Part One: A War Against Tankies and Tanks: the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Margaret talks with Mia Wong about the communists and socialists who fought for workers’ power against the USSR.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when bad things happen, people often
do good things in response to the bad things. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Mio
Wong Hi. Hello.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hello, very very excited, very excited to be back for
my annual traditional all the Communists Get Shot episode.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
It seems to be the onson I've always saw. I see,
I did give me heads up about this. Well, I
was like, who do I know who knows this history
and theory enough to talk about this with me? And
I guess I'm always like, I can't spoil the subject
to the listener because the listener has read the episode description. Yeah,
but before we talk about our subject, we should talk

(00:50):
about the fact that our producer is Sophie Sophie. That's me.
I'm Sophie. I'm very glad that Sophie is back. That's Mia,
I'm Sophie. We also have an audio engineer who's named Rory. Hi.
Rory Hi, RII Hi Rory. Our theme music was written
for us by Unwoman this week. I've been really excited

(01:11):
about doing this episode. You have, You've talked about it
for a minute. I know, I know this was on
my long list at the very very beginning when I
sat down to plan out doing this show. Hell ya,
but I felt like I hadn't earned it yet.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I also felt like I had to come to learn
more about the general context. Okay, so today, this week,
we are going to talk about one of the most
referenced but least discussed and most misunderstood moments in Western
political history. We are going to talk about the Hungarian
Revolution of nineteen fifty six. Mia, you ever heard of

(01:46):
the Hungarian Revolution of nineteen fifty six.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
You know, this is the most oh god, I whatever
I hear about this. Now I get my like fucking
war flashbacks to the dis course trenches, and I'm thinking
about this guy posting this picture that he said was like,
this is the Hungarian revolutionaries lynching a Jewish man. And
then someone found the guys, like they found the guy's tombstone,

(02:13):
and it turned out that it was a Christian secret
police agent. So this is one of the most unhinged,
like discourse wise revolutions of all time. I'm excited to
hear about this because, like I have, I guess what
you would call the like mid level anarchist understanding of this. Yeah,

(02:36):
where like I don't know, like I've read my COLR. James,
I guess who writes about this a couple of times,
but like I don't actually I'm not actually like like
I've read accounts of it, but I'm really interested to
see whether my conclusions about it are backed up by
like the fullness of history, because I have I have
like takes about this.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
But yeah, And that's one of the hardest things about
this event for anyone who's just coming in, who's like,
I have no idea what you all are talking about.
The reason that this revolution is so talked about without
actually being talked about, and it's a thing that everyone
has opinions about without actually reading about, is that this
revolution is famous on the internet today because one of

(03:19):
my favorite pejoratives, tanky, derives from this event. It is
the word for people who cheer on the antagonists of
the Hungarian Revolution. It's a word for people who watch
Star Wars and think, you know, Aldron really had it coming,
so I'm gonna do instead of a Lord of the
Rings reference. That's what I figured. That was really weird.

(03:41):
I know, I know, I actually know so much less
about Star Wars. Oh, don't worry, don't worry, I got
you covered. I got cover it. Okay, okay, between the
two of us, the shortest version of this history that
I could talk, I could I could come up with.
Hungary was a Soviet satellite state. It was not part
of the USSO, but it was part of the Warsaw Pact.

(04:02):
The aligned communist countries who shared a military alliance, who
thought that they had some vague semblance of the USSR
until they realized they didn't. They found themselves basically extracted
from colonies of the USSR. Economically, the economic conditions in Hungary,
as well as in Poland and other places like that,
were absolutely terrible. Still, most people living there on some

(04:26):
level believed in socialism or communism, not the Soviet occupation
and the local authoritarian regime. But people were overall left
of center. So a bunch of young communists in the
nineteen fifties, like the official youth branch of the Communist Party,
they had a demonstration in support of some other socialists

(04:47):
facing repression in Poland, and they found themselves machine gunned
for their trouble. So the country revolted and they did
what most cool people revolutions do. They set up workers
councils to create workplace democracy and run a socialist country
from the bottom up. The Soviets invaded with tanks. The
Red Army put down the revolution. The whole thing lasted

(05:11):
more or less three weeks, though fighting went on in
the countryside, and especially strikes went on across the country
for months afterwards. Those three weeks changed everything for good.
Because the Iron Curtain went down for a moment, and
the line that separated Soviet influenced countries from the rest
of the world. Foreign journalists were able to pour into

(05:33):
the country and actually cover what happened firsthand, including a
lot of Western communists came which, by the way, the
fact that everyone argues about what happened in this revolution
is particularly funny because we have all of the documents,
we have the official Communist Party reports, we have lots

(05:54):
of first hand reports from all these participants from all
over the political spectrum. Actually just look, yeah, yeah, I
got to read more first like primary sources that I
usually get to for this particular episode, you know. And
so while the border was down, about two hundred thousand

(06:15):
people fled the country, spoiler alert for the US in
the near future. Strong borders are as much about keeping
people in the country as they are at keeping people
out of the country, And these people who fled brought
with them the truth about life under Soviet control. If
you read a lot of communist history, like I somehow

(06:35):
wound up doing not ever something I had originally intended,
you notice that all the original Bolsheviks, you know, whenever
you're reading about like some Bolshevik who's like, ah, it's
nineteen twenty three and I'm doing a thing, you know,
and you're like dead nineteen thirty six. Yeah, Like, how
come they all died nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty eight.
What's going on there? They were all purged by Stalin

(06:58):
in the Great Purge, is what happened all the original Bolsheviks,
not all of them, but a huge number of the
original Bolsheviks get got by their own Bolshevik party. But
there's another slightly more subtle, but only slightly more subtle
shift that you see too when you read about Western communists. Yep,
any of the ones who are actually doing cool things

(07:20):
and actually have some fucking heart, the ones who fought
for social justice against fascism did all the good stuff,
like a ton of the Italian Partisans fall into this?
Last week's episodes had several of those main characters that
we talked about last week were Italian communists who all
left the Communist Party in the nineteen fifties yep, Because

(07:41):
after the Hungarian Revolution they could no longer believe that
the USSR and the Communist Party was a force for
good or even a force for communism. It was this
I'm still doing the quick version of it, I swear
it was this split in the UK Communist Party that
led to people getting called tankies for their support of

(08:04):
the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It is a word that
was used by communists and socialists against authoritarians, and yet
online authoritarian communists love to claim that the word tanky
is used against them because they're communists, when actually that's
completely just not true. To be fair, a lot of
right wing people, including like centrist capitalists, do use the word,

(08:25):
which I guess is centrist not whatever. Anyway, a lot
of people, including capitalists and right wing people use the
word tanky to critique communists at large, and that is
a misuse. It is only for the people who support
the enemy of today. Yep.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
There's an interesting thing that like one of the things
you read about like the American Communist Party, well, the
thing that they believe in like the thirties and forties
is really weird because like if you like read the
descriptions of what they think the USSR is, it's like
weirdly like syndicalists, like they think it's this kind of
like they think it's the thing that the Soviet is

(09:01):
supposed to be, where it's like it's like this republic
of like these workers councils, right, and they like all
believe this, and they all believe this, and they all
believe this, and then like like even through Stalin right,
like they're all like you watch all these people who
are like absolutely convinced that like yeah, this is all
just sort of like like all of the stuff and
the terrors like capitalist propaganda and then Hungary hits and
they're like, oh shit, is It's fascinating because it plays

(09:25):
like all over the world. You get like versions of this.
There's a really funny one in China where they like
the Hungarian Revolution in like actually sort of inspires like
a wave of like kind of unrest in China over it,
because yeah, it's like not super well known, but there's
like kind of like a wave of strikes and like
you can like see like a kind of like peaking
of this that it's one of the things that kind

(09:48):
of like it's one of the things that influences like
the Thousand Flowers campaign and in China where like there's
this period there's a very brief period in like fifty
six and fifty seven where you can like sort of
openly criticize the party and like it's lines and like
what it's been doing, and then immediately that it all
gets cracked down on because it's a lot of it
is this attempt to sort of like draw out the
kinds of dissonance that had been you know, like like

(10:09):
that stuff I had been intensifying as like as like
fifty six went on because there's there's all this unrest
in poland there's all this like there's all that happens
in Hungary and like that like pisses people off, and
there's like people in the streets of like Beijing chanting
here another Hungary, whoa, and they all get fucking murdered.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Also it was another Hungary. They were right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
they all died right, like you know, like and this
thing goes on. But it's also really funny because so
the official like Chinese Communist party line is that, like
the Hungarians were all fascists and they all deserve to
be killed. But later on, because they swit from the
Soviet Union, their line is that the progue spring in

(10:46):
Czechoslovakia was a genuine workers uprising against the Soviets, okay,
because that was after the break or whatever. Yeah, that
was after the break. Is such a baffling position.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Like my my apps, I don't know if my favorite one,
but I do want to this one. It was one
of the Italian autonomists had this line that was like
the Hungarians were right to revolt and also the Soviets
were right to repress.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Them, which is like the most cognitive I've seen, so
like people tie themselves in ideological knots around this problem,
like all over the world, like like in every continent,
it's people are like trying to square the Soviets just
like openly acting as like the guys who fed the
workers to the machine guns. And it breaks so many

(11:28):
people's brains in so many fascinating ways. I think it's
because the like the tanky mind right, has this idea
where like it's just an axiom that the USSR was
good and so everything has to be warped around that,
and they're like, well, I guess you know, I don't
know you just said about like, oh, they were right

(11:50):
to resist, but also they were right to be cracked
down on. You just have to like come up with
ways to try and make it fit. And I think
one of the things that's so fascinating is that I
didn't come up in any kind of context in which
I would have to bother defending the idea that Stalin
was a bad man, Like yeah, you're like, well, that's
just self evident. And it's not just because I like

(12:10):
grew up in Cold War United States. I think any objective,
big picture view, it's like, well Stalin was bad, you know,
like the fact that we have to argue this, okay, anyway,
so it's ridiculous, yeah, right away. As soon as this
Hungarian revolution happened, there's actually this you know, you can
have that meme of two arms holding hands, you know,

(12:33):
the two muscle arms holding hands. Yeah, of the USSR
and the West both claiming the Hungarian revolution is capitalist. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
The West was like, see these people revolted because they
love democracy and capitalism and rock and roll or whatever.
And the USSR was like, see these people love capitalism

(12:56):
and rock and roll or whatever and the bourgeoisie, you know,
and they're both wrong and or lying. And I think
the governments are lying, and then the individuals who believe
the governments are wrong.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
And this is the thing that like this happens so
many times over the course of this thing, because like
you know, I mean one of my like Hungry takes
right is that it is part of this line of
revolutions that is kind of distinct in some sense from
like what you would call the Soviet mainline, even though
I would argue it starts in like nineteen oh five
with the workers councils. Was like, for like one hundred years,

(13:28):
the thing that you were doing, if you were doing revolution,
basically from like nineteen oh five in Russia through like
two thousand and one in Argentina, was you would seize
control of your workplace and formal workers council.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, and there's so many of these, right, I mean,
this is still a good idea frankly, yeah, yeah, yeah
it is. And like I mean they're like, like you know,
you can look at like Spain, like Hungary is one
of the famous ones. Like this happened in Algeria, this
happened in like Czechoslovakia, it happens in Oh my god.
Now now that I'm trying to list this off, I'm
forgetting a whole bunch of them, a bunch of places. Yeah, totally. Yeah,

(13:59):
Like you know, like I mean people do this in
like Shanghai, they do this in Yeah, it happens to Vietnam.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
Briefly, Like it's just like all over the world. People
do this for like one hundred years. It happens in Italy,
in France, and like because they're trying to do socialism, Yeah,
they're trying to do socialism. The thing is like, like
and this is this is the really effective ideological tactic
that both the Soviets and the Americans use, which is
that they both were like democracy is capitalism, and so
everyone tries to claim all of these revolutions that are

(14:25):
like like if you read like a conventional American history
of this, they will call this a liberal revolution. They
will call them liberalizing reforms. It's like, right, No, they weren't.
This is all stuff that's further left than the Soviets.
It's like they're trying. They formed the workers' councils again.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah. And the most recent, of course co option of
this revolution has been the Hungarian nationalists and the right
wing parties who are like and they have no more
of a legitimate claim on it than anyone else, which
is to say the people have a legitimate claim on it.
Are bottom up socialists. That is far and away the
largest chunk of this revolution, as the Belgian and French

(14:59):
movement communists. It looks like movement communists. I don't know
that they drop a lot of letters as they wrote
about it. The nineteen fifty six revolution in Hungary was
a worker's revolution. The workers constituted the majority of the
combatants and deaths against the Russian Army, the AVO, the
secret police, and the hostile elements of the Hungarian army.

(15:20):
The workers organized themselves into councils and tried, in extremely
difficult conditions to elaborate a political and theoretical program which
can be criticized today, but which constituted a high point
of the limits of its time, and whenever you research
something Cold War related, you have to weighe through an
ocean of misinformation and contradictory sources. Like you. I came
in with like my assumption of a take right, and

(15:44):
I actually, I actually thought it was going to be
a little bit more politically diverse and a little bit
more liberal. That was actually what I was kind of
coming into it thinking, because I didn't I didn't want
to like hold my breath and hope for it to
be like really cool.

Speaker 4 (15:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, I still haven't read everything on this. There's so
much written about this, or so many eyewitnesses, but I
tried to cast as wide of a net as I could.
I wound up reading Soviets with a lot of declassified information,
a lot of non tanky communists like the Movement Communist,
a lot of anarchists, a lot of capitalists on the issue,
and I feel like I have a decent sense of it.

(16:19):
The Hungarian Revolution is maybe one of the clearest examples
of I've ever seen of something that we've discussed again
and again on this show. Sometimes even when you lose,
you win, just by fighting, you win. The Hungarian Revolution
famously a failed revolution, right, and that's like, oh, we
hear about it. It showed that the authoritarianism of the

(16:39):
USSR more plainly to the West, and in particular to
Western leftists, than anything else had before it. By invading
their own satellite state, the USSR torpedoed any chance they
had of winning the Cold War, as my argument, because
they entirely and irrecoverably broke the international communist movement by

(16:59):
so blatantly giving up on their principles. But you know
it isn't giving up on my principles. Oh no, the
foundings and services that support this podcast, that's right. Oh no,
I support all of them because I'm a liberal revolution
that's me. Here's some stuff. I like all of it.

(17:28):
And Rebeck, So I feel like half the stories we
talk about and okay, now I'm gonna do the context part.
Everyone's been waiting for that. I feel like half the
stories we talk about in Europe could be traced back
to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight, which makes sense.
The revolutions of eighteen forty eight were the anvil on
which most modern socialist ideologies were formed, and more than

(17:50):
people necessarily realize, like socialism and liberalism and all of
these different sort of modern political ideologies were in response
to each other. Socialism wasn't just a like something that
showed up late and was like, hey guys, I'm here too,
you know, it's actually one of the foundational things of
the modern political landscape. We're not going to get into

(18:11):
the revolutions of eighteen forty eight two greatly because I
don't know. One day, when I have nothing else to do,
I'll probably spend an entire year covering the revolutions of
eighteen forty eight. There's so many of them, there's so
much stuff. It's I know, I know, you can throw
I think Wagner is in a story at some point.
Marx is in it, Pecuon's in it, pacoonin comes off

(18:32):
a little bit better.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
A guy who challenged Marks to a duel is in it.
Hell yeah, it's August.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
I think I actually just want to read historical fiction
about eighteen forty eight. I actually don't think. I don't
want to read. It's too much stuff. It's too much,
it's too big, h which is why I do a
little segmented podcast for everyone. So one thing that is
important to understand about the Hungarian Revolution in particular, but
also the eighteen forty eight revolution. Is that nationalism in

(19:00):
the ninth middle of the nineteenth century, it was both
new and leftist, not in a national socialist way. Words
just change meanings. Sometimes. Hungarian nationalists were fighting for independence
from the Austrian Empire. They were spurred on less by like,
but we want our own flag, and we love Hungary
and hate everyone who's not Hungarian. And more, we want

(19:24):
a democracy because actually I didn't realize this Hungary is
like one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the fucking world.
Like they had like shit going back to like thirteen hundreds.
I think I didn't end up including all of that
in my script, so now I'm just winging it. But
they were like, look, we wanted democracy is now in
eighteen forty eight times and they were like, we want

(19:44):
a democracy and the king said yes. But then the
king was replaced by another king who said no, you
can't have it. Orb's a emperor or whatever the fuck.
The rebels put up a really serious fight and it
took Austria making common cause with Russia to put them down.
So there's a history of Russia invading Austria and democracy

(20:05):
while the rest of Europe was modernizing with textiles and mines.
Hungary was modernizing with flour mills. They were a key
point for food trade around Europe, and they started more
properly urban industrializing kind of late in the game. They
don't really have like iron ore. There's like some mines
and I think the north of the country where's some hills,
but like its resources as they can grow stuff, you know. Yeah,

(20:29):
it's cultural, yeah, which famously doesn't imagine being a like
I'm a country and I'm like all that matters is industry.
To hell with food and you're like, how is that?
What's your plan there? Like, don't you realize you got
to eat food?

Speaker 3 (20:46):
Like that's they're calling it the Great Leap Forward. It
goes forward, which were that is admittedly a simplistic explanation,
the Great Leap Forward, that's not really accurate.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
But oh god does that mean? Is that what? Like,
because we're trying to bring back adustrial production of the
United States, We the fascists are trying to bring back
industrial production to the United States right now? Is that
going to be a problem?

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Okay, I will give I will give my one sentence
rant about that, which is that that is deeply unfair
to the Great Leap Forward comparing it to this, because
the Great Leap Forward, at the very least was a
response to a production bottleneck, okay, where they didn't have
enough cultural goods to produce more like industrial goods. But
they also couldn't increase your agricultural output with that increasing
your industrial output.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
And this is causing an inflationary crisis, and so they
tried to like just power their way through it with
pure what if you made everyone work harder and it
turns out that's a terrible idea, okay, and take people
out of agriculture and put them in other things, terrible idea.
I think instead of comparing this to the Great Leap Forward,
I want to compare it to something that's going to
happen a little bit later in this story in Hungary.

(21:47):
Oh hell yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited. In nineteen nineteen,
Hungary tried to do a revolution. We covered this a
little bit on the Bela Lugosi Vampire episodes because one
of some of my favs, some of my favor I oh,
I know it turns out in case anyone's curious, go
look for the vampires are on our side because Bella Lagosi,
the original Dracula, fought in the nineteen nineteen uprising and

(22:10):
had to flee the country, and also Max Shrek, the
other famous vampire actor from around the same time, was
a leftist anti fascist bouncer in Weimar, Germany. Anyway, So
nineteen nineteen Hungary tried to do a revolution, and they
tried to do it the actual communist way, where you
set up workers councils soviets and then have a bottom

(22:32):
up socialist society, which is, as you pointed out, the
way that every revolution tries to start, and then it
often either gets crushed or it gets co opted by authoritarians, right,
which is just so funny to me because there's like
a really clear structure. It's not like people are like, oh,
you just want socialism, but you don't want to do anything.
They're like, no, we have this structural idea and we've

(22:52):
tested it time and time again, where we create a
federation of these councils and then they go up to
the bigger councils and they all talk and it's bottom
up instead of top down, and like, that's just what
socialism fucking meant. Until the twentieth century when anyway, whatever.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, what a bunch of people read about the German post
office and we're like, holy shit, what if socialism was
to post office. You think I'm joking, Go read your letted.
She will make this argument.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
I am.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
I am not surprised. So nineteen nineteen fails in Hungary,
Bella Lagosi has to flee. I think he goes to
buymar Germany before he comes to the States. I can't remember.
It was hammer Max Shrek who came as an undocumented migrant,
and after World War One, Hungary ended up in a
bad spot. They ended up with a national conservative something

(23:40):
akin to but different from, a fascist in charge. His
name is Admiral Horthy and he ruled from nineteen nineteen
until the end of World War Two. He was totally
down to join the Access Powers in World War Two.
If you want to read so much cope, you should
read his Wikipedia article because it is full of cope
about the number of Jews he sent off to die.

(24:02):
Oh God, because he is the only Axis Power leader
I believe to survive the war. So he got to
like write a memoir Jesus Christ. Anyway, so he joins
the Axis powers in World War Two. He's also like, uh,
just kidding, I hate the Axis Allies. Can you take
me once the Red Army is like at his door?

(24:23):
Oh no, And since he was starting to get disloyal,
he got the Italy treatment. Germany invaded and occupied Hungary.
Oh my god, they'd already deported some Jewish people, but
once Germany occupied it was like four hundred thousand Jews
were sent to their deaths. Jesus Christ. Yeah, and like
his whole thing is He's like, I tried to stop.

(24:43):
I tried to only send one hundred thousand. And I'm like, man,
you kill one person and you go to prison for
the rest of your life. I'm just gonna say this,
like they the number I wish you should just die
is one. Yeah, Like yeah, like this, why do we
let this guy live through this? Like what the fuck? Yeah?

(25:03):
Because he was like he's like the reluctant Axis guy.
That's his like whole vibe. And I swear to God,
oh no, I just had to be a Nazi, you
know the horror Oh I know, God, what a pathetic
fucking worm. And he was like he's just like, well,
I hated communism so much. That I had to become
a Nazi. Like, look, a lot of us have spent
our entire political careers hating both the USSR and the fascists. Okay, also, like, like,

(25:28):
which did Churchill fun against the Nazis? You have no excuse?
Totally totally, God damn it. When the Soviets, the Soviets
come and they capture Hungary and they put a guy
named Bella Michlos in charge, and he's a there there
is a lot of bias in all of the stories

(25:49):
that you read about Hungary and anything fucking Cold War related.
And so though though if you read a leftist take,
including an anarchist take, they'll be like, look, the Soviets
invaded and they put a Nazi in charge. This is true.
They put Bella Miklos in charge. He was a Hungarian
general who had an iron Cross that had been given
to him by Hitler, but he had actually defected late

(26:12):
in the war and was like literally fighting for the
other side. And I don't know whatever that he wasn't
a fucking good person, but like whatever, he gets the
Hitler Cross for also having fought Hitler. Yeah, totally, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Hitler also famously fought Hitler. True, he's sure. He's the
only person you ever killed Hitler, So I know, I know,
people don't give him enough credit for that. So prior

(26:35):
to the Soviet capture of the country, and look, it
was good that the Red Army captured Hungary, Like kicking
out the Nazis is good, right, fuck him? Yeah, they
stopped the Holocaust, like that's good. Famously, World War Two
was the three less evil empires fighting the most evil empire.
Uh yeah, the two of them. Admittedly, yeah, okay, fair well,

(26:58):
Italy wasn't as powerful, but oh ja yeah, no, no, no,
I know, you're right, You're right. I'm so sorry. I yeah,
you're all.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
And so, which is funny because that's even in the
fucking theater of war that my family fought in. Yeah,
mine too. Unfortunately, so prior to the Communists capturing the now,
when I from now on, when I say communist, I'm
going to mean the Communist Party, which is one of
my least favorite semantic things has ever happened. But you know,

(27:30):
imagine a capital ce. Before the Communist took the country,
the Communist Party was tiny. There was a huge socialist
movement in Hungary, but it was largely Social Democratic and
there's also anarchists and stuff, and of course they're left
out of all of the histories unless you specifically look
for them. But yeah, the Social Democratic Party had ten
times the number of people and they had like organized
all the factory workers and shit. Soviets show up. They

(27:54):
take over all of the existing state apparatus in the country,
including the a v O. The Secret police. Like basically
the Social Democrats come over at this point, and then
the anarchist movement gets kind of split into a different group.
Like some of them are like, we're getting the fuck
out of here. Some of them are like, we're gonna
fight tooth and nail against the Soviets, and some of
them are like, hey, the Soviets said that we're allowed
to be legitimized, and so they became like a legitimate

(28:15):
anarchist group and then they all got liquidated. Oh never
do that.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
They're always lying and never people have tried this, They
always die.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
I know, it's Lucy with the football. Come on, Charlie Brown,
just kick the football this time. Yeah. Oh god, I
hate thinking about this in the context of the fact
that we need a popular front in order to feed
fascism anyway, so they take over. The Soviets takeover. They
start stripping the place of resources, which they call reparations,

(28:44):
so that the Hungarian workers are paid shit and all
their food is going to the USSR. In nineteen forty eight,
shit was so bad that the USSR canceled half of
their reparations to avoid uprisings. J Is christ by A.
Nineteen forty nine, the Hungarian Peace Republic was formed, a
single party communist state. Prior to that, there was like, oh,

(29:05):
we're like communists, but there's like elections kind of asterisk,
you know. But the thing is is that the Hungarian
Communist Party was kind of largely made up of these
like social democrats and not actual like communists, and so
they kind of are like, yeah, we're what now, Okay,
I guess we're communists now whatever, And so they kind

(29:26):
of they have this beautiful thing where they're just doing
lip service to everything. They're like, oh, yeah, we're totally
doing the thing, and no one's doing the thing. They're
all just lying. It's brilliant rules. Yeah, and all these states,
all the Soviet satellite states, they're all extracted from territories
whatever you would want to call that, I would call

(29:47):
it imperialism, but obviously words of no meaning. To quote
historian Nick Heath quote, they sold to Hungary at above
world prices. This is the USSR, and bought it ex
sports at well below world prices. It's like how they
did their economic extraction. And I have read official Communist

(30:07):
meeting notes from the nineteen fifties where Communist Party members
say things like, well, Poland thinks were ripping them off
by buying their coal at terrible prices, leaving their entire
economy and shambles and everyone poor as hell. But they're wrong,
Like they don't offer any supporting evidence, Like the Communists
say this. They're like, well, all the workers think that

(30:28):
they're getting ripped off over a coal, which is clearly
not true because the party line says it's not true.
Oh and I think this is just the way that
the Communist Party members like have to talk, even at
the highest level. Yeah, they have to lace their speech
with disclaimers. A note to the left, don't do that.
Don't be forced to do that. They have to lace

(30:51):
their speech full of disclaimers like don't worry, I toe
the party line. But some people are saying all the
polls are starving to death. Clearly they're wrong.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
I also just love the just the no one having
the cost in a dissonance here of like, congratulations, we
have built communism. It's based on a price system.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
What are we doing here? Wait? Yeah, come on, yeah,
come on, meet the new boss actually different from the
old boss, but just worse. Yeah, it's like it's just okay.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
So like, yeah, you wake up in the morning, you
go to your communism job, and you get paid your
communism dollars. Did you work for your communism boss? And
your communism boss can have you arrested if you.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
It's like, what are we doing here? What was the
point of this? Like, yeah, you have to pay your
rent to the communism state, Like yep, yep, it's really
hard to make systems worse than capitalism. And hats off
to the USSR. They did their best. Yeah did they succeed,
But they tried. It's a toss up. Yeah they tried

(31:53):
little little better in some areas and worse than other areas. Yeah,
they're both worse. Yeah, exactly exactly the words of Actually
I think that was Stealin who said they're both worse.
Oh where Stalin win Salin did two good things and
we'll talk about it later. Oh mayeople were gonna hold

(32:15):
that against me if you don't keep listening, all right,
you know, and hungry things were bad the five year plan,
which is like not actually though I bet it's a
perfectly fine way to organize an economyist to set up
a five year plan. They just keep doing bad ones. Yeah, Like,
if you listening, if you wanted your life to get better,
make a five year plan to start working on it.
You got to make plans in order to get anything done.

(32:35):
So I'm not mad about a five year plan. There
were some thatwork.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
Fine, it's just you just don't hear about them because
like I don't know, like the five year plan to
like develop the like I don't know, like you're running
an oil system like worked kind of hell yeah, but
you don't really hear much about it.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, when you're like my five year plan is to
make the library system more accessible, and like everyone's like
ohs and eat, you know. Like from nineteen forty nine
to nineteen fifty three, their five year plan involved turning
an agricultural country with no iron ore or coal into
a place full of heavy industry. This is the thing
I was comparing this too earlier. Yeah. Yeah, the capital,

(33:14):
Budapest in particular, was turned into a factory town making
steel and guns and trucks and bikes and shit like that. Unions,
of course, were dissolved. Can't have unions in your communist country.
Woo hey, you could have them in China. It's just
that your union doesn't get to do anything. Oh okay, Well,
it's just like part of the management structure. It's great,
it's great.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Well, I mean it's not actually technically formally part of
the MANUFRA structure, but like that's functionally what it does
except for one time at Gianemen and then never again.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
So yeah, they learned their lesson. Yeah, wages fell seventy
five percent between nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty two. Jesus,
what the oh my god. This is the comparison I
want to make when I was saying I want to
make it, compare it to right now moving everything to
heavy industry. But you know, it doesn't hurt the economy.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
The products and services support this podcast if you buy them,
but if you don't buy them, it hurts the economy.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, it's actually true. It actually does. It does literally
help the economy if you buy stuff. That is actually
the way economies work, which is why when you decrease
everyone's wages, you mess the economy up. And when you
make things too expensive to afford and you have hyper inflation,
it messes the economy up. But buying stuff doesn't mess
the economy up unless you support things you shouldn't. And

(34:32):
you know what that's up to you, dear listener, to
listen to these products and services and think about which
ones you support and which ones you don't. And I'm
sure you'll agree with me that they're all good. And
I have personally vetted each and every one. You can't
legally say that YEES training is very clear. Interesting. I
have not vetted any of these That's the actual truth.
I love that I can't lie on air. See it's good.

(34:54):
It's keeping me from lying. Here's the ads and we're back.
Nineteen fifty two was the worst year in Hungarian history
for agriculture. As of that year, I don't know if
it got any better after that. I probably fifty five

(35:19):
percent of people were living below the minimum standard of living.
When you're like, oh, okay, well that means that forty
five percent we're living above the minimum standard of living. Incorrect,
Only fifteen percent of people were above the standard of living.
Thirty percent of people were at it. Oh no, this
is oh no, yeah, you can't be doing this to

(35:40):
people like you simply cannot. No, it really didn't work out.
One in five workers had no winter coat Jesus Christ. Like,
that's like, this is something like like Chinese soldiers Moreshkua
Korea with no shoes bullshit, Like what are we doing here?
Like a peasant can go shoe a bear and have

(36:00):
a coat. You know, you've made them poorer than that,
Like it's actually astonishing. It's like, wow, damn the wages
of imperialism. Who could possibly have guessed that resource distraction
and redesigning someone's economy would it make people poor? Yeah?
Wow damn woo. So people were upset by this, including communists.

(36:21):
Four hundred and eighty three thousand Communist Party members were
expelled from the Communist Party over this period. Jesus Christ.
That's more Communists than I've ever met. Yeah, are there
even that many Communists in the US?

Speaker 1 (36:33):
Now?

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Like maybe maybe? And if so, it's like right of
that line, So what happened was everyone stole from their job.
It was the only way to make ends meet. The
entire economy ran on theft. The output quotas that people
were presented with were absurd, so everyone just lied about

(36:57):
meeting the output quotas. You could probably just like bribe
the official who's also relying on you know, graft and whatever.
Just mean bribery. I think it just means bribery. Yeah, yeah,
it's like general corruption. Yeah, okay, cool, Yeah, but like Blake.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
I think it's I think it graphic is specifically about
taking money out of the thing.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
But yeah, so the entire economy is running off of that.
If you go to the store, you know that you're
going to be ripped off. The scales are weighted against
you because that's the only way the shopkeepers could survive.
So everyone's stealing from everyone else. Unfortunately, it's not just
a like noble robinhood. Everyone's stealing from the big state corporation.

(37:39):
You know. Everyone is just trying to fucking live.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Which no one here has any experience of living in
an entire economy that is based on scams and robbing people,
not like none of us. What is AI?

Speaker 2 (37:50):
What is crypto. No one, no one's ever seen this before,
no one, no one knows what a robo call is.
I will say though, April fifteenth is annual steal something
from workday. Wow amn wow. I used to joke when
I worked for the anarchist publisher a K Press as
a freelancer that I was going to celebrate steal something
from workday, and they were like, please don't. I'm like,

(38:15):
all right, fine, you're a workaround collective. Come on, you
go st you gotta steal a pen, I know, like
just to maate it. I know, well, obviously I've never
stolen anything, but imagine someone who would have stolen something, okay,
girl boss, girl.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Bos so moral, so she I know, I know I
was clearly never I think I've like written and published
things about how I used to shoplift all the time.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Never mind anyway, as a long time ago, as a
love from corporation statul limitation statue limitations. I want to
start a podcast is a really bad idea. I always
wanted to start a podcast called the Statute of Limitations Podcast.
Oh or we just have a lawyer on the phone
call with us. People tell really cool stories of crime.
After the revelation. After the revelation, we could have the

(39:06):
better podcast. We can't do right now exactly all of
the things we will be able to tell each other
if we yeah, pull off a worker council run society.
So all the while, there's all the usual state communist
fuckery going on. There's internment and labor camps, there's internal
exile and deportment. I think people are getting like sent

(39:27):
off to the USSR at labor camps or whatever. There's
no religious tolerance, there's no free speech. Lots of people
are getting arrested for quote incorrect opinions. And dear tankies,
if you're hate listening this far into it. That is
a direct quote from communist reports of the time talking
about the need to crack down on quote incorrect opinions.

(39:50):
I am not putting words in their mouth. I promised
you earlier that Stalin did two good things with his life. Ooh.
One of them was that he used to rob Banks
as a communist revolutionary, And honestly, that was just kind
of cool, Like this is funny, It's pretty funny. He
was kind of a cool guy. Ever, the moment, he
was probably a terrible person. I don't know, great episode
of vanderwer based off of it. We're episodes. Oh shit, yeah,

(40:13):
I'm not watching second season until all of it's out.
That's so reasonable that this is this that season one though.
Oh well, I have no functional memory, so that's my
excuse there. That's reasonable. You know, many such cases, many
such cases, which is also I'm really screwed when it
comes to TV shows because I have to The reason
I have to watch it all at once is because
I forget everything. But I also have to watch everything linear.

(40:35):
So when like a new season, like a new season,
a lower decks came out and I'm I just finished
rewatching all first four seasons so that I could watch
season five. Oh, because I can't just jump in. But
Jamie Loftus helped make it so I have to watch it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
I was gonna say, yeah, beloved friend of the show
and coworker, Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, we love Jamie. So that was one of the
things that Stalin did that was good. Was Rob Banks. Second.
He made his greatest contribution to socialism on March fifth,
nineteen fifty three, when he died. Ah, I was gonna
make a joke about him dying. No, I have nothing

(41:14):
nice to say about that man. Besides the fact that
he was before he had any power and he was
a bank robbery, he was an interesting person. He died
and everyone was like desperately like, oh cool, can we
destalinize now? This has been just a reign of terrors,
like literally a rule by fear, and it affected everyone
at the highest levels too. So a guy named Krushchev

(41:34):
came into power, and for a while in the nineteen
fifties the USSR looked like it was going to de
Stalinize and become slightly less fucked of a place. Spoiler alert,
this is the guy who was about to invade Hungary.
In Hungary, things start to become a little bit more free. Specifically,
in June of nineteen fifty three, the leader Matthias Rikassi,

(41:55):
who called himself Stalin's Hungarian disciple, stepped aside for a
guy named Imare Nog. And this guy has done a
lot of stalinisty things over his life Nog, but in general,
his whole thing was like not being as bad as Stalin.
I was like his whole vibe right.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
But that great great bander to be able to wave
like I'm not as bad as Stalin well, spoiler alert,
it's gonna get him killed by the communists.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Rip.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
I guess unless it here is always be worse than
Stalin were the same as Stealin. No, they'd probably get
killed by Stalin too, that's true. That's true. Be Stalin.
I guess it's never safe to be a Bolshevik. Bolsheviks
will kill you.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Like that's always the thing is, like people always assume
that you're going to be like Stalin, or you're gonna
be on the secial committee or something. It's like, no,
like you're gonna be some asshole who's like neighbor gets
into an argument with you over like dishwashing, and they're
gonna report you to the secret police and then you're
gonna die.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah. Like that's like the actual like experience of this,
like yeah, you, oh, you'll be I've read accounts of
people in the Red Arm in World War Two, not
only like not being given a gun and being sent
into battle anyway being like, well there'll be guns around,
just get out there, but literally told that if they
don't like shout like glory to Stalin enough as they

(43:13):
like charge tanks with their fingernails, that they're going to
be shot by the cadre who's behind them? Great, great, great, incredible. Well,
I mean, look, you have to use the guings for something,
and it can't be shooting at the Nazis. Yeah I know, yeah, yeah, look,
you have so many communists to shoot, like, I know,
I know. No one is better at killing communists than communists.
The Nazis came close, they tried, they did their past. Yeah, yeah,

(43:34):
which fuck them. Actually it might be a it might
be a tie. Yeah, they might have. They might actually
have been better at it. Yeah, but anyway, A couple
of days later, after Nog gets into power, there's a
worker's insurrection in East Berlin involving a million fucking people
who wanted to live decent lives. Fifty or one hundred

(43:55):
people were killed when the USSR crushed that rebellion with tanks.
In a couple of days, looking at Hungary and the
general discontent, Nog is like, maybe we should try something new,
a new course, he called it. And that's what it
was called, with like capital N and capital C. Better
standard of I mean, it is genuinely a better thing.

(44:16):
Nog is not actually a bad person in this story.
Better standard of living, No more internment, camps. Some prisoners
get amnesty. People can have religion, I guess, and also
stop trying to force everything to industrialize. Collectivization of farms
is now optional, and so a quarter of them decollectivized.
I believe it to set up like small farms, but

(44:39):
I don't know. It could have been trying capitalist farms.
I don't know. Nog was still like a pro stalin
Ish guy, and he called the Great Purge of the
lighteen thirties trial and error.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
I guess that is technically true. They did do trials
and they didn't make a lot of errors.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
But it's true. It's gonna happen to him too, because
they even, like half of those people who get killed later,
the communists are like, oh, I shouldn't have killed that guy.
There's a whole yeah, there's a whole like thing. Which
is also funny because people now today believe that, like
all those people deserve to die. It's like the communists,
like the stalin Ist yeah, like the actual like stalind
didn't believe that, like what are we doing here?

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Absolutely terrible, terrible, And they tried the new course and
for a while it must have been nice. But on
April eighteenth nineteen fifty five, naug is kicked out and
another guy, Hegettis, is in and I probably mispronounced his name,
but it's okay because he's not going to come back
up in the story. No more new course, back to

(45:35):
rule by fear. Peasants who don't meet their quotas are deported.
I believe to do labor in the USSR, but everything
I like, literally I like three different sources are like, oh,
they get deported as if I know exactly what that
means instead of just.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yeah, because I mean it could also mean like internal deportation,
because like right, yeah, like Soviet systems are set up
such that like you're not supposed to be have like
leave your area.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, like that.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
There's just like a weird thing that still exists in
some European cities where like you can get kicked out
if you're like in another city and like at night
like to do this with like like people who look
not white in like Belgium.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Yeah, if you're like in another city partying, they will
just like fucking kick you out and send you back
to the city. You're like quote unquote supposed to be
in terrible stuff. Zero out of ten we hate it.
I think that that's gonna be like a big that's
like a big sign of when US authoritarianism gets to
a point where like internal travel, I mean obviously internal
travel isn't always safe for everyone already. Yeah, like there's already,

(46:26):
like anything, we're retally close to the borders. It's like,
you know, especially to further south you go, has had checkpoints,
but like it can get worse. It can always get worse. Yeah,
and I guess they also are trying to make it
illegal it whatever. I don't know all the details of
all the laws, but like you can't go get reproductive
care in another state sometimes, and yeah, freedom of movement.
I think it should be complete and for involve international

(46:51):
borders as well, but well there shouldn't be them, but anyway,
So in May nineteen fifty five, speaking of internationalization, the
Warsaw Pact was signed. This was the USSR's answered, well,
it was the Soviet Block's answer to NATO. It is
a military alliance of all the Eastern Bloc communist countries.

(47:12):
This alliance ostensibly means any country will support the others,
but it also means, in effect, Soviet troops are allowed
to occupy any Eastern Bloc country as long as NATO
is around. To be fair, NATO is the same thing,
just with the US and the USSRS for all.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, and like and there they are going to spend
a lot of the money and resources from that forming
like incredibly weird stay behind networks of like Nazis with guns.
We're gonna do a whole bunch of terrible shit.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
So it's not great, Like these things both suck. I
literally don't whether you're talking about the Soviets or NATO,
but either way, oh, NATO, NATO, this is not talking
about but yeah that the Soviets tend to be more
like tank roly and the NATO tends to be more
like ooh by weird spies handed in Neo Nazia a
bunch of bombs and they blew a bunch of train up. Yeah,

(48:02):
fair enough. Soviet troops are stationed in Hungary as a
result of the War So Pact. The majority of Hungarians
see themselves as under occupation and that however, my source
on that is a US Army report from early nineteen
fifty six, which is not the most reliable source, but
it matches everything else I've read. I just want to
flag that one is not the safest source. But I

(48:24):
want to talk about that report from January nineteen fifty six.
We're going to talk more later about US involvement and
lack of involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, But in January
nineteen fifty six, there was a US Army intelligence briefing
about Hungary about whether or not it was a reasonable
place to foment insurrection against communism. There were probably reports

(48:45):
like this for all the communist countries, but this is
the one that I read. The report decided the answer
of whether or not to foment an insurrection Hungary was no,
saying that Hungary was quote singularly unpromising. I wonder if
you're gonna be able to guess why it's unpromising. You
probably aren't. It's too weird of an answer, although it's
an answer I like, too democratic. No, it's it's too

(49:10):
geographically flat. Oh, it's the fucking Oh, it's the Siga War.
You need mountains to have a gorilla war. You know,
one day on this show, we're gonna do my blanky.
The writers of Rohan who didn't have mountains and they
still kicked ass. I was Emakar Cabral who was like, ah,

(49:33):
the people are my mountains.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
Each ship will fight a war in the planes that Oh,
he's the guy. He was one of the guys who
like liberated Guinea Bissau and like the Cape Verde from
from the Portuguese.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Okay, and they killed it. They killed him before he
could like because he didn't have mountains. They won the war.
Oh okay, fair enough, Okay, okay, the people were his mountains.
They also like basically defeated fascist in Portugal basically like
they can't kick their ask so much that the government collapsed.
Hell yeah, yeah, shit guy rules. Also, I want to

(50:11):
just make a correction of something I said earlier. Rohan
was able to go to helms deep, which were in
the mountains, and that's true. That's true. That is how
they survived. So I apologize everyone. One day I'm gonna
have an actual person who has Lord of the Rings
on here and they're gonna be like, what's the name
of the mountains, And I'll be like, man, I don't
know the name of the mountains. What the fuck? I
just like read those books a couple of times, and

(50:32):
I like the stories, like what God created the mountains,
like yeah, exactly. Anyway, so they look at so the
US Army. The US Army looks at this place and
is like, this is unpromising. There is less active resistance
there than there were in any of the other Warsaw
packed countries, but there was very widespread passive resistance, especially

(50:54):
among the peasantry, because agricultural workers were under less strict control,
because it's harder to control people in rural areas than
when they're condensed into factories. Sure, if you don't meet quotas,
you will be deported, but there were widespread work slowdowns
and shit, especially in the rural areas. And the report
comes out in January and Eisenhower's like, yeah, that's not

(51:17):
worth fighting a world war over. I am not fomenting
an insurrection there, and the issue is largely dropped. I
will come back and talk about some of the US involvement,
but that's later and less than what people claim. Meanwhile,
throughout the nineteen fifties, revolts start to pop off around
the Warsaw packed countries, and even within the USSR. Poland

(51:38):
had been revolting, and Polish communists are like, aren't we
fucking independent from the USSR? Isn't that like part of
our whole thing, Like I thought we were a communist country.
That's like a separate country. And they were upset that
they had to sell coal at shitty prices to the USSR.
Poland's economy was completely wrecked under communism in the fifties.
According to communist documents, by June nineteen fifty six, you

(52:02):
have one hundred thousand polls demonstrating against the communist regime
and fifty seven people were killed. People in Hungary were
aware of this happening. Declassified documents show that all the
communist parties of these various countries were like saying, declassified documents.
They were declassified a long time ago. I'm not being
like I've got my no.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Yeah, are these these are like Falosov Union documents, Yeah exactly,
like we got all the troops.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Yeah. The communist parties of all these various countries were like, oh, fuck,
we're losing control in nineteen fifty six, so they got
together to be like, what the fuck are we going
to do? Press and radio were starting to leave Communist
party control, partly due to dissent within the party. This
is specifically in Hungary. The main Communist Party paper. Remember
I promised to you earlier that the Hungarian Communist Party

(52:49):
was full of people who were like, were what now communists?
All right? I guess I mean we were socialists. I
guess sure, you know, the main Communist party paper in
Hungary was run by communists who dis agreed with the
Communist party line. An internal Communist Party investigation from Moscow reported, quote,
a practically parallel Communist party, opposed to the Central Committee

(53:12):
of the party has been created, which acts freely and
without impediments. Woo, that rules things. I created a second
shadow Communist party inside of the regular covenis from It
sucks less, but it was like but it was basically
the entire Communist Party was the shadow Communist party. The

(53:34):
Communist Party of Hungary wasn't loyal to the Communist Party
of Hungary, or at least its own ostensible party line.
People were paying lip service to the party line in
order to not get crushed. Several hundred dissident party members
have recently been released from prison and shit, I think
as part of the new course. And so Rakosi was like,
the guy who's in charge right now, He's like, well, quote,

(53:57):
if we arrest some others will appear, and if we
arrest them, the third wave will arise and there would
be no end to that. He's just like, nah, yeah, yeah,
I would get the rest of them, like, let just keep
me more. Yeah. And so that the communist guy from
Moscow is writing this report. His name is Anastas mccoyan,
and he wrote, just to quote him from his report, quote,

(54:19):
the local Communist party should not have its own policy.
It should be an executor of the Russian Communist Party's decisions.
Which is just like a this isn't the USSR, Like
this is such a nice, clear, blatant example of the
fact that like the satellite states were just that, you know, yeah,
they're just colonies, yeah, like the US and Puerto Rico.

(54:40):
And here's one of my favorite pieces of Soviet double
think I've ever read, from the same report, quote, A
situation where newspapers in the radio cease to serve as
channels of the Central Committee line also represents a violation
of internal party democracy. It is therefore necessary to get
rid of all press and radio staff unwilling to implement

(55:01):
the Central Committee's line in the name of democracy. Oh god.
And so there's this thing that happens sometimes in history,
and when this thing happens, you usually get a revolution.
As far as I can tell, it is when young

(55:22):
intellectual types start talking to and listening to workers and
vice versa. And you've got that going on in Hungary
at this point. The Young Communists is the official youth
organization of the Communist Party. Oh yeah, the group that
leads the fucking revolution is part of the Communist Party.

(55:44):
And in April nineteen fifty five, the year before the revolution,
they formed the Potophi Circle. It is named after an
eighteen forty eight Hungarian national poet who fought against the
Austrians back in that pro democracy leftist nationalist revolution. I
was talking about the very beginnings of people were attending
these Potfi Circle meetings. This isn't just like a book

(56:05):
club or whatever. I mean. Book clubs are great, listen
to mine every Sunday and so okay. I was saying
how peasants can do passive resistance because they're not as
closely surveilled. But industrial workers have an advantage too. They
can organize because they're in close proximity to each other,
and they're also because they're in the cities in proximity
with the po TOFI circle of intellectuals, and the two

(56:26):
groups start talking more and more. These people do not
want to end communism. They are communists. They want communism,
they want democratic workplace control, unions, workers' rights ideally, and
they're kind of split over whether they want to use
a sort of existing state Soviet infrastructure and have like

(56:49):
a more top down kind of whatever, or if they
want worker control of their own workplace, complete bottom up
transformation of society. Yeah. By nineteen fifth they start having
some strikes, not the Potoviy circle but workers, and the
potovie circle starts supporting those strikes. And then okay, So
this guy named Laslo Rosch, he was a Hungarian communist.

(57:13):
He did it all. He was kicked out of the
school in the nineteen thirties for being Communist party member.
He fought in Spain and the International Brigades of the
Spanish Civil War take a drink for Spanish Civil War. Mentioned.
He organized underground communist shit and fascist Hungary during World
War Two and was arrested and barely survived. And then
I did say he was a state communist. He ran

(57:34):
the communists secret police in Hungary. Oh No, and he
set up the very first show trials in that country
and started persecuting religious people. And do you know how
it killed him. It's not gonna be suberculous this. That's
the other thing that kills people, the government. Yeah, the government. Yeah. No,
he was killed in a show trial, only a couple
of years after he invented show trialsks, folks, don't show trials.

(58:01):
You will die in your own show trial. Yes, simply
do not do it. They're easy. I'm doing it right now. Yeah,
he does not do it. Play authoritarian games and you
win authoritarian prizes. Why do I bring him up? His wife,
Julia Rosh was part of the Potofi circle, and they
forced the government to officially say, I guess we shouldn't

(58:23):
have killed that guy. And one hundred thousand people turn
up for his new state funeral and it's one hundred
thousand anti establishment folks, m h. And it is the
first big gathering of such people in Hungary since Soviet era.
And so yeah, the po Tofi circle is organizing. They
go out all over the country to other cities and

(58:44):
start spreading their ideas and soon they're gonna have a revolution,
which we'll talk about on Wednesday. Ooh, cliffhanger. Oh, I know,
you gotta come back. There's a better cliffhanger, like about
five hundred words from now the script, but it would
have been too uneven of a break. I could have
left it on the like and they've got guns, what's

(59:05):
gonna happen? Don't worry, They're gonna get guns, and then
we'll see what happens. Oh yeah, So I'm excited for
the workers getting guns. We always like the workers getting guns.
I know, I know that's a big uh. Well, actually
it almost ended up in the script and then got
I ended up taking it out because people kind of
take Marxist quotes about gun control out of context. It

(59:26):
turns out like he has this quote where Marx is
a quote where he's like, I don't know whatever, like
don't let the workers be disarmed. Yeah, it's like the
workers should never give up their guns. Yeah yeah, But
that's actually in the context of a communist state, like
being the community, being the people trying to It's like
not quite as cool of a quote as even I

(59:47):
want it to be. And so I try to include
I'll bunch of that stuff, and then I ended up
cutting a lot out I also ended up cutting out
a lot where I like would find sources with like
really banger quotes about why like Lenin quotes about like
don't do imperialism in your communist country or whatever, but
then I couldn't source them besides to the fucking anarchist

(01:00:08):
thing from the nineteen sixties that I was quoting from.
Oh okay, there's actually an explanation for this, okay, just
that there is a bunch of stuff that Lenin said
that is cut out of the official anthology that were
published by the Soviet Union. Oh shit.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
So, for example, he has this line about how national
autonomy along the lines of two German guys who name
I can't remember right now, like is in and of
a self reactionary okay, which is this thing that is
like if you take what he's saying like seriously and
you're like, oh, okay, like you're not supposed to have
like national cultural autonomy. This also kind of like annihilates

(01:00:41):
the basis of sort of like a bunch of the
way stylist national liberation like functions where you're supposed to
have your own sort of like nationalist workers movement, et cetera,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Et cetera. And that shit is fucking gone. They cut
that shit out of the speeches, like the writings, So
there's shit that Lenin said that is just not in
the official things were they like edited down his like things.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
And because and because like those official copies of like
Lenin's writings and whatever are the ones that like are
a lot of the ones that got digitized, they's sometimes
hard to find things that he actually said.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
It's also in translation too, right, so you're searching searching
a quote, and so if it's not the exact same translation,
it's gonna be different.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
Yeah, And like I learned this from a very very
angry trust Gate professor I had in college. That guy,
I hope he's having a good day.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
It was. It was a whole thing I learned a
lot about. Trotsky is still a disaster, but they have
a lot of very funny beefs that have to do
with like specific quotes that were cut out.

Speaker 4 (01:01:38):
But the styllamists, Hell, yeah, it's a good time. Well,
there's gonna be lots of good revolution and stuff on Wednesday.
In the meantime, I guess I already plugged book club,
but I do a book club and Mia, you did.
I just introduced you and assumed everyone listening to who

(01:01:59):
you were. But that might not be the case.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
There might be someone who doesn't know who you are.
Who are you? How'd you get here? I am Mia Wong.
I am one of the hosts of the podcast It
Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and
how to put it back together again. I guess I'm
also There's a lot of people who don't realize I'm
also the Ice Must Be Destroyed girl on originally Twitter

(01:02:21):
and now just blue Sky. So yeah, I do those things.
We have a podcast. It's good History is most vindicated poster.
That is what people are calling you. It was funny.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
I was talking about this today and I was like, well, yeah,
of course obviously was like, yes, I took the incredibly
bulld political position of regardless of what administration is in power,
the Gestapo was bad. And I was like, yeah, I
don't know this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
This is like being vindicated for saying that water is wet,
Like it's like, this is the easiest shit of all time.
Like I will say though, Okay, so for anyone who's listening,
MIA's posts always end with furthermore no yes, more over,
ice must be destroyed. Moreover, ice must be destroyed. And
I reached a point because you also have like really

(01:03:05):
good tweet threads. Sometimes I reached a point every now
and then where I'm like, man, could you just stop?
Like everyone knows this, no, but I can't. It's an
active hatred act of grief active. And for me it
came around first is before I even knew you. I
was like, oh, it's the ice must be a destroyed girl.
And then like I was like, oh, I'm friends with

(01:03:25):
the ice must be destroyed girl. That's so cool. And
then eventually I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it.
I want to read the thread without seeing that every time,
but as it swings around, I'm like, no, it just
really needs to be said constantly.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
And yeah, because someone asked you and no one else's
and like I don't know, I can. Yeah, Like I
was doing it in the wake of like just sort
of collapse of occupy Ice, and like as it was
sort of falling apart, and like someone had to try
to keep the fucking flame alive in some public way,
and yeah, a person shoued out to be me, even
though I had like a thousand followers at the time,
and I was just like some.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
Dipshit, but I are a dipshit with a ton of followers. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
It's that you too can be some random person who
then suddenly does a thing, and you can you can
do good in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
All right, Well that's it. Listen to more cool Zone
Media podcasts and we'll talk to you on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.