The United States and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The Soviets had four elements that they regarded to be of great importance to the preservation of the communist system in the Eastern European satellite states. These four elements were: a effective and unified communist party leadership; a strong and determined state security force; a loyal and disciplined armed force and military leadership; and a strict control of all media. Any hint of unrest in any of these four guidelines immediately set off warning bells within the Soviet decision-making mechanism. The breakdown of all four of them at once, as happened in Hungary in 1956, left the Soviets with only two options: either accede to Hungary’s desire for independence and risk unleashing similar forces throughout the satellite countries or to reinstate their supremacy over the country with force. There was little doubt as to which option the Soviet leadership was going to choose in an emergency, such as the Hungarian uprising was. Hungary’s separation from the socialist bloc was simply unimaginable and was to be prevented at all costs.
The events that took place on October 1956 in Hungary caught the American government completely by surprise even though it was extremely well informed about the political changes that were taking place in these countries. What it had never expected was for Hungary to stand up against the Soviet Union in an armed uprising.
The Hungarian revolution was not only against American interests, but an inconvenience for the Eisenhower administration. The turbulent events in Hungary disturbed and, at least for a while, halted the by then promising and successful détente, or agreement, process between the East and the West.
The Soviet Union never considered letting the satellite states desert the Communist bloc. Ultimately only a more offensive stance from the West would compel the Soviet Union to surrender its East European domains. One such move came from the American government, which devoted considerable sums of money towards the funding of revolutionary radio stations and other such organizations. Reference to liberation of the captive nations was, all the way up until October of 1956, a mandatory part of all high-level American political statements, which were subsequently transmitted to Eastern Europe by various propaganda organizations, particularly Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. All this served to create the illusion, not only in Eastern Europe and the United States, but throughout the entire the world, that the United States, which had in fact never shown any real interest in the region, had made the liberation of these nations the cornerstone of its foreign policy and of East-West relations in general.
In reality, American foreign policy of this era was based on the prevailing balance of power with the Soviet Union and the avoidance at all costs of superpower conflict.
Thus the American government, especially after it had discovered that the Soviet Union had made unexpectedly rapid progress toward developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, the United States sought to relieve political tension between the East and the West by finding an acceptable form of agreement with the Soviet Union, an agreement that would enable peaceful coexistence between the East and the West.
The American leadership, however, having been fully aware from the beginning of that they had only very limited options regarding any sort of intervention within the Soviet sphere of influence. It was nonetheless very important for the United States to conceal this impotence on order to preserve its international prestige. They maintained a two-sided approach to the crisis. On the other hand, they tried to minimize the harm that their necessary condemnation of the Soviet intervention would do to the blooming Moscow-Washington relationship. On the other, they were eager to convince the world that the United States was not waiting idly by while an Eastern European nation was fighting for its freedom.
After the outbreak of armed uprising and the Soviet intervention, Hungary’s fate came to be almost entirely dependent on the reactions of the great powers and other members of the world community. Those in Hungary who took up arms against the Soviet Union were convinced by all the misleading liberation propaganda that the West, particularly the United States, would come true with the promises to provide armed assistance to the Hungarian people if they rose up against Soviet domination, or at the very least that it would employ all the political weapons at its disposal in order to force the Soviet Union to agree with the Hungarian desire for independence.
All that they thought were illusions. As no help came to the assistance of the Hungarians, their revolution was destined for failure. The non-response of the West in November 1956 gave the Soviets full assurance that should any future conflict take place within their empire, they would be free to see to it as they saw fit, as there would be no concern of Western interference. To an extent, the Hungarian revolution was to the advantage of the Soviet Union, for it gave them freedom to resolve internal matters without interference from the West.
Although the claim has been perpetually repeated by Communist propaganda, the West was not directly responsible for instigating the Hungarian revolution. The Western powers not only did not help to ignite the Hungarian revolution, but it did not even remotely expect that an open conflict, let alone an armed uprising, would erupt in one of the Soviet satellite states. However, the two-sided foreign policy of the United States toward Eastern Europe undoubtedly contributed indirectly to the fact that social unrest in Hungary eventually evolved itself in the form of an armed uprising.
The matter of the Hungarian crisis was addressed in a meeting of the National Security Council, the United States’ highest-level advisory body, on October 28th. It was here that a proposal was made of offering assurances to the Soviets that the United States would not seek to exploit the possible independence of the satellite countries in any way that could threaten the security of the Soviet Union. The plan called for the US, through diplomatic channels, to convince the Soviets that a zone of strictly neutral, non-NATO countries would offer the Soviet Union just as much security as the existing buffer if satellite countries. Then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles didn’t fully agree with the plan, and with President Eisenhower’s assent proceeded to drop any reference to both neutrality and prohibition on NATO membership. In the end, Dulles had downsized the plan to one sentence: “We do not look upon these nations as potential military allies.” The new version did not entirely meet the aim of satisfying the Soviets. The Soviets logically assumed it to mean that the United States was not going to take any action whatsoever on behalf of the independence of Eastern Europe. The United States’ weakness on the Eastern European front had been revealed to the Soviets and they knew they could exploit it.
By the summer of 1957, the Soviet Union had developed its first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The new Soviet missiles posed a threat to not only Western Europe but directly to US territory. The strategic invulnerability of the United States vanished almost overnight. As the Soviets had now climbed to the United States’ level in the arms race and had even passed them, the US saw that they could not intervene militarily in Hungary and threaten a war with the Soviet Union. The Eisenhower administration wanted to show the world and the American public that they could not risk a war between superpowers to help the cause of the Hungarian Revolution. Behind the Western response to the Hungarian revolution was the realization that any sort of Western military intervention in Hungary contained the very likely threat of war with the Soviet Union, quite possibly to be fought with thermonuclear weapons, which would likely lead to the eradication of the very Eastern European peoples which intervention was designed to liberate. And all this over Hungary. The US, though, was willing to commit themselves thoroughly to make the aftermath somewhat bearable. In the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution, the US government found itself under fire from the Western press. They were accused of first having urged the Hungarians to revolt and then abandoned them in the event of the subsequent revolution, amidst their calls for military assistance. The government replied that while they had been deeply concerned over the “enslaved nation” and had continuously expressed their concerns, they had never encouraged suicidal uprisings. It was no less than a clear and open admission that, should similar uprisings occur in the future, Eastern Europe could not expect any help at all from the United States.
Jani Helle
11 Feb 2001