Repression

With the arrest and removal of Nagy and the installation of the Radar Government, repression began against student and intellectual groups whose demands had pre-cipitated the crisis. Up till March, 1957, the government was forced, by pressure of public opinion, to continue amendments to the law in a liberalizing direction which had begun about a month before the crisis came to a head. Compulsory Russian at university, and exams in the general schools, had been abolished in October in the spate of eleventh-hour reforms, aimed at forestalling the inevitable. Nagy's Minister of Education, the respected Lukacs, was committed to sweeping improvements, and even under Kadar some of these were proceeded with in the early months. But it was not long before it became clear that it was the Government's intention to slow down the pace of these changes as soon as it was safe to do so, and then to reverse the process completely.

By January, it was announced that compulsory "Marxism-Leninism" was restored in the medical schools, and that the general power of prescribing courses of study had been removed from the universities and resumed by the State.

"It is clear," says the report, "that during this period a real measure of academic freedom was fought for by the university community and promised by the authorities. The kind of demands made, and the strength with which they were made, indicate clearly the degree of repression that existed, and the fierceness of the opposition secretly harboured by the entire university community."

But promises of freedom and autonomy were doomed to remain unfulfilled.

Arrests of students and university teachers who had participated in the uprising commenced almost as soon as Kadar took power, and the demands that these people should be released. Assurances given by the authorities in January that students who had been arrested had been freed again, were followed by the arrest en bloc of the entire Revolutionary Students Committee of Budapest and many others who had been active in the groups which had formulated the October demands. The report also accepts certain evidence that many Hungarians, including students, were deported to the U.S.S.R. during November. This evidence was explained by the Hungarian authorities in December as "isolated cases in the first days of chaos after 4 November", but even this admission was later denied.