On October 23, we revolutionaries commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. On the other hand, others will continue to discredit it. Both the right and the imperialist bourgeoisie as well as the left of the system, especially Stalinism, will lie saying that it was a revolution against communism and in favor of capitalism. They have tried to hide the workers' character of the Hungarian political revolution, expressed in the birth of the revolutionary organs, the workers' councils that put the workers at the center of events and terrorized the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Not only has this great revolution been slandered for decades by Stalinism, which says it was an anti-communist revolution, but also the renegades of Trotskyism led by Michel Pablo, who had broken the Fourth International in 1953 to later reunite and form aong with others, the Unified Secretariat in 1963, did not support this revolution because, according to them, it could play the game of US imperialism and endanger the Stalinist power, which they considered progressive. The truth is that the Hungarian workers waged a struggle against imperialism and Stalinism in favor of workers' democracy in what was the first of the several political revolutions in the degenerated or deformed workers' states.
The General Strike was the Hungarian response to the invasion of the Kremlin tanks. In 1956, the vast majority of Hungarians did not question socialism, quite the contrary. They did not want a "socialism" diminished by the totalitarian control of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste. They believed in complete socialism, that is, without national oppression and with workers' democracy.

But this reaction of the Hungarian workers could not find a response in the international proletariat because there was a siege to the Hungarian revolution that was isolated from the working class of the rest of the world because of Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism. They all defended the Stalinism which received, in addition, the support of US imperialism, which, in the words of its US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, promised not to intervene in Eastern European affairs because Hungary was considered "as an internal matter of the USSR and we do not consider these nations possible military allies”. It was the consequence of the peaceful coexistence between Stalinism and imperialism derived from the counterrevolutionary agreements of Yalta and Potsdam that were a pact to contain the world revolution between the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialism to, on the one hand, stop the revolution in the Post-war Western Europe (in Greece, France, Italy ...) and, on the other, to maintain an iron bureaucratic and counterrevolutionary control over the masses of the Eastern European countries that were occupied by the Stalinist bureaucracy with the Red Army - including the crushing by blood and fire of the processes of political revolution such as the East Berlin workers' uprising in 1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and then the Prague Spring in 1968. The revolutionary working class terrorized this Stalinist bureaucracy that feared losing its privileges and that had to be used thoroughly to end these revolutions.
Because of the betrayal of the Stalinist and ex-Trotskyist left, the world proletariat did not shout "The Soviet tanks shall not pass!" or "We are all Hungarian workers!" Linking the fate of the Hungarian political revolution to the Western European workers' social revolution was the condition for the European revolution on both sides of the Iron Curtain. After the Kremlin tanks came the counterrevolution, not the heirs' revolution of October 1917, the vast majority of whom had already been killed by Stalinist hitmen or shot after the Moscow trials. Because of the renegades of Trotskyism, the Fourth International as a world party did not become a mass party in the postwar period and it did not intervene in the processes of political revolution since Michel Pablo brought his followers into the Stalinist parties.

In the Hungarian political revolution, the determining factor was the working class and its organization, which would culminate in its main body, the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest. The intoxication campaign of imperialism and Stalinism concealed the fact that the workers were fighting for the factories to belong to the workers, with the democratically elected workers' councils running the companies. It is also hidden that the public force was organized by the factory workers and their workers' militias and that the demand for free elections was for the participation of parties that recognized the socialist conquests on the basis of collective ownership of the means of production.
The role of international Stalinism, to which the former Pabloite-Mandelist Trotskyists bowed, was to prevent the spread of the revolution and to tie the international working class to the plans for the peaceful coexistence of imperialism and the usurping bureaucracy of the conquests of the revolution of October.
In this text we are going to deal with the lessons of this great workers' revolution without forgetting the debates and analysis around the events, such as that, in addition to avoiding isolation as a condition for victory, the building of the revolutionary party would also have been necessary for the seizure of power that could have led to the final victory of the Hungarian revolution. We will also analyze how in the Hungarian revolution the workers' councils were formed as an independent intervention of the working class. But first we are going to clarify what a political revolution is, relying on Leon Trotsky's texts to later compare them with the facts and conclude that his predictions were correct.

What is a political revolution according to Trotsky?
Leon Trotsky analyzed the Stalinist bureaucracy in his work "The Revolution Betrayed" (1936), and defined the USSR as a degenerate workers' state. Trotsky characterized its regime as a dictatorship of the bureaucracy over the proletariat, but based on the property relations created by the revolution. This regime was Bonapartist in a society of transition between capitalism and socialism, stopping such transition. In that work he explained the need for a new revolution, a political revolution, to regenerate the USSR. Trotsky warned that the Stalinist bureaucracy represented an atrocious threat to the survival of the USSR as the material interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy were irreconcilably opposed to those of the working class. And he assured that it could not be reformed, but that it had to be overthrown through a political revolution. Trotsky drew up, with astonishing certainty, his famous "alternative forecast": either a political revolution would topple the bureaucracy or the bureaucracy would restore capitalism. This is what he says in “The Transitional Program”: “The regime of the USSR embodies terrible contradictions. But it is still a degenerate workers' state. This is the social diagnosis. The political forecast has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming more and more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism, or else the working class will crush the bureaucracy and will open the way to socialism”. (The Transitional Program. 1938)

In "The Revolution Betrayed" Trotsky defined that the USSR was neither a "capitalist" nor a "socialist" state but a transition between one and the other, with a key contradiction between the socio-economic bases of the workers' state and the state superstructure degenerated by a Stalinist bureaucratic caste. Trotsky defined that, to defend the USSR as a workers' state, the task of the Soviet working class was to carry out a political revolution: that is, to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus and rebuild the organisms of workers' democracy, but maintaining the new socio-economic bases of the workers’ state born of the October Revolution of 1917.
Trotsky theorized in his Theory of Permanent Revolution that there is a single world socialist revolution, which combines different tasks for the working classes of the imperialist countries, of the colonial or semi-colonial countries and those of the countries where the bourgeoisie was expropriated, the workers' states, but where the Stalinist bureaucracy had carried out a bureaucratic counterrevolution, expropriating the leadership of their own state from the workers and leading it to degeneration.
For Trotsky, the revolution that was planned in the USSR (and after the Second World War, also in the new deformed workers' states) was not a social revolution, but a political revolution, whose central objective is to overthrow the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy and transform these states into revolutionary workers states, but "without modifying the economic foundations of society or replacing one form of property with another." (The Revolution Betrayed, 1936).

The political revolution is a revolution of the majority of the workers and peasants organized in soviets, against the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy to overthrow it and regain the leadership of their own state that it had expropriated from them. This is how Trotsky defined it in The Transitional Program: “The bureaucracy has replaced the soviets, as class organs. The soviets must be restored not only to their free democratic form, but also to their class content. Just as once the bourgeoisie and the kulaks were not allowed to enter the soviets, now it is necessary to expel the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy from the soviets. In the soviets there is only room for the representatives of the workers, the workers of the collective farms, the peasants, the soldiers of the Red Army”. (The Transitional Program. 1938).
The political revolution needed a program and a revolutionary leadership (a revolutionary party) at its head that could lead it to victory. This program was developed by Trotsky in The Transitional Program, where he concluded by saying: “It is impossible to carry out this program without the overthrow of the bureaucracy, which is maintained by violence and falsification. Only the victorious revolutionary uprising of the oppressed masses can resurrect the Soviet regime and guarantee its further development towards socialism. There is only one party capable of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection: the party of the Fourth International! Down with the bureaucratic Cain-Stalin gang! Long live Soviet democracy! Long live the international socialist revolution!”. (The Transitional Program. 1938).

Trotsky, in "The Revolution Betrayed", explained that the bureaucratic caste would have to be overthrown and the power of workers' democracy restored with its soviets (workers' councils): "It is not a question of replacing one leading group with another, but of changing the methods themselves of the economic and cultural direction. Bureaucratic arbitrariness must give way to Soviet democracy. The restoration of the right of criticism and of authentic electoral freedom are necessary conditions for the development of the country. The restoration of the freedom of the Soviet parties, and the rebirth of the trade unions, are implicated in this process. Democracy will provoke, in the economy, the radical revision of the plans for the benefit of the workers. Free discussion of economic problems will reduce the overhead imposed by bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. (...) The ‘bourgeois distribution norms’ will be reduced to the proportions strictly required by necessity and will recede as social wealth grows, in the face of socialist equality. Grades will be abolished immediately, and decorations returned to the locker room. Youth will be able to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, mature. Science and art will shake off their chains. Foreign policy will renew the tradition of revolutionary internationalism". ("The Revolution Betrayed", 1936).
Two years later Trotsky added: “The question is how to get out of the Soviet bureaucracy that oppresses and plunders the workers and peasants, leads the October conquests to ruin and is the main obstacle in the way of the international revolution. We have long come to the conclusion that this can only be achieved through the violent overthrow of the bureaucracy, that is, through a new political revolution. (...) But in order to achieve this, we must theoretically understand, mobilize politically and organize the hatred of the masses against the bureaucracy as the ruling caste. Authentic workers' and peasants' soviets can only emerge in the course of the uprising against the bureaucracy. Such soviets will be incited to fight cruelly against the police-military apparatus of the bureaucracy. (...) Soviets can only emerge in the course of a decisive struggle. They will be created by those layers of the workers that are dragged into the movement. The importance of the soviets consists precisely in the fact that their composition is not determined by formal criteria, but by the dynamics of the class struggle. Certain layers of the Soviet aristocracy will waver between the camp of the revolutionary workers and the camp of the bureaucracy. Whether these layers enter the Soviets and at what stage will depend on the general development of the struggle and the attitude that the different groups of the Soviet aristocracy adopt in this struggle. Those elements of the bureaucracy and aristocracy who, in the course of the revolution, cross over to the side of the insurgents will undoubtedly also find a place in the soviets. But this time not as bureaucrats and 'aristocrats' but as participants in the uprising against the bureaucracy". (Leon Trotsky, "It is necessary to expel the bureaucracy and the aristocracy from the Soviets," July 4, 1938).

The Stalinist bureaucracy is the main counterrevolutionary agent of imperialism both within the workers' states and throughout the world, which had prevented and is preventing with its action the development of the world revolution. The political revolution, confronting the bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy, was thus an indivisible part of the world proletarian revolution, because it was part of the struggle to defeat the counterrevolutionary leaderships of the proletariat throughout the world, and the main one, Stalinist the bureaucracy. That is why, at the same time, the great struggles of the western working class were the great ally of the workers of the workers' states in their struggle against the bureaucracy.

Post-World War II: Bureaucratically-deformed-born Workers' States in Eastern Europe
The Stalin regime was consolidated in the USSR in the 1930s thanks to a generalized repressive brutality against the working class and its vanguard, assassinating the old guard of the Bolshevik party that had carried out the revolution in 1917. The new collective property relations conquered by the October Revolution proved themselves stronger against imperialism in World War II, even with the boot of the bureaucracy on them, because the working class heroically defended nationalized property against the Nazis. Taking advantage of the revolutionary rise of the working class in post-war Western Europe, which intimidated imperialism and capitalism, and the presence of the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe, the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR negotiated with imperialism in the Yalta and Potsdam Pacts the recognition of its dominance over the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. The counterrevolutionary agreements of Yalta and Potsdam were a pact of containment of the world revolution between the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialism in order, on the one hand, to stop the revolution in post-war Western Europe (in Greece, France, Italy ...) and, on the other hand, to maintain an iron bureaucratic and counterrevolutionary control over the masses of the Eastern European countries occupied by the Stalinist bureaucracy with the Red Army - including, as we shall see, the crushing with blood and fire of the processes of political revolution such as the uprising of the East Berlin workers in 1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and then the Prague Spring in 1968. That is, the bureaucracy "paid" by giving up the revolution in the West, and Stalinism became from that moment the main support of the decayed and semi-ruined capitalist regime in Europe. This is how the "People's Democracies" emerged in Eastern Europe as a result of this negotiation of Stalinism with imperialism, and in them the Kremlin hierarchs placed their national bureaucratic agencies that established totalitarian regimes without the slightest hint of workers' democracy. The secret agreements of Yalta and Potsdam are irrefutable proof of the historical betrayal of Stalin and the bureaucratic caste that he headed.

Upon being occupied by the Red Army, these states first underwent a process of formation of coalition governments of national unity supported by the occupation troops, with representatives of the native bourgeoisie parties together with the small Stalinist (communist) parties that they legally maintained private property. There were pantomime elections at the state, local and regional levels overseen by the occupying Russian army and Stalin's secret police. At first these regimes had a capitalist structure, their bourgeois states endowed with Bonapartist characteristics.
In those years there was clearly the “blackmail of the occupiers”, the USSR placed members of the local Stalinist parties in important positions in the unions, youth associations, cultural and other institutions. Public positions were left for their partners in the bourgeois parties while the Stalinists accepted key positions behind the scenes. The communist parties of Eastern Europe were clearly the most influential political groups in the region, not because of their numbers, but because of their Soviet "advisers" in the NKVD and the Red Army who carried out a blackmailing exercise in infiltration of all the institutions.
In every territory occupied by the Red Army, the USSR always established a new institution whose form always followed the Soviet Stalinist pattern. The structure of the new secret police was never left to the local politicians. The secret police forces of Eastern Europe were exact copies of their Soviet progenitor, the NKVD (successor to the GPU and forerunner of the KGB): Thus were born the dreaded Polish Secret Police (UrzadBezpieczenstwa, or SB), the Security Agency of the Hungarian State (Államvédelmi Osztály, or ÁVO), which in 1953 was renamed the State Protection Authority (ÁllamvédelmiHatóság, or ÁVH), the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Steaatssicherheit, or the Stasi) or the Czechoslovakia State Security (Státníbezpecnost, or StB).

The police force in many eastern states was a non-legal structure, controlled neither by the Ministry of domestic affairs nor by the government, but only by the Stalinist party. That is, from 1945 on, the political police reported directly to the party leadership, without paying the slightest respect for the provisional coalition government. The political police, as an independent body, were not accountable to anyone except themselves.
Little by little, these countries went through a gradual transformation of social relations, which were being carried out bureaucratically, without there being a conquest of power by the proletariat, through a "cold" integration of those countries in the orbit of the USSR. There was a breakdown of these coalitions of class collaboration and little by little the expropriation of the native and imperialist capitals occurred, transforming the social relations of the region in a bureaucratic-military way, through the occupation of the Red Army, without revolutions. The Stalinist bureaucracy expropriated in the postwar period in a context of revolutionary conditions, with tendencies of revolutionary upsurge, that is, the pressure of the masses on the bureaucracy played an important role in bringing about these processes of expropriation from above. This transformation of Eastern Europe as a result of a bureaucratic-military expansion of the USSR necessitated the expropriation of the native bourgeoisies as the only way to contain the revolution in the West and control it in the East, creating bureaucratically deformed workers' states in their image and likeness with a contrary line to the internationalist expansion of the revolution and, clearly, counterrevolutionary in the international plan of Yalta, of conciliation of Stalinism with the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
In the Eastern countries, imperialism, with the bankruptcy of Germany and the entire imperialist Europe, had lost all kinds of control over the masses and over those states. The emergence of deformed workers' states and the need for the bureaucracy to prevent the masses from seizing power directly was part of the Yalta agreement, which included that Stalinism guaranteed the survival of the imperialist powers in Europe and internationally.

The expropriation in the East was not to defend the USSR from imperialism, but was part of a pact with it for the bureaucracy to deal with the masses. It was a policy of containment so that the revolution does not reach imperialist Europe. In other words, it was a defensive policy of imperialism to prepare the offensive conditions, as happened decades later, for capitalist restoration.
That was the division of tasks in Yalta: imperialism even accepted to lose Eastern Europe tactically, rather than losing imperialist Europe. Imperialism did not have its own forces to invade Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Balkans, etc… and reach the borders with the USSR. On the contrary, it needed Stalinism to save itself. To do this, they later founded the UN, where they all joined as a guarantee of the Yalta Pact.
Totalitarian regimes of dominant ideology had been established, with a single party in power and a secret police force ready to use terror and a monopoly on information. The Eastern bloc began to imitate Stalin's USSR with its systematic terror ruled by the political police, its massive purges, accelerated industrialization that imposed rates of exploitation on the working class, the forced collectivization of the countryside, and extreme spending by militarization. one-party regimes, for which the Eastern countries had a general lack of consumer goods and poor general living conditions.

An Eastern bloc protected and exploited by the Stalinist bureaucrats of the Kremlin
Since their genesis, these new workers' states (like the GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland...) created "from above", and without any revolution involved, shared many of the characteristics that Trotsky had analyzed for the USSR, adopting, We repeat, a character of bureaucratic, non-socialist workers' states. The processes of expropriation of the bourgeoisie were carried out "from above" in the states of Eastern Europe, without the participation or benefit of the working class. It is clear that in these occupied countries what the Stalinist bureaucracy carried out was to constitute a buffer zone against the Western capitalist powers. Thus Stalin and his secret police undertook the conversion of a new political bloc of bureaucratically-deformed-born workers' states, and this happened in a surprisingly short time. Eastern Europe was completely Stalinized. At the head of each of the states of the Eastern bloc Stalin placed small Stalins, namely: Walter Ulbrich, in East Germany, Mátyás Rákosi, in Hungary, Bolesław Bierut in Poland, Klement Gottwald, in Czechoslovakia, JosipTito, in Yugoslavia, Georgi Dimitrov, in Bulgaria, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in Romania, and Enver Hoxha, in Albania.
The Russian bureaucracy, although it was not a possessing class, and the USSR, although it was not capitalist, was exploitative of the Eastern European nations and their workers. Lenin already warned, before dying, against the deviations of Stalin and the USSR in relations with the nationalities that constituted the USSR. Later, Trotsky raised the possibility of the Stalinized USSR becoming an exploiter of other countries, although not in an imperialist-capitalist form.

For example, in the case of Hungary, in reparations it had to pay the USSR 600 million dollars after World War II. In addition, the Hungarians had to pay all the expenses of the Red Army stationed and in transit through Hungary, including food and housing. The Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR formed joint ventures in Hungary to control the Hungarian production of oil, coal, and their industry.
Obviously, to this exploitation from occupying to occupied country is added another, the one suffered by workers in all these Eastern European countries, such as Hungary. Without any workers planning, the Hungarian national bureaucracy abused exploitative rhythms of production for the indigenous Hungarian working class. Therefore, the workers of the Hungarian political revolution, which we will deal with later, had a double enemy, on the one hand, the invading Stalinist bureaucracy that they oppressed and, on the other, the Stalinist national bureaucracy set up from the USSR that they also oppressed. This is the reason why, in the beginning, the entire nation intervened in the fight against the foreign oppressor. But, the most important thing is that later the working class remained as the only leadership, which not only fought against national exploitation, but also against the exploitation of the native bureaucracy. As proof of this is the formation of workers' councils that were coordinated in the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest, as we will deal with later.

To the national and social exploitation to which the workers in the area of ​​influence of the Soviet bureaucracy in Eastern Europe were subjected, the political and cultural totalitarianism of the totalitarian regimes of those countries is added. The totalitarian state, although it did not liquidate the great economic conquests of the October Revolution (such as the nationalization of the means of production, the monopoly of foreign trade, or the total planning of the economy), liquidated the Leninist content of said conquests (the free and democratic intervention of the workers). Therefore, the political structure of the Eastern European countries was of a totalitarian regime, without any workers' democracy, controlled by a bureaucracy created and directed from the Kremlin by Stalin.
These were the reasons why the workers of the East rebelled against the Stalinist usurping tyrants of the revolutionary conquests and the processes of political revolution took place, which Trotsky never saw and which spanned the three decades after the Second World War. There is a common thread from Berlin in 1953 to Poland in 1981, passing through Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

1953-1956: Stalinism without Stalin against the revolutionary impetus. Background to the Hungarian Revolution
The starting point of everything that will happen in Hungary from October 23, 1956 was the death of Stalin, which occurred on March 6, 1953. A few months later in Berlin, on June 17, 1953, the first sign of discontent happened. There was a workers' insurrection that spread to all of East Germany (the GDR). There was another much less known revolt in Czechoslovakia, which was also quickly crushed. It can be said that Stalin's death marked the beginning of the first stage of the revolutionary process of the Eastern European working class. The disappearance of Stalin, combined with the economic problems in the Soviet bloc, led to a turn of the bureaucracy to attenuate the discontent, called “new course”, followed later by the supposed “de-Stalinization”. The leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy, former staunch followers of Stalin, wanted to rejuvenate the facade of the bureaucratic regime to ensure its continuity in power. With this tactic they pretended for convenience to hold the dead idol responsible for all the problems suffered by the countries of the Soviet bloc. But this did not lessen the climate of revolt throughout the Eastern bloc, on the contrary, it was seen as a sign of weakness and was taken advantage of by the working class, which could no longer bear to live under the boots of Stalinism.
The insurrectionary strike in Berlin had a precedent in May 1953 in Czechoslovakia, where large strikes began, with the main focus of the Skoda automobile industrial complex in the Pilsen region. The mobilizations of the workers quickly went from the factory strike to the political rebellion against the centers of political power. The Stalinist repression was very strong, resulting in 200 injured workers and more than 2,000 political prisoners.

What happened in June 1953 in Berlin was a true insurrectionary strike, fighting for lower production quotas and to end high food prices. Berlin workers took to the streets in protest, shouting “Berliners join us! We don't want to be slaves to our work!”. The response on the part of the Stalinist power was the establishment of martial law and the departure of the tanks to repress. The workers defended themselves with stones, 50 people died that day. Hundreds of others were arrested and 13 were convicted and executed on charges of treason. It was counted that 500,000 people in 373 towns and cities went on strike in some 600 companies and that between 1 and 1.5 million people participated in demonstrations of some kind. The workers even burned communist party headquarters and several prisons. The appearance of Soviet tanks put an end to the demonstrations and the heroic strike.
A month later, in July 1953, the news of what happened in Berlin reached the same forced labor camps in the USSR and the insurrectionary strike of the detainees in Vorkuta, the destination detention center of the Trotskyists, took place. The repression cost 110 dead and 7,000 arrested. The movement spread to other centers of forced labor, such as Karaganda and Norilsk in 1953 and Kinguin in 1954.
From 1953 to 1956, not only the working class, but also different layers of the intelligentsia, the youth and the university students were a hotbed of concerns and the rise of protest movements that led to protests in several Eastern European countries. In Poland, the first show of discontent occurred at the Fifth Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship that was held in the summer of 1955, where the youth of the party had contact with Western youth, some with revolutionary concerns. In Hungary in the autumn of 1955 a group of young workers from the Hungarian National Museum decided to organize a literary and political debate group that they named after Sándor Petófi, the young poet of the 1848 revolution who had fought for Hungarian independence. Thus was born the Petófi Circle, which will play an important role in the future revolution. It was a debating club in which their supposedly intellectual discussions turned into open colloquia on censorship, central planning, and socialist realism. In the winter of 1955, the main factories of Budapest began to send delegations regularly to the meetings of the Petofi Circle. They became an extraordinary forum for interaction between intellectual youth and young workers.
The national bureaucracy of the occupied countries tried to temper the discontent with "new courses" in internal politics with a change of façade. In 1954 in Hungary the leader of the Communist Party Erno Gero, faithful to the dictates of Stalin, decided to replace the Stalinist Rakosi with Imre Nagy, leader of a less Stalinist wing of the national bureaucracy, although belonging to the same caste. Make no mistake about it, Nagy was also a Moscow man, but although he was the main leader of the "reforming" wing of the Hungarian CP, it should not be forgotten that he was a former NKVD informant among Hungarian emigrants after the Nazi occupation, and then Minister of Agriculture between 1944-45, Minister of domestic affairs between 1945-46 and President of the Legislative Assembly between 1947-49. He was, therefore, a solid member of the bureaucracy. But he was the man of the “new course” in Hungary and introduced certain reforms that reversed the repressive measures of the toughest wing of the bureaucracy that Rakosi embodied. Only one year later, in 1955 Imre Nagy was dismissed, returning Rákosi to power, which would later be replaced by Enro Gero himself.

In 1956 the 20th Congress of the CPSU was held where a policy was promoted with which the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR tries to delay or prevent the revolutionary push of the Eastern countries oppressed by the Stalinized USSR, as well as that of the working class of those states. The revolutionary momentum was so great and of such a danger to the Stalinist bureaucracy that Khrushchev was even forced to make a cosmetic "denunciation of Stalin's crimes." This tactical denunciation sought to preserve the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste and for this it was necessary to “throw overboard” Stalin himself. Khrushchev's stalinism without Stalin promised freedom to the masses of his own country and to those of the Eastern countries in order to better agree with imperialism. But the objective of calming the masses of Eastern Europe would not obtain any results since they would continue the revolutionary movements already started.
So we can say that, if the death of Stalin was a first wave of protests with the insurrectional Strike of Berlin in 1933, the 20th Congress of 1956 marked the beginning of the second wave, much deeper, in which the working class took advantage that show of weakness of the Khrushchev government. The new rise of the Eastern European working class culminates in insurrectionary movements in Poland and in a mighty revolution in Hungary against national oppression, social exploitation and political totalitarianism.

In June 1956, in Poland, 100,000 workers went on strike demanding less stringent production quotas and higher wages, but soon they also began to call for “the end of the dictatorship” and “for the Russians to leave”. The workers imposed workers' control, raised wages and lowered prices. The shouts of "Freedom and Bread" and "Russians out" were unanimous and were only silenced by the tanks. The army repressed them with tremendous brutality: some 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers shot at the strikers and killed dozens of people. The person responsible for the massacre was the occupying army of the USSR and that made a dent in the conscience of the whole working class of the Eastern countries. Within the Polish Communist Party, a group began to demand the removal of the responsible Soviet officers. To mitigate the general discontent the Polish Communist Party decided to make an agreement on high with the "reformist" Gomulka, of a less Stalinist national wing of the bureaucracy, to bring him to power. This one would impose certain antirepressive reforms, but under the control of the party. In Hungary, this move gave hope that things could be changed. But it must be borne in mind that Gomulka was the replacement figure of the regime to contain the crisis and he used himself thoroughly to end the revolutionary crisis by emptying the workers' councils of content and placing them under the domination of the communist party.
In Budapest on October 6, 1956, the symbolic burial of Rajk and his comrades took place, executed in 1949 in a prefabricated Stalinist process. This burial was demanded by the opposition. The Stalinist bureaucrats had to give in to the fight and make it official. Hundreds of thousands of attendees were present and began to march in silence. It was a demonstration that already threatened the proximity of the revolution a few weeks later.

An imposing classical political revolution in Hungary that terrorized the Stalinist bureaucracy
Inspired by the news from Poland and with the confidence that the great march of Rajk's funeral had instilled in them, Petofi Circles were born all over the country. From October 19 to 22 there were great levels of unrest in the universities of Budapest and the provinces where students organized their assemblies, rejected the official Stalinist leaders and formed their new student organizations by democratically electing their leaders. 5,000 students packed a room at the Budapest University of Technology on October 22 and held a vote to leave the Union of the Working Youth (an association controlled by the Communist Youth to which all students were obliged to belong) and form their own organization. From that assembly came the fundamental document that received the name of “the 16 points”. Among other things, he demanded that the Soviet troops withdraw from Hungary, that all criminal leaders of the Stalin-Rákosi era be deposed immediately, that workers have the right to strike, that a minimum wage be set for workers, that there be elections free, that all political trials be reexamined by independent courts, that there be freedom of association, opinion, expression and press, that the statue of Stalin (symbol of Stalinist tyranny and political oppression) be removed, etc. Furthermore, they expressed their complete solidarity with the workers of Poland. In that Assembly a demonstration was projected for October 23 and they asked the Petofi Circle to lead it together with the students.
In recent years many intellectuals and students had turned to the original texts of Marxism for inspiration and revolutionary guidance. They wanted to regain the credibility and good scientific reputation of Marxism. In the schools, one of the things that escaped the Stalinist doctrine was that it had been learned that, if a political system was bad, revolution had to be made and that to start a revolution it was the workers who had to make it, with the help of the intellectuals. So, students and intellectuals had been creating agitation in factories for a long time and it was not going to be less that same day, October 23: in the morning the student and the Petofi Circle pickets went to the factories to distribute propaganda and, in addition, they occupied the almost deserted premises (a sign of the pre-revolutionary decomposition) of the central headquarters of the CP in Budapest.

Given these events, the Government of Rakosi made a threat to ban the demonstration projected for that same afternoon, which they later had to withdraw. 155,000 protesters occupied Budapest to the internationalist cry of "Let's do it the Polish way!", because, certainly, a mass demonstration had imposed on Gomulka, who had fired the delegates of the Russian CPSU. Other shouts were those of "General strike" and "Out with the Russians." It should be noted that the protesters carried portraits of Lenin and shouted slogans against Rákosi and Stalinism. Hungarian flags waved through the streets with a hole in the middle because the revolutionary protesters had cut out the shield with the red star and the hammer crossed with the wheat branch, a symbol associated with the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR. This action was a rejection of Stalinism and Moscow, not socialism.
The demonstration overflowed all over Budapest and split into three groups, one began to dismantle the statue of Stalin (with the help of welders), another addressed the parliament asking Imre Nagy to speak. He called for calm and the returning home and was immediately booed by protesters who were predominantly young workers. And the third group spontaneously decided to go on the radio to demand the dissemination of the claims. The radio station was guarded by the AVH, the hated political police, which the Hungarians still called by their old name, AVO. The AVH began to machine-gun the peaceful protesters and the deaths numbered in the dozens (since then, the “hunt” for “the AVOs” has become an obsession for the revolutionaries). The terrified government called to its aid the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary who were received by pockets of armed struggle made up of young workers and some students accompanied by soldiers from the Hungarian army who had deserted.

The Hungarian Political Revolution had begun. The workers occupied the factories that they organized with Workers' Councils. The next day the CP and the state administration disappeared and the general strike was total. Workers' militias were formed that heroically defended themselves against the aggression of the 6,000 soldiers of the Red Army and its 700 tanks that joined the political police in their attempt to suppress the insurrection. There were also desertions of soldiers from the Soviet tanks who went over to the side of the revolution. On the 25th, in a massive demonstration in front of the parliament building, troops from the USSR and the AVH carried out a point-blank shooting with more than 300 deaths. The Workers' Councils responded with a call for a general strike. Armed repression failed to prevail. Some bureaucrats resigned, others fled inside the tanks. On October 25, the remnants of the Stalinist power proclaimed Imre Nagy head of the government as a measure of cession and containment, as a lesser evil.
The workers' militias of the Workers' Councils of the factories took over an arms factory and trucks loaded with weapons were sent to the center of the city where thousands of workers distributed them. The working class had knocked down the psychological walls with a stroke of the pen and nothing could stop it from having weapons, as Trotsky had already said twenty years earlier: “The proletariat produces weapons, transports them, builds the arsenals in which they are deposited, defends those weapons. arsenals against himself, serves in the military, and creates all of the army's equipment. It is not locks or walls that separate the weapons of the proletariat, but the habit of submission, the hypnosis of class domination, the nationalist poison. It will be enough to destroy those psychological walls and no stone wall will resist. It will be enough if the proletariat wants to have weapons and it will find them. The task of the revolutionary party is to awaken that will in the proletariat and facilitate its realization”. (Where is France going, 1934-36).

The workers 'councils were replicated by all the companies and to the workers' districts throughout Budapest. His demand was to free themselves from bureaucratic control. A part of the police and the high command of the army also joined the people. The next morning the main streets were in the hands of the workers and students, a Revolutionary Council was formed and the General Strike soon spread throughout Hungary. The people no longer accepted the Stalinist rulers. Throughout the country, the workers formed workers' councils that began to take over all the factories and expel their directors. Instead of fighting the revolutionaries, the soldiers who had sided with the revolution began to distribute weapons among the workers' militias. One of the first high-ranking officials to defect, Colonel Pál Malether, was promptly appointed as Nagy's new Defense Minister.
Faced with the momentary defeat of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Red Army was evacuated. Since the beginning of the Hungarian political revolution, on October 26 a situation of dual power began between the Imre Nagy Government and the Workers' Councils, with which an embryo of a parallel state appeared. Imre Nagy was forced to receive the delegations of the workers' councils and negotiate with them. The workers' militias also sent delegations to pressure the Nagy government, which has to be constantly reshaped. The councils pressed so that the more Stalinist elements had to be separated in each government reshuffle. From the ruins of the army the remnants of the Stalinist power tried to form a National Guard, it was an attempt to rebuild the state. A radical division of society is being established in a clear situation of dual power: on the one hand, there were the rulers and their new army and on the other, the armed militias and their workers and popular councils.

Soviet troops withdrew. Imre Nagy tried to get the perpetually striking workers back to work, but he ran into opposition from the workers’ councils which made the departure of troops from all over the country a condition. But the troops that left Budapest remained in a circle around the capital. At the same time, news of Soviet troop concentration in Romania and Czechoslovakia arrived.

The tanks of the Stalinist bureaucracy brought the counterrevolution
Faced with a CP in ruins, in the first days of November the Socialist Workers Party (new CP) was founded with the Stalinist Kadar at its head. At this point the government of Imre Nagy was paralyzed between the demands of the Workers' Councils and their militias and the maneuvers of the Kremlin and its Stalinist national apparatus that was undergoing reconstruction. Imre Nagy was a temporary ingredient in this reconstruction to deceive the masses. The bureaucracy couldn't keep up with Rakosi and that's why they used Imre Nagy. The revolutionary pressure was so great that Imre Nagy had to give in in some things to workers' demands, for example, by withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact (a military agreement of the Eastern countries tutored by the USSR under the leadership of the USSR, analogous to the Imperialist NATO). This was a workers' conquest, not Imre Nagy's.
On November 4, a massive bombardment of Budapest by 6,000 tanks began without warning (many more than the 700 that had entered on October 24). The Hungarian political revolution was very deep and it was not going to be easily defeated, so an invasion of no less than 15 Russian divisions was necessary. The troops came directly from the USSR, made up mainly of Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Armenians, who did not know anything about the situation, unlike the Red Army soldiers stationed in Hungary, and did not even understand the language and could not be informed through the leaflets or desert as they had done in the first incursion of the Red Army on the 24th. Terrible fighting broke out, 30 tanks were destroyed by the workers' militias. The destruction of buildings exceeded that of 1944 at the end of World War II. Budapest was heavily bombed and left in ruins.

Armed confrontations continued until November 11, the last combats taking place in the working-class neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the Stalinist power formed the Kadar "government" in the shadows, to better favor the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was formed in a provincial city and a few days later, on November 7, he settled in the capital and made a home at the parliament surrounded by Soviet tanks.
The Nagy government lost favor with the Stalinist power. He had already fulfilled his role and was no longer needed to contain the working masses. Imre Nagy had to flee and took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. The general strike continued to be absolute, the workers' councils did not give up. From November 11 to 14, the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest was formed, a centralized body of all the workers' councils of neighborhoods, factories and provinces, and it took the leadership of the country in its hands with complete ease. It directed and centralized all the management of Hungary.
Despite the tanks, the situation of dual power continued between, on the one hand, a workers' power centralized by the Central Workers' Council and, on the other, the Kadar Government that had taken over from that of Nagy, guarded by the High Command Soviet.
On November 23 the Central Council tried to formalize its national character with delegates from the provinces in a large public meeting to make a Central Workers' Council of all Hungary. The workers were going too far and the Stalinist bureaucracy was too threatened and it was then that Soviet tanks surrounded the building and slaughtered them with blood and fire.
That same day Imre Nagy was kidnapped from the Yugoslav embassy by the Soviet secret police with the treacherous complicity of Marshal Tito, and was brought before the "justice", whose action would lead two years later to the execution of Imre Nagy.
Khrushchev himself had made a diplomatic tour to win support among the Stalinist governments of all the Eastern countries and even the Polish "reforming" President Gomulka agreed that the "counterrevolution" in Hungary needed to be repressed, he only manifested himself in disagreement that the repression should be carried out by the USSR.

On December 13, Kadar summoned the surviving members of the Central Workers' Council to the government headquarters to allegedly negotiate, but there they were detained. Since December 13, with the councils beheaded, the end of all large-scale organized fighting begins. However, the general strike did not end until the end of 1957. The workers resisted clandestinely in an atomized way until they were totally repressed in the course of the first months of 1958.
The criminal repression of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy resulted in the exile of 200,000 Hungarian revolutionaries, a great purge in the armed forces, the atrocious execution of 2,500 revolutionaries after lightning farce trials and more than 3,000 deaths in combat.

The revolutionaries did not want to return to capitalism. Imperialism was on the side of Stalinism
Contrary to what the Stalinists maintain, the insurrected Hungarians did not fight for capitalism, they did not want to go back to 1945, nor did they question socialism. Moreover, in the Hungarian political revolution there was an unequivocal expression of workers' and revolutionary power. In the course of the general strike, the councils began to federate and established a Republic of Councils with the workers armed in militias. They succeeded in causing the puppet government of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy to cease to exist as a consequence.
The Hungarians did not want to return to capitalism, which was embodied before World War II in Hungary in the military-fascist regime of Admiral Horthy who ruled 24 years as regent of Hungary since in 1920 he overthrew the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Bela Kun, the second Bolshevik revolution in 1919 after the Russian. Horthy ruled until 1944, identified with the Nazi party and ended up getting Hungary into the war on the side fo the Axis, collaborating with Nazism in the extermination of Jews. In other words, the Hungarians were scared of capitalism that they had suffered in the worst of its forms. For this reason, when the Red Army drove out the Nazis, no one protested the nationalization of industry and banking or the agrarian reform. What the Hungarians complained about was that they had not counted on the working class, whose leadership had been expropriated at the hands of a single Stalinist party supervised by the Kremlin, imposing a totalitarian regime with the bureaucratic Stalinist scheme without workers' democracy.

In the Hungarian political revolution, state property and economic planning were defended as a pillar. In all the protest platforms of the workers' councils that demand appeared. Nobody attacked the conquests emanating from the October 1917 revolution. What they did want was to conquer workers' democracy and the independence of the country from the yoke of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy. As an interesting fact, it should be noted that with the revolutionary movement on the rise there was a rebirth of the independent protest press and those newly founded newspapers that carried pro-capitalist proposals were suppressed by the printing workers themselves.
On the other hand, it is necessary to deny the slanders of Stalinism regarding the support of imperialism for the Hungarian Revolution. US imperialism, as the highest power in the capitalist world, never supported the Hungarian Revolution but, on the contrary, supported the Stalinist bureaucratic Khrushchev caste. The one who most feared the mobilization of the Russian and Eastern European working class was imperialism. It did not suit them that a political revolution like the Hungarian ended up turning Hungary into a country with a planned economy democratically controlled by the working class and its organs of power. That could be the death of both, capitalism and its guardian behind the iron curtain, Stalinism.

The dictatorship of the Stalinist bureaucracy fulfilled a double role in favor of imperialism and counterrevolution: it crushed the workers and allowed, at the same time, that imperialism confused the great masses with the story that socialism and the sinister politics of the Stalinist bureaucracy are the same thing. For this reason, imperialism was never on the side of the political revolutions of the workers in Hungary in '56, in Czechoslovakia in '68 or in Poland in 1981. The only thing that capitalist imperialism did against the Hungarian workers' revolution was to use it as anti-communist propaganda, but he did not help the revolution with a single rifle.
But what demonstrates beyond any doubt that imperialism was with Khrushchev and against the Hungarian revolution is the comparison of Hungary with Korea. While the US had unambiguously aided South Korea in the Korean War only a few years earlier, the Hungarian revolutionaries were never helped to stop the tanks of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy.

Against the concealment of the workers' and socialist character of the Hungarian revolution: The Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest
The workers built local workers' councils from the first days of the revolution, from October 23, but the Central Workers' Council was not formed until almost 10 days after November 4. We are going to examine why and what was the evolution of these organs of the working class. But above all what we want to demonstrate is the absolute preponderance and hegemony of the Workers' Councils in the Hungarian political Revolution, which shows the workers’ and socialist character, and not bourgeois and pro-imperialist.
The local councils at the end of October already had a structure in which the factory delegates formed district workers' councils and governed the entire administrative, economic and political life of an entire region, at that time only in an atomized way. The councils replaced the absence of any kind of centralized administration, which the revolution had almost shattered. But even in Budapest, where the Imre Nagy government was established, the workers organized independently of the administration and forced the government to recognize many of the demands of the Workers' Councils, going further than where Nagy was willing to go.
In the working-class neighborhoods of the slums, such as Újpest and Csepel, the workers' councils represented the whole community and in addition to erecting their own factory councils, the workers in Budapest organized their activities to organize the entire city. On October 31, 1956, a resolution was approved that stipulated "the basic rights and functions of the workers' councils”, which included deciding on salary levels, deciding on all contracts concerning the export of goods, deciding on conducting all credit operations, controlling the hiring of workers and appointing the director who would be revocable and who will be accountable to the workers council.
There can therefore be no doubt that during the revolution the workers ruled, both at the factory and at the district level.
The Imre Nagy government had to negotiate with the workers. Due to the lack of a revolutionary party, the councils did not consider evicting Nagy from power and taking power. Because of this the councils had a role of pressure on the Nagy government. Since, by force of the councils, Nagy had to give in and did what they wanted on many occasions, any superficial outside observer might believe that the Nagy Government largely expressed the will of the people. It should be noted that many of Nagy's measures were assignments, not made of his own free will. This is precisely why the formation of a centralized workers council was delayed.

That was also why the local workers councils had decided to return to work by November 5 at the latest. But with the return of the Russian tanks on November 4, the councils modified that decision and continued the indefinite general strike.
The workers' instrument of the insurrectionary general strike from November 4 onwards was in conjunction and consonance with the armed struggle led by the militias dependent on the organs of workers' power that were the Workers' Councils.
It was the workers who organized the armed resistance with their workers' militias, it was not the Imre Nagy government. Despite the 60,000 tanks of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy and the 15 Russian divisions, the workers' militias were able to resist until November 12, especially in the workers' districts.
Other data to demonstrate the workers' character of this revolution were the official statistics. For example, the damage to buildings during combat was much higher in the working-class districts while the residential areas of the wealthier districts remained almost intact. Deaths during armed fighting predominated in the workers' districts of Budapest. According to the figures provided by the hospitals, among 80% of the injured were young workers, while the students represented no more than 5%.
As we have said above, after November 4, the maneuver of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy was to appoint the government of Kádár, which could not fully establish its power because it had a powerful official enemy: the workers' strike of the Councils that demanded the withdrawal of the Russian troops. Kádár, like Imre Nagy, was also forced to give in to some workers' demands. Kadar declared himself to be committed to three of the workers 'demands: "On the basis of the broadest democracy, workers' management must be carried out in all factories and conglomerates", "Democratic elections will be guaranteed in all existing administrative bodies and in the revolutionary councils” and “creation of armed guards in the factories”.

However, the first struggle for the Kadar government was to try to restrict the activities of the councils to purely economic problems, and thus keep them out of the political realm.
By November 12 the demands of the councils had advanced in a socialist sense. They included: collective ownership of the means of production (factories would only be in the hands of the workers' councils); the expansion of the powers of the councils in the economic, social and cultural fields; the organization of a police force in the style of a militia, under the control of the councils; workers should carry arms; On the political level, they demanded the creation of a plural system of parties that could run for elections, but would have to commit to defending the socialist conquests of the Workers' State; the systematic evacuation of Russian troops and the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact...
The working class was in the process of organizing on a larger scale that transcended the boundaries of each factory and each separate neighborhood. The Central Workers’ Council began to come to life rapidly. On November 12 was the decision to set up a Central Workers' Council. The Újpest Revolutionary Workers' Council summoned the Budapest factory delegates to send their council delegates to the Újpest Municipality on November 13 in order to form the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest Budapest. On November 14 it was definitely born. To all the demands already won before on November 12, it was necessary to add others that constituted a true revolutionary program: They demonstrated against members of the former State security services (the AVH, formerly AVO) being included in the new security forces. They approved that the men who make up these new security forces should be recruited from the ranks of the young revolutionaries and from those members of the police and the army who have remained loyal to the people and the factory workers; they demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all freedom fighters: they demanded the abolition of the one-party system and the recognition only of those parties that are based on socialist principles; the council did not recognize the government of Kádár, etc...

And, to definitively silence those who accuse these revolutionaries of being pro-capitalists and pro-imperialists, it would be necessary to carve in gold what was literally said in the final declaration on property and the plurality of parties:
"The factories should not be transformed into capitalist property, but into truly collective property" and "We demand a multiparty system: the workers want only to have those parties that recognize socialist achievements, and that are based on socialist principles".
Some of the delegates of the Assembly of November 14 raised the idea that a national centralized Council should be set up, to represent all the workers throughout the country; some delegates objected that they had no mandate to form something larger than a Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest, and that, furthermore, given the absence of so many provincial delegates, no such decision could be taken.
This is important because it shows that the question of forming a National Council was not approached simply from the point of view of political viability, but, more importantly, from an essentially democratic spirit. For the Hungarian workers and their delegates the most important thing about the councils was precisely their nature of workers' democracy.

The process of creating an all-Hungary central workers’ council was cut short by the final violence of the Stalinist bureaucracy. There was no time to see if in the future the central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest would expand to the entire state and if the workers would decide to form their own revolutionary party destined to seize power. Workers' councils cannot be fully conscious political organizations aimed at the seizure of power without the existence of political parties.

The revolutionary party to take power and to end the dual power situation was missing
Another point to refute is the argument of some centrists, including some currents of renegades of Trotskyism, that the figure of Imre Nagy embodied the demands of the insurrectionary Hungarian population. Imre Nagy, like Gomulka in Poland, was a way out for Stalin's puppet Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR against the Workers' Committees and Councils within the national revolution. Imre Nagy's role was to contain the masses. In Hungary there was a situation of dual power, a general characteristic of every country shaken by a revolutionary process. Under the government of Imre Nagy, as in Poland with Gomulka, there was this situation in which there are, in fact, two governments: on the one hand, the official power, on the other that of the workers and the masses. In Hungary the Workers' Councils, and in Poland the Factory Committees, were the absolute rulers at the local level. In front of them were the governments of Nagy and Gomulka, which remained standing thanks to the lack of a revolutionary party to take power and the lack of centralization of workers' and popular power. The official Nagy and Gomulka governments, run by the nationalist sectors of the bureaucracy, were the conveyor belt of the more pro-Russian bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy had turned to Imre Nagy as a "cession" and an attempt to stop the masses because Rakosi, from the hard Stalinist line, could not resist.
Faced with the brutal pressure of the workers' council revolution and the danger that it would overwhelm the Nagy government itself, the bureaucracy felt compelled to enter with blood and fire to atrociously crush the workers' revolution. The Soviet Army relieved Nagy (putting Kadar in his place) and crushed the workers' revolution with the tacit agreement of imperialism.

The absolutely primary reason why workers' power was not imposed in Hungary was the lack of a revolutionary party, as Trotsky pointed out before he died. The lack of a revolutionary leadership detracted from the centralization and precise objectives of the revolutionary movement. This lack of workers' revolution facilitated the subsistence of the Nagy governments. With the existence of a revolutionary party, it would have taken power by stripping Imre Nagy and guaranteeing forever that another hard-line bureaucratic Stalinist government like Rakosi's would not return, and a government like Kadar's would never have come to power.
The absence of a revolutionary leadership, in the form of a revolutionary Marxist party of the working class, allowed the conciliatory leaders to take the lead in this political revolution and spoil their power. They diverted the action of the Workers' Councils towards negotiations (from mere pressure to the Nagy governments, first, and after Kadar) and with hesitations that diverted the workers towards the perspective of the seizure of power and gave time to the Stalinist bureaucracy to regain power. The leadership of the revolution had a gradualist orientation and did not aspire to set up a political power proper to the workers' councils.
Trotsky's analysis of the CPSU and its definition as the party of the bureaucratic caste that rose above the working class, was also revealed in the countries of Eastern Europe. And it became even clearer, how, as the duality of powers developed, the communist parties were the basis of the power of the bureaucracy, in its different forms, the political pole opposed to the workers' power embodied by the workers, their councils and their workers’ militias.

As the conditions in the process of these political revolutions matured, all the conditions were already in place for the formation of a revolutionary party with the program of political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy and its party, the communist party.
The Hungarian political revolution confirms Trotsky's prognosis and the program of Trotskyism drawn up by the Fourth International for the USSR and for the entire area dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy and revolves around two pillars: political revolution and the right to self-determination of the nations that are dominated by the USSR. Furthermore, there is another point that ex-Trotskyist Pabloism-Mandelism always refused to acknowledge: the counterrevolutionary role of the Red Army, which went in to massacre the workers' revolution. Therefore, all revolutionary policies should also be focused on the slogan of the withdrawal of the Red Army, whose role was counterrevolutionary, far removed from its heroic years since its creation by Leon Trotsky.
At that time Pabloism, the pro-Stalinist revisionist current of the renegades of Trotskyism, headed by Michel Pablo, who would later form the Unified Secretariat after reunification, believed that Stalinism ceased to be counterrevolutionary in that post-war period because a Third World War was about to happen and the Stalinist bloc was progressive and had to have the support of the “revolutionaries”. At that time, Pablo even promulgated the “sui generis entryism” by which his ex-Trotskyists followers, entered the Stalinist parties. That is why they assumed as a mistake that the principled Trotskyists supported political revolutions like the Hungarian because "they could play the game of imperialism". The prognosis of the renegade Pabloites of Trotskyism failed in a drift of very deep degeneration.

The one who was right was Trotsky before dying with his alternative forecast that the IV International had made on the threshold of World War II, when he said, in the "Manifesto of the 1940 war" that "If the bourgeois regime comes out unscathed from the war, all revolutionary parties will undergo a process of degeneration. If the proletarian revolution triumphs, the causes that produce it will disappear”.
After the Second World War, during the Yalta period, revisionist and liquidationist Pabloism adopted Stalinism and its pact to contain the revolution with imperialism and led the Fourth International to the outbreak and its transformation from a world party into a trend movement. Because of these renegades of Trotskyism, led by Michel Pablo, brought their followers into Stalinism, the Fourth International as a world party did not become a mass party in the postwar period and could not be present in the processes of political revolution in the next four decades since the war. For all this period Trotsky also had a correct alternative forecast: "either a political revolution would topple the bureaucracy or the bureaucracy would restore capitalism”.

A Fourth International of the masses would have been decisive in the processes of political revolution, because as Trotsky also said: “The Fourth International is the only organization that correctly foresaw the general course of world events, that predicted that a new imperialist catastrophe was inevitable, who denounced the pacifist frauds of the bourgeois democrats and the petty-bourgeois adventurers of the Stalinist school, who fought against the policy of class collaboration known as the "popular front", who questioned the treacherous role of the Comintern and the anarchists in Spain, which he criticized irreconcilably the centrist illusions of the POUM, which ceaselessly continued to strengthen its cadres in the spirit of the revolutionary class struggle. Our policy in war is only the concentrated continuation of our policy in peace”. ("Manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution", 1940).

The Hungarian revolution was the future, it did not have the slightest hint of wanting to go back, towards the regime of the landlords and capitalism. The basis of the Hungarian political revolution was the people whose backbone and leadership was the working class, organized in the revolutionary workers’ councils. The Hungarian Revolution demonstrated the enormous revolutionary potential of the working class in its struggle against Stalinism and for a true internationalist socialism based on the self-government of the proletariat.
The Hungarian Revolution was the classic political revolution predicted by Trotsky and it is an honor for every internationalist revolutionary to be a faithful defender of these workers who fought for true socialism and against the Stalinist bureaucratic caste that oppressed them.