October Revolutions, New Style, by Isaac Deutscher 1956 (original) (raw)

Isaac Deutscher 1956

October Revolutions, New Style

Source: The Reporter, 15 November 1956. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Never since the 1812-13 insurrection of the European peoples against Napoleon – an insurrection that combined the features of revolution with those of counter-revolution – has Europe seen as confused and desperate a popular revolt as that which has shaken Poland and Hungary and sent its tremors through the rest of Eastern Europe.

The background of the October events was very much the same in Poland and Hungary. In both countries the explosion of the Stalin myth and the disintegration of the Stalinist police terror had put into motion vast popular forces impatient with the slowness and half-heartedness of official de-Stalinisation and pressing for an immediate and radical break with the Stalin era. Both in Poland and in Hungary the movement grew from modest beginnings and gained scope and momentum until it assumed a nation-wide scale. In both countries the offended dignity of peoples reduced to the roles of Russian satellites had powerfully asserted itself, claiming its rights. Yet the Poles and Hungarians struggled for political freedoms as well as for national emancipation, and they rose against the Stalinist police state through which Russia had dominated them. Last but not least, they revolted against an economic policy that had sacrificed their consumer interests to industrialisation and armaments and had plunged them into intolerable misery.

The upsurge of nationalist emotion, the yearning for political freedom, and despair at the economic plight in both countries were common to workers, intelligentsia, students, civil servants, army officers and the still numerous survivors of the old bourgeoisie. In both countries all social divisions were for a time completely overshadowed by the single and all-embracing antagonism of the peoples at large to a handful of Stalinist die-hards clinging to power. Even the die-hards were politically disarmed, and none other than Khrushchev had disarmed them. After his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress they stood naked before the peoples as the high priests of a dethroned idol and a desecrated church. They themselves were fitfully engaged in smashing the idol and desecrating the church – that is, in preaching de-Stalinisation. By preaching it they supplied to the popular movement surging from below the slogans, the banners and the moral weapons of insurrection.

Aspects of Anger: De-Stalinisation gave a legal cloak to the popular revolt in its initial phases and concealed the diverse currents and crosscurrents of the revolt. Communists and anti-Communists, Leninists and Catholics, socialists and conservatives all spoke in the same idiom – the idiom of de-Stalinisation. For a time all seemed united in the enthusiasm for a new leader – Władysław Gomułka in Poland and Imre Nagy in Hungary, both national Communists and martyrs of the Stalin era whose names had become symbols of opposition to Russian domination and to the Stalinist police state.

Yet within this outwardly harmonious anti-Stalinist movement there were from the beginning two separate currents in actual or potential conflict with one another, and a tense and only partly open struggle went on between Communists and anti-Communists. It should not be imagined that the line of division ran only between members and non-members of the Communist Party. It cut across the party itself, which in the last 12 years had absorbed the most diverse elements, some who would normally, given their freedom of choice, have followed a Social-Democratic lead, and others who would have joined right-wing clericalist and nationalist parties.

As long as the Communist Party was the Stalinist monolith, these differences mattered little; they had no opportunity of expression. But now the party was no longer the old monolith, and so the tug of war between Communism and anti-Communism – conscious or only instinctive – began to develop in its own midst. Outside the party, anti-Communism had behind it a numerous and influential Catholic clergy, the sentiments of vast sections of the peasantry and of the intelligentsia, and the hopes cherished by the remnants of the urban bourgeoisie. The new anti-Stalinism appealed to non-party men as well, to workers, intellectuals and members of the bureaucracy.

There were, however, also vital differences between Hungary and Poland – differences that were to determine the vastly different results of the struggle in the two countries. In Poland, anti-Stalinist Communism was incomparably stronger than in Hungary even in the heyday of Stalinism. Polish Communists, especially the older ones, had never at heart forgiven Stalin the blow and insult he inflicted on them in 1938, when he disbanded the whole of the Polish Communist Party, denouncing it as ‘a nest of Trotskyist _agents provocateurs_’ and ordering the execution of all its leaders who had fled to Moscow from Marshal Piłsudski’s prisons and concentration camps. Even in the years 1950-53 the Communist leaders of Warsaw used all their cunning to cheat Stalin and avoid staging trials in the style of Rajk in Hungary and Slánský in Czechoslovakia, and it was thanks to this that Gomułka lived on to fight another day. (Among the papers of Bolesław Bierut, the Stalinist Polish leader who died early this year, were found documents in which he urged his subordinates to ignore Stalin’s insistent demands for Polish purge trials.)

No wonder that Polish Communist activists received de-Stalinisation with relief and joy as a most congenial job, while Mátyás Rákosi and his men did their utmost to curb and delay de-Stalinisation in their country. The Polish Communist cadres remained on the whole sensitive to popular moods and kept in touch with them, while the Hungarians were cut off from the masses and were blind and deaf to the groundswell of political emotion in their country.

Early Warnings: To the Polish Communists the Poznań riots last summer came as a timely and salutary warning. Poznań made them aware of the gulf that had opened between their own ruling group and the working class. It made them realise that unless they, the Communists themselves, broke rapidly and radically with the Stalin era, Poland’s de-Stalinisation might be carried out against them by anti-Communists. Hence the Polish party did not use Poznań as a pretext for tightening screws. On the contrary, it pressed democratisation and worked to narrow the gulf between the rulers and the ruled.

By far the most important Polish development since Poznań has been the rise of a strong movement for ‘industrial de-Stalinisation’ among the workers in the factories. This essentially Communist movement, which was to play a decisive role in October, found its main base in the factories of Warsaw, especially in the suburb of Żerań, and in the mines and steel mills of Silesia and Dąbrowa. The spirit animating this movement was closely akin to that which animated the Bolshevik masses of Petrograd and Moscow in the early days of the Russian Revolution.

The Polish workers were quick to translate the intelligentsia’s call for de-Stalinisation and democratisation into specific industrial demands of their own. For them, democratisation has meant first of all ‘the workers’ direct control over industry’ and the abolition of an over-centralised economic dictatorship by bureaucracy that had ridden roughshod over the workers’ needs and rights. The party leaders at first viewed with some apprehension this movement and its potential challenge to national economic planning, but the movement had an irresistible force and they made their peace with it. It created something like a ready-made proletarian class basis for de-Stalinisation.

Up to the Poznań riots the intelligentsia led the movement for de-Stalinisation. Afterwards, however, the workers came to the fore, and the whole weight of the movement shifted from university halls, literary circles and editorial offices to industrial workshops. These became the scene of something like a genuine revolution from below, developing just at the time when that ‘revolution from above’ which Stalin had imposed on Poland was on the point of exhaustion and perhaps collapse. In this lay the strength of Polish Communism during the October crisis. The workers came to feel for the first time that the promise of Communism might after all be fulfilled, that they might become masters in their factories, and that the words ‘a workers’ state’ might cease to be empty. They were and still are inclined to credit the new Gomułka leadership with the intention of carrying out this programme and so are prepared to back that leadership against anti-Communist assaults.

‘Kerensky in Reverse'? Gomułka seems to be aware that the best chance of his survival in independence from Russia, and of the survival of Polish Communism in general, lies in that newly-emerged native strength of the Polish working class. Twice when in danger he has already appealed to that strength: first on 19 October, when he threatened Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich, on their arrival in Warsaw, that he would arm the workers of Warsaw against any Soviet-inspired military coup; and then on 22 October, when he sent the same workers – not the army or even the police – to disperse anti-Communist student demonstrations in the capital.

In this way, Gomułka managed for the time being to avert the threat of Soviet intervention and to check anti-Communism. The fact that he acted resolutely when threatened with Soviet intervention helped greatly to consolidate his position. For the first time since its inception, Polish Communism freed itself from the odium of being a Russian puppet condemned to remain forever in irreconcilable conflict with Polish national aspirations. Until then, the Poles had looked and could look only to anti-Communists to assert what they regarded as their national interest and national dignity. Now, for the first time in its long, chequered and tragic career, Polish Communism had assumed the role of the exponent of the national longing for independence.

Faced with this situation, Moscow had to acknowledge Gomułka’s ascendancy and to recognise that it was preferable from its own viewpoint that the heretical Communism of Gomułka rather than anti-Communism should find itself at the head of Poland’s national resurgence. When Khrushchev arrived in Warsaw on 19 October, he was not in fact motivated by any special hostility towards Gomułka – it was indeed far easier for him to come to terms with Gomułka than it had been to make apologies to Tito. What brought Khrushchev and his colleagues to Warsaw was, it seems, the fear that anti-Communist forces might gain the upper hand in the upheaval and that Gomułka, playing unwittingly the part of a ‘Kerensky in reverse’, might pave the way for a counter-revolution. The fear was not altogether groundless. At any rate, some Polish anti-Communists certainly viewed the situation similarly, for they too looked upon Gomułka as upon a Kerensky in reverse.

Outburst in Budapest: It was, however, Imre Nagy who was cast for that part, although he was not destined to act it to the end. Like Gomułka, Nagy was at first acclaimed by Communists and anti-Communists alike and carried back to power on a wave of national enthusiasm. But in that wave the anti-Communist current from the beginning was much more powerful than the Communist one. The Hungarian party now had to pay the heaviest penalty for its rigid addiction to Stalinist orthodoxy. No large and important section of its membership had intimately and in good time identified itself with the popular revulsion against the Rákosi era. Ernő Gerő, whose name still symbolised that era to the popular mind, remained at the party’s head even after the rehabilitation of László Rajk and his grimly provocative reburial. Only on the night of 23-24 October, after the storm had broken over its head, did the Communist Party recall Nagy to the leadership. By this time Budapest was already the scene of civil war, and the weakness and the sense of isolation of Hungarian Communism showed itself in its panicky call for Soviet armed help after the first shots had been fired.

The alignment of social and political forces in Hungary on the eve of civil war was also very different from that which had taken shape in Poland. No agitation for workers’ control over industry and no Communist ‘revolution from below’ comparable to the Polish one had developed so as to enable the Communist regime to gain fresh strength and find a ‘proletarian class basis’. Students and army officers took the initiative; the workers followed the intelligentsia’s lead.

The Anti-Communists: Such, at any rate, appears to have been the situation in Budapest. In the provinces, two distinct centres of insurrection sprang into being, at Miskolc in the north-east and at Győr in the west. In both cities, Communists and anti-Communists were active, and in both cities they soon came to blows with one another. At Miskolc, the insurgents appealed to the country in the Marxist-Leninist idiom, and it was in the name of proletarian internationalism that they demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the restoration of Hungary’s sovereignty.

The real headquarters of the rising in the provinces was at Győr, where after an interval during which Attila Szigeti, a Communist, led the insurgents, the anti-Communists – among whom the clergy were prominent – gained the upper hand. It was no longer de-Stalinisation that was the battle cry at Győr. It was: ‘Down with Communism!’

The split in the rebel camp came to a head when the Communist insurgents, responding to the appeal of Nagy – their man – were ready to lay down their arms and demanded that their comrades in arms do the same. By this time, a religious peasantry had risen and thrown its weight behind the anti-Communists. This was apparently one of the decisive differences between Poland and Hungary. In Poland the peasantry had remained passive through all the phases of the crisis from the Poznań riots to the October upheaval.

In vain did Nagy’s spokesmen now broadcast the desperate appeal: ‘We beg you, stop the slaughter. You have won. All your demands have been accepted.’ The anti-Communist insurgents did not agree that they had won, and as the insurrection was spreading over the countryside they played for ever higher stakes. Together with the call ‘Down with Communism!’ went up their cry for the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops. This demand was as sure to arouse the passions of a nation driven to frenzy by Soviet armed intervention as it was unlikely to be accepted.

The ascendancy of anti-Communism found its spectacular climax with Cardinal Mindszenty’s triumphal entry into Budapest to the accompaniment of the bells of all the churches of the city broadcast for the whole world to hear. The Cardinal became the spiritual head of the insurrection. A word of his now carried more weight than Nagy’s appeals. If in the classical revolutions the political initiative shifts rapidly from Right to Left, here it shifted even more rapidly from Left to Right. Parties suppressed years ago sprang back into being, among them the formidable Smallholders’ Party. The Communist Party disintegrated. Its newspaper Szabad Nép ceased to appear. Its insurgent members perished at Russian hands or at the hands of Hungarian anti-Communists. Its erstwhile leader, Gerő, was killed. [1] Its powerless premier hoped to avert the catastrophe by bowing to the storm and accepting every anti-Communist demand, until on 30 October he proclaimed the end of the single-party system and agreed to preside over a government in which the Communists did not have a majority. This spelled the end of the Communist regime, and Nagy drew the only logical conclusion from the fact when, on 1 November, he proclaimed Hungary’s neutrality and denounced the Warsaw Pact. He was now indeed ‘Kerensky in reverse’.

Crisis in Moscow: The events in Poland and Hungary undoubtedly led to a grave political crisis in Moscow, by far the gravest since Stalin’s death. That the Soviet ruling group was divided could be seen even during the Polish crisis, when the leaders of the three main factions came to Warsaw: Molotov and Kaganovich, the Stalinist diehards; Mikoyan, the ‘liberal'; and Khrushchev, the middle-of-the-roader. Khrushchev’s first inclination was to side with the die-hards and to use force or at least to threaten it.

Only when the threat failed and it turned out that the Polish upheaval did not after all imperil the Communist regime did Khrushchev reconcile himself to the new situation. The ‘liberals’ in Moscow had won the day. But the Hungarian rising at once aggravated the division. Mikoyan, in Budapest, assisted by Gomułka’s envoy on the spot and by Tito’s appeals from across the frontier, negotiated for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, while the government in Moscow was preparing the declaration of 30 October, in which it virtually committed itself to the withdrawal and openly confessed its errors in treating other countries as satellites. But Zhukov and Shepilov publicly stated on 29 October that Soviet troops would not be withdrawn before the Hungarian revolt was suppressed. Were perhaps the chief of the Soviet armed forces and the Minister of Foreign Affairs airing their differences with other party leaders?

The Soviet Army, it may be assumed, could have acted with greater vigour and determination at the beginning of the rising, between 24 and 27 October, if it had not been hampered by divided counsels in Moscow and contradictory orders. When the army feigned a withdrawal from Budapest on 30 October, it probably did so under pressure from the ‘liberals’ in the Presidium who hoped that this would enable Nagy to establish a national Communist regime that would, like Gomułka’s regime, still remain aligned with the Soviet bloc. This hope was dashed two and three days later, when the disintegration of Hungarian Communism became evident and Nagy denounced the Warsaw Pact.

The ‘liberals’ in Moscow had suffered a signal defeat. The diehards of Stalinism and the army dictated policy, and they dictated renewed and more massive intervention. Probably no one in Moscow had the desire or the courage to defend Nagy, whose government was seen as due to be presently replaced by an openly anti-Communist regime – failing Soviet intervention. It was no longer Hungary but the whole of Russia’s position in Eastern Europe, in Germany and in the world at large that was at stake. The collapse of Communism in Hungary was sure to increase a hundredfold the anti-Communist pressures everywhere. The Presidium was therefore probably unanimous in sanctioning the new Soviet intervention in Hungary.

The Mortgaged Estate: Its unanimity cannot last long, for it is not enough to crush the Hungarian insurrection to solve the problems posed by it. Stalin’s successors are in the position of heirs to a heavily mortgaged estate who work hard to pay off the mortgage and yet are driven to contract new and heavy debts in order to save the estate. They have given up most of Stalin’s methods of political control and economic exploitation, they have disbanded Russo-Hungarian, Russo-Romanian and other joint-stock companies, they have repeatedly revised the terms of trade between Russia and Eastern Europe in the latter’s favour, they have given up bases in Finland, and so on and so on. Yet they have now burdened themselves in Hungary with a moral and political liability far worse than any bequeathed them by Stalin, who never had the need to use his armoured divisions to keep the satellites in subjection. Stalin’s successors cannot relinquish Stalin’s Eastern European estate. But can they hold it? If so, by what means?

These questions are now suddenly and dramatically placed in the very centre of the controversy over de-Stalinisation, which has been going on in Moscow almost incessantly. The die-hards of Stalinism assuredly blame de-Stalinisation for the incalculable predicament in which Soviet policy has found itself. The ‘liberals’ may argue that the predicament has arisen because there has been too little de-Stalinisation, not too much. Both groups have enough grounds for attacks on Khrushchev. The ‘liberals’ blame him for resisting de-Stalinisation in Eastern Europe, for backing the Rákosi regime far too long. The die-hards of Stalinism must blame him for his yielding to the pressure of the ‘liberals’, for rehabilitating Tito and thereby starting the whole trouble, for the final removal of Rákosi from power, and for climbing down before Gomułka.

This is not all. The great controversy over domestic policy that raged two years ago and was resolved in February 1955 by Malenkov’s dismissal from the Premiership is bound to revive. That controversy has had a close hearing on the Eastern European upheaval. What exasperated the Polish and Hungarian masses and gave to their political discontent its present explosive power is the acute shortage of consumer goods. In vain the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe have repeatedly pressed Moscow to help alleviate the shortages.

Moscow has not been able to spare the foodstuffs and other consumer goods needed. In part at least, this has been due to the decision, taken two years ago, to curtail the expansion of Soviet consumer industries which had been planned under Malenkov. The example then given by Moscow was followed in Warsaw, Budapest and other Eastern European capitals, where Malenkov men were defeated or kept at bay and the anti-consumer bias continued to govern economic policy. Thus the advocates of the pro-consumer policy can now point out that their defeat two years ago has turned out to be an international disaster for Russia and Communism.

No Road Back: Khrushchev’s position seems to be gravely compromised. Whether he remains in his present post or not, his prestige and influence are on the decline. His middle-of-the-road policy has certainly not stood the test of events well.

Will the die-hards of Stalinism come back? This does not seem very probable, and it may even no longer be very important. Whoever is in power in Moscow, there is no road back to Stalinism. Twice since Stalin’s death the attempt has been made to reimpose Stalinist orthodoxy; first after the Berlin rising of 1953 at the time of Beria’s fall, then once again at the time of Malenkov’s dismissal.

Both attempts failed and served only to stimulate de-Stalinisation. Russian de-Stalinisation too has its own irresistible momentum, even if it is not as explosive as the East European, and it carries away and presses into its service even those who try to stem it. (This, incidentally, has been the case with Khrushchev himself.)

The crisis in Eastern Europe cannot save the residuum of Stalinism in Russia even if the die-hards of Stalinism were to come back. It can only hasten its disintegration. Once again the real choice before Moscow is between more democratisation and a more radical break with Stalinism on the one hand and some form of military dictatorship, authoritarian but not Stalinist, on the other. Events in Hungary may postpone the decision but only to make the issue more pressing and burning.

Notes

1. Deutscher is in error here: Gerő was not killed; he fled to the Soviet Union after being dismissed as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He eventually returned to Hungary, but was expelled from the Communist Party, and lived in obscurity – MIA.