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Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?
ALLAN J. LICHTMAN
COUNTERPUNCH
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The crisis in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia eerily recalls a tragedy of the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That year, after revolutionaries challenged Soviet control of this satellite state, Russian tanks and troops rolled into Hungary. They crushed the revolt at a cost of some 2,500 Hungarian lives. As in this year’s tragedy in Georgia, the United States did nothing to halt the Soviet onslaught. The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower offered only pious words.
Although the Eisenhower administration denied it at the time, we now know many decades later from recently declassified documents that the United States government was an agent provocateur in the Hungarian revolt. Radio Free Europe, a puppet of the CIA, beamed broadcasts into Hungary which gave the revolutionaries reason to believe that they could expect aid from the United States – aid that the administration was unprepared to provide. The conclusion of Charles Gati in his respected 2006 book on the Hungarian Revolution is worth quoting at length because it bears so directly on today’s events in Georgia:
New information shows how disingenuous the United States was when it kept the Hungarians’ hopes alive – even as it made no preparations to help them either militarily or diplomatically. The initials “NATO” could summarize its approach, No Action, Only Talk. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration’s official declaratory policy of rollback and liberation … amounted to hypocrisy mitigated only by self-delusion; the more evident goal was to satisfy the far-right wing of the Republican Party led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and roll back the Democrats from Capitol Hill.
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In the current crisis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia fell into a Soviet trap by moving troops into the disputed territory of South Ossetia and raining artillery and rocket fire on the South Ossetian capital city of Tskhinvali, with a still undetermined loss of civilian life. As in 1956, the Soviets responded with overwhelming force and additional loss of life. Once again the United States could offer only words, not concrete aid to the Georgians..
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