Tokya, Japan -- The Revolution of 1956 -- though failed -- still made a difference. After all, the Hungarian people courageously made up their losses afterwards and eventually led all of Eastern Europe into revolts in 1989.
When I was an East European Correspondent based in Warsaw, Poland in the late 1980s, Hungary was my paradise. In Poland, people were nice but everything else was in short supply. The Communist dictatorship of then Czechoslovakia was so depressing that I got instantly gloomy upon arrival. In Romania, people feared the Securitate (Ceausescu's secret police); I remember an extremely suspicious-looking girl was selling a bottle of Champaign plus herself at the price of 100 U.S. dollars...
Only in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary could you find both material sufficiency and decent human beings. Once accustomed to the coded language, I could even speak quite freely with intellectuals about politics.
I was told that this was the result of the great tragedy of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After it, the man who came back in a Soviet tank, Janos Kadar, tried to accommodate the population by introducing the most liberal policies in East Europe.
Hungary's history might not suggest it. The country had allied with Hitler's Germany in the hope of reviving their old empire. They annexed neighboring territories for that purpose as recently as just a dozen years before the tragedy.
And a U.S. intervention in 1956 could have prompted another European war. The Soviet determination to dominate what it regarded as the former Fascist satellite was very strong. Though foreign hands would change any nation's course of history, it is, in the end, up to its own population to make up a lot of the difference.
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