against, and useless attempts to negotiate with, the USSR, declared Hungary’s neutrality with its exit from the Eastern Military pact. The defeat of the Hungarian revolt was imminent. On 4 November, Budapest was shocked by the thunder of shells which exploded in the centre of the city. The Soviet army units had begun their attack to definitively crush the Hungarian uprising. Primarily in Budapest’s workers’ quarters there was bitter fighting. There was a countrywide general strike. In the end, the Hungarian workers had to give in to the Russian troops’ military superiority and their own reform government. On 15 November the countrywide uprising was finally broken. Now, under Janos Kadar after the military defeat, execution, internment and imprisonment were handed out by merciless Special and Summary Courts. JanosKadar only lifted martial law on 13 July 1957, which shows, on the one hand, a lasting period of resistance, and, on the other, the Kadar government’s fear and caution with regard to continuing or further unrest.

The Significance of the Hungarian Revolution

When the Hungarian Revolution had been smashed, the abominable crocodile tears of the West began to be shed. The Hungarian intellectuals of the Petöfi Circle reduced the uprising to a “revolution for human dignity”, or proclaimed it to be a “worldwide symbol of freedom and its tragic defeat”. Just like the nationwide uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany, all bourgeois forces spun the revolt against its own aims into an alleged national rising. Hungary 1956 was an attempt at a social revolution: wage-workers in the