“Marx called revolution ‘a human protest against an inhuman life’. The Hungarian revolution was precisely that. It has shown the way forward. In our own small we we British communists, too, can become freedom fighters”
Seventy years ago, in October 1956, Hungarians flooded into the streets. For eleven days they fought a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. By the end they were battling Soviet tanks street by street.
Contrary to Stalinist slanders, this was never a movement for the restoration of capitalism. It was an attempt by ordinary Hungarians to take control over their own lives and establish a healthy socialist society.
The revolution was ultimately crushed with an iron fist and Soviet tanks. tens of thousands of Hungarian workers were killed and countless more injured. this great revolutionary movement ended in tragedy.
Peter Fryer, then a correspondent for the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Daily Worker, was an eyewitness to these historic events. He found his reports censored and suppressed by the Worker’s Stalinist editors back in London. He was subsequently expelled from the Party for reporting the truth about what happened in Hungary.
Hungarian tragedy is Fryer’s contemporary, uncensored account of the revolution. First published in 1956, this new edition aims to introduce Peter Fryer and the extraordinary events of 1956 to a new generation of readers and revolutionaries.
