Hungary State Security Forces and the Revolution
Budapest, site of start of 1956 uprising
Courtesy Gustav Forster
Ironically, by the time the HPA had become thoroughly
Sovietized, the first waves of de-Stalinization rippled
through
the Hungarian Workers' Party. In 1953 both Stalinist party
leader
Matyas Rakosi lost his position as prime minister, and the
Stalinist minister of defense, Mihaly Farkas, fell from
power.
Professional training for officers was instituted at the
military
academies. A better educated and increasingly professional
officer corps began to question the dogmatic teachings of
the
party. Tension arose when the "internationalism" (a
euphemism for
following the Soviet line in foreign and military policy)
stressed by the communist state clashed with the latent
nationalism of the officers. These officers also resented
special
privileges bestowed on both the State Security Department
(Allamvedelmi Osztaly--AVO--the name for the pre-1956
secret
police) and the Soviet officers in the country.
Although the HPA did not participate in the Revolution
of
1956 as an organized force, its role in that conflict
demonstrated its political unreliability to both the
regime and
the Soviet Union
(see Revolution of 1956
, ch. 1).
Organized
military support for the revolution did not occur for two
reasons. First, before being sent home on October 28-29,
the
Soviet military advisers in Hungary ordered various
sections of
the Hungarian army to disperse. Second, Prime Minister
Imre Nagy
refused to order the HPA to oppose the final Soviet
invasion that
took place on November 3. However, not only did conscripts
refuse
to fire on mass demonstrations that took place on October
23
(although the AVO forces did), but some even went over to
the
insurgents and supplied them with weapons. Supposedly
"politically reliable" cadets from military academies
likewise
joined the insurgents, as did some military officers. One
of the
most important military figures to join the
revolutionaries was
Colonel Pal Maleter, the commander of an armored unit sent
to
recapture the Kilian barracks in Budapest from the Freedom
Fighters. In a parley with the insurgents, Maleter became
convinced that they "were loyal sons of the Hungarian
people,"
and he joined them. Maleter eventually became minister of
defense
in the Nagy government; he was later tried and executed
with Nagy
in 1958.
The regular police, at least those in Budapest, were
likewise
sympathetic to the insurgents. On October 24, Sandor
Kopacsi,
chief of the Budapest police, gave orders to supply the
revolutionaries with weapons. Budapest police joined the
rebels
but did not fight the Soviet army. Police headquarters
then
became headquarters for revolutionary forces.
Many members of the dreaded AVO, by contrast, fell
victim to
the public's wrath. During the revolution, AVO recruits
deserted,
and its professional officers found themselves hunted down
by
mobs. Some lynchings occurred. The regular police helped
disarm
the security police, and those security police known to
have
committed acts of state terror against the citizenry were
taken
into custody to await trial (some were summarily
executed). Most
AVO officers were detained by the revolutionary
government, which
abolished the security police on October 29. At first,
Moscow
sought to suppress the insurgency with the forces at hand.
Soviet
armored units began arriving in Budapest in the early
morning of
October 24. For the next four days, they fought
intermittently
with the insurgents. They were unable to dislodge
Hungarian army
units in the Kilian barracks that were under the
leadership of
Colonel Maleter or the units near the Corvin Cinema.
Soviet
forces and advisers publicly withdrew from Budapest on
October
28. On the surface, it seemed as through the revolt was
victorious.
On October 30, the government formed the Revolutionary
Committee of the Armed Forces, with representatives from
the
army, police, and the Freedom Fighters. The following day,
the
appointment as its head of General Bela K. Kiraly, who had
been
imprisoned from 1951 to 1956, was announced. On November
1, 1956,
Hungary withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and declared
political
neutrality. This act was in response to reports of the
Soviet
army's entering the country in force on October 31.
The Soviet army began pouring into Hungary on November
1 and
proceeded to occupy airfields and other strategic points
in the
country. The invasion used 120,000 soldiers taken from
eleven
fully staffed, "category-one" (forces of three-quarters'
to full
strength) divisions in Romania and the Ukraine. Volgyes
believes
that the coordinated nature of the attack and the
positions taken
by Soviet units suggest that the Soviet Union had planned
the
invasion far in advance.
The Soviet army returned to Budapest in force on
November 4.
The HPA, still splintered and riddled with pro-Soviet
officers,
could not offer organized resistance. The Freedom Fighters
had
neither the manpower nor the ammunition to oppose the
Soviet army
for long. After the fighting stopped, the Soviet
authorities
began to round up suspects, disarm the Hungarian People's
Army,
and carry out summary executions. In the next few years,
the
Hungarian courts handed down an estimated 2,000 death
sentences,
primarily to street fighters.
Data as of September 1989
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