Reform was in the eastern European air on October 23rd 1956, when thousands of students and workers took to the streets in Budapest demanding a relaxation of oppressive laws. Already that year Polish protesters had marched in June and Krushchev made his speech denouncing Stalin's legacy in February. There was a widespread feeling that the Stalinist regime imposed on the eastern bloc after the war could and should be relaxed. In the words of Bela Kiraly, a survivor of the uprising, "Hungary wanted to modernise, not abolish, socialism."
For a few short days the reformist movement took the initiative, installed a leadership and saw Soviet troops withdraw. But the extraordinary speed of events rapidly outpaced them. Radicals demanded free elections, an end to the one party system and the regime, while their supporters lynched secret police on the streets of the capital. Internationally, demands for the overthrow of the communist system made by Radio Free Europe allowed Soviet hard liners argue that the Hungarian movement was counter-revolutionary and must be crushed. So it was 12 days after it began - coinciding with the Franco-British-Israeli invasion of Suez.
The two interventions framed the subsequent development of East-West relations within the partition of Europe laid down in the Yalta agreement of 1945. The United States refused to back the Suez operation, opening the way to decolonisation. Nor did the US back the Hungarian uprising, preferring to maintain strategic stability in Europe. Hungary came to symbolise multiple failures, notably of popular efforts to break the Cold War structure for another 33 years. In western Europe it was a traumatic experience for the political left, undermining communism's appeal and determining many of its reformist and radical currents over the next generation.
Two thousand six hundred Hungarians died, over 200 were executed and 200,000 became refugees - 541 of them in Ireland - as a result of this political tragedy. It was not completely in vain, since Hungary established a rough autonomy from Moscow under the rule of Janos Kadar until 1988. But the political turmoil of recent days and weeks shows the legacy of 1956 still divides its people. The opposition Fidesc party bitterly disputes the right of the governing post-communist Socialists to claim it, while their opponents insist on the uprising's original objective to reform, not overthrow, the socialist system.
It is in the nature of such defining events that they are open to many different interpretations. The fiftieth anniversary of 1956 is an occasion to welcome the heroism and hope which drove the uprising and to recognise and deplore the cynical power politics which saw it crushed. It was an inconvenient rebellion both for Moscow and Washington, yet both centres wove their own mythologies around it. Since 1989 Hungarians have been free to make their own way, even as they passionately dispute the route which best expresses the uprising's legacy.