I'm increasingly spending most of my radio listening time to BBC Radio 3--uncompromisingly traditional and high modernist classical music rounded off with first class world music every night--since I came back online. Radio 4's relentless anti-Blair, anti-Bush, anti-Israel take on just about any news story they can shoehorn it into has got beyond my listening tolerance. The final straw was the very prominent platformm the Today programme gave to the raving fringe Islamist extremist Abu Izzadeen through an interview last week.
Tonight, Radio 3 has been running a wonderful extended feature commemorating the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its crushing by the Soviet Union in the November of that year. The link takes you to a page which should enable you to listen to the whole 2 hours and 45 minutes of it. Listen in if you can.
I remember those events of 1956 so vividly. I was just twelve at the time, and my limited political sensibility had already been given a radical shock by the Suez invasion, the spectacular Israeli victory over Nasser's Egypt and the consequent withdrawal under threat from the US Eisenhower administration.
Hungary was something else, because in the climate of 1956 it disturbed my then sense of a stable Europe divided into a free west and a grim and deadened Soviet sphere, which included all the countries of central Europe. My mother's stories of her summer visits as a child to interwar Czechoslovakia had evoked an image of that country as a sort of paradise, with peasants coming out to sell wild strawberries on the platforms of the stations that the train went through as the family travelled to Marienbad. She carried a sense of indignation that the Czechoslovakia of Masaryk, who she much admired, apolitical though she was, had been crushed by a Soviet-engineered coup.
My father's take on the Soviet Union and its satellites was much more paradoxical and ambiguous. He'd grown up in a Polish shtetl, where his comment on Polish anti-semitism was a laconic born-of-experience "they drink it in with their mothers' milk". He had a sympathetic affection for Communism, though I doubt he ever voted Communist.But he kept pretty quiet about it, because it appalled my mother, and it was at the height of the McCarthy campaign against Communist subversion in the US and the west.
He used to take me as a child to the radical "Workers' Circle" Jewish workingmen's club in the East End where we lived. Yet each year, he avidly read the account in the Jewish Chronicle of how many brave Jews had turned up at the Moscow Synagogue to celebrate the Jewish New Year--and inevitably attract the attention of the KGB.
Hungary 1956 was the first sense I had of the headiness of what a genuine popular revolution feels like. It was electrifying to listen in to the daily radio reports of people on the streets facing down tanks, even destroying tanks. And the people seemed to be winning. The Soviet tanks were retreating. Students were defeating soldiers. Spontaneous street meetings, newspapers appearing, revealing the creativity and energy that had been hidden behind the uniformly predictable cliches of the Soviet controlled media.
It was uncanny listening to tonight's broadcast, because I recognised so many of the news broadcasts that I had listened to fifty years ago. It had all left its traces in my mind over half a century. And then there were the accounts given by the Hungarian emigres of their experiences of being right in the middle of it. Yet the things they remembered were exactly what I remembered from the radio broadcasts.
And then there was the catastrophe of the Soviet reversal of policy, the massing of tanks and troop reinforcements, the crushing reinvasion of November and the cynical arrests and betrayals of the Hungarian politicians who tried to negotiate with them. It was utterly depressing at the time, like seeing those patients of Oliver Sacks who'd awakened from decades of semi-comatose existence ultimately lapsing right back into their previous state.
The saddest memory I have of that time was right at the end, where the doomed Prime Minister of the abortive new Hungary, Imre Nagy, made an impassioned broadcast to the west, crying out for them to come to Hungary's aid. I knew they wouldn't, and the broadcast quality was terrible, as I listened to this plaintive voice, followed by the playing of the melancholy and dirge-like Hungarian national anthem, of which the translated line, "Here you will live, and here you must die" were what stuck in my memory.
I kept remembering that broadcast as the Hungarian exiles spoke on tonight's programme of the last days of the revolution and their dawning and devastating realization that they were beaten. And then they too spoke of the same Imre Nagy broadcast, and quoted the same words from the anthem.
I found that so touching and moving. For I had been a twelve year old in Stepney, admittedly surrounded by the debris of the worst of World War II's bombing raids of London, but with no real awareness of what it was to live under a totalitarian regime that promoted itself as a people's democracy, and with even less of an understanding of what it was to glimpse, and then lose a revolution into freedom. Yet I shared and retained the same memories across thousands of miles and years of time.
We were the winners even then. For the UK opened its doors to the Hungarian refugees with a generosity that it never again showed. And this evening's programme showed the wealth of brilliance and talent that flowed into this country and the US from the borders of Hungary.
Ironic uptake: when my daughter was in the early years of the secondary school, the class had to prepare individual surveys of the places their family had come from, for their geography lesson. It was a highly selective, very elite school. There was virtually no-one in the class who was from a solidly ethnically English background. That was obvious, anyway, from just looking at the names on the register. But then there were two girls, both of them mathematical geniuses and general all-round paragons of excellence. Both had very English names, like the equivalent of Jane Smith and Helen Brown.
In the music lessons, the girls were asked to sing songs from their home cultures.
Both those girls sang Hungarian folk songs.
Turns out their mothers were Hungarian refugees of 1956.
Thank you for that. Very moving, and wry at the end. I sometimes wonder, if Britain had opened its arms to German Jewish parents as well in the 1930's, how much better off it would be today. And how much unbearable pain for those children would have been avoided.
Posted by: Stephen | September 29, 2006 at 10:30 AM
My mother told me how she and my father hardly slept for 3 weeks as they huddled over the radio, listening to the broadcasts coming from Hungary. I think it must have been the President's broadcast she was referring to which said "we appeal to you in the Free West to come and help us!"
And we didn't. The foulness of communism spewed its poison over eastern europe for the next 30 years.
I believe we still feel the effects of communism now. How many of todays terrorists were trained by the communists, funded and armed by them. How many disaffected and foolish westerners from gangs such as Bader Meinhoff were encouraged by them?
I don't think of communism with any affection at all, Judy. I remember travelling to the Ceauscescus' Romania, with its poverty, treachery and cruelty. And Albania, a few months and years after the death of Enver Hodxha, with what one of its impoverished residents called "its colour of fear".
It's easy to say that there are problems now in such countries, just as there are horrendous problems in Iraq. But I'll bet there aren't many Hungarians, Albanians or Iraqis who'd go back to the rule of the Ceauscescus or Hodxha, or Saddam.
Only foolish people, amongst whom the left are disproportiately represented, reflect with nostalgia upon communism's glory days.
Posted by: Huldah | September 30, 2006 at 12:36 PM
What you are forgetting is that Hungary was isolated from the west, surrounded by communist countries and one neutral country, namely Austria. The nearest NATO countries were hundreds of miles west and it would have required the troops to travel through there. If the effort had failed, as it might well have done given Hungary's physical isolation, it might well have led to the Sovietisation of Austria as well (as well as far wider destruction).
Posted by: Yusuf Smith | October 06, 2006 at 06:17 AM
the UK opened its doors to the Hungarian refugees with a generosity that it never again showed.
? Kenyan Asians ?
Posted by: AtWork | October 09, 2006 at 01:20 PM
As an occasional reader of this blog and as a participant in the Hungary programme you write about, Judy, the one niggle about it was the lack of reference to the situation of Jews in Hungary in the time leading up to the revolution, during it, and after.
Granted, since the issue is complex, it would have taken another programme, one that would be worth making some time, but it is a question a couple of us on the panel discussed afterwards. Especially since, as the other panellist remarked, of that list of Nobel Prize winning Hungarians briefly trailed in the programme, some 90% were Jewish.
And yes, we did receive a very warm welcome, and, as a joint letter in The Times from several notable British academics born in Hungary shows, we are indeed grateful.
Posted by: George S | October 14, 2006 at 12:49 PM
The Hungarian revolt was against a largely Jewish class of bolshevik functionaries, as revealed in David Irving's 'Uprising!'.
Why should the West have risked a nuclear showdown to aid these anti-semites?
Hungary emerged as one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the Soviet bloc, since it was allowed to be a test bed for limited capitalism for fear of a repetition of 1956.
A pretty optimal result for all concerned, I'd say.
Posted by: truthatlast | October 14, 2006 at 04:30 PM
'As revealed in Irving' - his was the first book I read on the subject - is not necessarily a recommendation.
There is in fact a story to be told there, but Irving is not the best man to be telling it.
'A pretty optimal result for all concerned, I'd say.'
Not for the dead. Not for Hungary. Not for the following years. Not later. Not now. You cannot dismiss the Uprising as an outbreak of anti-Semitism. Not by a long chalk. Nor did the West's non-intervention have anything to do with perceptions of the Uprising as anti-Semitic.
If it is the truth at last you are interested in, then it is worth looking for the proper relationship between things. There was, after some days, after the opening of the prisons, an element of anti-Semitism in the crowd, and there was indeed a strong, if not substantial, representation of non-practising Jews in the ruling party. At the top level they were Moscow based, but lower down they were radicalised Hungarian survivors of the war.
Furthermore, it is true that there existed and continue to exist strains of ugly anti-Semitism in Hungary, as elsewhere in the old Soviet empire, though not especially in Hungary, except in so far as the country was left with a sizeable number of Jews in Budapest at the end of the war on whom anti-Semitism might be focused.
The revolution of 1956, in my opinion, was not particularly marked by anti-Semitism and it would be doing serious dishonour to most of the participants to label them anti-Semites. A number of Jewish friends in Budapest celebrate 1956.
Posted by: George Szirtes | October 15, 2006 at 11:06 AM