It was almost World War III

21 October 2006

Fifty years after the Hungarian uprising, David Rennie talks to Bela Kiraly, now 94, who was urged to call for Western help — a call that could all too easily have sparked nuclear war

At the height of Hungary’s 1956 uprising, the general was already a middle-aged man. He did not just fight in the second world war; he had already reached the rank of general by 1944, in Hungary’s fascist army. The Soviets tried sending him to Siberia, but he and 26 of his men escaped from the train carrying them east, and walked home. Challenged to prove he was not a fascist true believer, he produced evidence of the Jewish slave labourers whose lives he had saved. Years later that same evidence earned him the status of Righteous Among the Nations, from the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority, Yad Vashem. The certificate hangs in his tiny study, next to his general’s full-dress uniform.

Seeing such artefacts is rather a comfort for an interviewer, as the details of Kiraly’s improbable life rush past: his postwar appointment as commander of Hungarian land forces; his 1951 arrest by the Soviets as an ‘American spy’; the four years spent on death row before his sentence was commuted to life; the years in America and his return to Hungary to become an MP in the first post-communist parliament.

Back in 1956 he had been out of prison only a month when the revolution began. And now here was a reporter from the New York Times, urging him to begin a war. The American did not waste time, Kiraly recalls. ‘He came to my office in Budapest, and he said, “You know, General, if you give me a statement inviting or asking the West to come and help you by means of arms, it will be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow.”’

At first the general — elected commander-in-chief of the anti-Soviet ‘National Guard’ only days before — tried to dodge the question. He urged the reporter to seek out Imre Nagy, Hungary’s prime minister and hesitant leader of its revolution. Western governments, including Washington, had been all but silent through the first days of the revolution, even as unarmed students were shot dead by secret police, and teenage street-fighters took on tanks with Molotov cocktails.

The Hungarian revolution is ill-remembered in the outside world — certainly compared with the much more famous Prague uprising. In Britain we have some sort of excuse. The revolt coincided with the Suez crisis, leaving the UK rather distracted. But behind the Iron Curtain, these were febrile times. A few months before, Nikita Khrushchev had stunned the Soviet ruling elite by denouncing the cult of personality about Stalin in a secret speech. That summer workers had rioted in Poland, in Poznan.

General Kiraly finally answered the visiting American’s question. His answer was no. ‘I told him, “Look, I believe that if the West sends military help, it will develop into a war. And in a war I don’t believe that nuclear weapons could be disregarded. And if nuclear weapons are used, then we will be the first to be evaporated. And that is not why we are making a revolution.”’