Into The Night

The steel-shod Russian jackboot heeled down on Hungary this week, stamping and grinding out the vestiges of a daring young democracy. A force of 4,500 Soviet tanks, crack paratroops, MVD storm guards, and a quarter-million Red army infantrymen drawn from the remote wastes of Muscovy swept through the brown fall countryside, overwhelming towns and villages, smashing isolated Hungarian army resistance, and sealing off the country.

On the hills around Budapest, heavy Soviet guns ranged in on the city's old Parliament House. Through the already battered streets thundered big new tanks, this time protected by trotting groups of dark-visaged Asian-Russian infantrymen. Weary but infinitely brave Freedom Fighters were mercilessly cut down. Traitors who had concealed themselves, or their intentions, during Hungary's miraculous five days of freedom (see Hungary) were welcomed. In a matter of hours Moscow was able to report that Communist Premier Imre Nagy, who had defied the Kremlin, was in jail, and a new Communist government installed under Party Secretary Janos Kadar (TIME, Nov. 5).

Shared Joy. But the fighting did not immediately end. Clandestine radio calls testified to rebel resistance in isolated areas, both in Budapest and the provinces. And after first announcing that resistance was being crushed, Kadar took to the air to complain of continuing opposition "which might even get the upper hand." The weight and power of the Soviet assault indicated the seriousness with which the Kremlin now regarded the situation.

What made the smashing of free Hungary different from other Soviet depredations? For one thing, the West had been an intimate eyewitness of Hungary's brave struggle for national independence, and had shared Hungarian joy at seeing Soviet tanks withdraw in apparently accepted defeat. Guarded hopes had changed to optimism. After all, perhaps the weak state of the Soviet satellite empire, forcing the Kremlin to come to terms with a national Communism in Poland, might also persuade the Kremlin to come to terms with a national regime in Hungary. Instead, the exceedingly swift development of anti-Communist sentiment in Hungary made a fearful Kremlin resolve to make an example of Hungary.

Skillfully, the Russians masked their intentions. At the Turkish embassy in Moscow early last week, in an atmosphere of champagne and caviar, burly Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov began talking sympathetically about the "bureaucratic errors" of the late Rakosi-Gero regimes in Hungary. All the rebels had to do to obtain the withdrawal of Soviet troops, said Shepilov, was lay down their arms. Taxed with continuing to pour troops into Hungary, Marshal Georgy Zhukov roared denial. Said he, with a grand gesture: "There are already enough troops in Hungary to suppress a rebellion and maintain order."

Next day Shepilov's Foreign Ministry said that, anyhow, the U.S.S.R. was withdrawing Soviet troops from Budapest (but not Hungary) because their "further presence [could] cause even greater deterioration of the situation." The Soviet Union now recognized the basis of the Hungarian revolt as being the Hungarian working people's legitimate "struggle against bureaucratic distortions in the state apparatus." But it solemnly warned the Hungarians against "forces of black reaction," which are "trying to take advantage of the discontent."

Out of Hand. All the while, from the Russian standpoint, Hungary was veering out of control. Premier Imre Nagy, himself an old and routinely conscienceless Moscow hand, had been made Premier by the Russians, somewhat reluctantly, at Tito's behest, and ordered to govern with a national Communist Party like that in Poland. His first Cabinet had been just that, an assemblage of Politburocrats with a few non-Communists for show. But somewhere along the road, perhaps because of personal conviction, more likely because of the sheer explosion of Hungarian antiCommunism, he dropped most of his Communists by the wayside and, to keep in power, he had to echo rebel demands for renunciation of the Warsaw Pact and withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Nagy knew that the Soviet tanks, so sharply stopped by the young rebels, were merely drawn from one of the nearby divisions, and were no measure of the true strength of the Red army. He knew that new divisions were massing on Hungary's frontiers. He saw Soviet diplomats streaming out of the Hungarian capital--always a fateful sign. Full of soft assurances, a delegation of Soviet officers had come to talk over "withdrawal of troops ... in two or three weeks." He knew the worthlessness of such words on Russian lips, but he dispatched Defense Minister Pal Maleter and Chief of Staff Istvan Kovacs to talk with the Russians.

There was one small, slim chance to bring off his defiance: to take his case to the United Nations. Premier Nagy must have realized that this act would, in effect, be the signal for the final Soviet shutdown, but he took it.

Life or Death. This week the U.S. broke off a debate on the Middle East to make way for a predawn Security Council session on Hungary. Said U.S. Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge: "If ever there was a time when the action of the United Nations could literally be a matter of life and death for a whole nation, this is that time." It was: the Soviet attack was already five hours old; phosphorus and incendiary shells were falling in Budapest; the bridges across the Danube were being fiercely contested; the Russians had issued an ultimatum that they would bomb Budapest unless all resistance ended.

For two hours the Security Council debated a dramatic appeal from Nagy to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. But at 5:15 a.m. the Soviet Union's Arkady S. Sobolev vetoed a resolution censuring the Russian attack on Hungary on the grounds of "interference with the internal affairs of Hungary." Said Lodge: "I am horrified by such cynicism." The debate was taken up in the U.N. General Assembly later, where 50 nations approved (with eight votes against) a U.S. resolution urging Russia to withdraw its troops from Hungary immediately.

Even before the U.K. vote, the freedom stations in Hungary had been going off the air one after the other. New voices told of the appointment of the new Communist regime of treacherous Janos Kadar, and of the downfall of Communist Nagy. Pravda had the last word on Nagy: "He turned out to be an accomplice of reactionary forces. A woman's voice on Radio Budapest screamed "ominous consequences" for those who did not lay down their arms. Dark night was returning to Hungary.

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