'The SF was conceived by the uprising in Hungary'

The Hungarian Uprising created chaos on the extreme left in Denmark. The grand old man of the Socialist People's Party [Socialistik Folkepartie (SF)], Gert Petersen, experienced the dramatic showdown from a central position in the DKP and was later a founding member of the SF. The following interview has been translated for the CHNN by Steve Parsons, to whom many thanks.

Gert Petersen, in October 1956 you were 29 years old and a member of the DKP. How was the news of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary received amongst Danish communists?

It was received rather differently and in reality in two different phases. The first phase started on 23 October 1956, when the uprising itself began with the big demonstrations in Budapest and the Soviet troops were used. Already these events created a strong protest movement within the Danish Communist Party, and there was, amongst other things, a group of discontented communists who formulated a protest against the Soviet intervention. As a joint editor of the journal Dialog, I was one of those who signed a protest against the invasion. This resulted in the immediate expulsion of those who were responsible for the initiative, while those of us who had merely signed it got away with a warning. It was not as if the Soviet interference was accepted from the start. There was a great deal of difference of opinion within the party.

Between 23 October and 4 November those of us who were sceptical about the Soviet's motives pressed more and more for the DKP to officially distance itself from the military intervention. It caused an enormous amount of trouble. In the meantime on 30 October when the Soviet leadership announced that it would withdraw its troops from Hungary, I was of the opinion that there were again grounds for optimism. I perceived the current tensions in the international communist movement as being a fight between the forces that wanted to get rid of the stalinist system and its dictatorial practice and other groupings which wished to maintain them. That conflict also existed in the DKP to a high degree. I saw, however, the decision to withdraw as a sign that the reform movement with Nikita Khrushchev in the lead had won the power struggle in the Kremlin and therefore it was an added shock for me when the Soviet Union, on the morning of 4 November, set the major invasion underway and advance towards Budapest. This became the second phase of the crisis.

Was it not naïve at have such great confidence in the reform friendly forces?

The whole thing has to be seen with respect to the background in the development after the 20th Congress in the Soviet Union half a year earlier, when Khrushchev brought the crimes of stalinism to account. It was, though, not at all everyone in the DKP who was in agreement with this course. Many were of the opinion that in reality it was a load of shit what Khrushchev had said at the Congress. I continued to hope that the Khrushchev line would be victorious. In the Russian 4 November proclamation it was promised that the troops would be withdrawn from Hungary as soon as order was restored. This was revealed to be simply a lie but in those days we still had a hope, also because Poland in the same period had in actual fact been allowed to develop in a rather liberal direction.

In addition on 30 October, England, France and Israel attacked Egypt as a reaction to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by President Nasser. It didn't cause a great stir - there weren't any demonstrations against it. Yet still we could not help thinking that the Soviet Union's objective in Hungary had a connection to the other worldwide events. Was a third world war in the brewing, and was that why the Soviet Union had acted in the way it had?

How did the functioning chairman, Aksel Larsen, react to the Soviet Union's invasion?

As it later became increasingly apparent Aksel Larsen was in fact our ally. This was something we were completely unaware of, and in the parliament he followed the party line and defended the Soviet invasion. It was common practice in the communist party that if a decision was made by the leadership, one backed it up. If he was to have any hope whatsoever of fighting his corner in the party he had to abide by the decision. Otherwise he would have been 'expelled' right away.

Aksel Larsen later told me, that during the showdown in the party in 1958 he believed he had won a little victory as he had succeeded in clarifying the party's independence. He had an opportunity to test this independence in 1958 when he put forward a proposal, outside of the party leadership, that the Soviet Union call off the nuclear test explosions it was carrying out. This led to all hell breaking out in the party, where some felt it was stabbing socialism in the back and that Aksel should [not?] have presented such a proposal to the central committee - where without doubt it would have been voted down. Here Aksel established it was so with independence. It was pure hot air. From that point in time he began to seriously take up the fight.

Yet despite everything this did not happen until two years after the Hungarian Uprising. Why did it take so long before the conflict led to a split in the DKP?

In the course of 1957, virtually the whole of the old guard in the Russian leadership - amongst others Molotov and Kaganovitch - were removed. There was a whole new anti-stalinist offensive, which once again gave some hope that there were changes on the way in the communist world. However, the execution of Hungary's former Prime Minister Imre Nagy in 1958 was yet another slap in the face for these hopes, and I know that it was particularly shocking for Aksel Larsen, whose memorandum for a new political course was made public at the same time.

We believed that the reform line was stronger in the Soviet Union than it actually was and gradually it became more and more difficult to see any hope in the communist world movement. Belief in international reforms faded and eventually also led Aksel Larsen to recognise the necessity of a split in the DKP. A further 30 years was to pass before the reform wing, that we had hopes in, won the power struggle in the Kremlin. On the other hand the dictatorship was dismantled without striking a blow.

So the conflict in the DKP ended with Aksel Larsen losing the power struggle in the party, which led to the formation of the SF in February 1959. Did it result in a new view of parliamentary democracy in the SF?

Yes, it does have a new view without doubt. Although it wasn't really new, because if one seriously researches the primary sources, one will not find after 1945 examples in the DKP's official publications of the party rejecting parliamentary democracy. But support for democracy was more firmly established in the SF and when we later looked more critically at it, we could well see that the communist party publications were also characterised by a lot of wordplay with respect to democracy.

When you look back fifty years on the Hungarian Uprising what did it come to mean for the development of the Danish left?

It came to mean that a current grew up in the Danish leftwing, that felt itself to be much more left orientated than the Social Democratic Party which at the same time, in contrast to the DKP, maintained the basic principles of democracy, a current which continued to criticise the USA's imperialism but also took up a critical attitude to the Soviet Union and its position in the cold war. It was the events in Hungary that created this current in Denmark which with time achieved the support of 8-10 percent, in periods as much as 15 percent, of the electorate. We would not have had this current with SF in the lead if it had not been for Hungary. Without Hungary we would have continued to fight within the DKP and would have had greater difficulty in defining a Moscow-critical line.

Steve Parsons