Expulsion , was distributed at the door, while inside the congress Brian Behan, a mili-tant building worker who had joined theGroup, acted as one of the main spokesmenfor the anti-Stalinist opposition. Fryer, mean-

while, laboured through the night to produce adaily bulletin reporting and commenting on thecongress proceedings.15 The congress was

packed so efficiently bythe CP leadership that onall the disputed issues –

Hungary, inner-partydemocracy and Fryer’sexpulsion – the opposi-tion was overwhelminglydefeated.16 But the politi-cal ferment in the CP didnot abate. A week afterthe Hammersmith con-gress, the Socialist Forum

movement – launched byCP dissidents to providean organisational frame-

work for political discus-sion – held a nationalconference at WortleyHall in Yorkshire. HereHealy, who attended witha small delegation fromthe Group, demonstratedan admirable degree oftactical subtlety. Insteadof crowing over the Stalinists’ crisis and pro-claiming that Trotskyism had been vindicated,as many there no doubt expected him to do,Healy advised the conference: ‘This is the sea-son for reading books, not burning them. Readand study. Examine every point of view.’17 Heleft it to Brian Pearce to put forward a Trotsky-ist historical analysis of the ‘Lessons of theStalin era’.18 Given Pearce’s reputation as a CP

historian, this obviously made a much greaterimpact on the conference than a lecture from aknown Trotskyist would have done.

Impressed by Fryer’s work on the Hammer-smith bulletin, Healy took him on as a full-timer to produce a weekly paper for the Group.

This appeared in May 1957 as the Newsletter . The paper claimed editorially that it had ‘nosectional axe to grind’,19 but its real purpose, as

Healy explained to Fryer, was to provide a pole ofattraction for CP dissidents‘so that we can catch themfor our movement’.20 Healy

allowed a fairly free hand toFryer whose journalistictalents guaranteed a highstandard of partisan work-ing class reporting. As usual

with Healy, there was un-doubtedly a strong oppor-tunist element in all this.Nevertheless, along with

the theoretical work in thebi-monthly Labour Review ,the Newsletter enabled theGroup to become the focalpoint for both intellectualsand militant workers break-ing with Stalinism. By con-trast, the small ex-RCPgroups led by Ted Grantand Tony Cliff were able tomake virtually no gainsfrom the CP crisis, having

been completely outmanoeuvred by Healy.However, although Healy employed the liter-

ary heritage of Trotskyism to good effect inrecruiting from the CP, there was an evidentgulf between the revolutionary content of Trot-sky’s classic writings and the actual practice ofthe Group, buried as it was deep in the Labour

Party. One former CPer, in a contribution tothe internal bulletin, while putting forward an

One former CPer… madesome telling points against theHealyites’ promotion of Tribune .

This he characterised, not inac-curately, as ‘feeding mass illu-sions to the workers by themass sale of reformist litera-ture’… In reply, Healy acceptedthat Bevan was a parliamentaryreformist incapable of provid-ing the working class with revo-

lutionary leadership. ‘Tribune ,however’, Healy assured hiscritic, ‘is different’! Indeed, ac-cording to Healy, pressure fromthe Tribunites had forced Bev-an ‘further and further to theleft’. This judgement was to befalsified within a matter of

months.


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ultra-left argument against Labour Party work,nonetheless made some telling points againstthe Healyites’ promotion of Tribune . This hecharacterised, not inaccurately, as ‘feedingmass illusions to the workers by the mass saleof reformist literature’. He dismissed the pro-spect of an imminent split in the Labour Party,

which Healy in 1956 had apparently predicted within six

Revolutionary and Counter-Revolution in Hungary 1956 Peter Fryer, Gerry Healy, Bob Pitt, June 2015

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