On this day, 23 October 1956, a nationwide revolt in Hungary saw thousands of people organise themselves into workers’ councils and militias, demanding not a transition to capitalism but rather a socialism controlled by the working class itself.
Peter Fryer, a member of the British Communist Party and a journalist for the Party newspaper the Daily Worker wrote in his first dispatch: “After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society-a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might.
And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years… . They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all-Communists as well as non-Communists-who dared to open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be.”
Fryer’s article went unpublished, and the rebellion was soon crushed by Russian tanks, leaving around 20,000 Hungarians and 3,500 Russians dead. This is a history of the uprising: https://libcom.org/history/articles/hungary-56 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1562925597225918/?type=3
