White Terror? Counter-revolution? These Witnesses of Hungary's Days of Struggle Give History's Answer

One year ago next Wednesday the workers, students and soldiers of Budapest rose in revolt against Stalinist tyranny. Within a few days the Revolution had spread throughout Hungary, administration was in the hands of workers' councils, the hated security police force (AVH) had been abolished and socialist democracy was being practised in pit and workshop, village and office.

Twelve days later the Hungarian Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Army and the Kadar government was placed in power to break the workers' resistance and punish those who had paved the way for the revolt and led it.

Many of them were communists; and on this sombre anniversary The Newsletter, as a Marxist paper, pays solemn tribute to the courageous Marxists who are in Kadar's jails.

Whether our message of greetings will reach Tibor Dery and Gyula Hay, Laszlo Benjamin and Miklos Gemes, we cannot know. But we salute their steadfastness, and that of the Hungarian working class, while dissociating ourselves utterly from the false 'friends' of the Hungarian people, the imperialists of Britain and America.

In honour of this first anniversary, and to answer some of the 'comfortable lies' that the Stalinists have sought to spread about 'White Terror' and 'counter-revolution', we print below the evidence of three witnesses little-known in Britain: a socialist journalist and two communist journalists.

LUIGI FOSSATI, star reporter of the Nenni socialist paper Avanti, was in Budapest when the Revolution broke out. His articles were afterwards collected into a book, to which Nenni wrote the introduction.

FRANZ XAVER PHILIPP was the representative of the East German news agency ADN in Vienna, and monitored Budapest radio broadcasts there for his employers. Philipp had been editor of the Taegliche Rundschau, the official Soviet daily in East Germany, for ten years. He resigned from ADN after the second Soviet intervention in Hungary.

MARIAN BIELICKI was special correspondent in Budapest of the Warsaw paper Po Prostu.