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Peter Fryer and the Hungarian Uprising


John Simkin

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Peter Fryer died last week. Initially he was an anarchist but inspired by the efforts of the Red Army during the Second World War he joined the Young Communist League in 1942.

After the war he worked as a journalist for the Yorkshire Post, but now a member of the British Communist Party, Fryer joined the Daily Worker in 1947.

He was sent to Budapest in 1956 and reported the Hungarian Uprising for the newspaper. Fryer, who was critical of the actions of the Soviet Union, found his reports were censored. Fryer responded by having the material published in the New Statesman. As a result he was suspended from the party for "publishing in the capitalist press attacks on the Communist Party."

Fryer resigned from the Daily Worker and published a full account of the uprising in The Hungarian Tragedy (1956). Fryer's book has been compared to John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World on the Bolshevik uprising of 1917. A few days before he died, Fryer heard that Hungary's president had awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic, in recognition of his "continuous support of the Hungarian revolution and freedom fight".

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDfryer.htm

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  • 3 years later...

Peter Fryer was in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising. Fryer, who was critical of the actions of the Soviet Union, found his reports in the Daily Worker were censored. Fryer responded by having the material published in the New Statesman. As a result he was suspended from the party for "publishing in the capitalist press attacks on the Communist Party." The loyal Sam Russell was now sent to the country to report on the uprising.

Sam Russell died last week. He worked for the Daily Worker during the Spanish Civil War and remained loyal during the purges. After the Second World War he became diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Worker. In 1952 he covered show-trial of Czechoslovakian Communist Party general secretary Rudolf Slansky and 13 other party leaders. At the time he considered the evidence as genuine but according to Roger Bagley it was an experience which "left a deep scar." Despite this Russell worked for the Daily Worker and its successor, the Morning Star, until his retirement in 1984.

The Morning Star has posted an obituary on its website. He does not talk about his pro-Soviet reporting instead it points out that:

In the 1970s he became increasingly critical of the Soviet model of socialism and by the 1990s he had turned into a fervent admirer of Tony Blair seeing him as a great leader of a supposed new leap forward for social democracy.

He also supported the destructive leadership faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain which was hell-bent on attacking the Morning Star in the mid-1980s. He backed the short-lived Democratic Left project which quickly morphed into a feeble think tank....

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPrussellS.htm

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  • 11 months later...

Peter Fryer died last week. Initially he was an anarchist but inspired by the efforts of the Red Army during the Second World War he joined the Young Communist League in 1942.

After the war he worked as a journalist for the Yorkshire Post, but now a member of the British Communist Party, Fryer joined the Daily Worker in 1947.

He was sent to Budapest in 1956 and reported the Hungarian Uprising for the newspaper. Fryer, who was critical of the actions of the Soviet Union, found his reports were censored. Fryer responded by having the material published in the New Statesman. As a result he was suspended from the party for "publishing in the capitalist press attacks on the Communist Party."

Fryer resigned from the Daily Worker and published a full account of the uprising in The Hungarian Tragedy (1956). Fryer's book has been compared to John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World on the Bolshevik uprising of 1917. A few days before he died, Fryer heard that Hungary's president had awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic, in recognition of his "continuous support of the Hungarian revolution and freedom fight".

http://www.spartacus...k/COLDfryer.htm

John,

Funnily enough, the US got exactly what it wanted - a provocation of the Soviet Union sufficient to cause the Communists to intervene.

In 1958 the CIA reported that, "This breath-taking and undreamed-of state of affairs not only caught many Hungarians off-guard, it also caught us off-guard, for which we can hardly be blamed since we had no inside information, little outside information, and could not read the Russians' minds."

"Undreamed of"? To get to the truth of the matter, we need to go back to June, 1953 and a NSC report titled, Interim United States Objectives and Actions to Exploit the Unrest in the Satellite States. Point 2a of that report states, "In East Germany and other satellite areas, where feasible, covertly stimulate acts and attitudes of resistance short of mass rebellion aimed at putting pressure on Communist authority for specific reforms, discrediting such authority and provoking open Soviet intervention."

So whilst the mass rebellion itself may not have been intended, and therefore came as a surprise, elsewhere in the report, it is also noted that the nourishment of resistance in Satellite countries should be done "without compromising it's spontaneous nature". In any case, the ultimate objective was achieved; to wit, "provoking open Soviet intervention."

http://reopenkennedy...garian-uprising

Edited by Greg Parker
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  • 1 month later...

Greg are you insinuating you think the CIA was behind the '56 revolution?

I haven't looked into it for years, but from what I remember, the CIA did have operations going in Hungry, especially psychological operations, and Frank Wisner was in the thick of it.

One thing they did was to encourage the anti-Soviet revolt, and then not back it up, just as they later did with the Cubans and Vietnamese.

Colby, why don't you look it up, find out what really happened and get back to us on it, will ya?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Greg are you insinuating you think the CIA was behind the '56 revolution?

I haven't looked into it for years, but from what I remember, the CIA did have operations going in Hungry, especially psychological operations, and Frank Wisner was in the thick of it.

One thing they did was to encourage the anti-Soviet revolt, and then not back it up, just as they later did with the Cubans and Vietnamese.

Colby, why don't you look it up, find out what really happened and get back to us on it, will ya?

If Greg insinuates something it is up to him to produce supporting evidence not up to someone else to prove otherwise.

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