Hungarian Revolution of 1956

On 23 October 1956, students in Budapest set out on a silent march. By nightfall Stalin's giant bronze statue was down, the secret police had opened fire on a crowd outside the radio building, and a country that had spent years being made to smile was in open revolt.

For a few astonishing days it looked as if they had won. Soviet forces began pulling out of Budapest. The hated secret police was dissolved. A one-party state stopped being one in a matter of days. Then, before dawn on 4 November, the tanks came back.

This Turbo History short tells the Hungarian Revolution straight, from a show trial in 1949 to a funeral in Heroes' Square forty years later:

• How a hanged Foreign Minister, dug up and reburied with full honours, cracked the regime's biggest lie wide open
• Young workers with petrol bottles against Soviet armour in the narrow streets around the Corvin cinema and the Kilián Barracks
• Why Moscow decided to crush the revolution before Hungary declared neutrality, not after
• The Suez war that broke out on day six, and the quiet split between Washington, London and Paris at the UN
• Did Radio Free Europe promise help? What the station's own review found
• Nearly 200,000 refugees, a secret trial, and a burial face down in an unmarked grave

Thirty-one years to the day after Imre Nagy was hanged, around a quarter of a million people came to bury him again. The tanks won in 1956. The revolution took thirty-three years.

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