HUNGARY IS mourning the death of Bela Kiraly, a military leader of the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination. He was 97.
When the communist secret police opened fire on protesters in Budapest on October 23rd, 1956, Kiraly was in hospital recovering from an operation and the rigours of five years in jail – four of them on death row – on trumped-up charges of spying.
The shots sparked a week of vicious fighting between lightly armed students and workers and Red Army tanks that rolled into the Hungarian capital, and prompted officials from the reformist government of prime minister Imre Nagy to ask Kiraly to lead a national guard and organise the defence of Budapest.
"I was just skin and bone after five years in jail and, when they came to see me, I was far from being healed. So I had to slip out of hospital because the doctors would not let me go," Kiraly told The Irish Timesin 2006.
“We had to protect the consolidation of forces behind Nagy. Nothing would have worked if we had all stayed separate. So we formed a unified national guard – a force prepared for domestic peace rather than making war with the Soviet Union.”
Kiraly had been a young general in Hungary’s fascist army when he was captured and sent to Siberia by the Soviets in 1944, only to escape with some of his men and march back over the Carpathian mountains to Hungary. Back home, he was jailed by Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi.
Within two days of sneaking out of hospital in 1956, he was leading the national guard and was military commander for Budapest.
But the reformists’ hopes were dashed when, after a brief withdrawal from Budapest, Soviet forces overwhelmed Hungary with more than 100,000 troops and 4,500 tanks.
Nagy and his main political allies were arrested, while Kiraly and his men made for Austria, skirmishing with Soviet troops along the way. From Austria he went to the US, where he was a history professor until 1989. He returned to Budapest for the reburial of Nagy – and to witness the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Kiraly was elected to parliament in the first post-communist elections in 1990 and served as vice- chairman of its defence committee, and was later a government adviser on military reform. He wrote several books in English and Hungarian, most about Hungarian history and the 1956 revolt.