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6/21/2025, 3:18:49 AM
>Things were never the same in the party after [1956]. Trust in the USSR was broken or wasn’t the same… Comrades felt tricked; they’d been treated all along as if they were as blind and helpless as newborn kittens, and now they swung between one denial and another… Many did leave [the party], and the remaining members were split between those who were disillusioned with the USSR and those who clung to it as if it were the last life raft…
>I am haunted by a photograph which for me sums up the Hungarian crisis: an official is dangling from a lamppost in front of the Csepel factory, with a broken neck and the distorted face of the hanged, while below him two workers from the factory in revolt are laughing. This was the first time I said to myself, ‘They hate us. Not their bosses; our own people hate us’… The poor and the oppressed are not always right. But communists who make the people hate them are always wrong. And that hatred was massive, deeply embedded: people don’t do these terrible things unless they have suffered a wrong for a long time.
>I am haunted by a photograph which for me sums up the Hungarian crisis: an official is dangling from a lamppost in front of the Csepel factory, with a broken neck and the distorted face of the hanged, while below him two workers from the factory in revolt are laughing. This was the first time I said to myself, ‘They hate us. Not their bosses; our own people hate us’… The poor and the oppressed are not always right. But communists who make the people hate them are always wrong. And that hatred was massive, deeply embedded: people don’t do these terrible things unless they have suffered a wrong for a long time.
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