720. Revolution in the Soviet Empire: Revenge of the Red Army (Part 2)

Three days into the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet Union, had the revolution escalated nationwide? How did the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev respond? And, with the threat of a Red Army invasion, would Hungary abandon the Soviet Pact? Join Dominic and Tom as they reach the violent denouement of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and explain its bloody outcome. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters Advertise with us: [email protected] _______ Sign up to Revolut at revolut.com/trih and get £20 when you spend. 18+, end date 30/06/2027 and promotion T&C's apply. Revpoints T&C's apply. _______ Check out Ask the Archives at ask-the-archives.com and get started with Claude at Claude.ai/restishistory _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Revolut. Standing still leaves no legacy. History is written by progress, by revolution.

• 0:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fighting for independence, dismantling those broken systems, defying injustice. Every revolution begins with the refusal to accept the norm, a demand for more.

• 0:24Tom Holland?

  And Revolut is founded on the same principle. Originally established to push back the frontiers of traditional banking, it puts the power back into your hands.

• 0:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can manage all of your money in one app. Plus, you can earn while you spend with the RevPoints Reward System.

• 0:44Tom Holland?

  As a fully authorised UK bank, your money is FSCS protected.

• 0:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sign up to Revolut today at revolut.com/trih. That's all lowercase. And you'll get £20 after the first time that you spend. 18+. End date and promotion Ts and Cs apply and RevPoints Ts and Cs apply.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Carhartt's holiday gift guides were built in collaboration with the greatest gift giver of all time, Santa Claus himself. Old Saint Nick counts on Carhartt's durable gear to have his back through rain, sleet and snow on the biggest night of the year. Because when everyone's counting on you to do your job, what else would you wear to work? Tap the banner to grab a gift for every hardworking person on your holiday shopping list or head to carhartt.com.

• 2:17Tom Holland?

  Since the early morning hours, Russian troops are attacking Budapest and our population. Please tell the world of the treacherous attack against our struggle for liberty. Our troops are already engaged in fighting. Help, help, help. SOS, SOS, SOS. The people have just overturned a tram to use as a barricade near this building. In the building, young people are making Molotov cocktails and hand grenades to fight tanks. We are quiet, not afraid. Send the news to the public of the world and say it should condemn the aggression. The fighting is very close now and we haven't enough guns in the building.

• 3:01Tom Holland?

  I don't know how long we can resist. Heavy shells are exploding nearby. Above, jet planes are roaring. A shell, a shell just exploded nearby. Now there is heavy fighting in the direction of the National Theatre, near us in the centre of the city. In our building, we have youngsters of 15, men of 40. Don't worry about us. We are strong, even if we are a small nation. When the fighting is over, we will rebuild our unhappy country. So those were telex messages sent from the Hungarian newspaper Sobod Nap, which of course, as all of us who speak Hungarian know, translates as a free people. And it was sent to the Associated Press newsroom in

• 3:46Tom Holland?

  Vienna on the morning of Sunday, the 4th of November, 1956. And then just before 11am, the line went dead and the newsroom in Vienna heard nothing more. And Dominic, just one of the many tragic scenes from the denouement of the Hungarian Revolution, which is a milestone in the Cold War, of course, a turning point in the history of communism. Although, I mean, how much of a turning point is interesting to debate? And we will explore these issues in today's episode. But first, could we have a reminder of what's going on? Because people will remember that our previous episode was

• 4:24Tom Holland?

  dominated by the charismatic swashbuckling. The great blaze of charisma that was Imre Nodj. And I looked up and I discovered it actually means Mr. Big, so like in Sex and the City.

• 4:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or indeed, Live and Let Die.

• 4:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah, well, that reflects our different perspectives, doesn't it, Dominic?

• 4:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does, indeed.

• 4:48Tom Holland?

  Also, I'll tell you who else it reminds me of is Yorg, which is the name that Andrew Ridgely called George Michael.

• 4:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 4:57Tom Holland?

  Yeah. Because it was Yorgios, Yorg.

• 4:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 4:59Tom Holland?

  Anyway, that's by the by. Remind us who Nodj is, why he's such a hero, or is he? And what's going on?

• 5:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right, we'll come to Nodj in just a sec. Just the big context. So last time we ended, it was on the 25th of October, 1956, and that was three days into this popular uprising against the communist regime that had ruled Hungary since the end of the Second World War. And the revolution was originally inspired by intellectuals and students, so people with a lot of polo necks.

• 5:28Tom Holland?

  You can't leave it alone, can you?

• 5:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can't.

• 5:31Tom Holland?

  Even when they're heroic and fighting for freedom.

• 5:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's just a knee jerk thing now. They're protesting against general repression and censorship, but then it became amalgamated with the anger of factory workers and peasants, people who had terrible working and housing conditions, low wages, high prices. And they felt that they were just downtrodden and they weren't being heard. And it shot through with this sense of Hungarian patriotism, fury at their leaders' slavish loyalty to the Soviet Union. And that, of course, was symbolised by the presence on Hungarian soil of so many Soviet troops. So last time, two successive Stalinist leaders, Matthias Rakoszny and Ernö Gere, were kicked out. And the man at the top, your hero, this sort of

• 6:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  woolrous, moustached, family grocer lookalike, Imre Nodj, Mr. Big. And Nodj, to remind people, he's a very sort of stolid, dogged man. He's a party loyalist. He wants to save socialism, restore order. He is also a moderate who has been arguing for a kinder, gentler, more authentically Hungarian path to socialism. So Nodj has been pulled in different directions. And spoiler alert, the tension between those two things will have tragic consequences for him. So as we heard last time, on the morning of the 24th of October, Nikita Khrushchev, the kind of paramount leader of the Soviet Union, ordered the Red Army to move into Budapest and restore order. There are an enter heavy resistance on the streets.

• 6:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  They lost five tanks and 120 men that first day. And so as night falls on the 25th, the second day, there are massive crowds on the streets. They're singing the national anthem, waving these Hungarian flags with the communist emblem cut out. And they are building barricades in preparation for the Soviet attack. Now, we've talked almost entirely about Budapest. But actually, this is now a nationwide uprising. So in cities and towns across Hungary, there are big demonstrations and they unite people of all classes. So workers, peasants, policemen, intellectuals, public officials, army officers and so on. And in the cities, people are producing independent newspapers, they've taken over radio stations, workers have

• 7:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  taken over factories, they're organising public transport themselves, there are workers councils, they're kind of taking charge of people's food, all of this kind of thing. And in the countryside, the peasants and the villages are organising food supplies into Budapest to support the revolutionaries. So Simon Hall in his book on 1956 quotes a building worker who was driving through rural western Hungary on the 26th of October. And this building worker said, you know, wherever he drove, he could see people flying Hungarian flags in the villages and peasants huddled around, you know, the single radio set in the village to try to find out what was going on. And as he points out in his book, Simon Hall, there are often big differences between the workers in the cities and

• 8:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  the peasants in the countryside, but what seems to unite all of these different people is the single word, freedom. That's the word that comes up again and again. And it has different meanings, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, political freedom, or simply national freedom from what they see as the Soviet jackboot. Now, of course, all revolutions have different sides to them, you know, we've done however many episodes on the French Revolution. There's idealism and enthusiasm, but there's also often a spirit of destruction. And this is true in 1956 as well. So by this point, there were reports from across Hungary of people destroying statues and war memorials, tearing down the Red Stars from buildings, breaking into Communist Party or secret police headquarters and things.

• 9:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is not a bloodless revolution, far from it. So the most famous incident.

• 9:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  On the afternoon of Saturday the 27th of October, Western journalists were taken across the border from Austria to a little town of Tom?

• 9:23Tom Holland?

  Mosson Magyar Ovar.

• 9:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not bad. I mean, well, not good, to be fair. I think it's Mosson Módjorvar.

• 9:30Tom Holland?

  It's a very long word, but it's got Magyar in it. So I know what that means. That means Hungarian.

• 9:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but you know what? Magyar is actually pronounced Módjor.

• 9:38Tom Holland?

  Is it? Who knew?

• 9:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  They did. Viktor Orban knew, I suppose.

• 9:42Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he'd know.

• 9:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And indeed, the new leader of Hungary, who's called, we call Peter Magyar, but I think they would call Módjor. Módjor. Anyway, wow. I mean, you learn a lot on the rest of this history, don't you? People must be astounded how much they're learning. When it's delivered with such authority, that's what people really like about this show. They can rely on us. All these journalists are taken to Mosson Módjorvar, and they're taken to the mortuary, which is crowded with bodies. And the reason it's crowded with bodies is this: The day before, a thousand people had marched on the secret police headquarters in this little town to demand the removal of the Communist Red Star. They said, "Take the Red Star down and put the Hungarian flag up." And the secret police commander at first seemed willing to talk, and he was talking to the crowd. Then suddenly, he pulled out his pistol, and he fired it in the air, and this was a signal.

• 10:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And his men opened fire from the secret police building with machine guns and hand grenades. At least 50 people in the crowd were blown or blasted to pieces, and the ground was strewn with their body parts. The survivors were not enormously pleased, it's fair to say. They went to the local army base, and they persuaded the soldiers to give them weapons. Then they came back, and they laid siege to the secret police building. Most of the secret police had fled, but two of them, two young men, were captured and lynched. And there's a hideous description of what happened to them in Viktor Sebastian's book on 1956. "The crowd threw itself upon them. They were beaten until their bodies were bloody objects. Then they were split into pieces as if this had been the work of wild animals."

• 11:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is not, you know, it's not just sort of a fun and games revolution. But anyway, let's return to Budapest and to our hero Imre Nodj, who is now established in the parliament building as prime minister. And he obviously has been cast as the national savior in this story. And as we said, he's torn between various different impulses. He wants to defend the party. He wants to restore order. He wants to save socialism. But also, he wants to stand up for Hungarian national dignity, and he wants to unite the country behind a kind of positive vision. And he has been talking to the emissaries from Moscow, Anastas Mikoyan, Armenian, and Miklós Szuszlóf, the chief ideologue,

• 11:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  about what concessions he can make. And they have said to him, "Look, if this is what it takes, tell people that you're going to have non-communists in the government." You know, we'll move almost backwards, as it were, towards a coalition. So on the 27th of October, that's what he announces: A new cabinet, most of them communists, but some of them from the old smallholders' party. But it's a very familiar story in revolutions. If he'd announced this a week ago, people would have said, "Unbelievable, what a tremendous moment." But on the 27th of October, it's a little bit too little, too late. So there were still huge crowds and no sign of the sort of fighting with the Soviet troops dying down.

• 12:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  The next day, the 28th, he offers more. He says, "I will recognize the just demands of the people. I'll order the security forces to stop firing. I will offer an amnesty to everybody who's been involved in this. And we'll do little symbolic things that will bring back the old national holidays and the old national flag. And on top of all that, I'll abolish the secret police." And now a big thing. He says, "All Soviet troops will return to their barracks, and then we'll have talks with Moscow on the full Red Army withdrawal from Hungarian soil." Because that has become the issue that is the sort of symbolic centre of this. This has become the one thing around which all Hungarians have now united.

• 13:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  We want every last Russian soldier off Hungarian soil.

• 13:20Tom Holland?

  And so there's a parallel there with the Suez Canal and the Egyptian desire to see the British removed from the zone.

• 13:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly so, yeah. So, again, three days ago, this would have been absolutely enormous. Is it enough? Fighting does start to die down the next morning, and Soviet units do start returning to their barracks. But now, outside Budapest, there are lots of kind of provincial councils that work as councils that have been set up, and they're keeping up the pressure. And they say, "We want to see the Red Army out immediately. We want elections. You know, we want free elections." So on the afternoon of the 30th, Nodj goes even further. He says, "Okay, fine. We'll abolish the one-party communist state. I'm going to form an entirely new coalition government. There'll be social democrats, there'll be people from the old National Peasants' Party,

• 14:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  there'll be smallholders and communists. I'm going to start talks with Moscow immediately about withdrawing all of their troops. So basically, I'm giving you everything you want." And it seems to work. By the next day, which is the 31st of October, so now the Suez Crisis in Egypt is in full swing. The Egyptians are fighting to hold back the Israelis and the Sinai, Britain and France preparing to start their air attacks. But in Hungary, there is a sense that the drama is coming to an end now. In fact, on the streets, there is now a sense of national euphoria. They've won almost everything they wanted. They have new political parties. They have new independent newspapers. There is this great sense of freedom.

• 14:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Budapest, the capital, is being run by a revolutionary council, not led by communists, but led by people from the old smallholders and social democratic parties. And on the 30th of October, the New York Times correspondent begins his report home with the words, "The Hungarian people seem to have won their revolution." So, an extraordinary story, and there's more extraordinary things to come. Because in Moscow, in the Kremlin, the Soviet Presidium have been meeting every day to discuss the news from Budapest. And contrary to the sort of stereotype, which is they're all hard-faced, you know, militaristic, imperialistic, repressive, all of this.

• 15:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Most of the Presidium agree, "We need to play this really carefully. What we don't want is for everybody in the rest of the world to see us as repressive imperialists."

• 15:51Tom Holland?

  No, heaven forbid.

• 15:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  But of course, they don't see themselves that way. This is, it's an important point to make, right? They do, they genuinely don't see themselves that way.

• 15:59Tom Holland?

  Of course not.

• 16:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  So on the 30th of October, when they're discussing it, Marshal Zhukov, you know, Jason Isaacs in The Death of Stalin, the hero of the Second World War, says, "We do not want to go down, quote, 'the military path of occupation.' We should have a negotiated end to all this." Zhukov says to his colleagues, "We should withdraw troops from Budapest, and if necessary, we should withdraw from Hungary as a whole. I don't want to get into a massive war with the Hungarians. If this is the way to keep them in the tent, then this is what we'll do." And so that evening, the Kremlin released an extraordinarily conciliatory statement. "We want peaceful coexistence, friendship and cooperation with Imre Nodj's government.

• 16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  We have ordered our troops back to their bases, and we are perfectly happy to talk to the Hungarians about the Red Army leaving their territory."

• 16:49Tom Holland?

  Again, a slight parallel with the British attempt to get the Arab countries that had been in the British Empire to sign up to this new military kind of Middle Eastern NATO.

• 17:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, I suppose. I'd never really thought of it that way, but I suppose you could, I suppose you could say it that way if you wanted. Yeah. Why not?

• 17:10Tom Holland?

  I do. I'm throwing that into the mix.

• 17:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Why not throw it into the mix? Brilliant.

• 17:14Tom Holland?

  This creative historical thinking, happening on the hoof.

• 17:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's great. Yeah. It's the spontaneity. So electrifying.

• 17:22Tom Holland?

  That's podcasting.

• 17:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. And this is elite podcasting. Right. So the next day, the Hungarians feel like they've won. The 31st of October, Imre Nodj addresses crowds in the parliament. He says, "The revolution of which you were the heroes has been won. We are living in the first days of our sovereignty and independence." The next day, the 1st of November, in the White House, the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who we met last time when we were talking about Suez, he briefs President Eisenhower. He says, "As far as we can tell, the Soviet troops have definitively left Budapest and returned to their barracks." Brilliant. "We don't need to worry about this anymore. We can completely focus on Suez and basically giving the British and the French a massive kicking.

• 18:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  The revolution is over, and the Hungarians have won." But have they?

• 18:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because even as this is happening in Moscow, Khrushchev and his colleagues are having second thoughts. On the morning of the 31st of October, they met, as usual, the Presidium on the second floor of the Kremlin Senate Building. And they met at this long table, not quite Vladimir Putin's table, it's sort of bay's table, Khrushchev at the head, everybody's sitting around. And Khrushchev has not been sleeping. He later said that Hungary was like a nail being driven into my head. Now, it may seem weird to have sympathy for Nikita Khrushchev. The reason for this is that he's only really been Soviet leader for about a year. He emerged from a power struggle after the death of Stalin. His position is still pretty insecure.

• 18:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which again is so like Eden, isn't it? I mean, the parallels are quite eerie. Well, I suppose this is all politicians, though. All politicians tend to be anxious about their rivals, worried about being outflanked, worried about looking weak. But, you know, Eden has succeeded Churchill, Khrushchev has succeeded Stalin, they're both looking to kind of flex their muscles to, you know, show that they're strong. They can't afford to allow, you know, fractious provinces to make them look weak. It's a very fair comparison because the anxiety about looking weak, which is so often an important thing in politics, I mean, these are both brilliant examples of that, aren't they? And this is what's on Khrushchev's mind. This is why, like Eden, actually, he can't sleep.

• 19:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's what made me think of it. That's the spontaneity of top podcasting. Podcasting gold. So, he's had his latest report from Mikoyan and Soslof in Budapest. And when Khrushchev looks at it, he doesn't think, oh brilliant, this has ended wonderfully. He thinks this is terrible. The Communist Party has basically fallen apart. The factories across Hungary have shut down. Newspapers and radio stations have been taken over by rebels. And I quote, "The political situation in the country and in Budapest is not getting better, it is getting worse." That's not all. At this point, Khrushchev has almost certainly, we can't be sure, but almost certainly had reports of another massacre, this time in Budapest on the morning of the 30th of October. And basically, what happened in this massacre, there are a group of

• 20:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  revolutioners that laid siege to the headquarters of the Budapest kind of municipal Communist Party, which was occupied by secret police and party officials. The secret police started for shooting at them, and they hit some bystanders in the crowd, including women. Then there was a massive gun battle. And the boss of the Budapest Party, who was a friend of Imre Nodj, a close friend of Nodj, he brokered a ceasefire. But while he was trying to organise a kind of full surrender and the evacuation of the building, insurgents broke into the building and they shot him and they shot his bodyguards. And then there was this horrendous scene where the people in the building, most of whom were young army officers or young secret police officers, were led outside.

• 21:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  It was captured by a photojournalist from Life magazine, British journalist called John Sadovy. And you can see his pictures online and they are pretty, you know, haunting. These very young men are led outside, most of them are absolutely terrified. And they are shot in cold blood, in full view of the cameras, at point blank range. Twenty-three of them were shot in all. Their bodies were beaten and mutilated, and then they were strung up, again in full view of the cameras, from trees and from lampposts, and people spat on their bodies. As Sadovy, the photojournalist, said, "I'd spent three years in the war, meaning Second World War, but nothing I saw then could compare with the horror of this." So, Khrushchev has almost certainly got this report about this

• 21:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  massacre, happening to kind of party officials. Khrushchev is not a stranger to violence. It's not like he's, he's a shrinking violet or something. But this plays on his mind, as does the fact that he's getting messages from other communist countries to say, what on earth is going on in Hungary? So the Chinese, for example, are saying, have you lost your minds? You know, Hungary is in complete chaos, you're doing nothing about it. And even more significantly, the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, you know, Czechoslovakia, Romania and so on, East Germany. They're very worried. If you open the door to multi-party elections in Hungary, well, people

• 22:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  will want them in Poland, they want them in Czechoslovakia. There are reports already of student protests in some of these places, most notably Romania, which has a big ethnic Hungarian minority population. There have been student protests in the city in the west of Romania, not far from Hungary, called Timis Shvara, actually a city that plays a massive part in the eventual revolution in 1989, and clashes with the security forces and so on. So the Kremlin is under pressure from all these people. And also, when they look at it, they say, they see everything in terms of the wider balance of power. So Khrushchev now, when they're all assembled there, he says to his colleagues, "If we withdraw from Hungary, this would encourage the American, British and French imperialists. They would interpret it as a sign of our weakness and they

• 23:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  would go on to attack. And our party would not understand us. Besides Egypt, we would be giving away Hungary too. So we have no other choice but to intervene." So, in other words, this goes back to your point, Tom, that as with the British in Suez, the motivation is, if we don't do this, we look weak and then we lose the rest of our empire. What will other people think of us? We don't want to necessarily get stuck in, but we feel like we have to. And of course, because Suez has kicked off now, that does make Khrushchev's task a little bit easier. The West are divided and distracted. The Americans have basically massively fallen out with Britain and France.

• 23:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if we were ever going to crack down on Hungary, this is the time. They would have done it, though, do you think, anyway, even if Suez hadn't been going on? Yes. I think they might have done it later, but I think they would have done it anyway. So Khrushchev says to his colleagues, "Okay, forget what we said about withdrawing troops. Let us take the initiative in restoring order. We will flood Hungary with troops in the next few days. I want this to be led by another Second World War veteran, Marshal Ivan Konyev. We will crush the revolution. We'll find a new Hungarian leader. Nodj's way to space. Let's get someone we can really trust." Now, there is one person who really disagrees with him about all this, and this is Anastas Mikoyan, ice cream guy, ice cream Armenian. He flew in that night from

• 24:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Budapest, and he is stunned when he realises that they have decided to invade. After midnight, Mikoyan rang Khrushchev at home, and he said, you know, basically got him out of bed. He said, "What are you doing? I want, let's have another meeting. I want to make my case. We should not use force. I'm dead set against this whole thing." And Khrushchev said to him, "Look, we've made the decision, we've established the timetable, and we'd have to rip up the timetable for intervention if we meet again. Our whole plan would be ruined. I personally think we made the right decision and you're wrong." And then he hangs up. Communists, they love a plan. Yeah, but it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think a lot of people think of the communist leadership as top-down, repressive. Monolithic. Monolithic. And here they're ringing each other at midnight, having sort of shouting

• 25:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  matches. Even more, Khrushchev gets up the next morning, they live, he lives like so many of them do in the sparrow hills above Moscow. He gets up the next morning, he walks to his car, which is a kind of zil, black limousine at the end of the drive. And who's by the car? Mikoyan, who lives basically next door. And Mikoyan says to him, "Before you get in the car, I'm telling you, this is a terrible mistake. It will undermine Soviet Union, it will undermine the image of communism. If blood is shed, I don't know what I'll do with myself," Mikoyan says. Well, I mean, he's behaving better than Macmillan did, or Selwyn Lloyd. Yeah, he is the Harry Macmillan of this story, but he's behaving much better. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Well, actually, there's another candidate to be the Harry Macmillan, which

• 26:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  we'll come to in a second. And Khrushchev says to him, "Look, you know, everybody else is telling us we've got to do this. The Poles, the Czechoslovaks, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, even Tito's telling us we've got to do this. Do you think this is easy for me?" Khrushchev says, "We have to act, we have no other choice." And then he gets in the car and off he goes to work. Now, already, rumours of the decision have started to reach Budapest. So as early as the 31st of October, there were reports that Soviet engineers were building bridges across the river Tisso that motorised units were crossing into Hungary from the border with what's now Ukraine. And by the next day, the 1st of November, there are more reports. Soviet troops, far from returning to

• 26:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  their barracks, are actually moving in to secure the airports. And there are tanks and thousands of reinforcements now coming across the borders from Ukraine and Romania. And that morning, Nodj calls in the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov, and he says, "What's all this? What's going on?" And Andropov is totally impassive, not an unfamiliar thing with a Soviet or Russian ambassador. He's totally kind of stone-faced, and he says,

• 27:16Tom Holland?

  Troop movements.

• 27:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, routine troop movements before we withdraw all our troops from your country. And Nodj says, I'm not sure you're telling me the truth. And if you don't stop this, we will leave the Warsaw Pact immediately. And later that afternoon, they've now got confirmation, Red Army is crossing the border in force. Nodj meets his cabinet and they all agree, fine, we're going to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. We're going to declare Hungary a neutral country. And they call Andropov back to tell him at five o'clock.

• 27:49Tom Holland?

  What do they think is going to happen? Do they seriously think that they can just slip the Soviet leash like that?

• 27:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's really hard to say. So it was often, it's often said, you see it repeated often in sort of popular accounts. The Red Army intervened to stop them leaving the Warsaw Pact. That's not right. They only said they wanted to leave the Warsaw Pact after they knew the Red Army were about to attack them. And I think the point of them doing this, I think in an odd way, Nodj thinks this might reassure the Kremlin. Because if he says, we want to be neutral, we're absolutely going to be neutral. That might reassure them that he's not going to go over to the capitalist camp, which might be their fear.

• 28:30Tom Holland?

  I think that's mad.

• 28:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that maybe they will look like martyrs in the eyes of the world, I suppose. I mean, of course, if you were being really hard headed, if you were like that American professor, John Mearsheimer, who's always going on YouTube and saying Ukraine should surrender to the Russians or whatever, the realist. Then you would say the Hungarians should have known that the Soviet Union was bound to crack down on them. And they shouldn't have provoked them to this extent. They should have done basically what the Poles did and sort of, yeah, made it clear that they would stay in the embrace. But I think the revolution has now got its own momentum. And, you know, Nodj is a prisoner of that momentum to some degree. Anyway, they've called Andropov in to tell him it's five o'clock in the afternoon.

• 29:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they say, we're going to, you know, leave the Warsaw Pact. And the new General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Janos Kadar, we met him last time.

• 29:26Tom Holland?

  He is Mercury Guy.

• 29:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Mercury, he'd been tortured, exactly. And he's seen as the sort of occupying the centre ground of the Communist Party. He's not an ultra moderate, he's not a Stalinist, he's kind of in the middle. Kadar is very emotional and he says to Andropov, he says, I have given my whole life to the Communist Party. But if the Soviets attempt to intervene in Hungary with the use of arms, he says, I will take to the streets with a pistol, myself against Russian tanks, and I would give my life for my country. Yeah, very sort of stirring.

• 29:59Tom Holland?

  Stirring, yeah.

• 30:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like Churchill, you know, if this Long Island story of ours should end, let us end only when we're all choking in our own blood on the ground. All this kind of thing. Andropov says, I'm going to have to report all this to Moscow, off he goes. And when he's gone, Nodj sends a telegram to the Secretary General of the United Nations, who is of course Dag Hamaschult, and he says, can the UN please guarantee Hungarian neutrality? We're asking all the great powers, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France.

• 30:33Tom Holland?

  Great to see Britain on that list.

• 30:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, I was just thinking.

• 30:35Tom Holland?

  Why? Get in, even as we're behaving badly.

• 30:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but he knows that was just a blip. To guarantee Hungarian neutrality. And then at that evening, Nodj goes on the radio and he says to the Hungarian people, we are now a neutral country, we're leaving the Warsaw Pact. Now invoking the United Nations is actually never going to work. Of course it's not going to work because the United Nations is completely distracted. This is the first of November, 1956, Britain and France have launched their air war against Egypt. The General Assembly of the United Nations is arguing about whether there should be a ceasefire in Egypt. And actually, when Britain and France try to get, change the subject and get them to talk about Hungary, the US Secretary of State, John Fustadala, says, this is a smokescreen. I know what the British and French are up to. Quote, they want the limelight off them.

• 31:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's a mockery for them to come in with bombs falling over Egypt and to denounce the Soviet Union. I want no part of it.

• 31:31Tom Holland?

  No, the Americans would never bomb a Middle Eastern country.

• 31:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 31:35Tom Holland?

  The very idea.

• 31:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course. But actually, even if Suez hadn't happened, the UN would have done nothing and the West would have done nothing. So the American radio station, American backed radio station, Radio Free Europe, you know, all this time has been encouraging young people in Poland and Hungary, rise up, you know, rise up against your oppressors. One day, the forces of freedom will liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe. But the truth of the matter is, they're never going to do anything to help them. Because, you know, the risk of provoking a third world war is too great. I mean, we'll maybe come back to this after the break. Meanwhile, in Budapest, the tragic denouement is fast approaching. So it's now dawn on the second of November. There are 11 Soviet mechanized divisions inside Hungary.

• 32:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Soviet troops have taken control of the railway stations and bridges and junctions. They've, they've taken control of all the roads leading to Budapest. Nodj is sending these increasingly sort of helpless plaintive messages to the United Nations and the great powers. Rather pointlessly, he decides to reshuffle his government. So he's going to get rid of more communists and he's going to bring in more of the opposition parties.

• 32:46Tom Holland?

  But not the Habsburgs.

• 32:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bring the Habsburgs back. Wow, that would be, that is absolutely the thing he should have done. But while he is reshuffling his government, one of his aides says to him, the former Interior Minister, Ferenc Munich, and crucially, the Communist Party General Secretary, Janos Kadar, have vanished. Nobody has seen them since the meeting with Andropov, the Soviet Ambassador. Last night, we've been looking for them, but we cannot find them anywhere.

• 33:18Tom Holland?

  So what's happened to them? I mean, a lot hangs on that question. So we will find out what's happened to them and the tragic end of this incredible story after the break.

• 33:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by Anthropic and they're the team behind Claude.

• 33:38Tom Holland?

  So Dominic, we have been doing the rest of history now for almost six years. We've done over 700 episodes. And one of the things that strikes me is that over the course of that time, certain historical figures have tended to crop up, often in places where you wouldn't expect them.

• 33:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you know what? Ask the Archive, which is built with Claude, lets you search through the episode transcripts of the whole of the rest is history. And you can find where a person or a phrase or a subject has cropped up in the great oeuvre that is our show. So Tom, I know you love a game, do you like a game?

• 34:10Tom Holland?

  Yeah, of course.

• 34:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Guess how many episodes our great friend, the Kaiser, has appeared in?

• 34:15Tom Holland?

  Oh, of course, the ultimate friend of the show. I would reckon, okay, I reckon, hmm, 32?

• 34:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, I'm going to do some live research.

• 34:24Tom Holland?

  How many do you think?

• 34:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he's appeared in 300 episodes. I think he's, he's all everywhere.

• 34:29Tom Holland?

  32 plays 300.

• 34:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, okay, I'm ashamed to say I was totally wrong. The Kaiser is mentioned in 80 episodes.

• 34:38Tom Holland?

  Okay, so I win. Love that game, that's a great game.

• 34:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is there not a sense in which we're both lost because he should have been in more?

• 34:45Tom Holland?

  No.

• 34:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  He should be mentioned more often, shouldn't he? He should be in more episodes.

• 34:50Tom Holland?

  No, I feel that I won and I think that is the main thing. So that's brilliant. And the other thing that's brilliant is that, you know, we're six years into it, but all the information is out there. It's waiting to be searched and that is wonderful to know.

• 35:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nothing in this show disappears, does it? So Ask the Archive is built with Claude from Anthropic. And you can find it at ask-the-archives.com. Ask it something that you've always wondered about and it will find the episodes where we've talked about it.

• 35:26Tom Holland?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rest is History. We ended the first half on a cliffhanger for the ages. Because with Marshal Konev's Soviet troops surrounding Budapest, poised to strike, two of Imre Nodj's closest colleagues have vanished into thin air. A case for Chief Inspector Sandbrook with his incredible mastery of Hungarian.

• 35:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant, thank you, and a detection indeed. So one of these men is Ferenc Munich. So he was a veteran communist. He'd fought as a prisoner of war for the Bolsheviks. People might remember him, he's only been a sort of very side character in this. In the first episode, he was the bloke who gave the eulogy at Lozlo Royk's funeral. And said, you know, people have been staggering out of the swamp of the cult of personality or something. That's Munich. But the other person most significantly has vanished is the party's General Secretary, Janos Kadar. So we heard from him just a couple of moments ago, telling the Soviet Ambassador Andropov that he would fight the Russian tanks himself, he'd give his life for his country if he had to.

• 36:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you will remember him from the last episode, Tom, he was the friend of Lozlo Royk.

• 36:41Tom Holland?

  Mercury Guy.

• 36:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, who was smeared with mercury, you know, who was had his fingernails pulled out, tortured in prison for three years. And he is the person who is, he's the other person who's vanished. Now, Kádár is an absolutely central figure in modern Hungarian history, and he's a riddle wrapped in an enigma. And he's the key figure in what happens at the end of fifty-six. So it's worth us talking a little bit about him. Who is this guy who's vanished? He was born Janosz Semannik in Fiume, which is now Rieka in Croatia in nineteen twelve.

• 37:20Tom Holland?

  You see, I'm just looking at him.

• 37:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Tom Holland?

  I think he's a lot better looking than Royk.

• 37:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you?

• 37:25Tom Holland?

  He's suave. He's got a kind of, yeah, he looks quite suave.

• 37:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Are you championing the wrong man though, Tom? That's the question. We're going to find out.

• 37:33Tom Holland?

  Well, good looking people can be awful. That is possible.

• 37:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we'll find out. So this guy, he was born Semannik. His father was a Hungarian soldier in the Imperial Army, in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and his mother was a Slovak servant girl. They weren't married. When he was born, his mother followed his father back to Hungary, and she was trying to persuade his father to do the decent thing and marry her, but he refused. So she ended up living in a little village near Lake Bolaton with her son, Janosz. And they were very poor. And at the end of the First World War, she moved to Budapest and got work as a cleaner. A little Janosz. He left school at fourteen. He worked as a servant for a pig herder. He worked as a newspaper boy and a delivery boy, then he was homeless for a bit.

• 38:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then he became an apprentice typewriter repairer. Then in nineteen twenty-eight, Janosz won a chess tournament. He was sixteen years old, and his prize was a book by Friedrich Engels called Anti-During.

• 38:35Tom Holland?

  Oh, goody goody, mommy, look what I've been given.

• 38:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it was an explanation of, I mean, the Anti-During basically tries to establish Marxism as a scientific creed to prove the scientific truth of Marxism. When he lost his job in the Depression, he became a full-time communist activist, and he was in and out of prison. And his alias, he decided to take the alias Kupa, which in Hungarian is Kádár. So this is how he became Janosz Kádár. And he became very close to this bloke Royk. They became great pals, and they were promoted together to the Hungarian Politburo at the end of the Second World War. Now, there's a really interesting description of Kádár. I mentioned already a bloke called Sir Brian Cartledge, who was the British Ambassador to Hungary and also to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I think.

• 39:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he wrote, has written this sort of definitive English language history of Hungary from start to finish, massive book. And he met Kádár, and he was, he's really interesting about him. He says Kádár was a personally very modest man. He was low key, spoke quietly and simply. Kádár didn't think of himself as an intellectual. He genuinely saw himself as the kind of spokesman for the ordinary working people of Hungary. And Cartledge said of Kádár, "The key to him was not ideological Marxism. He wasn't, it wasn't his loyalty to the ideology, but his loyalty to the institution, to the party, the true protector, or so he believed, of the interests and well-being of the Hungarian people.

• 40:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So every other consideration, quote, 'including those of morality and personal honor,' were subordinate for Kádár to the interests of the party." So this is the guy who has vanished. What had happened to him was this. When he left that emotional meeting where he said, "I'd rather die, you know, I will die if Russian troops invade our country." The other bloke, Munich, said to him, "I'm going to the Soviet Embassy. I think you should come with me, and we can continue this conversation with the Soviet Ambassador." They went to the Soviet Embassy, and there Andropov said to them, "Look, I'm going to level with you. We are going to invade your country. And it's a fait accompli. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

• 40:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nodj's game is up, and he is done for," he said. And Andropov said, "Listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll fly you to Moscow. You can come with me. You can talk to the Presidium yourselves in the Kremlin. You can tell them what you think is going on in Hungary, and you can help us, our Soviet friends, to sort it out." And they said, "Okay." You know, who knows what's going on in Kádár's mind there when he gets on that plane? But anyway, he gets on the plane. They fly to Moscow. They land in Moscow. They're driven straight to the Kremlin to meet Kusztov and the Presidium. And as Viktor Sebastian says in his fun book, I mean, it's weird to say fun book, but it's

• 41:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  a really dramatic book about the Hungarian Revolution. Effectively, what's happening here is the Presidium are interviewing him for a job as the new dictator of Hungary. But Kádár doesn't seem to realize this because he's unbelievably honest with them. They say, "Well, what do you think about the revolution?" He says, "Well, to be honest, I kind of was for it because I'm a Hungarian patriot, and you know, I felt like we had to make some changes. And everybody in Hungary, he says, wants to see your troops out. We want to see the back of the Red Army, me included." He said to them, they said, "Well, we're about to invade." And he said, "Well, I think that's a very bad idea. Don't send in the tanks."

• 42:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  I quote, "If you do this, the morale of the communists will be reduced to zero. If order in Hungary is restored by force, the authority of the socialist countries will be eroded." See how much he cares? Always he's thinking about what's good for socialism, what's good for the party.

• 42:26Tom Holland?

  And how do the, how do the Russians take this?

• 42:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, they're not, I mean, they're not pleased to hear this, right? Because he's telling them that what they're doing is wrong. Kusztov is still not sure, is this guy the man? Kusztov speaks to Tito, and Tito says, "Oh, obviously you should pick this guy. The fact that this guy has stood up to you a little bit, you know, that's exactly what you want. This guy, people in Hungary will say he's patriotic. He was tortured. He was smeared in mercury, and people urinated in his mouth. People in Hungary know this, and they won't see him as just a Stalinist puppet. They know that he has suffered, and they will give him a little bit of leeway because of it." So the obvious question is, why does Kádár himself go along with this? Is this just treachery from him? Lots of listeners may say, "Well, he sounds like a terrible person."

• 43:12Tom Holland?

  It's like kind of Marshal Peta.

• 43:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose you could see it that way. Yeah. I mean, both Peta and Kádár would say, I mean, by the way, I despise Peta, but both of them would say, "Well..."

• 43:26Tom Holland?

  Country's on its knees.

• 43:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  "We were going to lose anyway. Country's on its knees. Somebody had to step up and do the dirty work."

• 43:32Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  "To try to bring us back." And I think reading about him, his reputation Hungary today is very contested, but there are, there are a lot of people actually who are remarkably sympathetic to, I mean, a lot of critics, of course, but there are a lot of people who are also very sympathetic to him. And they would say, "Listen, he knows the revolution is doomed. He just wants to do the best for the party, and he wants to rebuild his country." So Kádár was in Moscow. Meanwhile, in Budapest, you know, tension is at fever pitch. So by the evening of the second of November, the Red Army has encircled the city. But the Red Army commanders are still keeping up with pretense that this is going to be solved by negotiations. And in fact, the next morning, on the third of November, senior Soviet commanders arrived at the Hungarian Parliament.

• 44:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  They said, "We just come to chat about the withdrawal of all our troops from your country." In fact, the talks actually went quite well. And they said, "Well, we'll continue the talks this evening at Soviet military headquarters, at the Tukul Base, which is south of Budapest." And the Hungarians sent their military officers, their own commanders, to this base. And of course, you know what's going to happen. They walked in, they started the negotiations.

• 44:39Tom Holland?

  Clang.

• 44:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Just before midnight, door opens, and a load of Soviet KGB men walk in with carrying submachine guns, and they're under the personal command of the Soviet KGB chief Ivan Serov. And these Hungarian commanders are all put under arrest. And just a few hours later, four AM, Marshal Konyev issues the signal "Thunder 444," which is the code word to trigger Operation Whirlwind. And this is the, basically, the final occupation of Budapest. So immediately, sixty thousand Red Army troops and thousands of tanks begin to move into the city. And within an hour, they are closing in on the city center.

• 45:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are meeting some resistance as they did before, but this time they have come in such an overwhelming numbers, and they are absolutely determined they're not going to be taking any prisoners. Now, Nodj could have ordered the Hungarian Army onto the streets to resist them, to fight back, but he decides not to. He decides it's pointless. We're outnumbered, we're outgunned, I don't want to waste people's lives. And at five nineteen in the morning, he goes on the state radio, you can hear the gunfire in the background as he's talking. And he says, "This is the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic. Today at daybreak, Soviet forces launched an attack on our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legal democratic Hungarian government.

• 46:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Our troops are fighting, the government is in its place, and notifying the people of our country and the world." So a little bit kind of Vladimir Zelensky, February twenty twenty-two kind of vibe to this, you know, "The government is in its place, I'm not going anywhere." But the difference is that Kiev held out in 2022, but Soviet troops are closing in very quickly on the parliament in Budapest. So a couple of hours later, Nodj and his family and about 30 of his close colleagues accepted an offer of sanctuary at the Yugoslavian embassy. At eight o'clock, Soviet tanks entered the parliament square and at 8.07, Radio Koschut,

• 46:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  the state radio, broadcast its last message. It was a woman's voice, "Help Hungary, help, help, help." And then it went off air. And that's not to say it was all done and dusted right there. So Marshal Konjew's men did encounter some resistance from about 15,000 factory workers and students. But this time, unlike a week or so earlier, the Soviet troops were absolutely merciless. So whenever they encountered resistors, they hammer them with their tanks and with their machine guns. There's artillery that is shelling kind of rebel positions. There are jet fighters strafing the city. And there are Western journalists on hand who

• 47:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  are absolutely stunned and horrified by the carnage. So writer for François, for example, describes tanks aiming at apartment buildings and just blasting them again and again. Six, eight, 10 cannon shots. The houses blown apart and crumbled. The inhabitants either killed or lie wounded on the ground.

• 47:52Tom Holland?

  How do they compare to the British and the French in Port Said?

• 47:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  The British and the French are, I mean, they, there are some civilian casualties, but nothing.

• 48:00Tom Holland?

  Not on this scale?

• 48:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're not, they're not, I mean, for one thing, they don't really have that many tanks and the tanks are not just absolutely pounding people's apartment buildings in the way that they are here. So anyway, by the evening of that first day, Konjew's troops control most of the major buildings and intersections and stuff in Budapest. There are some rebels left. They hold on for a few more days, but the Soviet troops just hammer and hammer at them. If you look at the map of sort of central pest, across a block of about two square miles, there are entire blocks of the city that are effectively destroyed. Shops, apartment blocks, churches, hospitals, even a children's clinic. The streets are strewn with bodies. Now, one of the reporters there was a communist, a British communist called

• 48:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Peter Fryer, who was reporting for The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain. And in his report, he wrote, "For four days and nights, Budapest was under continuous bombardment. I saw a once lovely city battered, bludgeoned, smashed and bled into submission." And when he sent this and other reports home to The Daily Worker, not only did they refuse to print them, but the editor wouldn't let other members of staff even see them. And Fryer was so horrified by this that he left the paper and of course, the Communist Party in protest. And we'll come back to this aspect of the story in a second. So there are loads of heartbreaking appeals. I mean, you read one right at the beginning

• 49:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  in the final hours. This is another one picked up by a Vienna monitoring station on the afternoon of the 4th of November. It was the last message from another rebel radio station. "Civilized people of the world, on the watchtower of 1,000-year-old Hungary, the last flames begin to go out. Soviet tanks and guns are roaring over Hungarian soil. Our women are sitting in dread. They still have terrible memories of the Red Army in 1945. Save our souls." But by the 11th of November, the guns have fallen silent. The revolution is definitively over. So about 2,700 Hungarians have been killed in the Soviet attack. More than half of those are civilians, 200 of them children, and tens of thousands injured. The Red Army

• 50:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  lost about 700 men killed. There's also a massive refugee exodus. So about 200,000 people fled the country across the borders into Austria or Yugoslavia. Some of them ended up in Britain and other European countries, but most of them ended up in Canada and the United States. Now, what's the rest of the world been doing? The rest of the world has been watching in horror and doing absolutely nothing, really. So there are big demonstrations across Europe in most capitals. There are attacks on Soviet embassies in some very unexpected places in Luxembourg, in Iceland, in Switzerland, and so on. There were lots of offers of help for Hungarian refugees. So in Simon Hall's book, he describes some nice British examples,

• 50:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  heartwarming British examples. So there was a place called Donnington Hall in Leicestershire, sort of big country house, that turned itself into a camp for 150 Hungarian children. There was a building firm in Wolverhampton, which built a free house, semi-detached house for a Hungarian family.

• 51:13Tom Holland?

  So much Wolverhampton history.

• 51:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much Wolverhampton in this, but some would say not enough, frankly. I mean, if you obviously listen to the bonus series, you've had a bit extra, but I think we could have had more. "The end of the year, Time Magazine picked the Hungarian freedom fighter as Man of the Year." Said the Hungarians fought bravely against the most brutal tyranny on earth and have shaken history's greatest despotism to its foundations. That's who ended up being Kermit the Frog's voice.

• 51:39Tom Holland?

  No, that sounded really good.

• 51:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 51:42Tom Holland?

  That was an excellent impression.

• 51:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of a 1950s Cold Warrior.

• 51:45Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, the most famous example of solidarity with the Hungarians, the most sentimental story, comes at the Melbourne Olympics. So a bit of Australian history on the podcast. And this is actually one of the most celebrated moments in the history of the Olympics. So it's the Blood in the Water Water Polo match. Are you familiar with this match, Tom?

• 52:05Tom Holland?

  I'm ashamed to say I'm not.

• 52:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it was the semifinal of the water polo and the Hungarians were playing the Soviet Union.

• 52:13Tom Holland?

  Oh goodness.

• 52:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the crowd, there were loads of Hungarian Australians in the crowd. It was a very, very raucous occasion and it turned violent in the pool, which is why it was called Blood in the Water. The Hungarians won 4-0, turned into a massive brawl, including the crowd. And the Hungarians went on to win the gold medal and half of the team promptly defected, refused to go home. So it's been made into a film, two films, actually, this story, one of which was shown to George W. Bush in the White House. The obvious question is why, I mean, it's all very well to have these fine words and water polo crowds, but why didn't the West give them any practical help?

• 52:53Tom Holland?

  Third World War?

• 52:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Third World War, of course. For the Hungarians, though, this played into a familiar theme. So in 1848, 49, they'd written against the Habsburgs. Their revolution was then crushed by Russian intervention in 1849.

• 53:09Tom Holland?

  Well, we will be exploring the life of the Tsar who commanded that.

• 53:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Nicholas the First, right?

• 53:16Tom Holland?

  Nicholas the First, the gendarme of Europe.

• 53:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So the Hungarians, to some extent, this is a familiar story for them. You know, they try to rise up. People offer, you know, well-meaning sentiments, but they don't offer practical help.

• 53:31Tom Holland?

  I mean, I suppose the Iranians might say the same.

• 53:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think there are probably quite a few people who might say the same, actually. Chinese in 1989, right? So what was Eisenhower doing in all this? Eisenhower actually told his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, "Send a message to Moscow and tell Moscow, we do not see the Hungarians as potential allies. Don't worry, we are not behind all this. You know, we're not doing this as a balance of power move against you, all of this." Now, of course, as the Hungarians themselves said, looked a little bit hypocritical because the Americans, all through the late 40s and 50s, had been talking about how they would help the captive nations of Eastern Europe, and yet when it came to it, they would do nothing. This is actually what John Foster Dulles himself said in late October. Dulles said to his colleagues in Washington, "It will be said that here are the great

• 54:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  moments. And when they came and these fellows were ready to stand up and die, we were caught napping and we did nothing." I think he's not necessarily wrong. So the West did nothing. The revolution lost. And what happened next, just to tie up the story. So Kader and Munich, the turncoats, had been flown into Eastern Hungary on the morning of the 4th after the operation to retake Budapest had begun. Kader read a radio address to the Hungarian people. He said, "The revolution began, you know, as an honest and patriotic thing, but it's been taken over by reactionaries and fascists. So I'm assuming power at the head of an emergency worker peasant government. I've asked the Red Army to help us crush the sinister forces

• 55:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  of reaction. And after that, the Red Army will, I promise the Red Army will leave." And he was then escorted into Budapest by Soviet tanks and sworn in as Prime Minister and installed in the parliament building, which is actually survived relatively unscathed from gunfire. Now, at first, Kader's authority and credibility are pretty much nonexistent. So he, he basically tries to win over people by appearing to be moderate. In his first big speech, he promises them higher wages. He says, "I'll bring in a national holiday celebrating the heroes of 1848." He makes a series of other promises. He says, "Don't worry, I won't bring back the secret police." And there won't be any witch hunt against the people who were in

• 55:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  the revolution. And actually, when the dust has settled, Kader says, "We can have a multi-party system. And I'd love to have us, I'd love to see us have free elections." That'd be really nice. And what about? What about the Nodjda? The Nodjda is still here. He's still in the Yugoslav embassy. He's sheltering in the Yugoslav embassy. And Kadar says, listen, you know, I know that the Nodjda didn't want this to all go down as it did. He is absolutely free to come out. We won't pursue him. Uh, he should just come out and retire to private life. And obviously there'll be no, no one will do anything to him. Now, does Kadar mean this? It's really impossible to say whether this is completely disingenuous or whether he's later reacting to pressure. But what definitely happens is this, he doesn't fulfill any of these promises.

• 56:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does bring back the secret police. He begins to crack down on dissidents within weeks. And above all, Kadar agrees to a Soviet plan to Winkle Nodj out of the Yugoslav embassy. He sends Tito a letter and he says, look, if, if Nodj and his friends come out, we will give them a safe conduct back to their families. So on the 22nd of November, Nodj and Co. leave the Yugoslav embassy and they get on this big bus. And to their horror, it turns out the bus has been organised by the KGB. They're driven to a military academy, they're told to get off the bus and then they're flown to Romania. And in Romania, they're held under house arrest. Meanwhile, so we're now well into the autumn and winter of 1956.

• 57:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Kadar is coming under pressure from other communist governments. Can you crack down a bit more, please? Crack down harder. In fact, in January, 1957, a load of other Warsaw Pact leaders visited Budapest and said, we've come here to show solidarity with you, but also to encourage you. Stamp out all dissent, please. So he does as he's encouraged. He bans non-communist parties, he bans workers councils, he shuts down the Writers' Association.

• 57:44Tom Holland?

  Oh, he's having a crack at the poets.

• 57:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's having a crack at the poets, exactly. And he sets up new people's courts to try people for political offences with the power of imposing the death penalty. And the most high-profile victim, no, I hate to break this to you, not Nodj. Our old friend, Imre Nodj, friend of the show.

• 58:05Tom Holland?

  Oh dear.

• 58:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's for the chop, I'm afraid. So it was always thought that Kadar moved against him because he was under pressure from the Kremlin. But actually, in his book, Viktor Sebastian makes the case that actually Kadar decided to get rid of him himself. Because Kadar thought, I will never be secure. Order and stability will never be entrenched as long as the Nodjda is out there. Inspiring people.

• 58:30Tom Holland?

  With his charisma and his powers of oratory.

• 58:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in March, 1957, Hungarian police travelled to Romania and they arrested Nodj and Co. And they brought them all back to Budapest. Now, Kadar couldn't quite decide, he dithered for months, couldn't decide what to do with Nodj. Nodj would not confess. He wouldn't admit that he'd done anything wrong. So a show trial was a bad idea. So eventually they put him on trial behind closed doors for treason. The verdict, of course, is a foregone conclusion. And poor old Nodj is sentenced to death. And he gives a very dignified, moving final statement. Why don't you read his final statement, Tom, since you're such a big fan of the man?

• 59:12Speaker 04

  My sole solace is my conviction that sooner or later, the Hungarian people and the international working class will exonerate me of the grave accusations. As a consequence of which, I'm a sacrifice my life. But I offer it willingly. After all that has happened, it has no value any longer. I realise that there will be another Imre Nodj trial, at which I shall be rehabilitated. And three times as many people will come to my reinternment as went to Rijks.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  My only dread is that my illige will be given by those who betrayed me.

• 59:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  See, I think you could, if you'd done that in a different voice, it would be really moving.

• 59:49Tom Holland?

  Well, it's quite moving. I mean, he's a, you know, he's, he's a drab guy who has no powers of oratory whatsoever.

• 59:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Tom Holland?

  But it's still moving.

• 59:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a dogged and decent man who tried to do his best.

• 1:00:01Tom Holland?

  Do you want me to give it a bit more zip?

• 1:00:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I think you've, you've made your choice. You've made a, you've made your dramatic choice and you've got to own it.

• 1:00:07Tom Holland?

  I think it's great to have a drab, uncharismatic figure.

• 1:00:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Tom Holland?

  At the centre of such dramatic events. And I don't think it diminishes the pathos of his end.

• 1:00:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hungarian listeners who are poised to write in and complain, listen to what Tom just said. Tom is saying that this terrible impression that he gave is actually to Nodj's credit. And that that just shows how much we value him.

• 1:00:28Tom Holland?

  Yeah, uh, you know, a lack of charisma i- in many ways is an appealing characteristic in a politician, I think.

• 1:00:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Keir Starmer joins us on the show.

• 1:00:37Tom Holland?

  It's the charismatic politicians who are always the dangerous ones.

• 1:00:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're not wrong there. So anyway, Nodj and two of his colleagues were hanged on the 16th of June, 1958. And they were buried face down in an unmarked grave, very sad. And there were some of 341 people executed in five years after 1956 as Kadar tightened his grip. There are 20,000 people imprisoned or interned, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and somewhere even deported to the Soviet Union. And yet the paradox is that Kadar did crack down and he did execute people and put people in prison. And yet, at the same time, his version of communism was much more moderate than what had gone before. So he's trying to win the Hungarian people over.

• 1:01:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  He gives them pay increases, he borrows a lot of money abroad to try to improve their living standards. And by about 1962, so that's about five or six years after the revolution, he's adopted a much more conciliatory line. So for example, you don't have to be a communist in Hungary to hold a sort of senior administrative position. And Tom, great news for you. Um, in the first half, remember I said all the, um, because of your gentry background, all the massive handicaps under which your family would have to operate. No more. Under Kadar, your middle-class children can go to university.

• 1:01:58Tom Holland?

  Oh, well, I'm rallying to Kadar then.

• 1:02:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Tom Holland?

  I mean, just to say, I think, I didn't think I have a gentry background.

• 1:02:08Tom Holland?

  I am, after all, of humble mining stock.

• 1:02:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sure. But you're not a Marxist, are you? And, and Kadar would have wanted to appeal to you because he said in 1962, I want to appeal to hundreds of thousands of people who are not Marxists, but who respect our party and our government for having created a legal order and a normal atmosphere in the country.

• 1:02:28Tom Holland?

  So is, is, is Hungary then the best place to be in the 60s, do you think?

• 1:02:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, 60s, 70s, 80s. Apart from Yugoslavia, Hungary is definitely the most liberal of the communist countries. So Kadar's ethos, his slogan, his most famous saying, those who are not against us are with us.

• 1:02:47Tom Holland?

  That's a great slogan.

• 1:02:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which is, you know, basically, you don't have to be a communist, you don't have to like it. But as long as you don't do anything, it's fine and we'll look after you. And this is the ethos, Tom, of something called goulash communism.

• 1:03:01Tom Holland?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:03:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if you like goulash, you're laughing. So basically what this involves, if you're Hungarian, you have to accept the Communist Party's monopoly of power. And you have to accept the alliance with the Soviet Union. And if you just accept those two things, you know, the party's not going to repress you particularly or are not going to force you to live the sort of grey drab life that you might get somewhere else. So you can go to church, you can travel to the West. You have a bit more freedom, there's a bit more free speech. You have more washing machines than other people in the Warsaw Pact. So it always comes back to washing machines. So right up until the late 1980s, when this all fell apart, Hungary was known as the happiest barracks in Europe

• 1:03:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  because of its more liberal regime. So is this been a terrible story of failure and misery? Not necessarily. So I mentioned Brian Cartle and his massive history of Hungary is massive history of Hungary is called the will to survive. And it's all about kind of Hungarian resilience. And he sees the revolution as a sort of landmark in that story. It's actually something to be proud of rather than as a failure.

• 1:04:09Tom Holland?

  I mean, it sounds like it was successful if you.

• 1:04:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Tom Holland?

  You're getting your goulash and.

• 1:04:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, it basically gives you, you've had a terrible time. Hungary's had a terrible history in the first half of the 20th century. You know, fascism, the Holocaust, occupation, all of this. And this is something that even though it lost, it gives the Hungarians something to be proud of. They've been able to wave their national flag, sing their hymns. They've, they've rediscovered what Cartle calls their national self-respect. And actually, the big loser from all this is not Hungary. The big loser is Soviet communism. Because the Hungarian revolution, you know, you were saying, was it a turning point? This deals an irreparable blow to the moral image of Soviet communism.

• 1:04:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  So until even in the 1950s, there were people who said, you know, Stalin was an aberration. Actually, you know, don't forget it was the Red Army who won the Second World War. Communism is still the best hope for a more equal, kinder future, all of this kind of thing. But after 1956 and Communist parties across Europe, and indeed America, intellectuals walk out and they say, I can't stomach this. You know, the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution was the final straw. So people like E. P. Thompson, the great historian in Britain, Italo Calvino in Italy, even Jean-Paul Sartre, who was usually wrong about absolutely everything, condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary and said that just shows the Soviet Union for what they are.

• 1:05:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I think up till 1956, there were loads of left wing idealists who were still idealizing the Soviet Union, romanticizing it. But after 1956, never again.

• 1:05:52Tom Holland?

  Eric Hobbsbaum does, doesn't he?

• 1:05:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Eric Hobbsbaum does, but of course the reason that's so well known is that Eric Hobbsbaum was an outlier in staying loyal to the party when so many other people say this is intolerable, this is too much.

• 1:06:04Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I mentioned that guy, Peter Frye, the reporter for the Daily Worker. He wrote a brilliant book, all of which is online, called Hungarian Tragedy. And in the conclusion to that book, he writes as follows, he says, "We British communists who visited Hungary did not admit even to ourselves the truth about what was taking place there. We defended tyranny with all our heart and soul." This is before 56. "But now," he says, "we should admit what Soviet communism has meant for Eastern Europe. Hypocrisy without limit, medieval cruelty, dogmas and slogans devoid of life or meaning, national pride, outrage, poverty for all but a tiny handful of leaders who lived in luxury."

• 1:06:44Tom Holland?

  Well, I think he's being harsh on the Middle Ages there, to be honest. When is he writing that?

• 1:06:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  1956.

• 1:06:50Tom Holland?

  1956, right.

• 1:06:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's saying, you know, "We have pretended that this was great and actually, let's be honest, it's terrible." And uniquely in the history, the rest is history, I'm going to give the last word to the New York Times. So the New York Times said, "The Hungarians have put a brand upon communism as a philosophy of life and government from which it can never recover." And amazingly, for once, the New York Times was right.

• 1:07:14Tom Holland?

  Well, the New York Times is often right. I mean, it does, it runs excellent profiles of British historians.

• 1:07:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does, it does.

• 1:07:22Tom Holland?

  It's always right when it does that.

• 1:07:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Tom Holland?

  So thank you, Dominic. That was, that was tremendous. And is there a sporting angle on this story, perhaps featuring Wolverhampton?

• 1:07:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So a lot of people may, may be saying, "I'd like to hear more about Hungary and I'd like to hear it from somebody who leans even more into mad Hungarian names than Dominic did."

• 1:07:43Tom Holland?

  Is such a man, is he, is he part of your contact book?

• 1:07:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is, and he's also part of yours. So he's a man you play cricket with.

• 1:07:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is the world's greatest football writer, Jonathan Wilson. And Jonathan Wilson has written the definitive history of Hungarian football, using football as a lens through which to, to understand all kinds of interesting things about Hungarian history. So Jewish Hungarians, coffee houses, the Holocaust, the Cold War, all of this kind of stuff is there in his tremendous book. And we have done a bonus series with Jonathan Wilson, exploring really two stories. One is the mighty Magyar's football team of the 1950s, the greatest football team of the time, and what happened to them and how they were affected by the Hungarian Revolution. But also how their most celebrated opponents, so that the, the Honved Army team played

• 1:08:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  a very famous match in 1954 against then the greatest team in the world, greatest club side in the world, the champions of the world, some would say, which was Wolverhampton Wanderers. And in doing so, they invented Europe. So this bonus series explores these incredible issues and only club members-

• 1:08:53Tom Holland?

  Can get that treat.

• 1:08:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Can get that treat. Yeah. Incredible scenes.

• 1:08:58Tom Holland?

  And you went on location, didn't you?

• 1:09:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  We did, to Budapest and to Wolverhampton.

• 1:09:02Tom Holland?

  And to Molineux.

• 1:09:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely unbelievable.

• 1:09:05Tom Holland?

  The glamour, the exotic glamour of it all. Incredible. Okay. So next time, this past series, we featured the British and the French teaming up and-

• 1:09:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Tom Holland?

  -launching a disastrous military expedition. And we have featured the Russians behaving badly. And I'm delighted to say that in our next series, the same themes will be reappearing, but in a slightly more aristocratic ambiance, because we are going to be looking at the charge of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan, Lord Lucan, Lord Raglan, there are a lot of lords, there's a lot of disastrous blunders, it's all going to kick off and it's going to be great fun.

• 1:09:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Crimean War.

• 1:09:51Tom Holland?

  We're focusing very much on the charge of the Light Brigade.

• 1:09:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:09:54Tom Holland?

  Which is the most glamorous incident in the, in the Crimean War. And it's a total debacle, but a glorious debacle. And the club members will be able to get all four episodes on Monday. And if you're not a club member, then go to therestishistory.com. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Bye bye.

• 1:10:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bye bye.

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  This holiday, all plans, even unlimited, are just $15 a month. A holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song, like "All I Want..." Right. OK, we can afford that. You know what? Forget the music budget. We're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. A front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. See terms.

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. HyperBound, a YC-backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit-ready in a month and closed a multimillion-dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  The real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables. It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. SimpliSafe keeps danger away from your family with three layers of protection. One, smart AI cameras and live US-based agents help stop intruders before they break in. Two, we sound the alarm at points of entry. Three, our agents request emergency response. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/spotify. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/l licenses for alarm license information.