Foreign News 1956: World Crisis, Appalling Events: Hungarian Revolution

• Share

(2 of 2)

Budapest (pop. 1,750,000) woke early next morning to the sound of machine-gun fire as a column of 80 Soviet tanks rolled into the city and took up positions covering all bridges, boulevards and public buildings. Other tank forces ringed the city. At dawn martial law was imposed on the whole country, a 24-hour curfew on Budapest. Trains and streetcars stopped running, telephone communication with the outside world was cut.

Around noon a crowd began gathering in front of the huge neo-Gothic Parliament building facing the Danube, intending to present Premier Nagy with a petition demanding the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. Soviet tanks and a phalanx of security police blocked all entrances to the building. Trigger-sensitive young Russian tankists became unnerved by the milling crowd around them and began firing indiscriminately into the mass of unarmed people. In a few minutes hundreds of men and women were lying dead or wounded on the ground.

The massacre in Parliament Square sent Budapest mad. The Soviet embassy was raided, Soviet automobiles fired, the contents of a Soviet bookshop burned. Workers fought their way into an arms depot at outlying Fot, got themselves machine guns. Others made gasoline bombs out of wine bottles. Soon Soviet armored cars were burning in the streets.

On the sixth day of Hungary's people's revolution, rebels were in control of much of the countryside, but Soviet tanks, withdrawing to the outskirts of Budapest, left behind a crushed city, ringed by Soviet steel.