When the Hungarian revolution was only four days old, Peter Fryer arrived in Hegyeshalom, a small to

When the Hungarian revolution was only four days old, Peter Fryer arrived in Hegyeshalom, a small town on Hungary’s border with Austria. Fryer had been a writer for the British Communist Party’s Daily Worker for eight years; he had reported approvingly on the Hungarian regime’s show trials in the late 1940s. Now, in 1956, he was being sent to report on what his Communist Party described as a counterrevolutionary putsch aiming to overthrow a socialist government. Fryer wrote that on his arrival in Hungary, he thought he was setting foot in “a country where ‘we’ were in power. A country where a new life was being built, where the workers were in command”. He expected to see ordinary workers enthusiastically defending the government against a fascist insurrection. What he witnessed was the opposite.

A working class revolution was attempting to free the country from the shackles of national oppression which the Russian regime was imposing upon it. The revolutionary process was developing through the construction of workers’ councils, modelled on the soviets of the Russian revolution of 1917. “I saw for myself that the uprising was neither organised nor controlled by fascists or reactionaries”, he wrote in Hungarian Tragedy, the book he published while the revolution was being crushed by Russian tanks, and which became a classic account of a modern workers’ revolution. In Hungary, Fryer witnessed “a people’s revolution–a mass uprising against tyranny and poverty”.

READ MORE: Stalinism versus revolution: Hungary 1956