The Gun (36 page)

For the fight against the massing troops, the Corvinists had gathered arms. Some carried a Mosin-Nagant rifle or a PPSh submachine gun taken from government stocks. Others brandished pistols. This was not an especially impressive suite of small arms for an army in 1956. For a guerrilla force in existence for less than a week, it was a feat. And the insurgents were blessed by convenience: A gas station was located near the theater, providing fuel for Molotov cocktails19—bottles filled with gasoline and adorned with a wick to be lit before being thrown. When the glass shattered, the wick ignited the gasoline in a whooshing blaze. In the Corvinists’ kill zones, charred vehicles littered the streets. Dozens of soldiers had died. Now they waited for the next thrust. Soviet generals had ordered an advance in two prongs, ending with tanks blasting at the theater as the infantry stormed forward, finishing the insurrection at last.

In the story of the assault rifle, the mid-1950s brought milestones: the AK-47’s combat debuts. The first known use of the AK-47 outside of tests and exercises was in East Germany in 1953, when Soviet divisions put down a smaller and less-organized uprising in Berlin. But in 1953 the assault rifle had yet to be issued to Soviet forces in large quantities.
It was not abundant. Three years on, as insurgents in Budapest gathered their bottled gas and looted guns, thousands of the Soviet Union’s frontline soldiers carried AK-47s into Hungarian neighborhoods. The newsreel footage of soldiers flowing into the capital, new rifles in hand, framed events to be repeated by centralized regimes for decades. They were a myth-buster. One point at the center of Soviet and Russian statements about the assault rifle and the immense industrial capacity behind it, and fundamental to Mikhail Kalashnikov’s descriptions of his life’s purpose and work, was that the AK-47 was made for national defense and distributed later as a liberation tool. These are the oft-repeated lines. Against this fable, the weapons’ premieres in Berlin and Budapest served as more than chronological markers. They informed a fuller understanding of the AK-47 and the political system that circulated it. The AK-47 was christened with blood not as a tool for liberation or to defend the Soviet Union from invaders. It made its debut smashing freedom movements. It was repression’s chosen gun, the rifle of the occupier and the police state.

The beginning established a pattern. The Kalashnikov was rarely a Soviet weapon of defense. It was to be the weapon of East German border guards who shot unarmed civilians fleeing for the West, and the firearm used in the state-directed violence against demonstrations and uprisings before the Soviet Union finally tottered and fell. It would be used in Prague, in Alma-Ata, in Baku, in Riga, and in Moscow. It would see crackdown service repeatedly in other strong-arm states—at Tiananmen Square in China, in Andijon in Uzbekistan, and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan—almost any place where a government resorted to shooting citizens to try to keep citizens in check. It would be used by Baathists to execute Kurds in the holes that served as their mass graves. It would shoot the Bosnian men and boys who were herded to execution in Srebrenica in 1995. But this was all so obvious that it barely deserves elaboration, save as a corrective to the authorities’ distortions. The fight for Hungary had another value. The Kremlin’s image tenders could influence the conversation about their nation’s actions and the supposed purposes of its arms. They could not control the ways that war and violence actually worked. There would be too many Kalashnikovs for their uses to be determined, much less fully obscured, by the centralized states that made them. Once Soviet soldiers drove into Budapest the omen appeared, the hint of what was in
store. No sooner had the AK-47 been carried into combat than it became the rebels’ arm, too.

Like the way power and personalities had changed in Moscow, the violence in Budapest in 1956 said much about the Soviet system. The Kremlin had a clear-eyed view of the hardships in Hungary. Since 1953, the leadership of the Communist Party had discussed in detail the ways its policies had failed the Hungarians, and how the national government it backed had alienated the nation. The Kremlin chose to crush the popular uprising nonetheless, worrying less about Hungary than about the prospect of losing a nation in the socialist camp, or appearing weak.

Hungary had been under Soviet occupation since the end of World War II. The country was ruled through much of the period by a dictator, Mátyás Rákosi, who was propped up by the Kremlin and applied the tools of state terror wholesale. Repression, Rákosi-style, took pages from Stalin’s book: a sadistic secret police force, labor camps,
kulak
lists, show trials, executions. Religion was suppressed. Single-party rule was established. The dictator was unchallenged. Stalin and Rákosi forced Hungary through a program of industrialization, collectivization, and militarization. Sovietization deepened popular resentment and shifted part of the hatred for Rákosi toward Moscow. Three months after Stalin’s death, the party summoned Rákosi to the Kremlin and spelled out Hungary’s wretchedness with exactitude. Beria denounced Rákosi to his face while referring to him in a chilling third person. “It is not right that Comrade Rákosi gives directions regarding who must be arrested; he says who should be beaten,” he said. (Beria himself was to be arrested within two weeks, on orders of the comrades in the room.)
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Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, extended the line, describing a nation paralyzed. He questioned, if only rhetorically, whether socialism in this form was better than what it had replaced.

They initiated a persecution against 1,500,000 people in a population with 4.5 million adults in three and a half years. There were 1,500,000 violations in this time. They punish for everything, and punish insignificant acts arbitrarily… they resort to all kinds of manipulations to ensure a forced industrial development. For instance
there was [only] 57% wool in a particular fabric. They left the name and price of the material, but they took the wool out of it. They significantly worsened the quality of milk. This resembles fraud. They have lost contact with the population, they do not express the interest of the population in many questions. Is this why we chased the bourgeoisie away, so that afterward the situation would be like this?
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Khrushchev stepped in. “Comrade Rákosi is primarily responsible for the mistakes,” he said.
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Rákosi was a thick-necked, confident man; a bull. He had bragged in the past of killing rivals, saying their liquidation was “like cutting off slices of salami.”
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But he was cornered. He did not resist. “Regarding hubris, that’s an illness that one cannot detect, just like one cannot smell one’s own odor,” he said. “If the comrades say this is the case, I accept it.”
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He was promptly deposed. Imre Nagy, a reformer, was appointed prime minister. Nagy eased the repression at home and began a program he called the New Course. There was only so much he could do. The economy was moribund. Consumer products were in limited supply. Agricultural production was low. Years of terror had exhausted the population. And while Khrushchev spoke of a fresh direction, Hungary’s arrangements with Moscow still broke in Moscow’s favor. No end seemed in sight. Rákosi returned to power in 1955 and Nagy was sidelined. The political turbulence sent mixed signals. Rákosi was removed from office once more in summer 1956. It was too late. Tensions erupted in a public demonstration on October 23, when tens of thousands of people turned out to protest the national government and Soviet interference. Stalin’s statue was pulled down, nationalist flags appeared, a crowd massed outside Parliament. Students marched to the radio station, intending to broadcast sixteen demands. The list included the withdrawal of Soviet troops, an election of party officers by secret ballot, the dissolution of the government, public inquiry into the crimes of Rákosi, a reassessment of Soviet-Hungarian relations, and an examination of the merits and practices of the planned economy. The confrontation with the authorities was at hand.

The radio station was under guard of the Hungarian State Security Police, or ÁVH, the loathed secret police. The students never made it into the broadcast booth. The crowd milled outside. The ÁVH fired
warning shots. The students held their place. Then someone—who it was remains in dispute, though blame typically falls on the ÁVH—shot into the crowd, killing several demonstrators. Rioting began. Groups of fighters formed in many of Budapest’s districts, overwhelming the police. The crowds emptied jails and looted arsenals. Fighting broke out in one neighborhood, then another, later in rural areas and towns. Some police units sympathized with the insurrection and gave weapons to the people. Others did nothing to stop their activities.

The Soviet Union and its proxies had previously weathered challenges from Europe’s captive populations. In June 1953 in Berlin and in June 1956 in Pozna´n, Poland, the authorities had shot into crowds. An official understanding had taken hold: State violence was an acceptable tool to push the people into line. For order, blood was a fair price. But the Kremlin had never faced a general national uprising, or the prospect that a satellite’s government would join the opposition as it grew. Notes from the Presidium meeting that day in Moscow show that the Kremlin considered intervening militarily from the first moments. Khrushchev raised the idea, though he seemed not quite ready.
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An interim solution was found: Soviet troops stationed in the republic would assist Hungarian forces. Before dawn on October 24, an army corps garrisoned outside Budapest moved for the capital, hoping a display of force might bring calm.
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In some places, the Soviet troops were met by unarmed crowds. In others they met resistance. In areas like the Corvin Passage, the resistance was organized and intense, and Soviet soldiers were cut down. This was not a riot. Many civilians had resolved to fight.

One corps was not enough. Its units entered Budapest tentatively, without a full reconnaissance, unsure of their mission and what to expect. They could depend on the loyalty of neither the Hungarian army nor the regular police. Their armor lacked adequate infantry support, which rendered many patrols blind and vulnerable to ambush. Often Soviet soldiers located insurgents only by drawing their fire—the 1956 version of a perilous form of combat patrol, known among soldiers as the movement-to-contact. The circumstances gave the rebels unusual advantages for a force of their experience, and limited the Soviet soldiers’ ability to apply their superior equipment and firepower. In such conditions, the newly issued AK-47s could make little difference. But they did make an impression. In one of the few available Soviet accounts of the fighting,
emissaries from the Kremlin sent an encrypted cable back to Moscow describing lopsided shooting. The emissaries, Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, told of skirmishes “between single provocateurs or small groups of provocateurs on the one side and our own machine gunners and automatic riflemen. Our own troops were firing more, responding with volleys to single shots.” Another translation of the cable, unearthed after the Cold War, summarized how Soviet firepower allowed a new generation of soldiers to fight. “Our men did more of the shooting. To solitary shots we replied with salvos.”
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On October 24, the government fell. Nagy returned to office. He tried to balance conflicting pulls, working with the Kremlin while feeling the revolution’s ineluctable draw. The Kremlin escalated. On October 25, Soviet divisions from outside Hungary crossed the border. Hungary, a member of the Warsaw Pact, was being invaded by its fraternal mentor, which had pledged to protect it from invasion. The Soviet military had decided that it must destroy the Corvinists. A conventional idea was settled upon: A Hungarian army unit, working with Soviet armor, would storm the theater. Hungarian commanders protested, sensing there would be too much bloodshed for the troops navigating the narrow streets, and too much danger for civilians who lived in apartments lining the route. During the final briefing by a Soviet division commander, as the armor idled on Boráros Square, it emerged that the tanks were not equipped with compatible two-way radios. There would be no ready way for government forces to communicate. Hungarian officers refused to participate. The Soviet officers were stuck.

The bungling grew. The column’s lead tanks—three Soviet T-34s, the same class that Kalashnikov commanded during the war—departed alone for a reconnaissance.
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Because they had no radios, no one could call them back, and no one knew what they faced once they clanked out of sight. Ninety minutes passed. Three T-54s—the Kremlin’s newest tanks—were sent to look for the wayward soldiers. An hour later, two T-54s returned. One was damaged. All the other tanks had been destroyed. The operation was a failure in every sense. The remainder of the column waited at the square into evening and the troops were told they would attack the next day. But by then the two sides had agreed to a cease-fire. The curfew was lifted that night. By October 30 the fighting died down. Elation swept the Corvinists. Soviet units were withdrawing. Nagy announced the end
of one-party rule, and the new government pledged free elections. The rebels, by all signs, had prevailed.

In the quiet of a city exhaling, a quintessential sight of the past half-century appeared for the first time. Outside the shattered facades of the buildings, rebels roamed the streets, posing for news photographers. A few of them carried AK-47s. Which Hungarian rebel first captured an AK-47 and turned it against the army that created it cannot be said. Thousands of men fought in Budapest, and Soviet soldiers were repelled and forced to abandon equipment in many places, just as they left behind some of their dead. But the streets around the Corvin Theater were where the rebels’ images were made. The names of most of these men were not recorded. At least one had his back to the camera; his identity is anybody’s guess. But one man’s name was remembered: József Tibor Fejes, twenty-two years old, fresh-faced, sharp-eyed, purposeful, and seemingly unafraid.