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Happy October 23! Barry Farber Most Americans know the meaning of July 4. Close behind, even a tie, is 9/11. Older Americans have no trouble deciphering December 7, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing America into World War II. October 23 needs a little help. October 23 DESERVES a little help, and I choose to give it a whole column's worth. All who fear terrorism today should devote one little thought back to the Americans of the Cold War era who faced an enemy that not only MIGHT get its hands on a nuclear bomb and find a sneaky way to deliver it into an American city, but that also had limitless atomic and hydrogen bombs and planes and missiles enough to destroy every inch of America many times over. And that, of course, was the Soviet Union. America and the Soviet Union lived uneasily in each other's gun sights from 1949, when the Soviets got the nuclear weapon, until 1991, when European communism died a quiet death. October 23 celebrates those who interrupted communism's rise and caused its blessedly nonviolent and inglorious collapse. On October 23, 1956, the population of communist Hungary rose up and, in the act of losing a vainglorious freedom fight against their Soviet masters, planted freedom's stiletto into the gut of communism, initiating its slow but steady and systematic demise. Hungary had been an unwilling captive of Soviet Russia since shortly after the end of World War II. The very idea of "rebellion behind the Iron Curtain" was one not even the most hawkish neocons of the day could foresee or realistically hope for. Then, as the young ones say, stuff happened. In the summer of 1956 in the Polish city of Poznan, the workers, already long sick of communism, rebelled in what was called the "Bread and Freedom Riot" at the Poznan Fair, a communist-sponsored extravaganza intended to impress visitors from the West with communist Poland's economic muscle. That outburst against Soviet-imposed communism went nowhere. But in Budapest, Hungary, students laid a wreath at the statue of General Bem, a Polish officer who had fought for Hungarian freedom in the 1800s. That started a sizzle that grew into a flame that grew into a conflagration that grew into the Hungarian Freedom Fight of 1956. The stern and evil Stalin had been dead for three years and the new Soviet ruler, Nikita Khrushchev, thought a little "nice guy" treatment might impress and delude the West. What is "nice guy" treatment under communism? Well, you don't shoot students laying a wreath at the statue of a Polish hero in an obvious act of defiance against communist rule. If there were a West Point for dictators, they'd teach them early, "Don't you dare!" Because that act led to poets of the Petofi Circle to start meeting without fear and writers and artists to hurl increasingly vicious criticisms at the absurdly inefficient communist system. Then the workers began to wonder out loud why they weren't nearly as well off as the workers of neighboring Austria, not to mention the dazzling prosperity of nearby Switzerland.
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"Give them an inch and they'll want their freedom" was the last and lingering lesson. Then the Hungarian students marched on their puppet Parliament, demanding a couple dozen points of personal and national freedom. The crowd grew. The notorious AVO, the Hungarian communist secret police, who hated unscheduled crowds the way the devil hates holy water, fired into the crowd. Go to any western movie of the 1940s and you'll see the scene of the pleasant bar where all of a sudden an argument breaks out at a card table and somebody kicks it over and the cards and chips and silver dollars and glasses and ashtrays go crashing to the floor and the women scream and the men dive behind the bar and somebody shoots out the kerosene light and the big brawl is on. That Big Brawl in Budapest and other Hungarian cities expanded into the nationwide Hungarian Revolution. And in that first phase of the Hungarian Freedom Fight, the freedom fighters won hands down. All of Budapest rejoiced at the sight of Hungarian freedom fighters riding atop Soviet tanks, hugging and kissing the Soviet drivers of those tanks for not resisting their freedom fight. The Soviet troops occupying Hungary at that time were mostly Ukrainian farm boys who had no desire to shoot their Hungarian neighbors no matter how anti-communist they were. When the bug-eyed Kremlin masters saw that not only their Hungarian captives but also their very own Soviet troops were aiding the freedom fight, they went clinically insane. They sent 200,000 new troops, backed by 2,000 tanks, into Hungary to quell the rebellion. Those Soviet reinforcements were from Soviet Asia, far, far away from Hungary and the West. They were told that the Nazis were rising again. They were told they were in the Middle East and the Danube River was the Suez Canal. They weren't there to study geography. They were there to extinguish the very flames of freedom that had exploded out of a repression that tried relaxing its grip. The Hungarians fought bravely under their new flag, which was the red, white and green tricolor with the communist star in the middle cut out, ripped out, or burned out. You'd think that with such overwhelming force the Soviets would at least fight in a manner befitting a modern civilized nation. Instead, a Russian tank would enter a residential block at random, swing its cannon around, fire a shell into the first house, then crawl a few feet forward and blast the next house, and so on and so on. When Paul Maleter and the other leaders of the revolution sought refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy, the Soviets offered them safe passage if they would come out and "negotiate" an orderly Soviet withdrawal from Hungary! They came out. And they were instantly arrested and executed.
The Western mainstream media saw a hopeless uprising that met the only fate it could possibly have expected. The smarter journalists saw something more. Like a boxer who's never quite the same after a certain punch or a quarterback who's never quite the same after a certain tackle, Soviet communism was never the same after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The communist movement outside communist-dominated Europe, which had enjoyed vigorous momentum since the end of World War II, shriveled. All the years of communist propaganda bathing itself in "peace" and "equality" and "brotherhood" and "workers' paradise" vanished like a cobweb under a blowtorch. All communist efforts to regain and retain that happy image became like pouring the finest French perfume over a healthy skunk; you may achieve a certain momentary fragrance, but it's a losing battle. I happened to have been in communist Yugoslavia a few weeks before the Hungarian Revolution and then again a few weeks afterward. Before, the people were clearly afraid of the secret police. Afterward, the secret police were afraid of the people. Those smarter journalists and analysts couldn't cash in on their sharper instincts right away. It took years, but inexorably they witnessed the slow-motion victory of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters of 1956. They saw it in the Prague Spring of 1968, the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980, the "velvet revolution" of Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the downing of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1959 a delightful piece of book/movie fiction, "The Mouse That Roared," told how a microstate, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, happened to conquer the United States and the world. Hungary, a nation of only 10 million, did even better in real life. By the time President Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin to "tear down this wall," the Soviet Union was spent and exhausted. And, as President Roosevelt said of Benito Mussolini when his Italian troops attacked France in the south only after Germany had destroyed the French army in the north, "It doesn't take a very brave dog to bark at the bones of a lion." Hungary was the real-life little puppy that dared "bark" at the Soviet bear at the height of that bear's ferocity. And that led to that bear's defeat, disgrace, and extinction. All freedom lovers should wish each other a "Happy October 23" forevermore.
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