politics – Tragedy and Farce

December 16, 1773: The Boston Tea Party

December 16, 2025 lars4968Leave a comment

On the night of December 16, 1773, over 100 Bostonians disguised as Mohawk or Narragansett warriors boarded three merchant ships of the British East India Company moored at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston Harbor and proceeded to dump 342 chests of tea overboard in what would become known as the Boston Tea Party. It was organized and carried out by the Sons of Liberty—a secretive organization led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock—who were the driving force of opposition to British rule over the colonies. The tea party was an act of protest driven by long standing colonial grievances against British rule but the primary complaint was the Tea Act of 1773 and the fact that the American colonies were taxed as subjects of the British crown but denied representation in Parliament. The tea party set off a series of British punitive measures known as the “Coercive” or “Intolerable” Acts that eventually plunged New England and the remaining American Colonies into armed rebellion against British rule two years later.

In the decade prior to the tea party, Great Britain was facing serious economic difficulties. It emerged victorious from a seven year struggle against arch rival France in 1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America, but its treasury was depleted. Moreover, the British economy was mired in a recession as a result of policies that were implemented to finance the war. The British government looked for new and untapped means to replenish its coffers and beginning in 1764 it levied a series of new taxes and customs duties on the American Colonies to raise more revenues. Over the next, eight years the British Parliament in London passed the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts, provoking violent protests by the outraged colonists.

The colonist anger stemmed from a deep seated conviction that the power to tax derived from the consent of the governed, a principle dating back to 1215 and the Magna Carta. The colonists were already paying taxes levied by their colonial legislatures for public goods and services and since there was no colonial representation in parliament, they argued, London had no right to impose additional taxes and duties on the colonies. British authorities disagreed. As such, the brewing crisis was not simply about taxes but about the power relationship between Great Britain and the colonies.

By the 1770s, relations between the American colonist and the British government had become increasingly acrimonious, if not confrontational, with Boston serving as ground zero for all anti-British sentiment and protests. In March 1770, British troops, who had been deployed to Boston earlier to quell violent protests over the Townshend Acts, opened fire on a small group of angry Bostonians, who had been heckling them, killing five in what would become known as the Boston Massacre. The massacre only served to further roil an already indignant public. In May 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act which was intended to help the East India Company, one of Britain’s most important commercial institutions, stave off financial ruin and reassert its authority over the increasingly rebellious American colonies.

The Tea Act was a complex plan that actually lowered the price of tea but it also forced the colonists to pay a tax of three pence on every pound of tea while granting the East India Company a monopoly on the tea market in the colonies. Many colonists denounced the act, seeing through it for what it was, a ruse to make them accept Parliament’s right to tax them. Moreover, the act threatened to put smugglers and legitimate importers out of business because it undercut the price of tea that smugglers were offering and the tea had to be purchased from designated consignees. As a result a nexus of opposition emerged to include radical political activists, smugglers, and the merchant class.

The first tea ships of the East India Company began to reach North America in November of 1773. Seven ships were bound for Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. The ships encountered strong opposition in all four cities and in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston the ships were prevented from unloading their cargo and forced to return home. In Boston, a defiant Royal Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, was determined to assert his authority demanded that the ships be allowed to dock and that colonial merchants pay the duties on the cargo. On 28 November, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston Harbor. It was soon joined by two other ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver. Threats from the Sons of Liberty and other like-minded groups prevented the ships from unloading their tea while Hutchinson would not allow the ship to leave the port without the customs duties being paid. The stage was set for a historical showdown.

On the afternoon of December 16, nearly 5,000 Bostonians crammed into the Old South Meeting house to listen to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and others debate a course of action to resolve the tea crisis. Late in the day, word spread that a last ditch effort to persuade Hutchinson to send the ships back had failed. Frustrated by the impasse Adams concluded, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!” With those words the meeting came to an abrupt close, and it was the signal for the Sons of Liberty to carry out a more radical plan, one which they had been preparing for for some time.

As the people filed out of the Old South Meeting House, a mob began to form and shouts of “Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight!” filled the air. The mob made its way towards Griffin’s Wharf where the three ships of the East India Company were moored. Along the way, 150 Sons of Liberty donned disguises as Mohawk and Narragansett warriors to conceal their identities and avoid any future retribution for acts they were about to carry out. The affair was planned and executed meticulously. The mob boarded the ships roughly around 7pm under a cover of darkness meeting little resistance from the ships’ crews. They proceeded to pry or smash open the 342 tea chests dumping their contents overboard into harbor. The conspirators were careful to ensure that no other property or people were vandalized or harmed or that anyone from within their ranks stole any of the tea. After three hours of heated work, they dispersed from the ships and returned to their homes, with each man having sworn an oath of secrecy about the affair.

Word of the tea party reached London little over a month later prompting a strong response from the British Government. British Prime Minister Lord North was determined to reassert British authority over the rebellious colonists and teach them a lesson they would not forget. In March 1774, British Parliament passed the first of a series of measures known as the “Intolerable Acts” intended to punish the colonists for their tea escapade. The first measure was the Boston Port Act which authorized the Royal Navy to blockade Boston, effectively shutting down the port to almost all commerce and trade until the tea was paid for. The port closure halted virtually all maritime trade, causing massive job losses, shuttered businesses, and created a humanitarian crisis as food supplies became scarce. The second, which was passed in May, was the Massachusetts Governing Act which ended the Massachusetts Constitution and the free election of local officials. Instead, it gave the Royal Governor the power to appoint local officials which posed a direct threat to representative government in the colony. On the same day, parliament also approved the Act for the Impartial Administration of Justice which gave the governor the ability to move a trial to another colony or Great Britain if it is determined “that an indifferent trial cannot be had within the said province.” The Act eliminated the right to a fair trial by one’s peers, removing an established judicial principle dating to Magna Carta. The fourth and final punitive measure was the Quartering Act passed in June which obligated the colonist to pay for housing British soldiers in North America. Lastly, Parliament wanted someone with a stronger hand to implement these acts and replaced Thomas Hutchinson with General Thomas Gage as Governor of Massachusetts, effectively putting the colony under military rule. In addition to serving as Royal Governor, Gage was also Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America. Gage and four fresh regiments set sail for Boston in mid-April 1774.

It was the fervent hope of the Crown that these strict and punitive acts would serve as punishment for the colony of Massachusetts and as a warning and threat to the other American colonies as well. The calculation was that other colonies would soon submit to British authority and resume their place as subordinates to Parliament and the Crown out of fear of similar reprisals.

However, these measures backfired on the British. Other colonies recoiled in horror at what they witnessed. After seeing the power Great Britain leveled on Massachusetts, other colonies quickly became sympathetic with their fellow colonists and began to wonder how much longer it would be before the same type of actions would be done to their own cities or colonies. The other American colonies soon sent aid and supplies to the beleaguered people of Boston.

On top of the fear these acts caused in colonies throughout America, they also forced the colonists to begin asking more important questions. These questions included: where had Great Britain received its authority? And to what degree did they have the right to use such force on the colonies? The word tyranny was used to describe the actions of Parliament and the Crown. Men like George Washington in Virginia would write, “Shall we supinely sit, and see one province after another fall a sacrifice to despotism?” In a years time, “the shot heard around the world” would ring out on Lexington green marking the beginning of the American Revolution.

August 20-21, 1968: The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia

August 20, 2025 lars4968Leave a comment

On August 20-21, 1968, the combined armies of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia to topple the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek and to ensure that Prague remained firmly entrenched in the Soviet orbit and under communist rule. This Soviet-led intervention was the third time since 1953 in which Moscow was forced to use military power to ensure its control over its East European satellites. It also further underscored the fundamental tenet of Soviet policy toward the region, the idea of limited sovereignty. Diversity within the Eastern Bloc was permissible only within the context of strict Soviet control and universal conformance on two key points: loyalty to the Soviet Union in foreign affairs and the primacy of the communist party in the domestic sphere.

Of all of Moscow’s East European satellites, Czechoslovakia was the last to succumb to full Soviet control and therefore was late to experience de-Stalinization. Since 1948, Czechoslovakia had been ruled by Communist hardliners Klement Gottwald and Antonin Novotny who ensured that unlike Poland or Hungary, Czechoslovakia remained a hardcore Stalinist state firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence. However, by the 1960s the Czech economy began to falter, and cracks within the ruling Communist Party emerged as popular dissatisfaction with communist rule was on the rise.

In early 1968, Novotny was ousted as the head of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party and replaced by Alexander Dubcek in what would become known as the “Prague Spring.” In many ways, Dubcek was a forerunner to future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Dubcek, like Gorbachev, sought to breathe new life into the Communist system and insisted that all reforms would take place within the framework of the Marxist-Leninist state. Nonethless, as he implemented reforms he began to lose control of the process. Dubcek relaxed censorship while encouraging greater policy debate and limiting the powers of the secret police. He also pledged to put more emphasis on the production of consumer goods, while suggesting the possibility of a multiparty government and democratic elections ten years in the future. From Moscow’s perspective, it appeared that Dubcek was dismantling Communist rule not reforming it.

Soviet leaders were increasingly alarmed by what was happening in Czechoslovakia and the model it might provide for the Soviet people and the other Communist states of Eastern Europe. However, Soviet leadership was divided between those who wanted to avoid a replay of the 1956 Hungarian crisis and counseled patience and those who argued for a swift military solution to the problem. In Eastern Europe there was surprisingly strong support for the latter. The hardline Communist leaders of East Germany and Poland—Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka—were especially apprehensive and argued for a decisive military intervention. Gomułka’s support for the use of force was a particularly ironic twist because his rise to the top of the Polish communist party in October 1956 against Moscow’s wishes, almost triggered a Soviet military intervention in Poland. In July, the Kremlin insisted on consultations with their Czechoslovak counterparts to better understand the situation. Dubcek defended his reform agenda and resisted demands he reverse course but reaffirmed Czechoslovakia’s alliance with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

As Dubcek struggled to convince the Soviets and his fellow East Europeans of his continued allegiance, momentum for a military intervention was growing in Moscow and the other East European capitals. On 3 August, representatives from the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, the People’s Republic of Poland, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia met in Bratislava in a last-ditch effort to reach a compromise and avoid military force. The meeting did little to resolve the standoff and only resulted in a vaguely worded declaration subject to contradictory interpretations. The declaration addressed the principles of equality, sovereignty, and territorial integrity while reaffirming the participants unshakable fidelity to Marxism–Leninism, proletarian internationalism, and the implacable struggle against bourgeois ideology and all “antisocialist” forces. More disturbing were the repeated references to fraternal assistance, code word in Soviet parlance for military intervention, and the idea that it was right and duty of all communist states to intervene in another if communist rule were ever endangered or replaced by a non-communist system. This idea would form the basis for what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

At an August 16-17 meeting, the Soviet Politburo unanimously passed a resolution to “provide help to the Communist Party and people of Czechoslovakia through military force”. At an August 18 Warsaw Pact meeting, Brezhnev announced that the intervention would go ahead on the night of 20 August, and asked for “fraternal support”, which the national leaders of Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland duly offered. East German military forces were left out of the invasion at the last minute for fear of reawakening memories of the 1939 German invasion and provoking strong resistance. Romania refused to participate in the intervention and its leader Nicolai Ceausescu condemned the invasion in a August 21 public address calling it a “grave error” that “constituted a serious danger to peace in Europe and for the prospects of world socialism.” His address was perceived as a gesture of disobedience towards the Soviet Union. However, Ceausescu escaped the Kremlin’s ire largely because he continued to run Romania as a hard-core communist state and did not threaten to leave the Warsaw Pact.

Around 11 pm on August 20, more than 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria rolled across the border into Czechoslovakia. Armed resistance to the invasion was negligible, but protesters immediately took to the streets. The invaders quickly occupied the capital of Prague and spread out to take control of other major cities, key points of communication, and airports. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev insisted on the participation of at least some of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact allies in the intervention to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Nevertheless, Soviet military forces did most of the heavy lifting.

The invasion caught most of Czechoslovakia and the world by surprise. Although resistance to the invasion was negligible, unlike the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, protesters immediately took to the streets. Within hours, Dubcek, along with other government leaders, was arrested and flown to Moscow in hand cuffs for interrogation. He was surprisingly allowed to return to Prague on August 27, where in an emotional address he acknowledged the error of his ways and agreed to curtail his reforms. He was forced to gradually dismiss reformist aides and government officials who were quickly replaced by hard-line Communists. After anti-Soviet rioting broke out in April 1969, he was removed as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and replaced by Gustav Husak, a hardliner who was willing to work with the Soviets. Dubcek was later expelled from the Communist Party and briefly served as ambassador to Turkey, before being made a minor forestry official in Slovakia.

In the years that followed, Husák consolidated his power, further purging the government and communist party of Dubcek loyalists, reimposing centralized control over the economy and reinstating the power of the security service. He also ensured that Czechoslovakia once again became a cooperative member of the Warsaw Pact. Husak’s rule would come to be known as the “Reluctant Terror.” It was characterized as one of strict adherence to Soviet policy objectives and the minimum amount of repression necessary to achieve these objectives and prevent a return to Dubcek- style reformism. As a result, the regime was neither a complete return to Stalinism nor al liberal one either. Husak would continue to rule Czechoslovakia until November 1989 when he and the rest of the communists were overthrown in what became known as the Velvet Revolution

The 1956 Hungarian Uprising: A Fight for Freedom

October 23, 2024 lars4968Leave a comment

On 23 October 1956, the people of Hungary rose up in a brave yet futile effort to overthrow their Soviet imposed communist government and set up a more democratic and pluralistic political system free of Soviet oppression. The uprising lasted 12 days before Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest deposing the government of Imre Nagy and thwarting the Hungarian revolutionaries efforts to escape the Soviet camp. The uprising presented the Soviet Union with the most serious challenge to its authority in Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. It also revealed the persistent, paradoxical, challenge the Kremlin would face in managing its East European satellites over the next 30 years; the contradiction between its determination to maintain absolute control over these states and building legitimate, viable Communist regimes that could exist without constant Soviet support or intervention.

At the end of World War II, Red Army troops occupied nearly all of the states of Eastern Europe, making their subordination to the Soviet Union almost inevitable. Soviet leader Josef Stalin acknowledged this fact in April 1945 commenting to Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking official in the Yugoslav Communist party, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it, it’s own social system. Everyone imposes their own system as far as their army can reach.” The establishment of communist rule in Hungary roughly followed a similar pattern to that of the other East European states. Employing what head of the Hungarian Communist Party Matyas Rakosi termed “salami tactics” the communist proceeded to divide the non-communist opposition while gradually seizing power with the support of the occupying Red Army lurking in the background. By 1948, Hungary’s communists had gained total power over the country, and in 1949 the country was proclaimed a “peoples’ republic” with Rákosi as its absolute ruler.

Rakosi set about rapidly transforming Hungary into a Soviet style communist state. He instituted Stalinist political and economic programs, resulting in Hungary experiencing one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe. Rakosi set up the dreaded AVH, the state political police, to identify and root out regime opponents who were subject to show trials. On the economic front, the government collectivized agriculture and it extracted profits from the country’s farms to finance rapid expansion of heavy industry. Industrial production rose steeply, but the standard of living did not; the production of consumer goods was limited and that of agriculture stagnated. Hungary’s free market economy was replaced by a Soviet command style economy in 1949 and trade was reoriented away from Western Europe towards the Soviet Union. In addition, Hungary, having sided with the Nazis, was obligated to pay reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia to the tune of 20 percent of its annual income. By the early 1950s, the imposition of Soviet-style economic policies and the payment of war reparations were impoverishing the Hungarian people fueling anti-Soviet political discontent as the payment of foreign debt and the heavy industrialization of the country took precedence over the material needs of the Hungarian people.

The year 1956 was a tumultuous one in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. It had been three years since Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev finally prevailed in a three-way power struggle to succeed him. In February, at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, Khrushchev gave a “secret speech” condemning Stalin. In a tirade that lasted hours, he denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality,” the party purges of the 1930s, the gulags, and his blunders in World War II. He accused Stalin of negligence, deceit, and incompetence which cost millions of Soviet lives.

Although Khrushchev’s address was intended to help consolidate his power and mobilize domestic support for a reform agenda in the Soviet Union, it had far reaching implications for the entire Communist Bloc. No where was its impact felt more profoundly than in the six countries of Eastern Europe where their leaders, who were installed by Stalin and were building mini-Stalinist regimes, now found their legitimacy compromised. Khrushchev argued that the Stalinist model was not the only acceptable model of communist development and that there were different roads to socialism. In Poland and Hungary, the people were beginning to chafe under Communist rule, Khrushchev’s speech led to increased protests and demands for political and economic reforms.

In Hungary, popular anger at Communist rule continued to grow rapidly and the government proved unwilling or unable to stop it. In July, Khrushchev facilitated the replacement of hard-line communist ruler Matyas Rakosi with another Stalinist hardliner, Erno Gero. Gero tried to defuse public anger and demonstrate to Moscow he was adhering to the party line of de-Stalinization by allowing the body of Lazlo Rajk, a communist reformer who had been executed in the 1949 Stalinist purges, to be buried in Budapest. His burial on October 6, 1956, brought to the surface anger over past Stalinist injustices against Hungary over the years, and the funeral march quickly transformed into a mass political demonstration. Anti-regime opponents, mostly urban intellectuals and students, began to make bolder and bolder demands of the government while calls for political and economic change soon spread to the working class and peasants as well.

Left: Matyas Rakosi; Center: Erno Gero; Right: Imre Nagy

On the afternoon of 23 October, a restless crowd of 20,000 marched through Budapest and gathered at the statue of Józef Bem, a Hungarian-Polish hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. Here they issued a list of demands known as the “Sixteen Points,” which included political reforms, democratization, the removal of Erno Gero and other Hungarian Stalinists, and the withdrawal of all Soviet military forces. What began as a series of peaceful student demonstrations now began to evolve into something much larger and by the evening there were more than 200,000 people on the streets calling for change.

In response, Gero went on the radio that evening and denounced the protesters as fascists and agents of imperialism and vowed that there would be no concessions. Gero’s defiant statements only further outraged the protesters and inflamed an already combustible situation. An angry crowd marched to the center of Budapest and defiantly tore down a ten-meter-high bronze statue of Stalin. They looped steel cables around its neck, pulled it to the ground with trucks and defaced the fallen icon. Elsewhere in Budapest, another group battled police outside a local radio station while units of the Hungarian military were besieged and attacked. Revolutionaries took over public buildings, destroyed Soviet symbols and freed political prisoners who had been locked away for years. The protest now became an armed uprising. The Hungarian Revolution had begun.

Fighting escalated quickly and the Hungarian government was quickly losing control of the situation as well as its security apparatus. Gero ordered the Hungarian military to quash the demonstrations and reestablish order, but many soldiers resisted cracking down on their fellow citizens and some even joined the protests. Acknowledging that his grip on power was slipping, Gero quickly appealed to his Soviet overlords for assistance. Khrushchev lacked confidence in Gero and was initially hesitant to dispatch Soviet military forces to quell the protests but incoming reports from the Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, Yuri Andropov, assured the Kremlin that military intervention was necessary. The next day, Soviet Defense Minister Georgiy Zhukov ordered 6,000 Soviet troops and 700 tanks into downtown Budapest. In return for Soviet military backing, however, Khrushchev insisted that Gero bring back Imre Nagy back into a high-level government position to appease the disgruntled populace. On the morning of October 24, Nagy was again named Prime Minister.

Neither the Soviet army nor the return of Imre Nagy did much to daunt the citizens of Budapest or defuse the crisis. Over the next several days, barricades went up throughout the city while fierce fighting raged between these revolutionaries and the Soviet Army , the Hungarian military, and the State Security Police. Shortly after being appointed Prime Minister, Nagy addressed the nation on radio calling for a ceasefire and promising to institute political reforms. His appeal did nothing to quell the revolutionary fervor. Not a single revolutionary stood down or handed over a weapon.

Nagy was a tragic figure about to be swept up in a wave of revolutionary tumult that he failed to fully grasp and was powerless to stop. Nagy appealed to the pre-revolutionary Hungarian public because he was a reformer and a moderate and not a hardline Stalinist like Rakosi and Gero but he was still a dedicated communist. Like Khrushchev, he believed that there were different pathways to socialism not just the single, rigid, Soviet model, insisted upon by Stalin. He wanted to build a distinctly unique communist system that reflected the national characteristics of the Hungarian people. The problem for Nagy was that Hungary’s young revolutionaries no longer wanted reform. They wanted to overthrow the system. Back in the government, Nagy quickly saw his dream of a new Hungary firmly on a peaceful path to reform communism under his leadership slipping away. He tried to steer a middle course acting as a bridge between the revolutionaries and the various Communist Party factions but for the people of Hungary the time for restraint, halfway measures and middle courses had passed.

*Massacred unarmed Hungarians at Kossuth Square.*

With no signs that order was close to being restored, two high-level Soviet Politburo members— Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov— traveled to Budapest on October 25 to troubleshoot the situation which was clearly deteriorating. Mikoyan and Suslov arrived to find a government that was no longer functioning and a Hungarian Communist Party that was in shambles. The two Soviet emissaries undressed Gero mercilessly for his handling of the crisis and suggested he resign at once and flee the country. He was quickly replaced by János Kádár as head of the communist party. The Soviets hoped that the new team of Nagy and Kadar would be able to right the ship but the situation was about to get worse. That morning, Hungarian and Soviet military forces opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters in Kossuth Square demanding Gero’s resignation, killing hundreds and wounding many more. As word of the massacre spread throughout Budapest, the revolution quickly devolved into an all-out existential war between ragtag groups of young, poorly armed, and undisciplined rebels and the Soviet army, supported by the few Hungarian military forces that remained loyal to the government.

*Erika Kornelia Szeles, a 15 year-old Hungarian anti-communist fighter. She was killed during the revolution*

Amidst the growing violence, Nagy continued to try and stake out ground as a bridge between the revolutionaries and hardliners inside the Hungarian Communist Party but his efforts found little traction. On October 27, He announced the formation of a new cabinet that included moderate communists as well as four non-communist ministers in the naive hope the revolutionaries would lay down their arms and embrace the new government. Instead, his announcement met with jeers and the resistance from the revolutionaries. Throughout Hungary, revolutionary councils already assumed the responsibilities of local governments from the defunct Communist party and had mobilized strikes to halt the economy and the functioning of civil society. Moreover, too much blood had been spilled by Hungary’s revolutionaries to settle for anything less than their full demands.

The crisis in Hungary was reaching an inflection point. Almost a week had passed since violence first erupted on the streets of Budapest and Soviet military forces still continued to struggle to suppress the revolution. The young Hungarian freedom fighters refused to be intimidated by Soviet military force and their confidence was growing daily. Conversely, Soviet troops were increasingly exhausted and demoralized with many growing more sympathetic to the Hungarian cause. The Kremlin was not prepared to allow Hungary to leave the Soviet bloc but it needed to find a way to extricate itself from the situation. What to do in Hungary prompted heated debate inside the Soviet Politburo. Hardline Stalinist holdovers like Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Lazar Kaganovich, who saw the situation in Hungary as an opportunity to discredit Khrushchev, argued strenuously for doubling down on a military solution. However, more moderate voices like Khrushchev and Defense Minister Georgiy Zhukov, who days earlier favored deploying troops, were more conciliatory and cautious urging flexibility. Zhukov argued that the option of military escalation should be kept in reserve but they also needed to consider pulling Soviet forces from the streets of Budapest to create an opening for a negotiated resolution to the crisis.

Khrushchev wanted to reach a deal with the Hungarians that would keep the essence of Soviet rule but allow for a little more independence from Moscow. For that, the Kremlin needed some semblance of a functioning Hungarian government which made Nagy still very relevant to Moscow. The Soviets also needed an opportunity to pull back without losing face. That opportunity presented itself late in the evening of October 27 when Nagy and Kadar approached Mikoyan and Suslov about the possibility of a cease fire and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest. With Kadar taking the lead, the four men hammered out the broad framework of a agreement and around noon the following day a ceasefire was announced.

The Hungarian people initially greeted the cease fire with considerable skepticism but as the Soviets withdrew their military forces from Budapest over the next several days it came to be seen as a great victory. In the absence of Soviet troops, the Hungarian people set about dismantling the Communist system. Nagy dispensed with his customary moderation and embraced the idea of revolution. On October 30, he announced that the one-party system was being abolished and replaced with a multiparty democratic system. Thousands of political prisoners that had been incarcerated by the regime were released including, Cardinal József Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic Church, who received a lifetime sentence in 1949 for opposing Communist rule. Angry mobs of anti-Communist revolutionaries also began to hunt down and execute members of the hated AVH, the Hungarian secret police, and other Communist party functionaries. By November 4, over 200 Communist party officials had been summarily executed.

Within days, Khrushchev regretted his decision to pull out Soviet military forces from Budapest. Increasingly pessimistic reports from Mikoyan and Suslov only served to confirm Moscow’s worst fear; Hungary was trying to break away from the socialist bloc. On the morning of October 31, Khrushchev convened an emergency session of the Politburo to decide what to do in Hungary once and for all. Where as days earlier the prevailing opinion in the Politburo was to give peace a chance, it was now clear from the deteriorating situation in Budapest that the Soviet Union had no other recourse than military force. Citing concerns about Soviet prestige, the unity of the socialist camp, and domestic political concerns, Khrushchev argued that the challenge in Hungary could not go unanswered, “We must take the initiative in restoring order in Hungary,” he declared. On 1 November, Nagy formally announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and Hungary’s international status as a politically non-aligned country. This step ensured that there was no turning back for the Soviets.

The Soviets quickly began preparations to oust Imre Nagy’s revolutionary government and restore Communist rule. Khrushchev informed Moscow’s Warsaw Pact allies of their plan for Hungary which met with little objection except from Poland’s leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who assumed power almost two weeks earlier against Soviet wishes. Soviet military forces also surreptitiously began returning. On November 1, Soviet tanks poured across the border into Hungary and when preparations were complete 150,000 Soviet troops from ten divisions and armed with the most modern equipment ringed Budapest. The Hungarians were not oblivious to the Soviet troop movements. Intelligence reporting had trickled in from Hungarian military forces loyal to the new revolutionary government and other observers but Nagy refused to believe the reports and convinced himself he still remained in favor with Moscow. Moreover, there was little Hungary could do at this juncture other than fight back.

*Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest*

Shortly before dawn on November 4, “Operation Whirlwind”, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, commenced as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to depose the government of Imre Nagy. Around 5:30am Imre Nagy broadcast his final plea to the nation and the world, announcing that Soviet forces were attacking Budapest before taking refuge in Yugoslavia’s embassy. Later that day, Janos Kadar, Nagy’s deputy prime minister and titular head of the Hungarian Communist Party, operating under direction from Moscow, declared the formation of a counter-revolutionary government. Fighting would spread through out the city, but the brave Hungarian revolutionaries who previously stalemated the Soviets were no match for the overwhelming firepower Moscow brought to bear this time around. Although sporadic fighting would continue over the next week Hungary’s fate was sealed. When all the guns were finally silenced, roughly 3000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet army troops were killed in the uprising since October 23.

With most of Budapest under Soviet control by 8 November, Janos Kádár became Prime Minister of the Hungarian “Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government” and General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, a position he would hold until 1988. Imre Nagy would suffer a far more terrible fate. After holding up in the Yugoslav embassy for two weeks, he was lured out of the embassy under false promises, arrested, and deported to Romania. On June 16, 1958, Nagy was tried and executed for treason alongside his closest allies, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave.

In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion, many thousands of Hungarians were arrested. Eventually, 26,000 of these were brought before the Hungarian courts, 22,000 were sentenced and imprisoned, 13,000 were interned, and 229 were executed. Approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary to Austria as refugees as a result of the uprising. More than 30,000 of these refugees would be airlifted by the US military and resettled in the United States as part of Operation Safe Haven. Upon arrival, the Hungarians were temporarily housed at Camp Kilmer, in Piscataway New Jersey where multiple federal agencies assisted them through a resettlement process to become the newest members of American society. Many settled in nearby New Brunswick, which had an already thriving Hungarian-American community.