HUNGARY: Bela Kiraly, who played a leading role in the revolution, talks to Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest.
When the first shots rang out in Hungary's 1956 revolution, Bela Kiraly didn't look like he would become one of its legends.
As the secret police opened fire at protesters on October 23rd, Kiraly was in a Budapest hospital bed recovering from an operation and the rigours of five years in jail - four of them on death row - on trumped up charges of spying.
Those shots sparked fierce clashes around the city, pitting students and workers with small arms and petrol bombs against Red Army tanks that rolled into Budapest to crush the uprising.
After a week of vicious street fighting, the Kremlin began withdrawing troops from Budapest and suggested it might bow to the demands of the reformists, prompting celebration in Hungary and the arrival of government officials at Kiraly's bedside.
"I was just skin and bone after five years in jail and, when they came to see me, I was far from being healed," he said last week. "So I had to slip out of hospital because the doctors would not let me go." He was taken to meet the leaders of revolutionary groups from across Budapest, and asked by aides to prime minister Imre Nagy to meld the city's thousands of fighters with rag-tag rebel groups across the country, to create a genuine, national army.
"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, still energetic and eloquent at the age of 94, says he was chosen to lead the guard because he was known as a "good organiser".
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 produced evidence of having saved Jewish lives to convince Hungary's post-war communist rulers that he was not a fascist, and he was promoted to major general before being jailed in 1951 by Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi.
Within two days of sneaking out of hospital in 1956, Kiraly was leading the national guard and was military commander for Budapest. But while many Hungarians believed they had beaten Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union, Kiraly saw a crisis looming.
Sensing victory, and incensed by secret police attacks on peaceful protesters, the revolutionaries pushed for free elections, the total withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, and the scrapping of the secret police and one-party system.
"Imre Nagy would have liked to keep a one-party system, but to give socialism a human face," Kiraly says. "But by the end of October that was no longer possible. If Nagy had insisted on keeping the old communist, one-party system, he would have been swept away."
In Moscow, hardliners said Nagy's support for multiparty democracy, and the lynching of dozens of secret policemen in Budapest, showed that violent reactionaries were seizing power through counter-revolution.
And with Britain and France backing Israel's October 29th invasion of Egypt, they argued that Moscow would appear weak to the West if it failed to enforce discipline in the Soviet bloc.
"On October 31st, Soviet troops began flooding into the country, with a force almost equal to that landed by the Allies at Normandy to liberate Europe," said Kiraly. "I told Nagy that same day that it was clear what was arriving in the country, as we were receiving very precise, hour-by-hour reports from railwaymen on what forces and hardware were being unloaded from wagons around the country." But Nagy - who for decades had been loyal to Moscow and communism - believed that the Soviets would still withdraw their troops and negotiate a settlement, lies told to him by the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, Yuri Andropov, whose sange froid during 1956 propelled him to the top of the KGB, and ultimately the Kremlin.
Massive Soviet fire-power was converging on Budapest, prompting Nagy to declare Hungary's withdrawal from the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact and appeal for help to the UN, which did nothing as its focus was on the Suez crisis.
On November 3rd, members of a high-level Hungarian delegation were seized outside Budapest as they negotiated the withdrawal of the Red Army troops with Soviet officials. Kiraly was appalled at the trap set by Moscow. "I was too naive, like Imre Nagy, and I believed the Soviet Union," he recalls. "On the night of November 3rd, I reported to Nagy about shooting all over the country. I knew a huge armoured force was invading and told him that, in my view, this is war, and he should declare a status of war between Hungary and the Soviet Union. He sounded nervous and said he didn't want war with the Soviet Union - and that Andropov was there with him in the office, and guaranteed that if any shooting was going on, it was in response to Hungarian provocation."
Less than two hours later tanks rumbling once more through central Budapest, recalls Kiraly. Only then did Nagy announce that Soviet troops had attacked Hungary to crush its democratic government, and once more appealed for help.
No help would come. Soon after, Nagy sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, but was later arrested with his main allies and executed. 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.
Was he angry with Nagy for refusing to let his men defend their homeland? "The superiority of Soviet forces was so immense, that we didn't have the slightest chance," he said, leaning lightly on his black cane. "Hungary wanted to modernise, not abolish, socialism. Here, in 1956, we saw the first war between socialist states - and the beginning of the end for Bolshevism."