On this day in 1956, what began as a small student demonstration snowballed into a national uprising. The students were joined 100,000 angry citizens as they marched to more impromptu demonstrations at various sites around Budapest. At the Parliament building they were met by Soviet tanks who fired on the crowd. The demonstrations then escalated into street battles between average citizens with Molotov cocktails and a force of Hungarian security police and the Soviet army.
In response, the Hungarian Communist Party installed a new Prime Minster, Imre Nagy, who they believed would placate the people to a degree. Nagy almost immediately announced plans to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and hold multi-party elections. On November 4th, the Soviet Union sent tanks and airstrikes to take back control of Hungary. Nagy, who had taken assylum at the Yugoslav embassy, was tricked into surrendering (they promised him safe passage out of Hungary), and eventually executed.
The political circumstances and the events of these eleven days were too complicated to describe in detail here. However, dozens of good books
Fast forward…
I went to Budapest in September, 1989 for what would be a three-year adventure in cake consumption (oh, and composition lessons too, I guess). On October 23rd, I had only been in Budapest for about six weeks. That evening, a crowd gathered in front of the Parliament building, where police had fired on the crowd 33 years earlier, and quietly held candles as they received the news that the People’s Republic of Hungary was now to be known simply as the “Republic of Hungary”, and that national multi-party elections would be held in May, 1990. During the next three years, I got to witness up close the beginning of an amazing transformation.
Until 1989, the 1956 uprising was never discussed officially. The official line was to clear your throat and stare at the floor while mumbling something about a “counterrevolutionary incident”. But starting in 1989, the uprising was officially acknowledged, and now October 23rd is a national holiday.
Categories:5 Responses to “Hungarian Republic Day”
despite being closely related to a Hungarian freedom fighter, I had no idea the anniversary was today! Thanks for the reminder.
Glad someone out there cares.
Take a look at this more thorough and personal account from my friend and Budapest roommate of October 1989.
I care! it was a good post! A similar thing happened in Prague in the 50s.
Anyway,I learned something today, so i thank you for that.
adventure in cake consumption?!? mmmmm.
Prague was 1968, and then again less violently in 1989, just a few weeks later in November, simultaneously with the Berlin Wall being opened.
I tried to go to Berlin a few days after they opened the border, but I was removed from the train in the middle of the night because I didn’t have transit visa for Czechoslovakia. I finally made it there in January, 1990. It was weird.
Eh, there’s a subject for a whole post, which I’ll do later.
AH! i am mistaken,it makes more sense then to- as my best friend’s parents remember it. (they’re czech, and not really old enough to remember the 50s).
