Budapest 1956: Refugees at Camp Kilmer

November, 1956: As a popular uprising in Hungary's capital, Budapest, was pushed back by the Soviet Union, bloody street fighting ensued. As people lost hope for armed victory against Soviet troops, and arrests and reprisals were carried out en masse by USSR police forces, 300,000 Hungarians fled their homes. Many went to refugee camps in Austria and West Germany. The 35,000 who made their way to the United States were given quarter in the disused military barracks at Camp Kilmer, Piscataway.

American officials praised these refugees as freedom fighters, giving them a heroes' welcome and help settling into new homes. But many Hungarians still felt betrayed- they had been expecting U.S. aid against the Soviet attacks, aid that never materialized as Budapest fell. Russian forces, meanwhile, slandered the rebels as 'fascists and hooligans.'

Denounced and terrorized by the USSR, given dubious help and used as Cold War propaganda by America, the revolutionaries themselves were given few venues to define their own aims. Later, dissident communists like the Situationists and Autonomists would look at the democratic workers' councils that Hungarians formed that October, and hold them up as an example of 'true' communism against the USSR's brutal 'state capitalism.'

But, not wanting to assign motivations to others, I've gathered some notes here about the first-hand accounts of street fighters in Budapest, their experiences as emigrants, and the New Brunswick Hungarian community that many of them settled into.

The American-Hungarian Foundation
'Founded in New Brunswick, NJ in 1955, the American-Hungarian Foundation hosts an extensive library, archive, and museum of folk art. Call ahead to arrange a time to visit. The Foundation also puts on a Hungarian festival in New Brunswick every summer.'

At the American-Hungarian Foundation, I learned more about how Hungarians had come to New Jersey as guest workers in the 1880s, not planning to stay, but rather to save up some money and take it home with them. In the 1900s, though, more permanent residents settled in New Brunswick, setting up their own churches and social clubs. This atmosphere made the town an inviting place for many of the 1956 emigrants to stay, when they were moving out of the Camp Kilmer barracks in nearby Piscataway.

Talking to historian August Molenar, we discussed how, even before the formation of the Soviet Union, the Polish and Hungarian people had a long shared history of resisting Russian invasions. The symbolism of the fights against Tsarist Russia would become part of the mythology for the fight against the USSR.

Gathered in the AHF's library and archives are many personal papers and interview transcripts from rebels who settled both in America and in Europe, and many U.N. documents that archivists saved from being discarded or destroyed when the U.N. was clearing out space for new materials.

Basic Facts and Essential Reading
'Paul E Zinner's Revolution in Hungary was written after a team of scholars from Columbia University traveled to Europe to interview refugees in Austria and Germany in the years after the 1956. Also of great value is Rift and Revolt in Hungary, by Hungarian-American legal scholar Ferenc A Váli. The book "56 Stories" is a wide-ranging compilation of first-hand accounts and photography, put together by Edith Lauer and the Freedom Fighter 56 History Project.'

The hungarian revolution of 1984 ended in 3 million deaths cause of englush teachrz

There was a brief transition to democracy, as the monarchy was dissolved and democratic elections were held in 1945 and 1946. But the Russian-backed Communist Party, which lost these elections, used other means to maneuver for power - first interfering with the winning Independent Smallholders' Party's ability to form a government, then forming a 'coalition government' in which it controlled key posts like the Ministry of the Interior, and then establishing solid military control in 1948.

Thus began a decade of Russian satelite rule, rigged elections and increasing repression, under politician Mátyás Rákosi (who had run as Communist candidate and lost in 1945.) Hungarians began leaving for Austria and Yugoslavia, while thousands of others wound up in temporary camps for the displaced, in Italy or Germany. From there, some began finding their way to the United States.

Meanwhile, some new Soviet social programs were better-recieved than others. An early attempt at a mass youth organization, Madisz, failed. It was followed up by the establishment of NÉKOSZ, or "people's colleges" in rural areas. These were popular because they gave people access to higher education who didn't have it before. Writers were hired to work for "Sazbad Nep," a newspaper that was controlled by the Russians. But many of these writers, and people active in the NÉKOSZ, would soon form the Petőfi Circle, a group of intellectuals that lead the ferment of revolutionary ideas in the 1956 uprising. [See Also: THE NÉKOSZ LEGEND]

Jewish people tended to be more sympathetic than the average Hungarian to the Communist Party, because it helped them to acheive more equal social status. Under the Axis-alligned Horthy Regime, in the 1930s and World War II, Jews suffered from legal discrimination, and a wave of terrorist attacks during the war. When Russian authority replaced Horthyism after the war, Jewish people were able to integrate and advance more in society. Jewish business-owners stayed suspicious of the Communist Party for obvious reasons, but working-class Jews were often relieved at the changes. Holocaust survivors and young students in particular, writes Zinner, were "eager to join the Party."

Because of this, and because de-facto dictator Rákosi came from a Jewish background, there were sometimes anti-Semetic sentiments echoed in anti-Russian nationalism. (Rakosi, notably, had distanced himself from Judaism before his rise to power, and was an adamant atheist.) Many Jewish activists became disillusioned with the Party and joined in the revolution themselves. In Budapest, the center of the uprising, they were accepted by other dissidents and took part, for instance, in the Petőfi Circle. But in rural areas, there were several murders of Jews during the height of the nation-wide fighting.

Economic discontent lead to strike waves during 1955. In the early months of 1956, tensions heightened. Groups of striking workers, and groups of students as well, studied events in Poland and looked to other countries, like Yugoslavia, for new social models they could emulate. One particular grievance of the students was the mandatory learning of Russian, and the centralized, propaganda-like control of school curriculums. The Petőfi Circle formed in Budapest in April of 1956. Meetings of the Petőfi Circle began to draw thousands of participants.

Student dissidents decided to stage a march through the city on October 23. The ruling regime, hearing of the planned march, granted and then withdrew permission to the students. But then, upon seeing the students gathering en masse in several parts of the city anyway, they decided to "give permission" again, since it was clear they couldn't stop it.

On the evening of the 23, a crowd of 100,000 marched through the city to the radio station, with the idea of broadcasting their demands to the country. They iconically tore down the statue of Stalin along the way, which had been put up when the Russians took power. When they got to the radio station on Sandor Street, the AVO (Soviet police) had the building heavily guarded. After a two-hour standoff the crowd surged forward, and the AVO opened fire with machine guns.

Thus the peaceful action became a revolutionary situation, as people began wrestling weapons away from the AVO and fighting back. What had been a majority of students became a more representative crowd as night-shift workers in weapons factories, hearing of the massacre, armed themselves and filled lorries to spread to the revolting people.

The Revolutionary Council of Workers and Students was the banner that the fighters in Budapest organized under. They called for a general strike the next morning, which spread through the entire country over the next two days. Councils in industrial towns and peasant groups in the farmlands made radio broadcasts and printed statements of their own demands, which were diverse and varied in range. Radio broadcasts warned people not to be tricked into giving up their arms. In Budapest, a set of Sixteen Points were agreed upon and advanced as a set of revolutionary demands.

Imre Nagy, a politician who had worked with the Communist Party but been expelled the year before, appealed to demonstrators by advocating non-alignment, national democracy, and the withdrawal of Russian forces. He again became Chairman of the governing Council of Ministers.

During the general strike, these new popular assemblies were the main decision-making bodies in Hungary. But on November 4, the Soviet Union sent a new wave of troops into Budapest to crush the revolutionaries and reassert its own dictatorship. To avoid the bloodbath, 200,000 Hungarians fled their country in the following weeks.

Ground forces put up pockets of resistance, joined by dissenting soldiers and tank commanders, keeping power in some areas until November 10. Nagy, along with a few other Party dissidents, took shelter in the Yugoslav embassy, but was then captured and imprisoned when trying to leave the country. He would be executed in 1958, after several hundred other dissidents had been executed and over 10,000 had been sentenced to jailtime.

Polish-Hungarian Solidarity
Strikes and sit-downs in factories in Hungary and Poland had inspired one another throughout 1955. There was a great deal of dialogue between intellectuals in the two countries, and that influenced the formation of the Petőfi Circle. An uprising in the Polish provence of Poznan in June of 1955 had also been an impetus to the Hungarians.

The Petőfi Circle had named itself after Hungarian poet Sandor Petőf, who had become iconic in the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. That revolution had seen the Polish and Hungarian forces fighting side-by-side. Then, too, Russian forces had tried to take control of Poland and Hungary - that time, aligned with the Austrian Empire.

It was Budapest's statue of Petőfi that demonstrators rallied around on October 23 - but first, they converged on the statue of Polish general Józef Bem, also a leader in the 1848 wars.

Revolution and Aftermath
'The 1956 Institute and the Hungarian-American Federation both offer online digitizations of first-hand photography, news foota   ge, later interviews and more. Also, the full United Nations report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary is in pdf form here.'

Laszlo Fulop, at the time a mechanic in a Budapest factory, later an architecture professor in Minnesotta, recalled that when another worker came into the factory talking about the students marching, the others first dismissed it as probably another Party-staged rallies promoting official propaganda. When the man said that, no, the students were demanding withdrawal of the Russians, they said he must be crazy or drunk.

The announcement that the students had released a twelve-point set of demands convinced them - and surprised them since the Twelve Points issued back in 1848 were part of the "sacred tradition" of that century's Hungarian Revolution. "Then let's join them," said one man.

"We are not university students." "But we feel the same way they do." [56 Stories]

The "ideology of the revolutionaries" is something that Paul Zinner discusses in his history book, saying, among the 200,000 "who fled... were both anti-Communists and Communists." First-hand accounts of fighters note that "political parties were organized within a few days," and their groundbreaking new publications expressed a "bewildering variety of opinions." [Sarkady, 56 Stories.]

Some of the children who left Hungary with their families fit into the Cold War narrative, growing up to become American soldiers and making statements like "I fought them in Vietnam because I was too young in Budapest." (The author of that account, Tamas Nagy, was ten in 1956, and his father had been tortured and sent to a forced-labor camp by the Russians, escaping and making his way back to his family.)

Others, like Dr. Alfonz Lengyel, said of their fellow rebels, "even those who were communists... had realized they did not want   this kind of communism." Lengyel had been a political prisoner before 1956, and said that many of his fellow prisoners were Communist Party members jailed for defying party lines, people who had joined "out of a belief in ideals but found it a dead end."

Laszlo Papp recalls his experience as a delegate to the Greater Budapest Workers' Assembly during the revolution, where the majority of members agreed on the goals of "national independence, Hungarian socialist structures instead of Communism, and democracy."

Recalling the atmosphere after November 4, he said it was a time of defeated "compromise" when "instead of national solidarity, [there] was alienation, distortion, and selfishness." He left the country and became president of the UFHS, an organization of Hungarian students in exile that worked to help refugees.

Edith Lauer, compiler of the 56 Stories anthology, was herself a 14-year-old girl witnessing the revolution. She recalls, that after the second Soviet offensive on the 4th, there was a time of uncertainty. Would there be more fighting? Would the new councils re-assert themselves? But things darkened and her family fled to Austria, and from there to Camp Kilmer. They eventually settled in Maryland where they had relatives living already.

In America, universities set up English courses for the new arrivals. Many of the accounts in 56 Stories are of emigrants who went on to study architecture, music or engineering in the United States.

The Open Society Archives: Central European University
'The Budapest-based Central European University preserves materials about the revolution in its Open Society Archives. The 1956 collection contains the notable Donald and Vera Blinken collection, of hundreds of interviews with street fighters, and has the following index of other related materials.'

The Comintern, Situationists, and 'State Capitalism'
As Russia centrally controlled the Hungarian government via the Communist Party, so also Communist Party chapters around the world reported back to the authority of the Comintern, falling into line with the orders from Moscow rather than making decisions independently.

The crushing of the Budapest councils was a major point of rupture. In France and Great Britain, organizations split or expelled people for differing from the Party line. Philosophers with radical leanings voiced their support of the rebels, like Albert Camus in his open letter, "The Blood of the Hungarians." [1] Leading British Marxist intellectual E. P. Thompson left the Communist Party over the brutal Russian intervention. In "The Smoke Over Budapest" he wrote:

"As I write the smoke is still rising above Budapest … It is true that dollars have also been sown in this embittered soil. But the crop that is rising will surely not turn out to be the one which [US Secretary of State] Mr Dulles expected … By an angry twist of history, it seems that the crop is coming up in students’, workers’ and soldiers’ councils, as ‘anti-Soviet’ soviets." [2] (The lower-case 'soviet' in this case means factory council. These councils, cropping up in Hungary at the time, had also appeared as central players in the Russian Revolution decades before - so central, in fact, that the country was renamed after them. However, after the Revolution, the new ruling Communist Party bureaucracy quickly crushed any soviets that tried to organize independently.)

The wave of uprisings would continue - in Poland, in Czechoslovakia - and the repression of them would further discredit Moscow-beholden Communist groups.

The Situationists, a radical French-based network with some international affiliates, also cited the 1956 revolution among their inspirations. Guy Debord, a Situationist involved in organizing the French general strike in 1968, wrote in The Society of the Spectacle:

"From this point on, each bureaucracy in power will have to find its own way, and the same is true for each of the totalitarian parties aspiring to such power... This international collapse has been further aggravated by the expressions of internal negation which first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers” — a negation which has in one case already gone to the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary." [3]

The Situationists also wrote a longer essay,Preliminaries on Councils, specifically exploring the internal organization of people's revolts in Eastern Europe against Russia- often using obtuse language that translates rather clumsily from the French - and a comic satirizing the 'pseudo-revolutionary' nature of Communist groups around Europe.

These writings - and later, the theory of the Italian operaistas - would show a strengthening tendency in international politics that was strongly anti-capitalist and oriented towards neither the East nor West side of the Cold War - nor even to the non-alligned bloc in Africa and Asia. Their views would often describe China and the Soviet Union as "state capitalist" - where the central bureaucracy of the ruling Party had taken on the same role as big-business owners in the west.

The CIA and the Professor: Some Loose Threads
A declassified report from CIA agent Guy E. Coriden was my point of departure for a number of important angles in studying the Hungarian Revolution. For instance, it was where I first learned about the United Nations report which was an invaluable guide throughout my research.

Coriden's "Report on Hungarian Refugees" focuses on "the collection of the intelligence information and material from the Hungarians who were admitted to the US." He describes the early days of the resettlement at Camp Kilmer, driven by a "primary concern... to provide a humanitarian welcome for the victimized Hungarian people... motivated by a genuine sympathy and admiration... and a determination to take full advantage of the propaganda opportunity against the Soviet Bloc."

We learn that "advanced units of ASPIC [a CIA-military cadre originally set up to specialize in the interrogation of prisoners] were sent to Camp Kilmer in December to establish a process for assessing the intelligence value of the refugees, in preparation for a full exploitation."

Because there would be an attitude of "mild horror" (though we're not told who would be horrified) towards open intelligence operations, the CIA set up a cover - the Historical and Statistical Survey Team (HSS) which would interview the refugees. The HSS went about collecting information from the Hungarians in the barracks, that "generally consisted of name, place of birth, former occupation, military service, and, in some cases, education and language capabilities."

Around 3,600 were interviewed in more depth, and "slightly more than 2,000 proved to have sufficient potential to justify recording a Preliminary Interrogation Report (PIR). These ranged from scientists or ministerial officials with detailed knowledge of intra-Bloc operations, to private soldiers with knowledge of troop and supply locations in one limited area." After the revolt was no longer a mass-media focus, and some immigrants had moved out of Camp Kilmer and into new homes - often with relatives - the intelligence agents decided to quietly conduct a broader study. They set up a new front group "with the cover name of US Sociological and Technical Research Unit (USSTRU). This unit was activated on 10 January 1957."

"The total result of the effort seemed to be that the overwhelming majority of the gaps in intelligence information on pre-revolutionary Hungary were filled," Corriden wrote. "When you add the thousands of reports and items to the training and area familiarization and divide it by the cost... you find that the intelligence community has made a bargain purchase. The Hungarian exploitation effort, American domestic style, will be a source of example and anecdote for some time to come."

Seeking to find out if this body of collected intelligence - like Corriden's report - was ever made public, I found my way to an essay entitled "Uninvited Guests" by a David Price. It is part of the anthology "The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State."

Price tells of two Rutgers sociologists- Richard Stephenson and Jay Schulman- who the university hired to interview Hungarian immigrants in the late 1950s. It wasn't until 1977, Price writes, that Stephenson and Schulman found out that the CIA had funded their research, and that the interviews they conducted were being fed back to the feds.

Stephenson went on to have a long career at Rutgers. When he found out about the true nature of his work in 1957, he wrote "The CIA and the Professor: A Personal Account."

"On the one hand, I felt offended and resentful," said Stephenson. "I had 'been had,' and by people I respected... On the other hand, in view of the nature of [the interview project] and its unclassified status, the idea that the CIA was involved... assumed a cloak and dagger staging closer to comic opera than to serious drama."

Stephenson has since retired from Rutgers. Interested in his story, I asked the Rutgers sociology department if they could help me contact him - but they couldn't - so I looked up Jay Schulman, the other professor who had been doing the same work.

Schulman, unfortunately, died in 1989, but his story merits discussion of its own. After his unwitting participation in federal intelligence-gathering, he went on to become a lawyer and an expert in scientific jury selection. His testimony was key in the defense of the Attica Brothers after their prison rebellion, and as a lawyer he represented guerrilla Kathy Boudin, charged with murder in the 1981 Brink's Robbery. [1]

(See also: the fallout of lawsuits around another federal intelligence front-group: The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology)

1989: Power Shifts and Nationalism
In 1989, with the weakening of the Soviet Union, Hungary and the other satellite nations of Eastern Europe saw resurgent nationalist movements that lead to their breaking-away and becoming independent of the USSR, which would be completely gone within the next two years as new regimes took hold of Russia as well.

A major economic crisis was looming throughout the region; inflation, and national debt were rising sharply. The end of the 1980s did not see popular unrest or street fighting in Hungary on the level of 1956, rather, political parties negotiated with the Hungarian Parliament and Moscow leaders. Ultimately, independence from Moscow and implimenting free-market policies were agreed upon as responses to the crisis. (Unrest elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc also weighed on the situation- as, for instance, many East German refugees were fleeing to Hungary.)

The first free Parliamentry elections were held in Hungary in 1990. The Moscow-based parties fared poorly while new parties came to power. The military occupation also ended that year as Russian troops withdrew from the country.

However, through the early 1990s, financial troubles continued, with high unemployment and few state safety nets. This would lead the country's Socialist Party, lead by former Communists, to regain many seats in the 1994 elections - though this lead to little change in economic policies - and lead to more support for European Union affiliation. Hungarians debated and figured out how to exert their newly-regained independence. They would again organize massive grassroots efforts, to guard against rigged elections and other abuses of power, in the national protests of 2006.