The fight over 1956
The records about informers that are set to be published cover a broad swathe of Cold War history. Their symbolically charged release dates (both the original October 22 and revised November 4), however, link them inextricably to the 1956 revolution and its crushing.
Competing interpretations of 1956 have characterised political identity since Hungary’s democratic transition in 1989-90. The 70th anniversary looks set to continue that trend.
Post-1990, Hungary’s left-wing parties emphasised the revolution’s social-democratic features, including the prominence of grassroots workers’ councils in decision making. The discourse of the Fidesz party, conversely, crystallised around emotive stories of personal heroism, especially concerning the “Lads of Pest” – teenage (and younger) volunteers who faced down the invading Soviet tanks with rifles and Molotov cocktails.
Fidesz also benefitted from the recollections of former prime minister Viktor Orban’s emergence into the public consciousness with his speech at the reburial of prime minister Imre Nagy (and other revolutionary leaders) in June 1989, when he demanded, to much acclaim, the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops.
In October 2006, around the revolution’s 50th anniversary, Orban’s Fidesz party had, as today, also just lost a parliamentary election. Fidesz’s communication at the time highlighted the connection between the governing MSZP (Socialist Party) and its MSZMP (Communist Party) predecessor, and the persistent need for national liberation.
Violent street clashes in September and October 2006 between far-right extremist groups, normal Fidesz supporters and the police were presented as reiterations of 1956. Those clashes – and with them Fidesz’s claim to be the true heir of the revolution – subsequently became a touchstone of the party’s political identity.
On September 18, 2006, police failed to prevent far-right protestors storming, and setting alight, the national television broadcaster in response to a leaked closed-door speech by the MSZP prime minister of the time, Ferenc Gyurcsany, in which he admitted that his party had “lied morning, noon and night” on the economy. Allegations of Fidesz’s co-operation with extremist groups remain disputed.
Conversely, on October 23, 2006, police responded with excessive force when confronting a gathering of far-right activists in Budapest that had blurred into an adjacent anniversary rally of Fidesz supporters. Many ordinary participants, and some onlookers, were seriously injured.
Past and present converged when protestors hot-wired a Soviet T-34 tank of the sort used in 1956 (part of a nearby street exhibition) and drove it at police lines, only for the vehicle to splutter to a halt due to a lack of fuel.
Police violence, and subsequent official investigations, received considerable criticism, not only from Fidesz but also from independent human rights groups. The current prime minister, Peter Magyar, (then a Fidesz sympathiser), has repeatedly referenced the importance of those events to his political development through his work representing victims as a young lawyer.
Exactly what narrative his Tisza party will promote in relation to the upcoming anniversary remains to be seen. Fidesz, however, has already begun implicitly to frame it in relation to current politics, describing the recently established National Asset Recovery and Protection Office (NVVH), which is looking into corruption during Orban’s 16 years in power, as “AVH” – the name of the secret police at the time of the 1956 revolution. Likewise, Orban has characterised the recent arrest of former ministers in his government, Balazs Hanko and Miklos Sesztak, as exemplifying “neo-communist tactics”.
According to Andrea Peto, professor of history at Central European University in Vienna, Fidesz will likely “continue developing a narrative that reframes 1956 from an anti-Soviet, anti-communist revolution into a broader story of national sovereignty”.
Such reframing, Peto tells BIRN, allows Fidesz “to avoid the uncomfortable contradiction between its historical anti-Soviet rhetoric and its current Russia-friendly foreign policy” – shifting the focus from specific anti-Russian resistance to “protecting the nation from external actors, whether Brussels, migrants or geopolitical pressures”.
University College London’s Bede believes that Fidesz will struggle to mobilise around the anniversary in a way comparable to 2006. This time, Fidesz “were planning to organise a ‘peace march’, but it was cancelled a few days after it was announced,” he notes.
This, he thinks, was “likely because they knew they would not have the numbers.”