It began like a carnival day. Thousands of people thronged Budapest's old cobblestoned streets wearing red, white and green boutonnieres, tossing red, white and green ribbons into passing cars. Then gradually the crowd began to gather at focal points and to express its will, and then to march. A scared Communist official told an American businessman: "The earth is moving."
The earth moved to the tread of a million feet in Hungary last week, and a satellite which had been blindly spinning in the Soviet orbit for eleven years suddenly swung out of its gravitational course into a still unsteady national axis. It had never happened before. As the world looked on, incredulous, a people armed principally with courage and determination (and a few filched guns) fought one of the most spectacular revolutions of modern times. Behind barricades, from rooftops and apartment windows, they harried their powerful oppressors in the classic revolutionary manner, and at week's end they had wrung from the most ruthless of modern despotisms a promise of the right to be free.
In any fight to the finish, Soviet tanks might win military control because an unorganized, unfed people cannot fight for long against an organized army. Thousands of Hungarians would be dead or seriously wounded. But what mattered to Hungary as a nation was that her Soviet overlords had been forced to dissolve their all-Communist government and set up in its place a government that included non-Communist elements. The Soviet leaders might later attempt to hedge on this concession, but the fact was that they had made it in front of the whole world. This was the first time in their history that the Soviet leaders had done this, and the implications of their act went far beyond Hungary. That was why the events in Hungary on this foggy October day were of such vital concern to the world.
Eleven-Year Silence. Poland's break with Russia was the spark. Hungarian students got permission to express sympathy with the Poles by gathering silently before Budapest's Polish embassy. Then the Central Committee of the Communist Party canceled the permit. Party Leader Erno Gero, belatedly conferring with Tito on means to "liberalize" the regime and expected back from Belgrade that day, wanted no political demonstrations. At noon there were angry student meetings in every college. At the Polytechnic a printing press was seized, a broadsheet printed. Budapest came out to see the student fun. Said an old woman: "We have been silent for eleven years. Today nothing will stop us." There was no hint of the violence to come.