Bloody Budapest

• • Hungarian Government "White Book on the Counter-Revolution and October Events in Hungary," Parts I and II. Dec.. '56-Feb., 57.
• • "Hungarian Tragedy," by Peter Fryer, London, December, 1956.
• • What Really Happened in Hungary," by Basil Davidson, London, December, 1956.
• • Articles in "New Statesman." Tribune," "Monthly Review," "Labour Monthly." November, '56-April, '57.

The Hungarian revolt has swept in, broken, and been beaten back. And now, with the dust settled and the corpses buried, it is easier to assess accurately the causes and effects of Budapest's agony in the last months of 1956.

The U.S. State Departments version of what occurred has been made familiar enough for us to omit it. We here restrict our field to the statements of some eye-witnesses and compare these with the official version that is still being repeated by Moscow and her mouthpieces.

Peter Fryer and Basil Davidson are especially valuable witnesses, as neither could be said to have been prejudiced against the regimes of Eastern Europe. Fryer was a Communist, a "Daily Worker" correspondent for eight years, and had covered various Hungarian occasions as a reporter friendly to the Rakosi Government. Davidson had often visited post-war Hungary and reported favourably in the "New Statesman."

Their picture of last year's uprising puts a very different face on the Communist empire from the one they had described before.

Fryer was sent to Hungary in November to cover the fighting for the "Daily Worker," which was, presumably, expecting a version in conformity with the party line. His first impression of the fighting was the pile of corpses of the people of Magyarovar, who had been shot down by the A.V.H. (security police), and his first cable home carried all the emotional impact of this impression. The newspaper censored the story, and did the same, more or less completely, to all Fryer's reports until they ordered him home.

He saw the horrible evidence of the armed might of a government which he had believed to be the workers' government, representing the power of the workers against the motley of displaced landlords, capitalists, and militarists, turned against the workers in the worst traditions of landlord and militarist regimes.

Davidson's fortnight in Budapest in November made a similar impact. It became apparent to him that popular indignation against the brutal repressions of the Communist administration had burst in protest meetings and demonstrations late in October; that the Government had panicked and ordered the A.V.H. to fire; that the populace, exasperated, had taken to more violent action (of which an extreme right-wing lunatic fringe took advantage); and the Russians had weighed in with a puppet government and full-scale armed intervention.