Taming a Tiger

Hungary's puppet Premier Janos Kadar, whose own fingernails were once pulled out by Communist torturers, last week proclaimed his intention of crushing the Hungarian revolution. "A tiger cannot be tamed by bait," he said. "It can be tamed and forced to peace only by beating it to death."

But the tiger that was the Hungarian revolution refused to be killed. Defiantly, Delegate Sandor Eckmann of the Budapest Central Workers' Council told Kadar to his face: "The real power in Hungary today, apart from the armed forces, is in the hands of the workers' councils. They have the masses at their disposal." It was a struggle in which neither side had the upper hand, and the result was misery, but not surrender.

What Kadar feared most was the establishment of a nationwide coalition of workers' councils that might turn into a kind of parliament. When, at midweek, an organization calling itself the "National Central Workers' Council" began to set up shop in Budapest, Kadar's police moved in on it. Two days later, worried by the proliferation of clandestine newssheets, the police seized every duplicating machine they could lay hands on.

No Quorum. Kadar flatly rejected, one by one, virtually every demand the workers' councils had made upon his government. He refused to bring former Premier Imre Nagy back into the government. He could not see his way clear to allowing the establishment of more political parties "under prevailing circumstances." (His own Communist Party, under a new name, the Socialist Workers, had been unable to muster a quorum at some meetings, and in the Csepel metalworks, once known as "Red Csepel," the party has so far enrolled only 360 out of 38,000 workers.)

At first the workers were prepared to dicker and, to indicate their reasonableness, agreed to "suspend" their demand for Nagy's return. But when Kadar proved unwilling to make any real concessions, they began to fight back. Angered by his refusal to allow them to publish a paper, the Budapest Workers' Council exhorted all Hungarians to boycott the government press. Ominously strike leaders warned Kadar that his obduracy might force them to plunge the country into "total anarchy."

Once again Kadar's Russian masters moved to his rescue. "By night," reported TIME Correspondent Edgar Clark from Budapest, "the city is usually quiet and no Hungarians are abroad after the 9 o'clock curfew. Late last Saturday night and early Sunday morning it was different. The sporadic flourish of small arms fire and an occasional artillery shot echoed and re-echoed from the hills of Buda. Reinforcements of Soviet tanks were moving into the city. They came because Budapest streets were littered on Saturday afternoon with leaflets calling for a 'total strike' in the name of the Budapest Workers' Council.

"A few hours after the leaflets appeared a representative of the Workers' Council went on Radio Budapest to deny that they had been issued by the council. He warned that they were false and provocative, and urged the people to disregard them. In many homes electricity was off, and so was the radio. But fortunately the telephone still worked, and despite the curfew word gradually got around.

"All night long the city held its breath, while a few bursts of firing and the rumble of armor were heard. At daybreak a Hungarian sighed with relief: 'They did not shoot up the town again.' "

On Sunday thousands of people went to the cemetery to look through rows of unidentified bodies lying in plain wooden coffins. They were searching for a missing brother or son among the 25,000 dead in Budapest's six weeks of revolt.

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