Soviet might decreed that Budapest should die. Free Budapest refused to die.
After a week of unleashed terror, the new government of treacherous Janos Kadar was still unable to control the situation. Fighting had died down to sporadic outbreaks as surviving Freedom Fighters went underground. But the country's railroads, factories and mines were at a standstill, the city of Budapest without light, heat, transport, communications or food, with thousands of unburied dead lying in its rubble-filled streets and fires burning in hundreds of buildings. At week's end, in a desperate attempt to gain popular support Janos Kadar went to the length of consulting deposed Premier Imre Nagy.
Corpses on the Bridges. As soon as Russia switched to violent repression, a thousand tanks had rumbled into the city and at every cross street they were drawn up with their backs to each other in protective circles, each tank able to fire down a different street. Batteries of heavy Soviet artillery were set up on Gellert Hill, and H.E. shells were poured into buildings where resistance was spotted. But the rebels were not without resource. Said Gyula Petoki, who escaped: "During World War II the Germans had made doors in cellars between houses so that people could move around during air raids. When the war ended the doors were bricked up. But we remembered them and ripped them open again so that we could go from house to house." The surviving security police (AVH), creeping out of their lairs, were hungry for revenge. Soon there were rebel corpses hanging from the Danube bridges. In their mouths paper money was stuffed, and across their bodies were signs: "These men fought for capitalists."
In front of their flimsy barricades the rebels put pictures of Stalin, Lenin and Molotov, saying: "They will have to shoot their own leaders before they get us." On one side of the Hungaria Korut lay a row of wounded rebel fighters, on the other a first-aid station. Every time a Red Cross man crossed the street he was brought down by Russian fire. Other Red Cross men spun ropes across the street. The wounded tied the ropes to their legs and were dragged to the first-aid station.
Telephone lines between Vienna and Budapest went dead next day, but Radio Rakoczi, identified by Radio Free Europe monitors as a mobile rebel station, became a regular station, gained in strength, and reported the stirring battles of the "Seventh Patriots." Two Russian tanks were set on fire by youths with gas bombs in Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Street. On Izabella Street grenades thrown from windows scattered a squad of marching Russian infantry. A few minutes later tanks and artillery came rolling down the street, shot up the whole neighborhood. In one house the Russians found the 13-year-old son of the porter with an open clasp knife in his hand. They smashed his head with rifle butts.