Hungarian Tragedy

by Peter Fryer

Peter Fryer was sent to Hungary in 1956 to document what the British Communist Party considered to be a fascist uprising against Soviet rule. Instead he discovered a workers’ revolution being brutally suppressed by the Soviet regime.

Hungarian Tragedy documents what he saw, providing insight into the debates, creativity and heroism of the Hungarian revolutionaries. It is a testament to the capacity of workers to create a new world in the most oppressive circumstances.

Fryer's account of the Hungarian Revolution got him expelled from the British Communist Party, but it gave new life to the anti-Stalinist socialist movement around the world.

Genres: History

108 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1956

Reviews

[Fletcher Hood Withey · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderfully insightful and moving eyewitness account to the Hungarian revolution. provides a great picture of the heroism of Hungarian workers in their fight for genuine socialist democracy

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Here was a revolution, to be studied not in the pages of Marx, Engels and Lenin, valuable though these pages may be, but happening here in real life before the eyes of the world. A flesh and blood revolution with all its shortcomings and contradictions and problems - the problems of life itself. As they took me to see the president and vice-president of this committee not yet forty-eight hours old I caught sight of a portrait of Lenin on the wall, and I could almost fancy his shrewd eyes twinkling approvingly."

[Suryashekhar Biswas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In ten days the Versailles army which suppressed the Paris Commune of 1871 slaughtered between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children, either in battle or in cold blood, amid terrible scenes of cruelty and suffering. ‘The ground is paved with their corpses’, gloated Thiers. Another 20,000 were transported and 7,800 sent to the coastal fortresses. That was White Terror. Thousands of Communists and Jews were tortured and murdered after the suppression of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and hideous atrocities took place at Orgovány and Siófok. That was White Terror. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek massacred 5,000 organised workers in Shanghai. That was White Terror. From the advent of Hitler to the defeat of fascist Germany untold millions of Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, Jews and Christians were murdered. That was White Terror. It is perfectly true that a section of the population of Budapest, outraged to the pitch of madness by the crimes of the secret police, was seized with a lust to exterminate Communists. It is true that the innocent suffered as well as the guilty. This is a painful and distressing fact. But to describe the murder of a number of Communists (which all observers agree was confined to Budapest) as ‘White Terror’ necessitating Soviet intervention is to describe events in Hungary in a one-sided, propagandist way."

- Hungarian Tragedy, Peter Fryer

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is one further proof of how false was the claim that the Soviet troops went into action against reactionaries and fascists, and that is the indisputable fact that they were greeted, not with joy, as the Soviet communiqués claimed, but with the white-hot, patriotic fury of a people in arms; and that it was the industrial workers who resisted them to the end. ‘Soviet troops are re-establishing order ... We Soviet soldiers and officers are your selfless friends’, said the Soviet communiqué of November 5. It was the proletariat of Hungary, above all, that fought the tanks which came to destroy the revolutionary order they had already established in the shape of their workers’ councils.”
…

“Hungary was Stalinism incarnate. Here in one small, tormented country was the picture, complete in every detail: the abandonment of humanism, the attachment of primary importance not to living, breathing, suffering, hoping human beings but to machines, targets, statistics, tractors, steel mills, plan fulfilment figures ... and, of course, tanks. Struck dumb by Stalinism, we ourselves grotesquely distorted the fine Socialist principle of international solidarity by making any criticism of present injustices or inhumanitites in a Communist-led country taboo. Stalinism crippled us by castrating our moral passion, blinding us to the wrongs done to men if those wrongs were done in the name of Communism. We Communists have been indignant about the wrongs done by imperialism: those wrongs are many and vile; but our one-sided indignation has somehow not rung true. It has left a sour taste in the mouth of the British worker, who is quick to detect and condemn hypocrisy.

Stalinism is Marxism with the heart cut out, de-humanised, dried, frozen, petrified, rigid, barren. It is concerned with ‘the line’, not with the tears of Hungarian children. It is preoccupied with abstract power, with strategy and tactics, not with the dictates of conscience and common humanity.”

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Magyaróvár was a poor town, its poverty made no more bearable by the veneer of socialism: the red star, the slogans, the portraits of Lenin, Stalin… the expression elvtárs ("comrade"), and the compulsory May Day demonstrations. The people had been promised a better life, and were prepared to cooperate to the full to achieve it. But life grew worse instead of better.’

This is a beautiful account (if only it were longer) of the revolution in Hungary that revealed the abhorrent nature of the Stalinist regime that had ruled since 1944. On his way to Budapest to report on the situation, Fryer stops in a few random industrial/farming towns and catches a glimpse of the revolution in these areas where workers and peasants are experiencing democracy for the first time. Despite the lies of the Soviet regime that claimed the movement consisted of ‘fascists and counter revolutionaries’ this book shows how it was a popular uprising of the people of Hungary, of workers fighting against an unequal, authoritarian society.

‘There were Gestapo-like torture chambers with whips and gallows and instruments for crushing people's limbs. There were tiny punishment cells. There were piles of letters from abroad, intercepted for censorship. There were batteries of tape recorders to take down telephone conversations.’

‘The Party committee office, the opening of the safe, the discovery of hundreds of dossiers, one for each worker at the farm, in which were recorded his whole career, his political reliability or otherwise, any scrap of information known about him... All over Hungary in these days of revelation the people were finding and burning these dossiers, whose contents were unknown to the individual concerned, which were passed on from job to job and which might easily prevent promotion or lead to arrest, secret trial, torture, imprisonment or death.’

Workers all over the country take up arms to fight the secret police and the Russian troops deployed to crush the movement. The people are directed by their elected workers/local councils. They are fighting to protect their newly won freedom and democracy. In their struggle they rediscover the true heart of socialism.

Whilst in Hungary, Fryer is fighting with his party, the Stalinist communist party of Britain, who refuse to publish the truth about the revolution in Hungary and continue to parrot the lies of the Soviet regime. It shows what a pivotal moment 1956 was for the socialist movement across the world, and how real socialism has nothing to do with a bureaucratic state and has everything to with what the workers of Hungary were fighting for.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly human account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. A must read, both to understand the despicable crimes of Stalin and his ilk, but also to appreciate the depts of courage, organisation, and creativity that is displayed by people in revolutionary situations.