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From Budapest to Baghdad

In a Long-Ago Revolution, Echoes for Today

By ROGER COHEN

FUNNY with history, how remote it can seem, and how close, even in teeming Times Square, scarcely an oasis of retrospection. Charles Legendy recalled being there the other day when his gaze turned to a black-and-white billboard of a tank emblazoned with the words “1956 Hungary” and, beneath that, “Our Revolution Was Not a Movie.”

His wife, Annemarie, also looked up, and the elegant young man on the left of the tank in a European city rising in revolutionary ire against the Soviet empire caught her eye. She knew him, she felt, with a certain intimacy. “Charlie,” she said, grabbing her husband and pointing at the photograph, “that’s you!”

A half-century can concertina in a moment, eliding exile and a whole American life, and leaving a 69-year-old New Yorker, Mr. Legendy, back in the Budapest of his youth, on the eve of the Hungarian uprising of Oct. 23, 1956, living once again “that electric atmosphere, that absolute exhilaration.”

Mr. Legendy’s disorientation — he said it took him some time to accept that he was indeed captured in an image he’d never previously seen — is in some measure also every American’s at this 50th anniversary. The Hungarian events are far away, but are they? Once again, in Middle Eastern guise, the United States confronts issues of containment or rollback, of moral principle or pragmatic caution, of liberty or stability.

“The same quandaries are posed, most fundamentally the question of how America can behave responsibly and whether it may be more tragic to engage in war against tyranny or refrain from it,” said Paul Berman, an author who has written widely on European political history.

President Bush, who chose to tear down the status quo in Iraq and unleash violent instability in the name of liberty, has not hesitated to draw a straight line from Budapest to Baghdad.

He has compared the Iraqi government’s pursuit of democracy to that of the patriots of 1956 and told Hungarians: “We’ve learned from your example, and we resolve that when people stand up for their freedom, America will stand with them.”

That has a ring to it and the stamp of post-cold-war, neoconservative certainty. But the Eisenhower administration had also vowed to roll back Communism from Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, when Hungary rose, it was left to a bleak fate beneath the Soviet yoke. Liberty was set aside in favor of circumventing World War III.

Worse, America misled the freedom fighters. Radio Free Europe, Washington’s mouthpiece, egged on the uprising, declaring on Nov. 4, 1956, that a “practical manifestation of Western sympathy is expected at any hour.” At the same time, it disparaged the revolution’s leader and martyr, Imre Nagy, as a compromised Communist.

A less felicitous mixture of misleading near-promises and maximal demands from an American knight-turned-bystander is hard to imagine. That rankles still, as all blots do on the idealism inextricable from the freedom-bearing narrative of American foreign policy.

“You can’t incite people and then do nothing to help them,” said Max Boot, a conservative commentator at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The closest parallel is what happened in 1991, when we told the Kurds and Shia of Iraq to rise up and abandoned them. That was really inexcusable, even more so than in 1956, when there were not really military options short of starting a world war.”

Or were there? History happens, but only just. Few events are as tantalizing as the Hungarian uprising, whose initial few days saw Soviet hesitation and a growing belief that Nagy, the prime minister, could engineer some form of pluralist democracy — Titoism-plus — even within the Communist orbit. Might the exercise of militant American principle over pliancy have ushered Hungary toward the neutrality achieved by Austria in 1955?

The hypothetical has little value: what happened, happened. Thousands died; Hungary waited another 43 years to be free. But we now know from the Soviet archives that as late as Oct. 30, 1956, a week into the revolution, Nikita Khrushchev was still talking of “a military path,” that of “occupation,” or “a peaceful path” — “the withdrawal of troops, negotiation.”

The die, it seems, was not altogether cast from the outset. Certainly that was the impression on the street, where Mr. Legendy, then a student at Budapest’s technical university, recalled: “It seemed we could change the system. Russian troops were ordered to put down the uprising, but were inefficient, hesitant. We were almost sure America would intervene. After all, we were being attacked for being pro-American, and Radio Free Europe was encouraging us to end the regime.”

But the United States was not ready to challenge the division of Europe between free and totalitarian spheres; and Britain and France were embroiled in the simultaneous Suez crisis, a Western attempt to reassert empire in the Middle East that proved less successful than Khrushchev’s ultimate decision to impose Communist imperialism through force of arms.

No wonder Eisenhower expressed unease, in a discussion with his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, at feelings that “we have excited Hungarians for all these years,” and are “now turning our backs on them when they are in a jam.” To which Dulles, according to a memorandum of the conversation on Nov. 9, 1956, responded that “we always have been against violent rebellion.”

So goes history — and myriad human lives — floating on the whims and hesitations and little hypocrisies of the powerful. But Hungarian bloodshed and loss were not without catalytic effects.

The revolution jolted the West European left into the beginning of a rethinking of Communism, long an affair of the heart. “Hungary signaled to the West that it was not true that the masses supported Communism,” Mr. Berman said.

It also carried Hungarians, on the wrong side of two world wars and Europe’s division, to a rediscovered pride. Arthur Koestler is quoted in Kati Marton’s “Great Escape,” a new book on Budapest’s loss of its Jewish intelligentsia, as saying that, “To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis.” That state was eased by an uprising that became a collective point of reference in the nation’s journey toward NATO and the European Union.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Hungary became an example for the Czechs, the Poles and others in the web of dissent and defiance that would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

An optimist, and someone prepared to take the long view, might look to all these developments — a catalyzed region, a changed Western view of the acceptability of a totalitarian ideology, rediscovered national pride — and argue that the Iraqi invasion, for all its own terrible human cost, has also set in motion a cycle that will prove to be a liberating one.

Mr. Legendy, who fled Budapest in November 1956 and later studied at Princeton University, supports the invasion strongly, although he’s a Democrat and believes grave mistakes have been made. “Because of my experience of Hungary, I feel very strongly about Iraq,” he said. “The Baathists and the Communists are so close, first cousins. The cause of liberty is a great one.”

His 23-year-old son, Gabriel, also a Princeton graduate and now a second lieutenant with the United States Army, is in Baghdad. Almost a month ago, on Sept. 11, Lt. Gabriel Legendy sent his parents a letter from Iraq saying he felt melancholy as he recalled the attack on America. “That day and my thoughts and feelings on it are such a benchmark in my life,” he wrote. “Maybe this letter is my way of observing a moment of silence.”

So a line of sorts does run from Budapest to Baghdad, from a Hungarian student in revolt against Communism a half-century ago to his son, a young American officer trying to fashion a free Iraq. But how best to craft liberty?

A realist might conclude from the events of 1956 and what followed, as well as from today’s Iraqi mayhem, that totalitarianism must be tackled not by frontal assault, but by fostering resistance within — through a Polish pope, say, or the anti-Soviet, American-financed mujahedeen of Afghanistan of the 1980’s.

Through subtlety, that is, and long-term probing, and knowledge and effective agents of influence — all apparently absent in the Iraq whose freedom the Bush administration likes to trumpet.

But perhaps there is a third view, and that is simply of history as tragedy, a process where sometimes no options, whether transformational or incremental, are good, and events may be as arbitrary as Mr. Legendy’s extraordinary sighting of himself in Times Square.

The billboard was put up at a cost of $100,000 by the Hungarian Cultural Center, whose director, Laszlo Jakab Orsos, said: “What happened to Mr. Legendy illustrates the nature of history, which is no more than a chain of stories and lives, all interwoven, often in the most unexpected ways.”

Roger Cohen writes the Globalist column for The International Herald Tribune.