Sport and Politics: an Olympic history

Munich 1972 was the first Olympics I remember. Aged 8 I have hazy memories of Olga Korbut in the ring, Lasse Viren and Valery Borzov on the track, Mark Spitz in the pool and hooded men in the Village. The Palestinian involvement was an early indication to me the Olympics was about far more than just sport. Here in the middle of the Cold War, the US and USSR were once again battling for supremacy in Germany.   

Only six nations nations have topped the OIympic medal tally: USA (16), Soviet Union (7), China (1), Germany (1), France (1) and Britain (1). The US dominated most of the 20th century but the Russians beat them in 1956 and 1960. As the space race intensified, the US regained control in the 1960s.  By Munich it was the turn of the USSR to come out ahead again. I remember this strange thing called “East Germany” with their forbidding looking athletes running a very creditable third well ahead of their western rivals despite a population of just 16 million people to the West's 50 million plus. They would rub salt in fellow German wounds with another home soil victory in the World Cup two years later in the only time they would ever meet (the West lost that battle but won the war against the Dutch in the final). 

With the pride of communism on the line, the 70s and 80s were the glory era of East German sport. It was the German College for Physical Culture which produced with ruthless efficiency the coaches, trainers and sports medicine personnel responsible for East Germany's remarkable success. There was drugs and cheating there but there was also genuine success. The problem was, as 1980 Olympic 110-metre hurdles gold medallist Thomas Munkelt said, “we ran our sports by the performance principle, but not our economy."

The 1980 Olympics was East Germany’s first high water mark. It was also the year any doubt the Olympics wasn’t political was wiped out with the west’s boycott after Afghanistan. Without the US, the East Germans ran second to the Russians. The Russians got their own back and boycotted Los Angeles in 1984. They cited “security concerns, chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria whipped up in the United States” but no one was in any doubt it was tit-for-tat. 

Little brother East Germany wasn't there either but Ceausescu’s Romania was the one Communist Bloc that ignored Konstantin Chernenko’s directive and they finished second to the Americans. 1984 was notable for another reason. Five years earlier, the IOC decided to rename the Republic of China to Chinese Taipei. With Taiwan downgraded, China would not lose face by competing for the first time since 1952.  They finished a creditable fourth in their first outing.

The Seoul Olympics in 1988 was the first truly global Olympics. It was also the first since Montreal to feature the US and the Soviets. East Germany were there too and they forced the Americans into third place. Other eastern bloc countries in the top ten were Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The Chinese dropped to 11^th.  But East Germany’s second high water mark was to mark a rapidly changing tide. 

The stunning collapse of Eastern bloc Communism meant the medal table in Barcelona looked radically different. The USSR was the last to go in 1991 so there was still a strong “Unified Team” consisting of 12 of the old 15 Soviet republics. They were still unified enough to win the most medals a year later. It would be the last time Moscow would finish in front. East Germany was gone and China was back up to fourth behind the united Germany. There was still an East German clone in Barcelona as one of the last of the Communist countries Cuba finished fifth.

There was further change in the New World Order of Atlanta 1996. On home soil, the Americans finally beat the Russians for the first time since 1968. China stayed fourth but cut the gap on Germany as they were doing in the real world. In Sydney, China beat Germany and got the same amount of medals as the hosts (58) but with 28 golds to Australia’s 16. At Athens, China went clear as number two to the Americans. They got fewer medals than the Russians but as they did in Sydney, they knew how to get gold.

In Beijing they did to the Americans what they did to the Russians four years before. The US had 110 medals to China’s 100 but it was 51-36 to the hosts in golds.  China’s remarkable powerhouse economic advance was on display in Beijing and the last four years have accelerated the trend. it will be no surprise, that even without home advantage, they get more medals and golds than anyone else in London.

Sure enough, they have won the first gold of the 2012 Olympics (though arguably that honour belongs to Specsavers). Top-ranked Yi Siling of China captured the first gold medal of the London Olympics in the women's 10-metre air rifle at Royal Artillery Barracks on Saturday. Another Chinese woman, Yu Dan won the bronze.  If the 21^st century is the Asian century, then the place to watch for proof will be the Olympic Medal tally. It won’t be too long before the likes of India and Indonesia become the new East Germany – but getting the economics right as well as the sport.

Weeping for monsters: North Korea's dynastic dues

I’ve been thinking all week about the hysterical sobbing in those images of North Koreans mourning Kim Jong-il. Was it pretend-crying just to avoid looking different to everyone else? Was it just group hysteria? Was it stage managed by the government and then exaggerated out of all proportion? Was it genuine grief for a leader that was a daily presence to them? Was it grief for their own loved one who have died in famines and their miserable fortune to live in such an accursed place? Was it fear that things could get worse under Kim Jong-un? Was it simply just a great chance to cry uncontrollably and not look out of place?

The ambiguities hidden in the tears define North Korea as it has done since the end of World War II. When the Democratic People's Republic of Korea set up shop in the northern part of the peninsula in 1946 they were faced with two big problems. The North had always been more remote and less developed and now 2 million more fled south to avoid the Communist DPRK. The three-war that followed left the new country in tatters.

North Korea converted to a centrally planned economy which strangled small business. Dissent was not tolerated and all good was embodied in leader Kim Il-sung. In turn Il-Sung promoted “Juche” as a concept of self-reliance which would have to make do in difficult times. Il-Sung said juche meant man was the master of everything and decided everything. That man was him and he mobilised the entire workforce to industrialise North Korea rapidly after the civil war.

But always suspicious of the South, they built up their military might to deter invasion. They ran up massive debts mainly to the USSR, China and Japan. By 1980 they defaulted on all their loans and the economy has been contracting ever since. The collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 left Russia unimpressed with their poverty-stricken debtor. That meant an increasing reliance on China with which DPRK shared philosophies and its only open border. Il-sung refused to consider Gorbachev’s perestroika because he knew it led to glasnost. He died in 1994 and first son and heir apparent Kim Jong-il took over.

Born in 1942 Jong-il spent his first years in Siberia with his parents. His father commanded the 1st battalion of the 88th Brigade, a Red Army unit made up of Chinese and Korean exiles. Jong-il was born in Vyatskoye, a fishing village near Khabarovsk where the railway turns south to Vladivostok. As a schoolboy, Jong-il was interested in politics and Marxist literature. He learned English in Malta and as early as 1980, was effective head of the politburo with only his father to look up to. He inherited his father’s personality cult and was named head of the armed forces in 1991.

With Jong-il making all the decisions since they defaulted on their debts, North Korea’s economy collapsed. When Il-Sung finally collapsed in 1994, aged 82, Jong-il was undisputed leader. The US were worried by his nuclear ambitions and threats to leave the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. The countries signed an Agreed Framework as one of Jong-il’s first achievements in office. It allowed the DPRK to continue developing nuclear technology at foreign expense but with light water reactors rather than the nuclear proliferating graphite reactors they already had.

The US overplayed its hand. President Clinton rashly assumed North Korea was on the verge of collapse and DPRK officials knew his assumption. Congress would not pass a bill to end the trade embargo in place since the end of the Korean War and the US dragged its feet in calling for tenders to build the new reactors. By October 2002, the US believed North Korea had an enrichment program and confronted them with their evidence. Three months later North Korea left the NNPT. The Framework was no longer Agreed and the subsequent Six Party talks were almost completely fruitless. North Korea had gone rogue.

While nuclear testing proceeded with Iranian and Pakistani know-how, the fate of the people of North Korea worsened. Jong-il oversaw a collapse in industry and technology and floods and storms in 1995 wrecked existing electricity and health infrastructure and destroyed harvests. Hungry peasants ate what survived before it was fully developed and the country could no longer feed itself. Women and children bore the brunt of the death toll of a million or more in the three years that followed.

Food from China, South Korea and the US eased the situation until Jong-il refused all overseas aid in 2002. Inclusion in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union “Axis of Evil” heightened the sense of North Korea’s isolation. Famine conditions worsened again. Recent escapees told the BBC hunger and starvation were common with homeless people dying in the railway station, and others too weak to beg. Complaining about this inside the country would lead to instant imprisonment.

It’s not difficult to imagine the logical leaps of doublethink North Koreans must take in order to make sense of their world. Death is all around them but so is a regime that demands obedience and Juche. Even when people were confronted on the street by evidence of the failure of the regime, their total reliance state media meant foreign powers and the evil South could always be conjured up as scapegoats.

The extraordinary scenes in Pyongyang after Jong-il’s death are not without precedence. This week’s public lamentation eerily resembles the carefully choreographed mourning after Kim Il-sung died. Life seemed almost too unbearable to go on without Dear Leader. But just as in 1994, the State machinery will be whipped into shape after a decent interval and the leadership cult will swing to Kim Jong-un. The world should learn from Clinton’s mistake. North Korea can survive dysfunction. Bellies may remain empty but the belicose dynasty of Dear Leader will continue. As the handpicked factory worker in the sobbing video said “I will change sorrow into strength and remain faithful to Comrade Kim Jong-un.” It’s best the North Koreans cry now because it will not be tolerated in six months time.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

A little-known researcher in Moscow’s Gorbachev Foundation has done the world an extraordinary favour when he smuggled secret 1980s Politburo papers out of Russia. Last week Pavel Stroilov published documents that revealed the leaders of the Western World were lying when they said they wanted a united Germany. Stroilov copied more than 1,000 transcripts of Politburo discussions before they were sealed off. Among the many astonishing details there are a meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher where the British PM said he should pay no attention to Nato communiqués. The reality was that Britain and France (and presumably the US too) feared a united Germany even more than the red menace in Moscow. (picture: AP)

But to some people this was hardly a revelation that the West preferred the devil they knew. The Telegraph noted that Thatcher herself alluded to the Moscow lie in her 1993 autobiography when she said she was “apprehensive” about the prospect of a united Germany. Meanwhile Spiked’s Marxist writer Mick Hume says the revelations should only be a shock to those who take “the anti-Soviet statements of Western leaders at face value.”

Hume points to an invariable human failing: the tendency to believe what we see or hear. Information is a valuable commodity but a dangerous one too and it hardly surprising the Russians (like those in power in the West) place an embargo on all sensitive government records until well after the events have taken place and the participants are either retired or dead. But now that this is in the public sphere it has changed from being tacit to explicit knowledge. It can be taken from place to place, it can be internalised, and it can become personal knowledge. Knowledge transfer is a learning process and relies on wide dissemination of information.

It is the role of the world’s media to provide that information fully and fairly. As soon as an English translation is available, Stroilov’s thousand documents should be published in full either in print or online. But as the great 19th journalist Lincoln Steffens found out, some information would never be printed by any newspaper. Steffens was idealistic but would never report on police brutality or political corruption because the complaints were coming from “faddists: co-operators, socialists (a few), anarchists, whom nobody would listen to.” By nobody, he meant his editors, wealthy readers and the city’s elite.

Arguments about what information should be in the public domain are complicated by the current push for media owners to start charging for online content. The push goes against the grain of those who believe “information should be free”. Jeff Jarvis is one of the most strident voices against paying for content. He says it is costly, it impacts branding, there are other free sources and perhaps most important it takes “the content out of the conversation.” No one can talk about something they cannot see.

Jarvis is also a big fan of the power of Googlejuice and that company’s CEO has his own view of whether information is worth paying for. Eric Schmidt told a group of British broadcasting executives last week that general news publishers would find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available. Schmidt agreed with the commonly-held opinion that the information had to have niche value such as business news to work.

There is a good reason why this is so. People will pay for information they think they can make money from. As American essay and programming language designer Paul Graham wrote earlier this month, consumers never really paid for content and publishers never really sold it either. Graham says the price of books, music and movies depends mostly on the format and there is no additional charge for quality or quantity. The content is in fact irrelevant. Selling information is a distinct business from publishing, says Graham. Those who can’t sell their content will have to give it away and make money indirectly or embody it in things people will pay for.

Graham says giving it away is the future of most current media. But those in the business are slow to accept this conclusion. Meanwhile it is giving every indication of a business in crisis. Newspaper jobs have fallen from more than 450,000 in 1990 to fewer than 300,000 today. Jarvis calls the media the first “post-industry.” But as communications theorist Dennis McQuail wrote, the Information Society so beloved of Jarvis has no core of political purpose, just an inevitable logic of its own. In this, there is an ideological bias towards free market outcomes.

Stroilov’s documents don’t fall into the niche business content category. No-one is going to make money from knowing what went on in secret Kremlin meetings in 1989. But they are important for all that. They contribute greatly to the public knowledge about the mendacity of leaders, the problems of ideology and the course of history. Gorbachev and Thatcher were unable to stop the Berlin Wall from falling, and the West could not stop Germany from re-uniting. Despite such diversions that followed such as the Wars on Drugs and Terror, the fall of Communism would eventually reveal the West’s true preoccupation – making money.

The Marx Botherers: 125 years on

On the 125th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, China’s Communist Government has announced that work on the first direct translation from the German of the 60 volumes of the Chinese-language edition of 'The Complete Works of Marx and Engels' won't be completed in the foreseeable future because of staff shortages. The work has never before been translated from German directly into Chinese and it has taken 18 years to produce the first 20 volumes. The latest deal is lack of new qualified translators who take up to ten years to train. The previous translation is based on a Russian version from the 1950s.

The father of communism, Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883 of pleurisy and bronchitis. However his writings on politics, economics and philosophy remain hugely influential today. Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at Trier in the Rhineland which was then part of Prussia. His father Heinrich was a lawyer who, although was from a Jewish family, registered as a Protestant when laws were passed preventing Jews from holding public positions. Europe was undergoing massive change during Karl’s early life. The Industrial Revolution was leading to the growth of the factory system and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars led to the abolition of feudalism throughout much of Europe.

Marx followed in his father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Bonn before moving on to history and philosophy. In 1836 he moved to the University of Berlin where he became interested in the teachings of Hegel. He wrote a thesis on Greek philosophers which was accepted at the University of Jena in 1841. In 1843 he married Johanna “Jenny” von Westphalen, the beautiful daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a cultured and politically progressive Prussian. That same year Marx began working for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. His hard-hitting articles on the plight of peasants in France’s Moselle region made waves and the paper was eventually censored and Marx was forced to resign.

Marx moved to Paris to escape Prussian political repression. There he encountered a vibrant working class and socialist movement. He briefly worked on a journal called German-French Annals where Marx first began to direct his appeals to the workers rather than the intellectuals. It was here he also met Friedrich Engels who was to become a lifelong friend. Engels was a business agent based in England working for his father. It was his article on economics for the Annals that impressed Marx.

While in Paris, Marx also became influenced by Russian anarchists including Mikhail Bakunin. Their ideas of a government-less society and absolute freedom became important to him as he struggled to work out his own philosophy. In 1848, he and Engels published their own theory of reform in a 12,000 word booklet called Manifesto of the Communist Party, popularly shortened to The Communist Manifesto. The book described the unfair state of society and how revolution could change it into an ideal communist state. It described how the capitalist system had come about and how it exploited the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The most famous rallying cry of the book read: The proletarians have nothing to lose except their chains…working men of all countries unite!”

Marx’s revolutionary ideas caused him to be expelled from France in 1845, from Belgium in 1848 and Prussia a year later. He moved to London where he settled for the rest of his life. His wife Jenny gave birth to seven children but only three survived. The baron’s daughter was not used to the crushing poverty she now found herself in. They relied heavily on Engel’s largesse while Marx learned English. His main source of income were the articles he wrote for newspapers such as the New York Herald Tribune.

In London, Marx’s main contacts were with other Europeans, particularly German and French radicals and refugees, with many of whom he had intermittent squabbles and disagreements. Marx spent the last 25 years of his life writing Das Kapital. This was to be a broad-ranging scientific study of capitalism, politics and economics running into several volumes. He spend much of his time researching at the British Museum library where he became a well known figure. Marx made extensive use of the library’s collection of factory inspectors’ and public health officers’ reports. Marx also spoke often at working men’s clubs and political groups.

Marx’s final years were dogged with illness especially bronchitis. Marx was a heavy smoker and also drank alcohol heavily. He made his illnesses worse by overwork. As well as working and speech-making, he was also heavily involved with the International Working Men’s Association which was better known simply as the International. Marx was a founder member of the international in 1864, wrote its inaugural address and drew up its statutes.

His last years were also dominated by personal tragedy. Jenny died in 1881 and his favourite eldest daughter, also Jenny, died a year later of cancer of the bladder. Marx never recovered from this double blow. He died in March 1883 with his great work incomplete. He was buried at London’s Highgate cemetery. After he died, Engels spent another 11 years working on Marx’s papers and completing the final volumes of Das Kapital.

Marx’s ideas were initially slow to spread. Although Marx himself expected the revolution to occur in the industrialised countries of Britain and Germany, it was Russia where his ideas were first put into practice. Marxism came to Tsarist Russia through the work of Georgi Plekhanov, son of a European based landowner. Plekhanov was the first Russian to write about Marxism as it applied to his own country. His ideas were taken on by students who spread the word through towns and factories.

One of the early converts was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who was later to become known as Lenin. Lenin was sent to Siberia for three years for preaching Marxism to factory workers. He was a charismatic leader whose time came with Russia’s disastrous entry into World War I. His Bolsheviks gained power in October 1917 and inaugurated the dictatorship of the proletariat. But after many years of civil war, the Russian Communist state that emerged bore little resemblance to that envisioned by Marx and Engels. Russia was not developed economically enough for true communism to exist. Stalin became dictator on Lenin’s death and the state that Marx prophesised would ‘wither away’ instead became all powerful.

Although the capitalist system that Marx described no longer exists, Marxism remains relevant in the 21st century. His economic predictions that large corporations would dominate world markets and industry would become reliant on technology have both proven to be correct. At the end of the Cold War, critics suggested that Das Kapital was obsolete but by 1998 market panics in Asia caused the Financial Times to question if we had moved "from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade. Marx’s philosophy is also pertinent. His ideas of the alienation of labour and its debilitating consequences on human beings has more credence than ever today.

How Soon is Mao

The UN Security Council (UNSC) has given its imprimatur to an assistance mission to Nepal after a peace agreement between the Government and the Maoist Rebels. In a statement read out by the Security Council President for December, Qatar's Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, the Council welcomed the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement by the Nepalese government and the Communist Party, and the commitment both parties have stated to transforming the existing ceasefire into a permanent peace. All 15 fifteen member of the UNSC have supported the statement.

The ten year conflict killed 15,000 people and displaced over 100,000 others. The two sides signed a UN sponsored agreement on Tuesday outlining out how the insurgents will set aside their weapons. The technical assessment mission will contain an advance team of 35 UN monitors and 25 electoral personnel. On Wednesday, the Secretary-General's Personal Representative in Nepal Ian Martin briefed the UNSC and said that the agreement represents "the most promising opportunity for the establishment of lasting peace and far-reaching reform".

Nepal's government and rebels are still working to finalise an interim constitution as part of the peace process. The constitution will have to be in place before 73 rebels join the proposed 330-seat interim Parliament. Under the pact, tens of thousands of rebel fighters will be confined to seven main camps under UN supervision ahead of elections next year.

The UK drafted the UNSC’s statement. Britain’s ambassador to the UN Emyr Jones Parry said “"What we've mapped out today is a way in which the UN ... should rally behind the positive developments in Nepal”. US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said the unanimous Council approval shows a desire to do whatever necessary to support Nepal's fragile peace. Reports from Kathmandu on Friday indicated Government and Maoist rebel representatives have failed to meet a deadline to form an interim government. The deal had been delayed until next week. Last April, the Maoists helped lead three weeks of mass protests that forced King Gyanendra to give up absolute power.

Nepal was led for over a hundred years by the Rana Autocracy. Jung Bahadur, a strongly pro-British leader, seized control of the country in 1846. He declared himself prime minister and began the Rana line of rulers. The Rana's monopolised power by making the king a titular figure and paid obeisance to the British to avoid invasion. They ruled until a newly independent India flexed its muscles and installed a Nepal Congress Party government in 1951. In 1994, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) won the majority of seats. Man Mohan Adhikary was sworn in as prime minister. His government survived two years until it was dissolved by the parliament. Adhikary resigned his position under allegations of corruption. Also that year a radical leftist party called the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) launched a “people’s war” aimed at overthrowing the government, abolishing the monarchy, and establishing a republic. They were first confined to remote mountain regions but by the late 1990s had spread to more than half the country.

In June 2001 the Maoist insurgency intensified after an astonishing royal massacre. King Birendra, Queen Aiswarya and seven other members of the royal family were fatally shot in the royal palace in Kathmandu, in a drunken rampage by Birendra’s first-born son. Crown Prince Dipendra dispatched his family armed with a machine gun before turning the gun on himself. Dipendra initially survived his wounds but lapsed in a coma. His subsequent death officially made his uncle Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah the new regent of Nepal. An official investigation of the massacre confirmed earlier reports that Dipendra had killed his family members in a drunken rage.

The rebels capitalised on the shootings by claiming it was part of a bigger government conspiracy. They immediately took the uprising to Kathmandu and bombed the home of the Chief Justice who led the investigation into the palace massacre. It was the first time they bombed the capital and they struck at the regime's legislative heart. The new king Gyanendra immediately declared emergency rule, allowing the first large-scale deployment of the 80,000 strong royal army to fight the insurgency. Despite this, the rebels controlled much of western Nepal by 2002. In 2005 Gyanendra dismissed the government and assumed full executive powers in the name of combating the Maoists. The rebels held a three-day nationwide general strike to protest the king's decision.

Gyanendra’s unilateral declaration of power lost him all support among the political parties who threw their support behind the Maoists. By 2006, the population was in open uprising. Finally under foreign pressure, Gyanendra made a declaration to reinstate the parliament. Since it has reassembled Parliament moved quickly to strip the king of his power over the military, abolish his title as the descendent of a Hindu God, and required royalty to pay taxes.

Nepal's new cabinet declared a ceasefire in May. The cabinet also announced that the Maoist rebels were no longer to be considered a terrorist group. The government finally signed a peace deal with the Maoists in November. The 12 point letter of understanding which agreed that “autocratic monarchy is the main hurdle” in realising “democracy, peace, prosperity, social advancement" and "a free and sovereign Nepal”.

Blood on the streets of Budapest

Yesterday Budapest marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Hungarian Revolution. History is repeating itself as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to quell protesters against the current government who disrupted anniversary celebrations. Demonstrators have been on the streets for the last month protesting against Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany after he admitted lying to win re-election. Veterans of the 1956 uprising refused to shake hands with him at Monday's commemoration and the main opposition party said it was boycotting events where he was due to speak. By the end of the day it was difficult to tell whether marchers were celebrating the anniversary of the revolution or protesting against the government.

The events of the fortnight following 23 October 1953 were astonishing. It was the first major challenge to Soviet military power since the violence that ended World War II. What began as a student demonstration turned into a full scale revolution. It was eventually destroyed by the might of the Soviet Red Army. The revolution was a wildfire that quickly engulfed the country. It caused the fall of the central government in Budapest for two weeks before the Russians intervened to crush the rebellion.

Hungary fought on the side of Germany during the War. Its Second Army was annihilated at Stalingrad and Hungary looked to make peace with the Soviets. As a result Hitler ordered Nazi troops to occupy Hungary and forced its government to increase its contribution to the war effort. When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1944, they quickly signed an armistice which was repudiated by Germany. The country became a battlefield and the last Nazi troops did not leave Hungary until April 1945. Even before the war had ended, Churchill had agreed with Stalin the Soviet Union would enjoy 80 percent influence in Hungary, with Britain retaining the rest. Communists were part of a provisional government that took power after the war.

In November 1945, the non-communist Independent Smallholders' Party won power in an election. The communists used what one of their own leaders called “salami tactics” to gradually increase power by discrediting and arresting opponents. The Communist leader Rakosi took control of the police and set up a secret unit called the AVH. The Smallholders party was slowly marginalised and eventually made illegal. In 1947 relations between the Soviets and the West deteriorated markedly. Stalin pushed for the creation of a Soviet state in Hungary and the Communists quickly took control. In 1949 the regime held a single-list election, and later that year the government ratified a Soviet-style constitution. The Hungarian economy was reorganised according to the Soviet model. But it was performing dismally. Stalin’s death led to a new breed of leaders including Imre Nagy. Nagy freed political prisoners and ended the forced collectivisation of Hungarian agriculture. Hardline Communists regained control in 1955 and Nagy was forced to step down. But Nagy still had much support in the community. Hungarians were resentful that much of the food and industrial goods they produced were sent to Russia while the local population starved.

On 23 October 1956, students in Budapest held a rally in support of Polish efforts to win autonomy from the Soviet Union. It sparked mass demonstrations of 200,000 people. The police attacked, and the demonstrators fought back tearing down Soviet symbols. Alarmed, the Communist leaders called out the Hungarian army, but many soldiers handed their weapons to the demonstrators and joined the uprising instead. The following day, Soviet troops entered Budapest. This further enraged the Hungarians and the day saw many pitched battles with troops and state security police. The extremely popular Nagy was named Prime Minister on 25 October. He brought non-Communists into the government. He dissolved the hated AVH secret police and promised free elections. For most of the next 12 days, Hungarians fought the Soviets in ferocious street battles. The Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov (who led the USSR briefly before his death in 1984) publicly agreed to remove their forces from Hungary but they secretly sent new armoured divisions instead.

When Nagy found out the double-cross, he was enraged. He immediately withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and called on the West to support it as a neutral nation. But the west was otherwise engaged in the Suez Crisis. The Israelis had invaded Sinai, and a day later, the British and French had bombed Egypt, hoping to force the country to reopen the recently nationalised Suez Canal. President Eisenhower kept the US out of the Suez issue and was also sympathetic to the freedom movements in Eastern Europe. But he was not prepared to go to war to save Hungary. The US secretly told the Soviets that Hungary was in their sphere of influence and would not protest if the Soviets ended the revolution.

The Soviet response was devastating. On 3 November Red Army troops bolstered by regiments from Eastern Asia surrounded Budapest and closed the country's borders. The Asian troops could speak no European languages and were told they were going to Berlin to fight German fascists. Overnight they entered the capital and occupied the parliament building. They easily overpowered the poorly armed local forces. Nagy fled to the Yugoslav embassy as the Hungarian Communists announced on state radio that they had regained control. The head of the Hungarian Catholic Church, the remarkable Cardinal Mindszenty (recently released after being had been imprisoned for 8 years after the war) sought refuge in the US embassy. He was to live there for the next 15 years until the Hungarian government let him leave the country. Meanwhile 200,000 Hungarians fled across to Austria before being re-settled in the West.

Over the next five years, Hungary executed 2,000 rebels and imprisoned another 25,000. Nagy was arrested and apparently deported. However two years later, Hungary admitted he was secretly tried and executed. A bitter Hungarian joke of the time expresses local sentiment:
Two men meet on the street after the revolution.
First man: you know, come to think of it, we Hungarians are very lucky people
Second man: What? You don’t mean you’ve become one of them?
First man: Oh no, but just think. The Russians came here as friends. Imagine what they’d have done if they came as enemies.