Ten Years After [antikvár]

MICHAEL POLANYI The Message of the Hungarian Revolution It IS ten years, almost to the day, since the 20th Party Congress at which Khrushchev denounced the insane regime of Stalin. After another four months, in June 1956, the repercussions of this act led to an open rebellion of the Hungarian writers at the meetings of the Petőfi Circle in Budapest. This was the actual beginning of the Hungarian revolution which broke out violently in October. It has often been mentioned, but I believe it has never been realized in its full importance, that this was a rebellion of Communist Party members. There were many among them who had won high honours and great financial benefits from the government and had—until fairly recently—been its genuine passionate supporters. The Petőfi Circle, where this first rebellion broke out, was an oflBcial organ of the party and the meetings were presided over by trusted representatives of the ruling clique. But other party members, forming the bulk of the audience, overcame the platform. They demanded a reversal of the position assigned to human thought in the Marxist-Leninist scheme. Marxism-Leninism taught that public consciousness is a superstructure of the imderlying relations of production. Public thought under socialism, therefore, must be an instrument of the party controlling socialist production. The meeting rejected this doctrine. It affirmed that truth must be recognized as an independent power in public life. The press must be liberated to tell the truth. The murderous trials based on faked charges must be publicly condemned and their perpetrators punished; the rule of law must be restored. And, above all, the arts corrupted by subservience to the party must be set free to speak to the imagination and to tell the truth. It was this outbreak that created the centre of opposition which later overthrew the communist government. Has the response of the West to these events been adequate ? I am not asking whether we ought to have aided the Hungarian revolution by