Revolution!

A truck loaded with soldiers and rifles stopped in a Budapest street beside a band of shouting civilians. "Go ahead take them," a soldier said. "No!" said a man who seemed to be their leader "Our weapon is the flag." Behind him fluttered Hungary's red, white and green banner.

The magic chemistry of courage, anger and desperation that makes men wager their lives for an ideal fired Hungary into revolution last week. Unarmed, unorganized, unaided from outside, not even fully aware at first of what might be involved in their deeds, the Hungarian people rolled back the tide of Communism. They overthrew a government. They took on the Soviet army. They fought well and long enough to win at least the pledged right to be free of Moscow dictation and free of one-party dictatorship. I hey suffered by the thousands and died by the hundreds, and if, in the end, the strength of their arms was no match for the guns and tanks of the foreign army the strength of their passion for freedom was enough to give pause to the rulers of great Russia itself.

The Kremlin had to decide: Was it worth it to hound the revolutionaries into the hills, to fight for months a war of repression while the world looked on? Or was it better to cut their losses, settle for what control they could keep over Hungary, and take their chances at restraining other satellite nations from seizing the same opportunity? In six days the Hungarian people made history--six days that shook the world.

After the week's events, the Communist empire could never be the same. In Poland, Communist Wladyslaw Gomulka had won a palace revolution by invoking the spirit of his people. In Hungary it was the people themselves who spoke. The rest of the world could only look on with a catch in its heart, while thousands who must have known they could expect no outside aid chose, in Jefferson's phrase, to refresh the tree of liberty with blood.

The streets of Budapest were like a favorite proletarian tableau come to frightening life--shouting students, muscular workers, flag-waving women raising fists on the barricades and braving death. But the oppressors they defied were their Communist masters. As the final irony of this amazing situation, the only word the Communists could think of to apply to these genuine revolutionaries was the epithet "counter-revolutionaries."

In time, the Communists may try to renege on the promises they made in panic. But the promises themselves are significant. On the revolution's sixth day, Premier Imre Nagy announced that the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw its troops from Budapest, pledged that Hungary's hated security police would be disbanded, that the "serious sins" of the past twelve years would be rectified, and that his government would embrace the "new democratic forms of self-government initiated by the people."

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