(See Cover)
The world entered 1956 with a full complement of great men: national leaders, statesmen, philosophers, artists and scientists, many of whom, pursuing their legitimate vocations, would be remembered among the great names of the epoch. But the man who put his stamp on this particular year—the Man of the Year—was not on the roster of the world's great when the year began. Nor could anyone have guessed his identity, even when the year had run four-fifths of its course. Yet by year's end, this man was seen to have shaken history's greatest despotism to its foundations.
The ultimate consequences of his action could only be assessed in the future. But the effect upon European political and military alignments was already stupendous. He had actually lowered, by some 80 divisions, the combat potential of the world's most menacing army by showing that its colonial conscripts could no longer be relied upon. The Kremlin's current irresolution owes much to him. So does Communism's great loss of prestige around the world. Bulganin and Khrushchev, because of him, could not now expect to be received at Buckingham Palace or make the same kind of laughing-boy junket through Asia, and all over Western Europe, disillusioned Communist sympathizers turned away in nausea. Destroyed also was the 1984 fantasy that a whole generation could be taught to believe that wrong was right, or could be emptied of all integrity and curiosity. But his greatest triumph was moral: he demonstrated the profound and needful truth that humanity is not necessarily forever bound and gagged by modern terrorist political techniques. Thus he gave to millions, and specifically to the youth of Eastern Europe, the hope for a foreseeable end to the long night of Communist dictatorship.
The Man of the Year had many faces, but he was not faceless; he had many names, but he was not nameless. History would know him by the face, intense, relentless, desperate and determined, that he had worn on the evening of Oct. 23 in the streets of Budapest; history would know him by the name he had chosen for himself during his dauntless contest with Soviet tanks: the Hungarian Freedom Fighter.
The Special Quality. Hungarians are not very good plotters. The art of conspiracy—so well understood, practiced and detected by the Russians—would have been self-defeating in their struggle. What the Hungarians, a people of a special heritage and a unique language, did have was an overpowering common impulse, spirit or emotion, which suddenly united all classes against their enemy without the necessity of planning or leadership. The emotion had its origin in shared sufferings under the Russian police state, but it was made strong and enduring because it was tempered by that impracticable and, in Marxist terms, most despised of qualities, romanticism.