Fifty years ago today, on October 23, 1956, students marched in downtown Budapest on the Parliament and on the Radio Building in protest against the Neo-Stalinist government of Hungary. When students reached the Radio Building, they demanded to be allowed to broadcast their demands, which included withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Instead of allowing broadcast of student demands, state security forces fired on the students. This was the beginning of the 18 day Hungarian Revolution, which briefly toppled the Communist government of that nation.
Initially, it seemed that the Soviet Union would acquiesce in demands for the withdrawal of troops and for free elections. Instead, on November 4, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, crushing the Revolution within less than a week.
One factor that played into the Soviet Union's decision to invade was that the West was occupied with other issues. On October 29, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula in an action that was pre-arranged with the United Kingdom and France - designed to take over the Suez Canal. On October 31, the UK and France actively joined Israel in the military action, which became known as the Suez Crisis.
In the United States, November 6, 1956 was Election Day. President Dwight Eisenhower was a candidate for re-election against his 1952 opponent, Adlai Stevenson. Christopher Andrew and others have speculated that the Soviet Union counted on the fact that the United States would be unlikely to take drastic action in the days immediately before a Presidential election.
The result of the failure of the Hungarian Revolution was that Hungary would remain under totalitarian Communist rule for more than 30 more years - until the peaceful revolutions that swept central and eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s.
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