Imre Nagy remembered

The BBC reports:

An audio recording of the 1958 secret trial of Hungary's executed prime minister Imre Nagy is being played in public for the first time.

It marks the 50th anniversary of Mr Nagy's trial for treason for his role in the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising. . . .

Mr Nagy was prime minister during the Hungarian revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks after only 12 days.

The Communist authorities then put Mr Nagy and his associates on trial in the Hungarian capital Budapest.

It started on 9 June 1958 and lasted for a week. Mr Nagy, 62, was sentenced to death by hanging on 16 June 1958. . . .

The BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest said the 1956 revolution against Soviet domination is held in the highest regard by most Hungarians.

He added that even though the revolution was defeated, it dealt a blow to Soviet Communism from which many historians say it never recovered. -- Via Cronaca

As David Pryce-Jones wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution:

Reflecting long after the event, Peter Kende, a prominent Hungarian journalist, considered that 1956 had been "the Waterloo of leftist thought." Hannah Arendt, an archetypal intellectual of the Left, thought that this revolution "illuminated the immense landscape of post-war totalitarianism." In shock at Soviet reality, the British Communist Party shriveled. In Italy, even as faithful a Stalinist as Palmiro Togliatti expressed doubt and dismay. Jean-Paul Sartre, probably the world's foremost Soviet apologist, wrote that the Soviets had won nothing and lost everything, merely "kindling hatred in people's hearts." In the Soviet Union itself, the courageous Andrei Amalrik spoke for fellow dissidents when he stated that "1956 was a turning-point in the history of the Communist bloc." So it was. Large numbers of people had proved ready to sacrifice themselves in order to be free.

Comments

[Marco McClean]

Yes, you'd think we would have learned from all that and not become a country with torture prisons and secret trials and massive telecommunication spying and propaganda ministries of our own, not to mention smashing whole other countries, rolling tanks in and staying as long as we like, all to nobody's benefit but the operators of a few war and mining/sucking/refining companies so entangled with the government it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.