The Militant, New York, April 29 1957
The following is the text of the speech which Peter Fryer would have delivered to the 25th National Congress of the Communist Party if he had been allowed to make his appeal against expulsion before the full Congress. Fryer distributed the text in mimeographed form to the delegates. - Ed.
This Congress will almost certainly confirm my expulsion. That grieves me. I cannot feel any other emotion at being excluded from a movement I joined fifteen years ago because I wanted to fight for the emancipation of man from every kind of chain that fetters him.
I joined the Communist Party because I saw in every man who fights for liberty a brother and a comrade. The African who fights for liberty against the hideous crimes of imperialism, the Hungarian who, though his chains are decked with"people's democratic" flowers, fights for liberty against bureaucracy and tyranny - these are my brothers and my comrades. Do you ask of me that I should stay silent while one or the other is crushed and broken by his oppressors? Much as it grieves me to be cast out from the party, it would grieve me still more to stay silent about the sufferings and gallant resistance of the Hungarian workers. . .
Officially I was expelled for using the Daily Express as a platform from which to declare my support for these comrades [Hungarian Communists who played leading roles in the Hungarian uprising] and to tell the truth about the revolution they helped to prepare and lead. But if I were given the task of sticking up posters in a town to warn the inhabitants about an outbreak of plague, ought I to refrain from sticking my posters on the walls of gambling dens and brothels?
Our Party had to be told of this plague that was eating at the heart of the Hungarian Party, even if many comrades refused to believe the truth when they heard it. And how little it becomes this leadership to complain of my using, the capitalist Press for this purpose when they themselves welcome to this very Congress a representative of the Daily Express, while refusing to issue a Press ticket to Tribune, a Socialist weekly.
Not a single delegate to this Congress, if he had seen what, I saw at Magyarovar last October 27 - the bodies of eighty men, women and children vilely murdered by a Stalinist police force - would have tolerated any gag whatever which the British Stalinists sought to impose on him.
Not a single delegate, with the bodies of those victims of Stalinist inhumanity and terror lying there before him, would have failed to vow to wage the most implacable fight agains every rotten trace of Stalinism inside the British Communist Party.
This crime, and the incomparably greater crime of November 4, were, committed in the name of resistance to a fascist conspiracy, to protect the Hungarian people from counter-revolution and White Terror. But in a report on the present situation in Hungary, The Times wrote on April 15: "With so little co-operation, from the people, the regime is having to make use of almost , anyone, even those with fascist backgrounds, in its administration."
So the Kadar government, like the Rakosi-Gero regime whose worthy successor it is, must recruit fascists as officials. The new AVH [political police] like the old is composed of Horthyite dregs of humanity who would serve any regime that paid them well.
On October 23 1956, the Hungarian! workers rose to free themselves from the domination of these thugs and their masters. Had it not been for Russian aggression they would have won, and the workers' councils, this magnificent reawakening of the Hungarian Soviets of 1919, would have taken over control of their country's economy and brought into being socialist democracy.
FRAME-UP IN OFFING
While the fascists are rallying to the support of Kadar there are sinister signs of an approaching show trial of the Hungarian Communists who resisted Stalinism. In a speech in the Kremlin Palace on March 27, reported in No. 3599 of Soviet News but, not in the Daily Worker, N. A. Bulganin spoke as follows:
One must make particular mention of the sinister role which was played by the Imre Nagy-Losonczy group in the staging of the counter-revolution' in Hungary. The undeniable facts make it abundantly clear that long before the October events in 1956 Imre Nagy, masquerading as a Communist, was in fact in the service of the enemies of the Hungarian people. He and his group, while coming out under the false banner of a 'new deal in building Socialism were in fact workings to weaken the young people's democratic State and push it off the road to Socialism.' But it was not until Imre Nagy took the reins of power that; the true face of this group was revealed completely. Everyone remembers the tragic days of October last year when the Imre Nagy and Losonczy men came out into the open in an attempt to destroy the very foundations of the people's democratic State.
Bulganin went on to accuse “the Imre Nagy group" of organizing "a reign of murderous terror against the revolutionary forces of the Hungarian working class”. He described Nagy and Losonczy as "traitors" and compared them with "the ringleaders of the-counter-revolution of 1919.”
If Nagy and Losonczy were placed on trial while the infamous Rakosi, Faricas and Gero went scot-free this would be a crime no less monstrous than the murder by Stalin of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and of Rajk, Rostov and Slansky. And should we then be to1d, after five, ten, twenty years that Nagy and Losonczy, too, were victims of a "violation of Socialist legality”, of a "mistake"? When, comrades, do we have the right to say that we can no longer and shall no longer countenance these perversions of everything Socialism has ever stood for. I suggest that we have the right now, and must exercise it.
Hungary tore the last veils of the decay and degeneration of political life of the Socialist States. It was the third in the series (but the first really full-scale, mass example) of political revolutions by the proletariat of these States. These revolutions, forecast by those who in the dark years of Stalinist theoretical decay kept alive the priceless heritage of the Marxist tradition, are in essence attempts to overthrow a bureaucracy which has usurped the rule of the workers. They are not aimed at restoring capitalism, but at preserving and strengthening the Socialist economy and allowing it full scope for its development by removing those bureaucratic obstacles which fetter it.
The Hungarian revolution was ruthlessly crushed. But it was the harbinger of further political revolutions, which will not be confined to the outer rim of the Stalinist regime, where national oppression is blended with bureaucratic despotism to make the peoples twice oppressed. Some day the Russian workers, too, faithful to the glorious traditions of 1905 and 1917. will settle accounts with the gang of unscrupulous vodka diplomats and hucksters, filing clerks and ideological fortune-tellers who have robbed the Russian proletariat of its power...
Secondly, and no less important, the Hungarian revolution has once again proved the resilience and viability of the Soviets as organs of insurrection and of popular self-government, as the highest expression of the creative initiative of the the proletariat. The political revolution in Russia will see the flowering once more of this Iong-buried but unquenchable form of working-class struggle. There will be Soviets again in the Soviet Union.
CONTRADICTIONS REMAIN
The contradictions between the Socialist economy and the rule of the bureaucracy force the latter to twist and turn, to make concessions, to make admissions about the past, to zigzag between de-Stalinisation and re-Stalinisation, to adopt grandiose plans and scrap them. But the contradictions remain, and will be solved by the workers in their own way. Then the flames of freedom lit at Berlin and replenished at Poznan, flames which sprang up afresh in Hungary for twelve unforgettable days, will become a cleansing fire that no secret police, no censorship, no imprisonment, no tortures, no murders, no yellow Stalinist terror, will extinguish or withstand.
When that day comes British Communists will have to decide whether they are on the side of the workers or the bureaucrats...
This is my appeal to the Congress; not for my reinstatement, but for something: infinitely more important - the transformation of this Party into the revolutionary Marxist vanguard of the British working class, exercising the right to interpret and apply Marxism itself, giving to members the right of free and forthright controversy. Such a party, cleansed of the filth and dross and poison of the Stalinist theory and practice, its members enriched with an understanding of the real Marxism that Stalinism sought, but failed, to destroy, would take its rightful place at the head of the mass movement, would flourish and go forward.
