FORTY years ago this month, on November 4, 1956, Nikita Khruschev ordered Soviet tanks to open fire on the Hungarian working class districts of Budapest.
The bombardment left 20,000 dead and eventually crushed the revolutionary upsurge which had gripped the city: but it also delivered a decisive blow to the prestige and authority of the Kremlin leadership in the eyes of countless thousand members of Communist Parties around the world, who were appalled at the brutality of the repression of a workers' struggle. The British Communist Party alone lost over 10,000 members as a result of its shameless defence of the attack.
Confidence in the 'progressive' role of Moscow's Stalinist leadership had already been severely shaken earlier in 1956 by Khruschev's astonishing Secret Speech to the Soviet CP's 20th Congress, in which he had revealed a monumental list of crimes committed by the previously idolised Joseph Stalin.
Among the revelations which rocked the packed assembly of Stalinist bureaucrats (accustomed as they were to uncritical acceptance of Stalin's leadership and policies) was Khruschev's admission that the traumatic split between the Kremlin and Yugoslavia's Stalinist leader Tito in 1948 could have been avoided.
This caused especial embarrassment for Hungarian leader Rakosi, who had executed former Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk in 1949 and jailed other leading Hungarian CPers for alleged collaboration with the fascist" Tito. The following month Rakosi was forced to admit that the show trial had been a gigantic frame-up.
As Rakosi faced a growing storm of dissent reaching beyond students and intellectuals into layers of the police and army, and was eventually replaced by the equally objectionable Kremlin stooge Erno Gero, a wave of strikes and demonstrations broke out in Poland, with workers demanding far-reaching reforms.
On October 23, 100,000 Hungarian workers and students demonstrated in Budapest in solidarity with the Polish
struggles, but also with their own political agenda. Some carried placard pictures of Lenin, others pictures of former Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who had been ousted from office in 1954, and become a focus for oppositional groups demanding democratic reforms and independence from Moscow: but all factions united to haul down & gigantic statue of Stalin.
Gero broadcast a heavy-handed altack on the demonstrators: crowds immediately converged on the radio station - where they were fired upon by the hated AVH secret police. As fighting spread, Soviet troops garrisoned in Hungary moved in.
October 24 saw the start of a general strike. and fighting spread beyond Budapest. Moscow reluctantly agreed that Nagy should take over as Prime Minister as the man most likely to restore control.
Nagy moved only timidly at first, offering little to the angry workers but inviting two leaders of the suppressed right wing Smallholders Party to join the government.
The workers, however, linking up with students and with rank and file soldiers, were strengthening their resistance. Rapidly they organised workers' councils which challenged the control of the hopelessly bureaucratised Communist Party.
On October 31, with Soviet troops withdrawn from Budapest, a Parliament of Workers' Councils drew up a far-reaching statement of demands for workers' control over production, while on the streets joint patrols of workers, soldiers and students had taken to beating up members of the AVH secret police, who kept files on more than ten percent of the 10 million Hungarians. Under this popular pressure, Nagy called for the complete removal of Russian troops from Hungarian soil, and then went on to propose leaving the Warsaw Pact and declaring Hungary neutral.
The Kremlin would not tolerate this level of independence. Instead it set up a new stooge government headed by veteran Stalinist Janos Kadar, and sent in heavy reinforcements to the Red Army detachments which began their attack by a massive artillery bombardment designed to keep troops out of contact with Hungarian workers.
200,000 Soviet troops were deployed: but neither they nor the shells that rained down could crush the spirit of the workers: the workers' councils and sporadic strikes continued through to January.
When Kadar's regime, backed by Russian troops, arrested delegates at the Budapest Central Workers' Council on December 11 it triggered a fresh general strike the next day.
The military force of Stalinism eventually won the day, but at the expense of exposing its inability to accept any degree of internal democracy, and the humiliating subordination of the 'national' bureaucracies of Eastern Europe to their Soviet masters.
1956 had seen the first substantial fractures in the Stalinist monolith; and
LACK
these were to develop into a succession of new crises: but it had also seen a glimpse of the working class response, in all its strengths and weaknesses.
Workers had grasped the need to organise independently of the bureaucracy: but they had not developed a coherent revolutionary programme, and the vacillating leadership of Nagy, himself a bureaucrat schooled in Stalinism, was inadequate to the task of ousting the parasitic bureacracy.
But forty years on, as Hungarian workers face the grim reality of the capitalist market and privatisation, it is the revolutionary heritage of 1956 which offers the best starting point for a response.