Peter Fryer and the Hungarian Uprising Options

[John Simkin]

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