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The restless and articulate Hungarian intellectuals who sparked the revolt of Oct. 23, mostly young Communists, were not thinking in terms of Lenin, but of the Hungarian patriots who revolted against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848. The street and rooftop fighters, who took over the struggle from the intellectuals, performed their self-appointed tasks with a valor, pride and gallantry that is found only in the revolutionary traditions of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Then, as their strength was exhausted in the battle against modern steel, the fight was taken over by the stolid nerveless men of the factories, inspired by Utopian ideals of a democratic workers' state. The Man of the Year was an amalgam of all these men and of all their qualities.
Did Hungary's Freedom Fighters hope to win? The answer is that, unlike the Poles before them, who infiltrated the party apparatus and to an extent controlled their break from Moscow, they did not pause to think that far ahead. Their motto might well have been that of another great romantic, William of Orange: "One need not hope in order to act, nor succeed in order to persevere.''
Who were these men and women, and in some cases children, who so acted? Among the thousands who made Hungary's revolution, it was possible to see, in a few individuals, those qualities and characteristics that made the whole thing credible.
Janos Feher
Janos Feher was one of the score of young intellectuals who, without being Aware of it, set the stage for the Oct. 23 revolt.
There was nothing particularly chauvinistic about Janos. His father, a mason, was the village socialist in the hamlet where Janos was born 26 years ago. What Janos got from his father was not patriotism but a thirst for knowledge. He was a thin, blond boy whose Roman nose was never out of a book. He joined the Communist Party at the age of 16, and this got him a scholarship to Budapest University.
The rigors of Marxist education—the interminable indoctrination lectures, the slanted subjects—soon disillusioned Janos, and he became one of that considerable group of discontented students who have sprung up in all Soviet countries. He wrote a novel about village life and was severely rebuked by the party for attempting to sabotage the People's Democracy. He and some other students wrote and performed a sharp satire on the wreck of Mt. Olympus (i.e., Russian Communism) and were investigated by the AVH, the Hungarian secret police. But the police did nothing to them because the students and intellectuals enjoy a special place in Communist regimes, providing the reservoir of skill and talent on which the bureaucracy continuously draws. A friend remembers Janos as saying before the revolt: "The workers and the peasants hate the regime because they know it is wrong and evil. They accept this and go on working. But we intellectuals are paid to lie about the regime. The workers know we lie, and so they hate us too. But the truth is we hate ourselves for lying."