The legacies of the Polish and Hungarian revolts

The most obvious outcome of the failed revolution in Hungary for international politics was that the Western states, by not intervening, had proved once and for all their unconditional acceptance of the postwar European status quo. Despite all their propaganda about the "liberation of the enslaved nations," it meant nothing. This was a great consolation for the Soviet leadership: beyond any previous agreement they had had with the Western states, the noninterference of the West in November 1956 reassured Kremlin officials that, should any future conflict occur within the boundaries of their empire, they would have a free hand.

Western condemnation of the Soviet intervention was limited to the arena of propaganda and to debates in the United Nations General Assembly.

Nevertheless, after several years of ineffectually condemning Soviet behavior, the United States adopted a more pragmatic policy. In secret talks between US officials and the Kadar regime, Washington agreed to remove the Hungarian question from the General Assembly’s agenda in December 1962 in exchange for which the Hungarian government in 1963 granted a general amnesty to the majority of those who had been imprisoned because of their participation in the 1956 revolution.

In the decades following 1956, the Hungarian revolution yielded several legacies in East Central Europe. The leaders of the various regimes learned from Hungary’s example that attempts at radical party reform could easily lead to the collapse of the Communist political monopoly. They also learned that in such cases the Soviets would not hesitate to restore order by any means necessary, including the most brutal ones. Conversely, however, the Hungarian revolution also demonstrated that East Central European leaders ignored social demands and public opinion at their own peril. Even though they had seen that any threatened regime could rely on Soviet help in the event of some political crisis, local leaders could also expect to be held responsible and to be replaced.

In these ways, the Hungarian revolution largely contributed to the success ofthe effort to build a post-Stalinist Communist order in the Soviet Union and throughout East Central Europe. The October 1956 Polish crisis, with its contrasting positive outcome, also strengthened the same trend. The Polish example demonstrated that a limited campaign of moderate reforms which did not imperil the political system, or threaten the security of the Eastern military bloc, could be implemented even against the will of the Soviet leadership. More than anything else, this Polish precedent motivated the Czechoslovakian Communist reformers in 1968.479

The final lesson of the events of 1956 was that they ended any hopes in East Central Europe that the Soviet yoke could be thrown off by active revolt. The inaction of the West, the brutality of the Soviet intervention, and the broad scope ofretaliatory measures combined to dispel that illusion. In the course of the decades that followed, this understanding undergirded all reform activities in Eastern bloc states. While consciously taking the security interests of the Soviet Union into account, those wishing for change worked gradually but effectively to liberalize the Communist system. They no longer aimed to overthrow it.