<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_5562" style="width: 497px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-5562">And then came tanks.</figcaption></figure>

Almost overshadowed by the Presidential election, the situation in Hungary quickly spiraled out of control by November 4th 1956. News reports were coming in thick and fast regarding Russian tanks heading for Budapest with the intent on crushing a revolt that had begun in Budapest and spread throughout Hungary.

The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956 in Budapest when university students appealed to the civil populace to join them at the Hungarian Parliament Building to protest against the USSR’s geopolitical domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Mátyás Rákosi. A delegation of students entered the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their sixteen demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but were detained by security guards. When the student protestors outside the radio building demanded the release of their delegation, a group of police from the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) fatally shot several of the students.

Consequently, Hungarians organized into revolutionary militias to fight against the ÁVH; local Hungarian communist leaders and ÁVH policemen were captured and summarily executed; and political prisoners were released and armed. To realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government from the Hungarian Working People’s Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja). The new government of Imre Nagy disbanded the ÁVH, declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October the intense fighting had subsided.

Although initially willing to negotiate the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Hungary, the USSR repressed the Hungarian Revolution on 4 November 1956, and fought the Hungarian revolutionaries until Soviet victory on 10 November; repression of the Hungarian Uprising killed 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet Army soldiers, and compelled 200,000 Hungarians to seek political refuge abroad, mostly to Austria.

Here is a ninety minute excerpt from an almost ten hour special broadcast, as heard over CBS Radio on the night of November 4, 1956. It bounces back and forth between the special emergency session of the United Nations Security Council and reports from the ground in Budapest.

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