International Viewpoint 10 November 1986
HUNGARY ocratic mass movement in Poland, a demonstration was held in Budapest, Hungary's capital. The rallying point was the monument to General Jozef Bem, hero of the Hungarian and Polish revolutionary democratic movements in the period of the 1848 uprisings, known as the "Springtime of the Peoples". (1) Quickly, the crowd grew to several thousands. The demands became more radical. Militancy inreased.
At 8.00 in the evening, Erno Gero,
IN POLAND, the night of October 21-22, 1956, was the third night of extreme political tension throughout the country. The workers' militias of 16 big Warsaw factories, which were linked to workers' ents' vigilance committees, were on tenterhooks as Soviet troops slowly advanced toward the capital and other cities and the Soviet fleet sailed toward Gdansk. In many units of the Polish army and police the decision was taken to resist, if the Soviet Union intervened militarily.
ARTHUR WILKINS
That night, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had just been named as first secretary of the Central Committee of the
Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR -.
the Polish CP), got a telephone call from Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin. The Soviet chief had return-
CC ed there after attending the plenum in Warsaw the day before, at which Gomulka had been elected.
Khrushchev announced that the leadership of the Soviet Communist
Party had decided to place its confidence in the new leadership of its and stud started to withdraw to their bases. The alert in the factories, universities and neighborhoods was lifted. The Soviet bureaucracy had dropped the idea of a military intervention in Poland. It thought, and it was not wrong, that Gomulka, who had enormous mass support, would be able to handle the masses astutely, to dampen the flames of anti-bureaucratic revolution and reestablish the power of the bureaucracy, without any need for the Soviet armed forces to go in.
On October 23, on the initiative of students demanding socialist demochief of the Hungarian bureaucracy, made an aggressive speech over the radio, condemning the demonstration as a counter-revolutionary operation mounted by "the enemies of the Hungarian people and of the Soviet Union." The speech aroused the anger of the masses, who stormed the radio station in order to be able to broadcast their demands to the country and to the entire world.
The political police wanted to hold back the demonstrators, and opened fire. The demonstrators fought back with the few arms they had. The army moved in, but instead of suppressing the demonstrators it fraternized with them and helped them to arm themselves. Truckloads of reinforcements came from the working class suburbs. The working class went into action. The great monument to Stalin was demolished moments later by the people of Budapest.
The East European people most oppressed by the bureaucracy rose up violently and with extreme radicalism, demanding, arms in hand, all that it had been denied - respect for
Polish sister party.
At the same time, the Soviet troops
Monument to Hungarian uprising at Poznan, Poland (DR)
1350 cracy, and in solidarity with the demhuman rights, national dignity, political democracy and collective control by the workers over the means of production.
In the capital and provinces, workers' councils, revolutionary committees and people's militias established their authority, destroying the hated political police and the apparatuses of bureaucratic domination. Finally, they confronted the Soviet troops.
The special correspondent of Po Prostu, the journal of the revolutionary left that was at the head of the mass movement in Poland, telegraphed from Budapest: "The entire people is on the side of the insurgents. The
1. The French revolution of February 1848 installed the Second Republic. The news of the fall of the monarchy in France sparked a new wave of revolutionary crises in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and Poland against the reactionary order and absolutism that had been established in Europe after the Napoleonic wars. This was a national liberation movement against the empires, a movement for national unity of divided peoples and for social emancipation. This period of March to June 1848 was also known as the "Springtime of the Peoples", and was followed by a summer of reaction throughout Burope.
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The continuing example of 1956