Itt-Ott, 1986 (19. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
1986 / 4. szám
OKTÓBERI ÁTHOZAT Andrew Ludanyi (Ada, 0H> 1936 THEN AND TODAY: A YEAS TO REMEMBER (Talk delivered in Portland, Oregon, Oct 31, 1986) It is good to be back in Portland again and to see familiar faces, to see people I have not seen in such a long time. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your invitation to this commemorative celebration of the 1956 Hungarian Fight for Freedom. Like everything else in life, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 can be examined from a number of different perspectives. At the most general level, it can be dissected and evaluated with the objective aloofness of the scholarly community - or it can be reviewed with the emotional involvement, the pain and the trauma of the participant eyewitness. Even though I have been part of the academic scene for some 20 years now, 1956 for me is still an event, a happening, that I cannot approach without personal involvement - this is the case even though I was neither an eyewitness, nor a participant When I think of 1956, I can think of only two words in description: magnificence and tragedy! I remember the pride and the sorrow, the anger and the anguish, the helplessness and the frustration I felt as a teenager growing up in New York City; experiencing the 1956 Revolution on the comer of 68th Street and Madison Avenue, from a street demonstration in front of the Soviet UN mission, thousands of miles from the actual confrontation was not the same as the experience of those young Hungarians who actually threw the Molotov cocktails against overwhelming Soviet power. Yet_. this far-off, indirect experience - this indirect involvement - touched me to such an extent, that it still provides my life with guideposts for my own selfdefinition and gives meaning to my individual existence. Thirty years ago, this event shook Eastern Europe to its very foundations and provided many of you, who are in this room today, with the opportunity to become refugees, emigres, or immigrants _ and eventually Hungarian-Americans. The Hungarian October of 1956 can be examined in a number of different ways - as I have said depending on where one stands. From the perspective of 30 years hindsight, the impact of this momentous occasion can perhaps be understood even more clearly than it was understood at the time, when all participants and outside observers were deeply involved emotionally. The trauma and the agony made us all focus on the immediate struggle, on the drama, on the heroism, and on the hopeless odds. Only later did we begin to appreciate what had really happened and what it has meant for our lives and our self-definition. From the newsreporter's perspective, what was significant was that the monolithic structure of the Eastern Bloc was forever shattered. Although the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 had already driven the first wedge into the Stalinist edifice, it took the Hungarian fight for freedom to open the crack into a gaping crevice. It also caught the imagination of the newsreporters in the West: because it rekindled those fires of the soul which feed the eternal aspirations of mankind for freedom. Furthermore, the David-Goliath proportions of the conflict made good copy! From the perspective of the Soviet leaders, Hungary posed a totally new situation. It shook their hold over Eastern Europe and challenged their claims that they represented the interests of the exploited masses, the workers, the downtrodden and the poor. In Hungary, they were forced to look into the mirror to see the Bolshevik internationalist as the Russian imperialist - whose methods they now adopted, whose inheritance they could not shake off. American leaders were also taken by surprise. Although the Eisenhower-Dulles team had been preaching "roll-back'' and "liberation", all of a sudden they were forced to put up or shut up. They chose the latter course as their response. In retrospect, we know that the American presidential elections of November, 1956 were the critical consideration _ the elections, and the Anglo-French-lsraeli attack against Egypt A drop of Middle-Eastern oil (to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau) was (and is) worth more than a drop of East European blood _ so went the reasoning of the Western world, even if the flow of rhetoric in the UN covered over the crassness, the vulgarity, - and, indeed, in the long run - the shortsightedness of this line of self-justification. 8 T-------Í
