Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly reminder that when bad things happen, people often
Speaker 2: do good things in response to the bad things. I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Mio
Speaker 2: Wong Hi. Hello.
Speaker 3: Hello, very very excited, very excited to be back for
Speaker 3: my annual traditional all the Communists Get Shot episode.
Speaker 2: It seems to be the onson I've always saw. I see,
Speaker 2: I did give me heads up about this. Well, I
Speaker 2: was like, who do I know who knows this history
Speaker 2: and theory enough to talk about this with me? And
Speaker 2: I guess I'm always like, I can't spoil the subject
Speaker 2: to the listener because the listener has read the episode description. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but before we talk about our subject, we should talk
Speaker 2: about the fact that our producer is Sophie Sophie. That's me.
Speaker 2: I'm Sophie. I'm very glad that Sophie is back. That's Mia,
Speaker 2: I'm Sophie. We also have an audio engineer who's named Rory. Hi.
Speaker 2: Rory Hi, RII Hi Rory. Our theme music was written
Speaker 2: for us by Unwoman this week. I've been really excited
Speaker 2: about doing this episode. You have, You've talked about it
Speaker 2: for a minute. I know, I know this was on
Speaker 2: my long list at the very very beginning when I
Speaker 2: sat down to plan out doing this show. Hell ya,
Speaker 2: but I felt like I hadn't earned it yet.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I also felt like I had to come to learn
Speaker 2: more about the general context. Okay, so today, this week,
Speaker 2: we are going to talk about one of the most
Speaker 2: referenced but least discussed and most misunderstood moments in Western
Speaker 2: political history. We are going to talk about the Hungarian
Speaker 2: Revolution of nineteen fifty six. Mia, you ever heard of
Speaker 2: the Hungarian Revolution of nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 3: You know, this is the most oh god, I whatever
Speaker 3: I hear about this. Now I get my like fucking
Speaker 3: war flashbacks to the dis course trenches, and I'm thinking
Speaker 3: about this guy posting this picture that he said was like,
Speaker 3: this is the Hungarian revolutionaries lynching a Jewish man. And
Speaker 3: then someone found the guys, like they found the guy's tombstone,
Speaker 3: and it turned out that it was a Christian secret
Speaker 3: police agent. So this is one of the most unhinged,
Speaker 3: like discourse wise revolutions of all time. I'm excited to
Speaker 3: hear about this because, like I have, I guess what
Speaker 3: you would call the like mid level anarchist understanding of this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: where like I don't know, like I've read my COLR. James,
Speaker 3: I guess who writes about this a couple of times,
Speaker 3: but like I don't actually I'm not actually like like
Speaker 3: I've read accounts of it, but I'm really interested to
Speaker 3: see whether my conclusions about it are backed up by
Speaker 3: like the fullness of history, because I have I have
Speaker 3: like takes about this.
Speaker 2: But yeah, And that's one of the hardest things about
Speaker 2: this event for anyone who's just coming in, who's like,
Speaker 2: I have no idea what you all are talking about.
Speaker 2: The reason that this revolution is so talked about without
Speaker 2: actually being talked about, and it's a thing that everyone
Speaker 2: has opinions about without actually reading about, is that this
Speaker 2: revolution is famous on the internet today because one of
Speaker 2: my favorite pejoratives, tanky, derives from this event. It is
Speaker 2: the word for people who cheer on the antagonists of
Speaker 2: the Hungarian Revolution. It's a word for people who watch
Speaker 2: Star Wars and think, you know, Aldron really had it coming,
Speaker 2: so I'm gonna do instead of a Lord of the
Speaker 2: Rings reference. That's what I figured. That was really weird.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, I actually know so much less
Speaker 2: about Star Wars. Oh, don't worry, don't worry, I got
Speaker 2: you covered. I got cover it. Okay, okay, between the
Speaker 2: two of us, the shortest version of this history that
Speaker 2: I could talk, I could I could come up with.
Speaker 2: Hungary was a Soviet satellite state. It was not part
Speaker 2: of the USSO, but it was part of the Warsaw Pact.
Speaker 2: The aligned communist countries who shared a military alliance, who
Speaker 2: thought that they had some vague semblance of the USSR
Speaker 2: until they realized they didn't. They found themselves basically extracted
Speaker 2: from colonies of the USSR. Economically, the economic conditions in Hungary,
Speaker 2: as well as in Poland and other places like that,
Speaker 2: were absolutely terrible. Still, most people living there on some
Speaker 2: level believed in socialism or communism, not the Soviet occupation
Speaker 2: and the local authoritarian regime. But people were overall left
Speaker 2: of center. So a bunch of young communists in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, like the official youth branch of the Communist Party,
Speaker 2: they had a demonstration in support of some other socialists
Speaker 2: facing repression in Poland, and they found themselves machine gunned
Speaker 2: for their trouble. So the country revolted and they did
Speaker 2: what most cool people revolutions do. They set up workers
Speaker 2: councils to create workplace democracy and run a socialist country
Speaker 2: from the bottom up. The Soviets invaded with tanks. The
Speaker 2: Red Army put down the revolution. The whole thing lasted
Speaker 2: more or less three weeks, though fighting went on in
Speaker 2: the countryside, and especially strikes went on across the country
Speaker 2: for months afterwards. Those three weeks changed everything for good.
Speaker 2: Because the Iron Curtain went down for a moment, and
Speaker 2: the line that separated Soviet influenced countries from the rest
Speaker 2: of the world. Foreign journalists were able to pour into
Speaker 2: the country and actually cover what happened firsthand, including a
Speaker 2: lot of Western communists came which, by the way, the
Speaker 2: fact that everyone argues about what happened in this revolution
Speaker 2: is particularly funny because we have all of the documents,
Speaker 2: we have the official Communist Party reports, we have lots
Speaker 2: of first hand reports from all these participants from all
Speaker 2: over the political spectrum. Actually just look, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: got to read more first like primary sources that I
Speaker 2: usually get to for this particular episode, you know. And
Speaker 2: so while the border was down, about two hundred thousand
Speaker 2: people fled the country, spoiler alert for the US in
Speaker 2: the near future. Strong borders are as much about keeping
Speaker 2: people in the country as they are at keeping people
Speaker 2: out of the country, And these people who fled brought
Speaker 2: with them the truth about life under Soviet control. If
Speaker 2: you read a lot of communist history, like I somehow
Speaker 2: wound up doing not ever something I had originally intended,
Speaker 2: you notice that all the original Bolsheviks, you know, whenever
Speaker 2: you're reading about like some Bolshevik who's like, ah, it's
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty three and I'm doing a thing, you know,
Speaker 2: and you're like dead nineteen thirty six. Yeah, Like, how
Speaker 2: come they all died nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2: What's going on there? They were all purged by Stalin
Speaker 2: in the Great Purge, is what happened all the original Bolsheviks,
Speaker 2: not all of them, but a huge number of the
Speaker 2: original Bolsheviks get got by their own Bolshevik party. But
Speaker 2: there's another slightly more subtle, but only slightly more subtle
Speaker 2: shift that you see too when you read about Western communists. Yep,
Speaker 2: any of the ones who are actually doing cool things
Speaker 2: and actually have some fucking heart, the ones who fought
Speaker 2: for social justice against fascism did all the good stuff,
Speaker 2: like a ton of the Italian Partisans fall into this?
Speaker 2: Last week's episodes had several of those main characters that
Speaker 2: we talked about last week were Italian communists who all
Speaker 2: left the Communist Party in the nineteen fifties yep, Because
Speaker 2: after the Hungarian Revolution they could no longer believe that
Speaker 2: the USSR and the Communist Party was a force for
Speaker 2: good or even a force for communism. It was this
Speaker 2: I'm still doing the quick version of it, I swear
Speaker 2: it was this split in the UK Communist Party that
Speaker 2: led to people getting called tankies for their support of
Speaker 2: the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It is a word that
Speaker 2: was used by communists and socialists against authoritarians, and yet
Speaker 2: online authoritarian communists love to claim that the word tanky
Speaker 2: is used against them because they're communists, when actually that's
Speaker 2: completely just not true. To be fair, a lot of
Speaker 2: right wing people, including like centrist capitalists, do use the word,
Speaker 2: which I guess is centrist not whatever. Anyway, a lot
Speaker 2: of people, including capitalists and right wing people use the
Speaker 2: word tanky to critique communists at large, and that is
Speaker 2: a misuse. It is only for the people who support
Speaker 2: the enemy of today. Yep.
Speaker 3: There's an interesting thing that like one of the things
Speaker 3: you read about like the American Communist Party, well, the
Speaker 3: thing that they believe in like the thirties and forties
Speaker 3: is really weird because like if you like read the
Speaker 3: descriptions of what they think the USSR is, it's like
Speaker 3: weirdly like syndicalists, like they think it's this kind of
Speaker 3: like they think it's the thing that the Soviet is
Speaker 3: supposed to be, where it's like it's like this republic
Speaker 3: of like these workers councils, right, and they like all
Speaker 3: believe this, and they all believe this, and they all
Speaker 3: believe this, and then like like even through Stalin right,
Speaker 3: like they're all like you watch all these people who
Speaker 3: are like absolutely convinced that like yeah, this is all
Speaker 3: just sort of like like all of the stuff and
Speaker 3: the terrors like capitalist propaganda and then Hungary hits and
Speaker 3: they're like, oh shit, is It's fascinating because it plays
Speaker 3: like all over the world. You get like versions of this.
Speaker 3: There's a really funny one in China where they like
Speaker 3: the Hungarian Revolution in like actually sort of inspires like
Speaker 3: a wave of like kind of unrest in China over it,
Speaker 3: because yeah, it's like not super well known, but there's
Speaker 3: like kind of like a wave of strikes and like
Speaker 3: you can like see like a kind of like peaking
Speaker 3: of this that it's one of the things that kind
Speaker 3: of like it's one of the things that influences like
Speaker 3: the Thousand Flowers campaign and in China where like there's
Speaker 3: this period there's a very brief period in like fifty
Speaker 3: six and fifty seven where you can like sort of
Speaker 3: openly criticize the party and like it's lines and like
Speaker 3: what it's been doing, and then immediately that it all
Speaker 3: gets cracked down on because it's a lot of it
Speaker 3: is this attempt to sort of like draw out the
Speaker 3: kinds of dissonance that had been you know, like like
Speaker 3: that stuff I had been intensifying as like as like
Speaker 3: fifty six went on because there's there's all this unrest
Speaker 3: in poland there's all this like there's all that happens
Speaker 3: in Hungary and like that like pisses people off, and
Speaker 3: there's like people in the streets of like Beijing chanting
Speaker 3: here another Hungary, whoa, and they all get fucking murdered.
Speaker 2: Also it was another Hungary. They were right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they all died right, like you know, like and this
Speaker 2: thing goes on. But it's also really funny because so
Speaker 2: the official like Chinese Communist party line is that, like
Speaker 2: the Hungarians were all fascists and they all deserve to
Speaker 2: be killed. But later on, because they swit from the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union, their line is that the progue spring in
Speaker 2: Czechoslovakia was a genuine workers uprising against the Soviets, okay,
Speaker 2: because that was after the break or whatever. Yeah, that
Speaker 2: was after the break. Is such a baffling position.
Speaker 3: Like my my apps, I don't know if my favorite one,
Speaker 3: but I do want to this one. It was one
Speaker 3: of the Italian autonomists had this line that was like
Speaker 3: the Hungarians were right to revolt and also the Soviets
Speaker 3: were right to repress.
Speaker 2: Them, which is like the most cognitive I've seen, so
Speaker 2: like people tie themselves in ideological knots around this problem,
Speaker 2: like all over the world, like like in every continent,
Speaker 2: it's people are like trying to square the Soviets just
Speaker 2: like openly acting as like the guys who fed the
Speaker 2: workers to the machine guns. And it breaks so many
Speaker 2: people's brains in so many fascinating ways. I think it's
Speaker 2: because the like the tanky mind right, has this idea
Speaker 2: where like it's just an axiom that the USSR was
Speaker 2: good and so everything has to be warped around that,
Speaker 2: and they're like, well, I guess you know, I don't
Speaker 2: know you just said about like, oh, they were right
Speaker 2: to resist, but also they were right to be cracked
Speaker 2: down on. You just have to like come up with
Speaker 2: ways to try and make it fit. And I think
Speaker 2: one of the things that's so fascinating is that I
Speaker 2: didn't come up in any kind of context in which
Speaker 2: I would have to bother defending the idea that Stalin
Speaker 2: was a bad man, Like yeah, you're like, well, that's
Speaker 2: just self evident. And it's not just because I like
Speaker 2: grew up in Cold War United States. I think any objective,
Speaker 2: big picture view, it's like, well Stalin was bad, you know,
Speaker 2: like the fact that we have to argue this, okay, anyway,
Speaker 2: so it's ridiculous, yeah, right away. As soon as this
Speaker 2: Hungarian revolution happened, there's actually this you know, you can
Speaker 2: have that meme of two arms holding hands, you know,
Speaker 2: the two muscle arms holding hands. Yeah, of the USSR
Speaker 2: and the West both claiming the Hungarian revolution is capitalist. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 2: The West was like, see these people revolted because they
Speaker 2: love democracy and capitalism and rock and roll or whatever.
Speaker 2: And the USSR was like, see these people love capitalism
Speaker 2: and rock and roll or whatever and the bourgeoisie, you know,
Speaker 2: and they're both wrong and or lying. And I think
Speaker 2: the governments are lying, and then the individuals who believe
Speaker 2: the governments are wrong.
Speaker 3: And this is the thing that like this happens so
Speaker 3: many times over the course of this thing, because like
Speaker 3: you know, I mean one of my like Hungry takes
Speaker 3: right is that it is part of this line of
Speaker 3: revolutions that is kind of distinct in some sense from
Speaker 3: like what you would call the Soviet mainline, even though
Speaker 3: I would argue it starts in like nineteen oh five
Speaker 3: with the workers councils. Was like, for like one hundred years,
Speaker 3: the thing that you were doing, if you were doing revolution,
Speaker 3: basically from like nineteen oh five in Russia through like
Speaker 3: two thousand and one in Argentina, was you would seize
Speaker 3: control of your workplace and formal workers council.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's so many of these, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: this is still a good idea frankly, yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 2: it is. And like I mean they're like, like you know,
Speaker 2: you can look at like Spain, like Hungary is one
Speaker 2: of the famous ones. Like this happened in Algeria, this
Speaker 2: happened in like Czechoslovakia, it happens in Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Now now that I'm trying to list this off, I'm
Speaker 2: forgetting a whole bunch of them, a bunch of places. Yeah, totally. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like you know, like I mean people do this in
Speaker 2: like Shanghai, they do this in Yeah, it happens to Vietnam.
Speaker 3: Briefly, Like it's just like all over the world. People
Speaker 3: do this for like one hundred years. It happens in Italy,
Speaker 3: in France, and like because they're trying to do socialism, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're trying to do socialism. The thing is like, like
Speaker 3: and this is this is the really effective ideological tactic
Speaker 3: that both the Soviets and the Americans use, which is
Speaker 3: that they both were like democracy is capitalism, and so
Speaker 3: everyone tries to claim all of these revolutions that are
Speaker 3: like like if you read like a conventional American history
Speaker 3: of this, they will call this a liberal revolution. They
Speaker 3: will call them liberalizing reforms. It's like, right, No, they weren't.
Speaker 3: This is all stuff that's further left than the Soviets.
Speaker 3: It's like they're trying. They formed the workers' councils again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the most recent, of course co option of
Speaker 2: this revolution has been the Hungarian nationalists and the right
Speaker 2: wing parties who are like and they have no more
Speaker 2: of a legitimate claim on it than anyone else, which
Speaker 2: is to say the people have a legitimate claim on it.
Speaker 2: Are bottom up socialists. That is far and away the
Speaker 2: largest chunk of this revolution, as the Belgian and French
Speaker 2: movement communists. It looks like movement communists. I don't know
Speaker 2: that they drop a lot of letters as they wrote
Speaker 2: about it. The nineteen fifty six revolution in Hungary was
Speaker 2: a worker's revolution. The workers constituted the majority of the
Speaker 2: combatants and deaths against the Russian Army, the AVO, the
Speaker 2: secret police, and the hostile elements of the Hungarian army.
Speaker 2: The workers organized themselves into councils and tried, in extremely
Speaker 2: difficult conditions to elaborate a political and theoretical program which
Speaker 2: can be criticized today, but which constituted a high point
Speaker 2: of the limits of its time, and whenever you research
Speaker 2: something Cold War related, you have to weighe through an
Speaker 2: ocean of misinformation and contradictory sources. Like you. I came
Speaker 2: in with like my assumption of a take right, and
Speaker 2: I actually, I actually thought it was going to be
Speaker 2: a little bit more politically diverse and a little bit
Speaker 2: more liberal. That was actually what I was kind of
Speaker 2: coming into it thinking, because I didn't I didn't want
Speaker 2: to like hold my breath and hope for it to
Speaker 2: be like really cool.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I still haven't read everything on this. There's so
Speaker 2: much written about this, or so many eyewitnesses, but I
Speaker 2: tried to cast as wide of a net as I could.
Speaker 2: I wound up reading Soviets with a lot of declassified information,
Speaker 2: a lot of non tanky communists like the Movement Communist,
Speaker 2: a lot of anarchists, a lot of capitalists on the issue,
Speaker 2: and I feel like I have a decent sense of it.
Speaker 2: The Hungarian Revolution is maybe one of the clearest examples
Speaker 2: of I've ever seen of something that we've discussed again
Speaker 2: and again on this show. Sometimes even when you lose,
Speaker 2: you win, just by fighting, you win. The Hungarian Revolution
Speaker 2: famously a failed revolution, right, and that's like, oh, we
Speaker 2: hear about it. It showed that the authoritarianism of the
Speaker 2: USSR more plainly to the West, and in particular to
Speaker 2: Western leftists, than anything else had before it. By invading
Speaker 2: their own satellite state, the USSR torpedoed any chance they
Speaker 2: had of winning the Cold War, as my argument, because
Speaker 2: they entirely and irrecoverably broke the international communist movement by
Speaker 2: so blatantly giving up on their principles. But you know
Speaker 2: it isn't giving up on my principles. Oh no, the
Speaker 2: foundings and services that support this podcast, that's right. Oh no,
Speaker 2: I support all of them because I'm a liberal revolution
Speaker 2: that's me. Here's some stuff. I like all of it.
Speaker 2: And Rebeck, So I feel like half the stories we
Speaker 2: talk about and okay, now I'm gonna do the context part.
Speaker 2: Everyone's been waiting for that. I feel like half the
Speaker 2: stories we talk about in Europe could be traced back
Speaker 2: to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight, which makes sense.
Speaker 2: The revolutions of eighteen forty eight were the anvil on
Speaker 2: which most modern socialist ideologies were formed, and more than
Speaker 2: people necessarily realize, like socialism and liberalism and all of
Speaker 2: these different sort of modern political ideologies were in response
Speaker 2: to each other. Socialism wasn't just a like something that
Speaker 2: showed up late and was like, hey guys, I'm here too,
Speaker 2: you know, it's actually one of the foundational things of
Speaker 2: the modern political landscape. We're not going to get into
Speaker 2: the revolutions of eighteen forty eight two greatly because I
Speaker 2: don't know. One day, when I have nothing else to do,
Speaker 2: I'll probably spend an entire year covering the revolutions of
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight. There's so many of them, there's so
Speaker 2: much stuff. It's I know, I know, you can throw
Speaker 2: I think Wagner is in a story at some point.
Speaker 2: Marx is in it, Pecuon's in it, pacoonin comes off
Speaker 2: a little bit better.
Speaker 3: A guy who challenged Marks to a duel is in it.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, it's August.
Speaker 2: I think I actually just want to read historical fiction
Speaker 2: about eighteen forty eight. I actually don't think. I don't
Speaker 2: want to read. It's too much stuff. It's too much,
Speaker 2: it's too big, h which is why I do a
Speaker 2: little segmented podcast for everyone. So one thing that is
Speaker 2: important to understand about the Hungarian Revolution in particular, but
Speaker 2: also the eighteen forty eight revolution. Is that nationalism in
Speaker 2: the ninth middle of the nineteenth century, it was both
Speaker 2: new and leftist, not in a national socialist way. Words
Speaker 2: just change meanings. Sometimes. Hungarian nationalists were fighting for independence
Speaker 2: from the Austrian Empire. They were spurred on less by like,
Speaker 2: but we want our own flag, and we love Hungary
Speaker 2: and hate everyone who's not Hungarian. And more, we want
Speaker 2: a democracy because actually I didn't realize this Hungary is
Speaker 2: like one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the fucking world.
Speaker 2: Like they had like shit going back to like thirteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: I think I didn't end up including all of that
Speaker 2: in my script, so now I'm just winging it. But
Speaker 2: they were like, look, we wanted democracy is now in
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight times and they were like, we want
Speaker 2: a democracy and the king said yes. But then the
Speaker 2: king was replaced by another king who said no, you
Speaker 2: can't have it. Orb's a emperor or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 2: The rebels put up a really serious fight and it
Speaker 2: took Austria making common cause with Russia to put them down.
Speaker 2: So there's a history of Russia invading Austria and democracy
Speaker 2: while the rest of Europe was modernizing with textiles and mines.
Speaker 2: Hungary was modernizing with flour mills. They were a key
Speaker 2: point for food trade around Europe, and they started more
Speaker 2: properly urban industrializing kind of late in the game. They
Speaker 2: don't really have like iron ore. There's like some mines
Speaker 2: and I think the north of the country where's some hills,
Speaker 2: but like its resources as they can grow stuff, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's cultural, yeah, which famously doesn't imagine being a like
Speaker 2: I'm a country and I'm like all that matters is industry.
Speaker 2: To hell with food and you're like, how is that?
Speaker 2: What's your plan there? Like, don't you realize you got
Speaker 2: to eat food?
Speaker 3: Like that's they're calling it the Great Leap Forward. It
Speaker 3: goes forward, which were that is admittedly a simplistic explanation,
Speaker 3: the Great Leap Forward, that's not really accurate.
Speaker 2: But oh god does that mean? Is that what? Like,
Speaker 2: because we're trying to bring back adustrial production of the
Speaker 2: United States, We the fascists are trying to bring back
Speaker 2: industrial production to the United States right now? Is that
Speaker 2: going to be a problem?
Speaker 3: Okay, I will give I will give my one sentence
Speaker 3: rant about that, which is that that is deeply unfair
Speaker 3: to the Great Leap Forward comparing it to this, because
Speaker 3: the Great Leap Forward, at the very least was a
Speaker 3: response to a production bottleneck, okay, where they didn't have
Speaker 3: enough cultural goods to produce more like industrial goods. But
Speaker 3: they also couldn't increase your agricultural output with that increasing
Speaker 3: your industrial output.
Speaker 2: And this is causing an inflationary crisis, and so they
Speaker 2: tried to like just power their way through it with
Speaker 2: pure what if you made everyone work harder and it
Speaker 2: turns out that's a terrible idea, okay, and take people
Speaker 2: out of agriculture and put them in other things, terrible idea.
Speaker 2: I think instead of comparing this to the Great Leap Forward,
Speaker 2: I want to compare it to something that's going to
Speaker 2: happen a little bit later in this story in Hungary.
Speaker 2: Oh hell yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited. In nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: Hungary tried to do a revolution. We covered this a
Speaker 2: little bit on the Bela Lugosi Vampire episodes because one
Speaker 2: of some of my favs, some of my favor I oh,
Speaker 2: I know it turns out in case anyone's curious, go
Speaker 2: look for the vampires are on our side because Bella Lagosi,
Speaker 2: the original Dracula, fought in the nineteen nineteen uprising and
Speaker 2: had to flee the country, and also Max Shrek, the
Speaker 2: other famous vampire actor from around the same time, was
Speaker 2: a leftist anti fascist bouncer in Weimar, Germany. Anyway, So
Speaker 2: nineteen nineteen Hungary tried to do a revolution, and they
Speaker 2: tried to do it the actual communist way, where you
Speaker 2: set up workers councils soviets and then have a bottom
Speaker 2: up socialist society, which is, as you pointed out, the
Speaker 2: way that every revolution tries to start, and then it
Speaker 2: often either gets crushed or it gets co opted by authoritarians, right,
Speaker 2: which is just so funny to me because there's like
Speaker 2: a really clear structure. It's not like people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: you just want socialism, but you don't want to do anything.
Speaker 2: They're like, no, we have this structural idea and we've
Speaker 2: tested it time and time again, where we create a
Speaker 2: federation of these councils and then they go up to
Speaker 2: the bigger councils and they all talk and it's bottom
Speaker 2: up instead of top down, and like, that's just what
Speaker 2: socialism fucking meant. Until the twentieth century when anyway, whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what a bunch of people read about the German post
Speaker 3: office and we're like, holy shit, what if socialism was
Speaker 3: to post office. You think I'm joking, Go read your letted.
Speaker 3: She will make this argument.
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 2: I am not surprised. So nineteen nineteen fails in Hungary,
Speaker 2: Bella Lagosi has to flee. I think he goes to
Speaker 2: buymar Germany before he comes to the States. I can't remember.
Speaker 2: It was hammer Max Shrek who came as an undocumented migrant,
Speaker 2: and after World War One, Hungary ended up in a
Speaker 2: bad spot. They ended up with a national conservative something
Speaker 2: akin to but different from, a fascist in charge. His
Speaker 2: name is Admiral Horthy and he ruled from nineteen nineteen
Speaker 2: until the end of World War Two. He was totally
Speaker 2: down to join the Access Powers in World War Two.
Speaker 2: If you want to read so much cope, you should
Speaker 2: read his Wikipedia article because it is full of cope
Speaker 2: about the number of Jews he sent off to die.
Speaker 2: Oh God, because he is the only Axis Power leader
Speaker 2: I believe to survive the war. So he got to
Speaker 2: like write a memoir Jesus Christ. Anyway, so he joins
Speaker 2: the Axis powers in World War Two. He's also like, uh,
Speaker 2: just kidding, I hate the Axis Allies. Can you take
Speaker 2: me once the Red Army is like at his door?
Speaker 2: Oh no, And since he was starting to get disloyal,
Speaker 2: he got the Italy treatment. Germany invaded and occupied Hungary.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, they'd already deported some Jewish people, but
Speaker 2: once Germany occupied it was like four hundred thousand Jews
Speaker 2: were sent to their deaths. Jesus Christ. Yeah, and like
Speaker 2: his whole thing is He's like, I tried to stop.
Speaker 2: I tried to only send one hundred thousand. And I'm like, man,
Speaker 2: you kill one person and you go to prison for
Speaker 2: the rest of your life. I'm just gonna say this,
Speaker 2: like they the number I wish you should just die
Speaker 2: is one. Yeah, Like yeah, like this, why do we
Speaker 2: let this guy live through this? Like what the fuck? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Because he was like he's like the reluctant Axis guy.
Speaker 2: That's his like whole vibe. And I swear to God,
Speaker 2: oh no, I just had to be a Nazi, you
Speaker 2: know the horror Oh I know, God, what a pathetic
Speaker 2: fucking worm. And he was like he's just like, well,
Speaker 2: I hated communism so much. That I had to become
Speaker 2: a Nazi. Like, look, a lot of us have spent
Speaker 2: our entire political careers hating both the USSR and the fascists. Okay, also, like, like,
Speaker 2: which did Churchill fun against the Nazis? You have no excuse?
Speaker 2: Totally totally, God damn it. When the Soviets, the Soviets
Speaker 2: come and they capture Hungary and they put a guy
Speaker 2: named Bella Michlos in charge, and he's a there there
Speaker 2: is a lot of bias in all of the stories
Speaker 2: that you read about Hungary and anything fucking Cold War related.
Speaker 2: And so though though if you read a leftist take,
Speaker 2: including an anarchist take, they'll be like, look, the Soviets
Speaker 2: invaded and they put a Nazi in charge. This is true.
Speaker 2: They put Bella Miklos in charge. He was a Hungarian
Speaker 2: general who had an iron Cross that had been given
Speaker 2: to him by Hitler, but he had actually defected late
Speaker 2: in the war and was like literally fighting for the
Speaker 2: other side. And I don't know whatever that he wasn't
Speaker 2: a fucking good person, but like whatever, he gets the
Speaker 2: Hitler Cross for also having fought Hitler. Yeah, totally, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hitler also famously fought Hitler. True, he's sure. He's the
Speaker 2: only person you ever killed Hitler, So I know, I know,
Speaker 2: people don't give him enough credit for that. So prior
Speaker 2: to the Soviet capture of the country, and look, it
Speaker 2: was good that the Red Army captured Hungary, Like kicking
Speaker 2: out the Nazis is good, right, fuck him? Yeah, they
Speaker 2: stopped the Holocaust, like that's good. Famously, World War Two
Speaker 2: was the three less evil empires fighting the most evil empire.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, the two of them. Admittedly, yeah, okay, fair well,
Speaker 2: Italy wasn't as powerful, but oh ja yeah, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I know, you're right, You're right. I'm so sorry. I yeah,
Speaker 2: you're all.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And so, which is funny because that's even in the
Speaker 2: fucking theater of war that my family fought in. Yeah,
Speaker 2: mine too. Unfortunately, so prior to the Communists capturing the now,
Speaker 2: when I from now on, when I say communist, I'm
Speaker 2: going to mean the Communist Party, which is one of
Speaker 2: my least favorite semantic things has ever happened. But you know,
Speaker 2: imagine a capital ce. Before the Communist took the country,
Speaker 2: the Communist Party was tiny. There was a huge socialist
Speaker 2: movement in Hungary, but it was largely Social Democratic and
Speaker 2: there's also anarchists and stuff, and of course they're left
Speaker 2: out of all of the histories unless you specifically look
Speaker 2: for them. But yeah, the Social Democratic Party had ten
Speaker 2: times the number of people and they had like organized
Speaker 2: all the factory workers and shit. Soviets show up. They
Speaker 2: take over all of the existing state apparatus in the country,
Speaker 2: including the a v O. The Secret police. Like basically
Speaker 2: the Social Democrats come over at this point, and then
Speaker 2: the anarchist movement gets kind of split into a different group.
Speaker 2: Like some of them are like, we're getting the fuck
Speaker 2: out of here. Some of them are like, we're gonna
Speaker 2: fight tooth and nail against the Soviets, and some of
Speaker 2: them are like, hey, the Soviets said that we're allowed
Speaker 2: to be legitimized, and so they became like a legitimate
Speaker 2: anarchist group and then they all got liquidated. Oh never
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 3: They're always lying and never people have tried this, They
Speaker 3: always die.
Speaker 2: I know, it's Lucy with the football. Come on, Charlie Brown,
Speaker 2: just kick the football this time. Yeah. Oh god, I
Speaker 2: hate thinking about this in the context of the fact
Speaker 2: that we need a popular front in order to feed
Speaker 2: fascism anyway, so they take over. The Soviets takeover. They
Speaker 2: start stripping the place of resources, which they call reparations,
Speaker 2: so that the Hungarian workers are paid shit and all
Speaker 2: their food is going to the USSR. In nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: shit was so bad that the USSR canceled half of
Speaker 2: their reparations to avoid uprisings. J Is christ by A.
Speaker 2: Nineteen forty nine, the Hungarian Peace Republic was formed, a
Speaker 2: single party communist state. Prior to that, there was like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're like communists, but there's like elections kind of asterisk,
Speaker 2: you know. But the thing is is that the Hungarian
Speaker 2: Communist Party was kind of largely made up of these
Speaker 2: like social democrats and not actual like communists, and so
Speaker 2: they kind of are like, yeah, we're what now, Okay,
Speaker 2: I guess we're communists now whatever, And so they kind
Speaker 2: of they have this beautiful thing where they're just doing
Speaker 2: lip service to everything. They're like, oh, yeah, we're totally
Speaker 2: doing the thing, and no one's doing the thing. They're
Speaker 2: all just lying. It's brilliant rules. Yeah, and all these states,
Speaker 2: all the Soviet satellite states, they're all extracted from territories
Speaker 2: whatever you would want to call that, I would call
Speaker 2: it imperialism, but obviously words of no meaning. To quote
Speaker 2: historian Nick Heath quote, they sold to Hungary at above
Speaker 2: world prices. This is the USSR, and bought it ex
Speaker 2: sports at well below world prices. It's like how they
Speaker 2: did their economic extraction. And I have read official Communist
Speaker 2: meeting notes from the nineteen fifties where Communist Party members
Speaker 2: say things like, well, Poland thinks were ripping them off
Speaker 2: by buying their coal at terrible prices, leaving their entire
Speaker 2: economy and shambles and everyone poor as hell. But they're wrong,
Speaker 2: Like they don't offer any supporting evidence, Like the Communists
Speaker 2: say this. They're like, well, all the workers think that
Speaker 2: they're getting ripped off over a coal, which is clearly
Speaker 2: not true because the party line says it's not true.
Speaker 2: Oh and I think this is just the way that
Speaker 2: the Communist Party members like have to talk, even at
Speaker 2: the highest level. Yeah, they have to lace their speech
Speaker 2: with disclaimers. A note to the left, don't do that.
Speaker 2: Don't be forced to do that. They have to lace
Speaker 2: their speech full of disclaimers like don't worry, I toe
Speaker 2: the party line. But some people are saying all the
Speaker 2: polls are starving to death. Clearly they're wrong.
Speaker 3: I also just love the just the no one having
Speaker 3: the cost in a dissonance here of like, congratulations, we
Speaker 3: have built communism. It's based on a price system.
Speaker 2: What are we doing here? Wait? Yeah, come on, yeah,
Speaker 2: come on, meet the new boss actually different from the
Speaker 2: old boss, but just worse. Yeah, it's like it's just okay.
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, you wake up in the morning, you
Speaker 3: go to your communism job, and you get paid your
Speaker 3: communism dollars. Did you work for your communism boss? And
Speaker 3: your communism boss can have you arrested if you.
Speaker 2: It's like, what are we doing here? What was the
Speaker 2: point of this? Like, yeah, you have to pay your
Speaker 2: rent to the communism state, Like yep, yep, it's really
Speaker 2: hard to make systems worse than capitalism. And hats off
Speaker 2: to the USSR. They did their best. Yeah did they succeed,
Speaker 2: But they tried. It's a toss up. Yeah they tried
Speaker 2: little little better in some areas and worse than other areas. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're both worse. Yeah, exactly exactly the words of Actually
Speaker 2: I think that was Stealin who said they're both worse.
Speaker 2: Oh where Stalin win Salin did two good things and
Speaker 2: we'll talk about it later. Oh mayeople were gonna hold
Speaker 2: that against me if you don't keep listening, all right,
Speaker 2: you know, and hungry things were bad the five year plan,
Speaker 2: which is like not actually though I bet it's a
Speaker 2: perfectly fine way to organize an economyist to set up
Speaker 2: a five year plan. They just keep doing bad ones. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: if you listening, if you wanted your life to get better,
Speaker 2: make a five year plan to start working on it.
Speaker 2: You got to make plans in order to get anything done.
Speaker 2: So I'm not mad about a five year plan. There
Speaker 2: were some thatwork.
Speaker 3: Fine, it's just you just don't hear about them because
Speaker 3: like I don't know, like the five year plan to
Speaker 3: like develop the like I don't know, like you're running
Speaker 3: an oil system like worked kind of hell yeah, but
Speaker 3: you don't really hear much about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're like my five year plan is to
Speaker 2: make the library system more accessible, and like everyone's like
Speaker 2: ohs and eat, you know. Like from nineteen forty nine
Speaker 2: to nineteen fifty three, their five year plan involved turning
Speaker 2: an agricultural country with no iron ore or coal into
Speaker 2: a place full of heavy industry. This is the thing
Speaker 2: I was comparing this too earlier. Yeah. Yeah, the capital,
Speaker 2: Budapest in particular, was turned into a factory town making
Speaker 2: steel and guns and trucks and bikes and shit like that. Unions,
Speaker 2: of course, were dissolved. Can't have unions in your communist country.
Speaker 2: Woo hey, you could have them in China. It's just
Speaker 2: that your union doesn't get to do anything. Oh okay, Well,
Speaker 2: it's just like part of the management structure. It's great,
Speaker 2: it's great.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's not actually technically formally part of
Speaker 3: the MANUFRA structure, but like that's functionally what it does
Speaker 3: except for one time at Gianemen and then never again.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they learned their lesson. Yeah, wages fell seventy
Speaker 2: five percent between nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty two. Jesus,
Speaker 2: what the oh my god. This is the comparison I
Speaker 2: want to make when I was saying I want to
Speaker 2: make it, compare it to right now moving everything to
Speaker 2: heavy industry. But you know, it doesn't hurt the economy.
Speaker 3: The products and services support this podcast if you buy them,
Speaker 3: but if you don't buy them, it hurts the economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's actually true. It actually does. It does literally
Speaker 2: help the economy if you buy stuff. That is actually
Speaker 2: the way economies work, which is why when you decrease
Speaker 2: everyone's wages, you mess the economy up. And when you
Speaker 2: make things too expensive to afford and you have hyper inflation,
Speaker 2: it messes the economy up. But buying stuff doesn't mess
Speaker 2: the economy up unless you support things you shouldn't. And
Speaker 2: you know what that's up to you, dear listener, to
Speaker 2: listen to these products and services and think about which
Speaker 2: ones you support and which ones you don't. And I'm
Speaker 2: sure you'll agree with me that they're all good. And
Speaker 2: I have personally vetted each and every one. You can't
Speaker 2: legally say that YEES training is very clear. Interesting. I
Speaker 2: have not vetted any of these That's the actual truth.
Speaker 2: I love that I can't lie on air. See it's good.
Speaker 2: It's keeping me from lying. Here's the ads and we're back.
Speaker 2: Nineteen fifty two was the worst year in Hungarian history
Speaker 2: for agriculture. As of that year, I don't know if
Speaker 2: it got any better after that. I probably fifty five
Speaker 2: percent of people were living below the minimum standard of living.
Speaker 2: When you're like, oh, okay, well that means that forty
Speaker 2: five percent we're living above the minimum standard of living. Incorrect,
Speaker 2: Only fifteen percent of people were above the standard of living.
Speaker 2: Thirty percent of people were at it. Oh no, this
Speaker 2: is oh no, yeah, you can't be doing this to
Speaker 2: people like you simply cannot. No, it really didn't work out.
Speaker 2: One in five workers had no winter coat Jesus Christ. Like,
Speaker 2: that's like, this is something like like Chinese soldiers Moreshkua
Speaker 2: Korea with no shoes bullshit, Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 2: Like a peasant can go shoe a bear and have
Speaker 2: a coat. You know, you've made them poorer than that,
Speaker 2: Like it's actually astonishing. It's like, wow, damn the wages
Speaker 2: of imperialism. Who could possibly have guessed that resource distraction
Speaker 2: and redesigning someone's economy would it make people poor? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wow damn woo. So people were upset by this, including communists.
Speaker 2: Four hundred and eighty three thousand Communist Party members were
Speaker 2: expelled from the Communist Party over this period. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: That's more Communists than I've ever met. Yeah, are there
Speaker 2: even that many Communists in the US?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: Like maybe maybe? And if so, it's like right of
Speaker 2: that line, So what happened was everyone stole from their job.
Speaker 2: It was the only way to make ends meet. The
Speaker 2: entire economy ran on theft. The output quotas that people
Speaker 2: were presented with were absurd, so everyone just lied about
Speaker 2: meeting the output quotas. You could probably just like bribe
Speaker 2: the official who's also relying on you know, graft and whatever.
Speaker 2: Just mean bribery. I think it just means bribery. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like general corruption. Yeah, okay, cool, Yeah, but like Blake.
Speaker 3: I think it's I think it graphic is specifically about
Speaker 3: taking money out of the thing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so the entire economy is running off of that.
Speaker 2: If you go to the store, you know that you're
Speaker 2: going to be ripped off. The scales are weighted against
Speaker 2: you because that's the only way the shopkeepers could survive.
Speaker 2: So everyone's stealing from everyone else. Unfortunately, it's not just
Speaker 2: a like noble robinhood. Everyone's stealing from the big state corporation.
Speaker 2: You know. Everyone is just trying to fucking live.
Speaker 3: Which no one here has any experience of living in
Speaker 3: an entire economy that is based on scams and robbing people,
Speaker 3: not like none of us. What is AI?
Speaker 2: What is crypto. No one, no one's ever seen this before,
Speaker 2: no one, no one knows what a robo call is.
Speaker 2: I will say though, April fifteenth is annual steal something
Speaker 2: from workday. Wow amn wow. I used to joke when
Speaker 2: I worked for the anarchist publisher a K Press as
Speaker 2: a freelancer that I was going to celebrate steal something
Speaker 2: from workday, and they were like, please don't. I'm like,
Speaker 2: all right, fine, you're a workaround collective. Come on, you
Speaker 2: go st you gotta steal a pen, I know, like
Speaker 2: just to maate it. I know, well, obviously I've never
Speaker 2: stolen anything, but imagine someone who would have stolen something, okay,
Speaker 2: girl boss, girl.
Speaker 1: Bos so moral, so she I know, I know I
Speaker 1: was clearly never I think I've like written and published
Speaker 1: things about how I used to shoplift all the time.
Speaker 2: Never mind anyway, as a long time ago, as a
Speaker 2: love from corporation statul limitation statue limitations. I want to
Speaker 2: start a podcast is a really bad idea. I always
Speaker 2: wanted to start a podcast called the Statute of Limitations Podcast.
Speaker 2: Oh or we just have a lawyer on the phone
Speaker 2: call with us. People tell really cool stories of crime.
Speaker 2: After the revelation. After the revelation, we could have the
Speaker 2: better podcast. We can't do right now exactly all of
Speaker 2: the things we will be able to tell each other
Speaker 2: if we yeah, pull off a worker council run society.
Speaker 2: So all the while, there's all the usual state communist
Speaker 2: fuckery going on. There's internment and labor camps, there's internal
Speaker 2: exile and deportment. I think people are getting like sent
Speaker 2: off to the USSR at labor camps or whatever. There's
Speaker 2: no religious tolerance, there's no free speech. Lots of people
Speaker 2: are getting arrested for quote incorrect opinions. And dear tankies,
Speaker 2: if you're hate listening this far into it. That is
Speaker 2: a direct quote from communist reports of the time talking
Speaker 2: about the need to crack down on quote incorrect opinions.
Speaker 2: I am not putting words in their mouth. I promised
Speaker 2: you earlier that Stalin did two good things with his life. Ooh.
Speaker 2: One of them was that he used to rob Banks
Speaker 2: as a communist revolutionary, And honestly, that was just kind
Speaker 2: of cool, Like this is funny, It's pretty funny. He
Speaker 2: was kind of a cool guy. Ever, the moment, he
Speaker 2: was probably a terrible person. I don't know, great episode
Speaker 2: of vanderwer based off of it. We're episodes. Oh shit, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm not watching second season until all of it's out.
Speaker 2: That's so reasonable that this is this that season one though.
Speaker 2: Oh well, I have no functional memory, so that's my
Speaker 2: excuse there. That's reasonable. You know, many such cases, many
Speaker 2: such cases, which is also I'm really screwed when it
Speaker 2: comes to TV shows because I have to The reason
Speaker 2: I have to watch it all at once is because
Speaker 2: I forget everything. But I also have to watch everything linear.
Speaker 2: So when like a new season, like a new season,
Speaker 2: a lower decks came out and I'm I just finished
Speaker 2: rewatching all first four seasons so that I could watch
Speaker 2: season five. Oh, because I can't just jump in. But
Speaker 2: Jamie Loftus helped make it so I have to watch it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, yeah, beloved friend of the show
Speaker 3: and coworker, Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we love Jamie. So that was one of the
Speaker 2: things that Stalin did that was good. Was Rob Banks. Second.
Speaker 2: He made his greatest contribution to socialism on March fifth,
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty three, when he died. Ah, I was gonna
Speaker 2: make a joke about him dying. No, I have nothing
Speaker 2: nice to say about that man. Besides the fact that
Speaker 2: he was before he had any power and he was
Speaker 2: a bank robbery, he was an interesting person. He died
Speaker 2: and everyone was like desperately like, oh cool, can we
Speaker 2: destalinize now? This has been just a reign of terrors,
Speaker 2: like literally a rule by fear, and it affected everyone
Speaker 2: at the highest levels too. So a guy named Krushchev
Speaker 2: came into power, and for a while in the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifties the USSR looked like it was going to de
Speaker 2: Stalinize and become slightly less fucked of a place. Spoiler alert,
Speaker 2: this is the guy who was about to invade Hungary.
Speaker 2: In Hungary, things start to become a little bit more free. Specifically,
Speaker 2: in June of nineteen fifty three, the leader Matthias Rikassi,
Speaker 2: who called himself Stalin's Hungarian disciple, stepped aside for a
Speaker 2: guy named Imare Nog. And this guy has done a
Speaker 2: lot of stalinisty things over his life Nog, but in general,
Speaker 2: his whole thing was like not being as bad as Stalin.
Speaker 2: I was like his whole vibe right.
Speaker 3: But that great great bander to be able to wave
Speaker 3: like I'm not as bad as Stalin well, spoiler alert,
Speaker 3: it's gonna get him killed by the communists.
Speaker 1: Rip.
Speaker 2: I guess unless it here is always be worse than
Speaker 2: Stalin were the same as Stealin. No, they'd probably get
Speaker 2: killed by Stalin too, that's true. That's true. Be Stalin.
Speaker 2: I guess it's never safe to be a Bolshevik. Bolsheviks
Speaker 2: will kill you.
Speaker 3: Like that's always the thing is, like people always assume
Speaker 3: that you're going to be like Stalin, or you're gonna
Speaker 3: be on the secial committee or something. It's like, no,
Speaker 3: like you're gonna be some asshole who's like neighbor gets
Speaker 3: into an argument with you over like dishwashing, and they're
Speaker 3: gonna report you to the secret police and then you're
Speaker 3: gonna die.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like that's like the actual like experience of this,
Speaker 2: like yeah, you, oh, you'll be I've read accounts of
Speaker 2: people in the Red Arm in World War Two, not
Speaker 2: only like not being given a gun and being sent
Speaker 2: into battle anyway being like, well there'll be guns around,
Speaker 2: just get out there, but literally told that if they
Speaker 2: don't like shout like glory to Stalin enough as they
Speaker 2: like charge tanks with their fingernails, that they're going to
Speaker 2: be shot by the cadre who's behind them? Great, great, great, incredible. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean, look, you have to use the guings for something,
Speaker 2: and it can't be shooting at the Nazis. Yeah I know, yeah, yeah, look,
Speaker 2: you have so many communists to shoot, like, I know,
Speaker 2: I know. No one is better at killing communists than communists.
Speaker 2: The Nazis came close, they tried, they did their past. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: which fuck them. Actually it might be a it might
Speaker 2: be a tie. Yeah, they might have. They might actually
Speaker 2: have been better at it. Yeah, but anyway, A couple
Speaker 2: of days later, after Nog gets into power, there's a
Speaker 2: worker's insurrection in East Berlin involving a million fucking people
Speaker 2: who wanted to live decent lives. Fifty or one hundred
Speaker 2: people were killed when the USSR crushed that rebellion with tanks.
Speaker 2: In a couple of days, looking at Hungary and the
Speaker 2: general discontent, Nog is like, maybe we should try something new,
Speaker 2: a new course, he called it. And that's what it
Speaker 2: was called, with like capital N and capital C. Better
Speaker 2: standard of I mean, it is genuinely a better thing.
Speaker 2: Nog is not actually a bad person in this story.
Speaker 2: Better standard of living, No more internment, camps. Some prisoners
Speaker 2: get amnesty. People can have religion, I guess, and also
Speaker 2: stop trying to force everything to industrialize. Collectivization of farms
Speaker 2: is now optional, and so a quarter of them decollectivized.
Speaker 2: I believe it to set up like small farms, but
Speaker 2: I don't know. It could have been trying capitalist farms.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Nog was still like a pro stalin
Speaker 2: Ish guy, and he called the Great Purge of the
Speaker 2: lighteen thirties trial and error.
Speaker 3: I guess that is technically true. They did do trials
Speaker 3: and they didn't make a lot of errors.
Speaker 2: But it's true. It's gonna happen to him too, because
Speaker 2: they even, like half of those people who get killed later,
Speaker 2: the communists are like, oh, I shouldn't have killed that guy.
Speaker 2: There's a whole yeah, there's a whole like thing. Which
Speaker 2: is also funny because people now today believe that, like
Speaker 2: all those people deserve to die. It's like the communists,
Speaker 2: like the stalin Ist yeah, like the actual like stalind
Speaker 2: didn't believe that, like what are we doing here?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Absolutely terrible, terrible, And they tried the new course and
Speaker 2: for a while it must have been nice. But on
Speaker 2: April eighteenth nineteen fifty five, naug is kicked out and
Speaker 2: another guy, Hegettis, is in and I probably mispronounced his name,
Speaker 2: but it's okay because he's not going to come back
Speaker 2: up in the story. No more new course, back to
Speaker 2: rule by fear. Peasants who don't meet their quotas are deported.
Speaker 2: I believe to do labor in the USSR, but everything
Speaker 2: I like, literally I like three different sources are like, oh,
Speaker 2: they get deported as if I know exactly what that
Speaker 2: means instead of just.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I mean it could also mean like internal deportation,
Speaker 3: because like right, yeah, like Soviet systems are set up
Speaker 3: such that like you're not supposed to be have like
Speaker 3: leave your area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that.
Speaker 3: There's just like a weird thing that still exists in
Speaker 3: some European cities where like you can get kicked out
Speaker 3: if you're like in another city and like at night
Speaker 3: like to do this with like like people who look
Speaker 3: not white in like Belgium.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're like in another city partying, they will
Speaker 2: just like fucking kick you out and send you back
Speaker 2: to the city. You're like quote unquote supposed to be
Speaker 2: in terrible stuff. Zero out of ten we hate it.
Speaker 2: I think that that's gonna be like a big that's
Speaker 2: like a big sign of when US authoritarianism gets to
Speaker 2: a point where like internal travel, I mean obviously internal
Speaker 2: travel isn't always safe for everyone already. Yeah, like there's already,
Speaker 2: like anything, we're retally close to the borders. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, especially to further south you go, has had checkpoints,
Speaker 2: but like it can get worse. It can always get worse. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I guess they also are trying to make it
Speaker 2: illegal it whatever. I don't know all the details of
Speaker 2: all the laws, but like you can't go get reproductive
Speaker 2: care in another state sometimes, and yeah, freedom of movement.
Speaker 2: I think it should be complete and for involve international
Speaker 2: borders as well, but well there shouldn't be them, but anyway,
Speaker 2: So in May nineteen fifty five, speaking of internationalization, the
Speaker 2: Warsaw Pact was signed. This was the USSR's answered, well,
Speaker 2: it was the Soviet Block's answer to NATO. It is
Speaker 2: a military alliance of all the Eastern Bloc communist countries.
Speaker 2: This alliance ostensibly means any country will support the others,
Speaker 2: but it also means, in effect, Soviet troops are allowed
Speaker 2: to occupy any Eastern Bloc country as long as NATO
Speaker 2: is around. To be fair, NATO is the same thing,
Speaker 2: just with the US and the USSRS for all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like and there they are going to spend
Speaker 3: a lot of the money and resources from that forming
Speaker 3: like incredibly weird stay behind networks of like Nazis with guns.
Speaker 3: We're gonna do a whole bunch of terrible shit.
Speaker 2: So it's not great, Like these things both suck. I
Speaker 2: literally don't whether you're talking about the Soviets or NATO,
Speaker 2: but either way, oh, NATO, NATO, this is not talking
Speaker 2: about but yeah that the Soviets tend to be more
Speaker 2: like tank roly and the NATO tends to be more
Speaker 2: like ooh by weird spies handed in Neo Nazia a
Speaker 2: bunch of bombs and they blew a bunch of train up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: fair enough. Soviet troops are stationed in Hungary as a
Speaker 2: result of the War So Pact. The majority of Hungarians
Speaker 2: see themselves as under occupation and that however, my source
Speaker 2: on that is a US Army report from early nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty six, which is not the most reliable source, but
Speaker 2: it matches everything else I've read. I just want to
Speaker 2: flag that one is not the safest source. But I
Speaker 2: want to talk about that report from January nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk more later about US involvement and
Speaker 2: lack of involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, But in January
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six, there was a US Army intelligence briefing
Speaker 2: about Hungary about whether or not it was a reasonable
Speaker 2: place to foment insurrection against communism. There were probably reports
Speaker 2: like this for all the communist countries, but this is
Speaker 2: the one that I read. The report decided the answer
Speaker 2: of whether or not to foment an insurrection Hungary was no,
Speaker 2: saying that Hungary was quote singularly unpromising. I wonder if
Speaker 2: you're gonna be able to guess why it's unpromising. You
Speaker 2: probably aren't. It's too weird of an answer, although it's
Speaker 2: an answer I like, too democratic. No, it's it's too
Speaker 2: geographically flat. Oh, it's the fucking Oh, it's the Siga War.
Speaker 2: You need mountains to have a gorilla war. You know,
Speaker 2: one day on this show, we're gonna do my blanky.
Speaker 2: The writers of Rohan who didn't have mountains and they
Speaker 2: still kicked ass. I was Emakar Cabral who was like, ah,
Speaker 2: the people are my mountains.
Speaker 3: Each ship will fight a war in the planes that Oh,
Speaker 3: he's the guy. He was one of the guys who
Speaker 3: like liberated Guinea Bissau and like the Cape Verde from
Speaker 3: from the Portuguese.
Speaker 2: Okay, and they killed it. They killed him before he
Speaker 2: could like because he didn't have mountains. They won the war.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, fair enough, Okay, okay, the people were his mountains.
Speaker 2: They also like basically defeated fascist in Portugal basically like
Speaker 2: they can't kick their ask so much that the government collapsed.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, yeah, shit guy rules. Also, I want to
Speaker 2: just make a correction of something I said earlier. Rohan
Speaker 2: was able to go to helms deep, which were in
Speaker 2: the mountains, and that's true. That's true. That is how
Speaker 2: they survived. So I apologize everyone. One day I'm gonna
Speaker 2: have an actual person who has Lord of the Rings
Speaker 2: on here and they're gonna be like, what's the name
Speaker 2: of the mountains, And I'll be like, man, I don't
Speaker 2: know the name of the mountains. What the fuck? I
Speaker 2: just like read those books a couple of times, and
Speaker 2: I like the stories, like what God created the mountains,
Speaker 2: like yeah, exactly. Anyway, so they look at so the
Speaker 2: US Army. The US Army looks at this place and
Speaker 2: is like, this is unpromising. There is less active resistance
Speaker 2: there than there were in any of the other Warsaw
Speaker 2: packed countries, but there was very widespread passive resistance, especially
Speaker 2: among the peasantry, because agricultural workers were under less strict control,
Speaker 2: because it's harder to control people in rural areas than
Speaker 2: when they're condensed into factories. Sure, if you don't meet quotas,
Speaker 2: you will be deported, but there were widespread work slowdowns
Speaker 2: and shit, especially in the rural areas. And the report
Speaker 2: comes out in January and Eisenhower's like, yeah, that's not
Speaker 2: worth fighting a world war over. I am not fomenting
Speaker 2: an insurrection there, and the issue is largely dropped. I
Speaker 2: will come back and talk about some of the US involvement,
Speaker 2: but that's later and less than what people claim. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: throughout the nineteen fifties, revolts start to pop off around
Speaker 2: the Warsaw packed countries, and even within the USSR. Poland
Speaker 2: had been revolting, and Polish communists are like, aren't we
Speaker 2: fucking independent from the USSR? Isn't that like part of
Speaker 2: our whole thing, Like I thought we were a communist country.
Speaker 2: That's like a separate country. And they were upset that
Speaker 2: they had to sell coal at shitty prices to the USSR.
Speaker 2: Poland's economy was completely wrecked under communism in the fifties.
Speaker 2: According to communist documents, by June nineteen fifty six, you
Speaker 2: have one hundred thousand polls demonstrating against the communist regime
Speaker 2: and fifty seven people were killed. People in Hungary were
Speaker 2: aware of this happening. Declassified documents show that all the
Speaker 2: communist parties of these various countries were like saying, declassified documents.
Speaker 2: They were declassified a long time ago. I'm not being
Speaker 2: like I've got my no.
Speaker 3: Yeah, are these these are like Falosov Union documents, Yeah exactly,
Speaker 3: like we got all the troops.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The communist parties of all these various countries were like, oh, fuck,
Speaker 2: we're losing control in nineteen fifty six, so they got
Speaker 2: together to be like, what the fuck are we going
Speaker 2: to do? Press and radio were starting to leave Communist
Speaker 2: party control, partly due to dissent within the party. This
Speaker 2: is specifically in Hungary. The main Communist Party paper. Remember
Speaker 2: I promised to you earlier that the Hungarian Communist Party
Speaker 2: was full of people who were like, were what now communists?
Speaker 2: All right? I guess I mean we were socialists. I
Speaker 2: guess sure, you know, the main Communist party paper in
Speaker 2: Hungary was run by communists who dis agreed with the
Speaker 2: Communist party line. An internal Communist Party investigation from Moscow reported, quote,
Speaker 2: a practically parallel Communist party, opposed to the Central Committee
Speaker 2: of the party has been created, which acts freely and
Speaker 2: without impediments. Woo, that rules things. I created a second
Speaker 2: shadow Communist party inside of the regular covenis from It
Speaker 2: sucks less, but it was like but it was basically
Speaker 2: the entire Communist Party was the shadow Communist party. The
Speaker 2: Communist Party of Hungary wasn't loyal to the Communist Party
Speaker 2: of Hungary, or at least its own ostensible party line.
Speaker 2: People were paying lip service to the party line in
Speaker 2: order to not get crushed. Several hundred dissident party members
Speaker 2: have recently been released from prison and shit, I think
Speaker 2: as part of the new course. And so Rakosi was like,
Speaker 2: the guy who's in charge right now, He's like, well, quote,
Speaker 2: if we arrest some others will appear, and if we
Speaker 2: arrest them, the third wave will arise and there would
Speaker 2: be no end to that. He's just like, nah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I would get the rest of them, like, let just keep
Speaker 2: me more. Yeah. And so that the communist guy from
Speaker 2: Moscow is writing this report. His name is Anastas mccoyan,
Speaker 2: and he wrote, just to quote him from his report, quote,
Speaker 2: the local Communist party should not have its own policy.
Speaker 2: It should be an executor of the Russian Communist Party's decisions.
Speaker 2: Which is just like a this isn't the USSR, Like
Speaker 2: this is such a nice, clear, blatant example of the
Speaker 2: fact that like the satellite states were just that, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're just colonies, yeah, like the US and Puerto Rico.
Speaker 2: And here's one of my favorite pieces of Soviet double
Speaker 2: think I've ever read, from the same report, quote, A
Speaker 2: situation where newspapers in the radio cease to serve as
Speaker 2: channels of the Central Committee line also represents a violation
Speaker 2: of internal party democracy. It is therefore necessary to get
Speaker 2: rid of all press and radio staff unwilling to implement
Speaker 2: the Central Committee's line in the name of democracy. Oh god.
Speaker 2: And so there's this thing that happens sometimes in history,
Speaker 2: and when this thing happens, you usually get a revolution.
Speaker 2: As far as I can tell, it is when young
Speaker 2: intellectual types start talking to and listening to workers and
Speaker 2: vice versa. And you've got that going on in Hungary
Speaker 2: at this point. The Young Communists is the official youth
Speaker 2: organization of the Communist Party. Oh yeah, the group that
Speaker 2: leads the fucking revolution is part of the Communist Party.
Speaker 2: And in April nineteen fifty five, the year before the revolution,
Speaker 2: they formed the Potophi Circle. It is named after an
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight Hungarian national poet who fought against the
Speaker 2: Austrians back in that pro democracy leftist nationalist revolution. I
Speaker 2: was talking about the very beginnings of people were attending
Speaker 2: these Potfi Circle meetings. This isn't just like a book
Speaker 2: club or whatever. I mean. Book clubs are great, listen
Speaker 2: to mine every Sunday and so okay. I was saying
Speaker 2: how peasants can do passive resistance because they're not as
Speaker 2: closely surveilled. But industrial workers have an advantage too. They
Speaker 2: can organize because they're in close proximity to each other,
Speaker 2: and they're also because they're in the cities in proximity
Speaker 2: with the po TOFI circle of intellectuals, and the two
Speaker 2: groups start talking more and more. These people do not
Speaker 2: want to end communism. They are communists. They want communism,
Speaker 2: they want democratic workplace control, unions, workers' rights ideally, and
Speaker 2: they're kind of split over whether they want to use
Speaker 2: a sort of existing state Soviet infrastructure and have like
Speaker 2: a more top down kind of whatever, or if they
Speaker 2: want worker control of their own workplace, complete bottom up
Speaker 2: transformation of society. Yeah. By nineteen fifth they start having
Speaker 2: some strikes, not the Potoviy circle but workers, and the
Speaker 2: potovie circle starts supporting those strikes. And then okay, So
Speaker 2: this guy named Laslo Rosch, he was a Hungarian communist.
Speaker 2: He did it all. He was kicked out of the
Speaker 2: school in the nineteen thirties for being Communist party member.
Speaker 2: He fought in Spain and the International Brigades of the
Speaker 2: Spanish Civil War take a drink for Spanish Civil War. Mentioned.
Speaker 2: He organized underground communist shit and fascist Hungary during World
Speaker 2: War Two and was arrested and barely survived. And then
Speaker 2: I did say he was a state communist. He ran
Speaker 2: the communists secret police in Hungary. Oh No, and he
Speaker 2: set up the very first show trials in that country
Speaker 2: and started persecuting religious people. And do you know how
Speaker 2: it killed him. It's not gonna be suberculous this. That's
Speaker 2: the other thing that kills people, the government. Yeah, the government. Yeah. No,
Speaker 2: he was killed in a show trial, only a couple
Speaker 2: of years after he invented show trialsks, folks, don't show trials.
Speaker 2: You will die in your own show trial. Yes, simply
Speaker 2: do not do it. They're easy. I'm doing it right now. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he does not do it. Play authoritarian games and you
Speaker 2: win authoritarian prizes. Why do I bring him up? His wife,
Speaker 2: Julia Rosh was part of the Potofi circle, and they
Speaker 2: forced the government to officially say, I guess we shouldn't
Speaker 2: have killed that guy. And one hundred thousand people turn
Speaker 2: up for his new state funeral and it's one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand anti establishment folks, m h. And it is the
Speaker 2: first big gathering of such people in Hungary since Soviet era.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, the po Tofi circle is organizing. They
Speaker 2: go out all over the country to other cities and
Speaker 2: start spreading their ideas and soon they're gonna have a revolution,
Speaker 2: which we'll talk about on Wednesday. Ooh, cliffhanger. Oh, I know,
Speaker 2: you gotta come back. There's a better cliffhanger, like about
Speaker 2: five hundred words from now the script, but it would
Speaker 2: have been too uneven of a break. I could have
Speaker 2: left it on the like and they've got guns, what's
Speaker 2: gonna happen? Don't worry, They're gonna get guns, and then
Speaker 2: we'll see what happens. Oh yeah, So I'm excited for
Speaker 2: the workers getting guns. We always like the workers getting guns.
Speaker 2: I know, I know that's a big uh. Well, actually
Speaker 2: it almost ended up in the script and then got
Speaker 2: I ended up taking it out because people kind of
Speaker 2: take Marxist quotes about gun control out of context. It
Speaker 2: turns out like he has this quote where Marx is
Speaker 2: a quote where he's like, I don't know whatever, like
Speaker 2: don't let the workers be disarmed. Yeah, it's like the
Speaker 2: workers should never give up their guns. Yeah yeah, But
Speaker 2: that's actually in the context of a communist state, like
Speaker 2: being the community, being the people trying to It's like
Speaker 2: not quite as cool of a quote as even I
Speaker 2: want it to be. And so I try to include
Speaker 2: I'll bunch of that stuff, and then I ended up
Speaker 2: cutting a lot out I also ended up cutting out
Speaker 2: a lot where I like would find sources with like
Speaker 2: really banger quotes about why like Lenin quotes about like
Speaker 2: don't do imperialism in your communist country or whatever, but
Speaker 2: then I couldn't source them besides to the fucking anarchist
Speaker 2: thing from the nineteen sixties that I was quoting from.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, there's actually an explanation for this, okay, just
Speaker 2: that there is a bunch of stuff that Lenin said
Speaker 2: that is cut out of the official anthology that were
Speaker 2: published by the Soviet Union. Oh shit.
Speaker 3: So, for example, he has this line about how national
Speaker 3: autonomy along the lines of two German guys who name
Speaker 3: I can't remember right now, like is in and of
Speaker 3: a self reactionary okay, which is this thing that is
Speaker 3: like if you take what he's saying like seriously and
Speaker 3: you're like, oh, okay, like you're not supposed to have
Speaker 3: like national cultural autonomy. This also kind of like annihilates
Speaker 3: the basis of sort of like a bunch of the
Speaker 3: way stylist national liberation like functions where you're supposed to
Speaker 3: have your own sort of like nationalist workers movement, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 2: Et cetera. And that shit is fucking gone. They cut
Speaker 2: that shit out of the speeches, like the writings, So
Speaker 2: there's shit that Lenin said that is just not in
Speaker 2: the official things were they like edited down his like things.
Speaker 3: And because and because like those official copies of like
Speaker 3: Lenin's writings and whatever are the ones that like are
Speaker 3: a lot of the ones that got digitized, they's sometimes
Speaker 3: hard to find things that he actually said.
Speaker 2: It's also in translation too, right, so you're searching searching
Speaker 2: a quote, and so if it's not the exact same translation,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like I learned this from a very very
Speaker 3: angry trust Gate professor I had in college. That guy,
Speaker 3: I hope he's having a good day.
Speaker 2: It was. It was a whole thing I learned a
Speaker 2: lot about. Trotsky is still a disaster, but they have
Speaker 2: a lot of very funny beefs that have to do
Speaker 2: with like specific quotes that were cut out.
Speaker 4: But the styllamists, Hell, yeah, it's a good time. Well,
Speaker 4: there's gonna be lots of good revolution and stuff on Wednesday.
Speaker 4: In the meantime, I guess I already plugged book club,
Speaker 4: but I do a book club and Mia, you did.
Speaker 4: I just introduced you and assumed everyone listening to who
Speaker 4: you were. But that might not be the case.
Speaker 2: There might be someone who doesn't know who you are.
Speaker 2: Who are you? How'd you get here? I am Mia Wong.
Speaker 2: I am one of the hosts of the podcast It
Speaker 2: Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 2: how to put it back together again. I guess I'm
Speaker 2: also There's a lot of people who don't realize I'm
Speaker 2: also the Ice Must Be Destroyed girl on originally Twitter
Speaker 2: and now just blue Sky. So yeah, I do those things.
Speaker 2: We have a podcast. It's good History is most vindicated poster.
Speaker 2: That is what people are calling you. It was funny.
Speaker 3: I was talking about this today and I was like, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: of course obviously was like, yes, I took the incredibly
Speaker 3: bulld political position of regardless of what administration is in power,
Speaker 3: the Gestapo was bad. And I was like, yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know this.
Speaker 2: This is like being vindicated for saying that water is wet,
Speaker 2: Like it's like, this is the easiest shit of all time.
Speaker 2: Like I will say though, Okay, so for anyone who's listening,
Speaker 2: MIA's posts always end with furthermore no yes, more over,
Speaker 2: ice must be destroyed. Moreover, ice must be destroyed. And
Speaker 2: I reached a point because you also have like really
Speaker 2: good tweet threads. Sometimes I reached a point every now
Speaker 2: and then where I'm like, man, could you just stop?
Speaker 2: Like everyone knows this, no, but I can't. It's an
Speaker 2: active hatred act of grief active. And for me it
Speaker 2: came around first is before I even knew you. I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, it's the ice must be a destroyed girl.
Speaker 2: And then like I was like, oh, I'm friends with
Speaker 2: the ice must be destroyed girl. That's so cool. And
Speaker 2: then eventually I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it.
Speaker 2: I want to read the thread without seeing that every time,
Speaker 2: but as it swings around, I'm like, no, it just
Speaker 2: really needs to be said constantly.
Speaker 3: And yeah, because someone asked you and no one else's
Speaker 3: and like I don't know, I can. Yeah, Like I
Speaker 3: was doing it in the wake of like just sort
Speaker 3: of collapse of occupy Ice, and like as it was
Speaker 3: sort of falling apart, and like someone had to try
Speaker 3: to keep the fucking flame alive in some public way,
Speaker 3: and yeah, a person shoued out to be me, even
Speaker 3: though I had like a thousand followers at the time,
Speaker 3: and I was just like some.
Speaker 2: Dipshit, but I are a dipshit with a ton of followers. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's that you too can be some random person who
Speaker 3: then suddenly does a thing, and you can you can
Speaker 3: do good in the world.
Speaker 2: All right, Well that's it. Listen to more cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media podcasts and we'll talk to you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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