Peter Fryer, the son of a Hull master mariner, was born on 18th February, 1927. H e won a scholarship to Hymers College in 1938. 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). He later became a member of the Socialist
Labour League. Fryer co-edited the Labour Review until clashing with its leader, Gerry Healey.
Books by Fryer include
The Battle for Socialism (1959),
Oldest Ally, A Portrait of Salazar's Portugal
(1961), Mrs Grundy, Studies in English Prudery
(1964), The Birth Controllers
(1965), Private Case - Public Scandal
(1981), Staying Power: The History of Black
People in Britain (1984), Black
People in the British Empire (1988), The
Politics of Windrush (1999) and Rhythms
of Resistance (2000).
Peter Fryer died on 31st October, 2006.
Forum Debate
Peter Fryer and the Hungarian Uprising
Masters of Deceit: Propaganda, Disinformation & Corruption
(1)
Peter Fryer,
Hungarian Tragedy (1956)
The troops in Budapest,
as later in the provinces, were of two minds: there were those who
were neutral and there were those who were prepared to join the people
and fight alongside them. The neutral ones (probably the minority)
were prepared to hand over their arms to the workers and students
so that they could do battle against the A.V.H. with them. The others
brought their arms with them when they joined the revolution. Furthermore,
many sporting rifles were taken by the workers from the factory armouries
of the Hungarian Voluntary Defence Organisation. The "mystery"
of how the people were armed is no mystery at all. No one has yet
been able to produce a single weapon manufactured in the West.
The Hungarian Stalinists,
having made two calamitous mistakes, now made a third - or rather,
it would be charitable to say, had it thrust on them by the Soviet
Union. This was the decision to invoke a non-existent clause of the
Warsaw Treaty and call in Soviet troops. This first Soviet intervention
gave the people's movement exactly the impetus needed to make it united,
violent and nation-wide. It seems probable, on the evidence, that
Soviet troops were already in action three or four hours before the
appeal, made in the name of Imre Nagy as his first act on becoming
Prime Minister. That is debatable, but what is not debatable is that
the appeal was in reality made by Gero and Hegedus; the evidence of
this was later found and made public. Nagy became Prime Minister precisely
twenty-four hours too late, and those who throw mud at him for making
concessions to the Right in the ten days he held office should consider
the appalling mess that was put into his hands by the Stalinists when,
in desperation, they officially quit the stage.
With Nagy in office it
would still have been possible to avert the ultimate tragedy if the
people's two demands had been met immediately - if the Soviet troops
had withdrawn without delay, and if the security police had been disbanded.
But Nagy was not a free agent during the first few days of his premiership.
It was known in Budapest that his first broadcast were made - metaphorically,
if not literally - with a tommy-gun in his back.
(2)
Peter Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy (1956)
Even the children, hundreds
of them, had taken part in the fighting, and I spoke to little girls
who had poured petrol in the path of Soviet tanks and lit it. I heard
of 14-year-olds who had jumped to their deaths on to the tanks with
blazing petrol bottles in their hands. Little boys of twelve, armed
to the teeth, boasted to me of the part they had played in the struggle.
A city in arms, a people in arms, who had stood up and snapped the
chains of bondage with one gigantic effort, who had added to the roll-call
of cities militant - Paris, Petrograd, Canton, Madrid, Warsaw - another
immortal name. Budapest! Her buildings might be battered and scarred,
her trolley-bus and telephone wires down, her pavements littered with
glass and stained with blood. But her citizens' spirit was unquenchable.
(3)
Peter
Fryer,
Hungarian Tragedy (1956)
Look at the hell that
Rákosi made of Hungary and you will see an indictment, not
of Marxism, not of Communism, but of Stalinism. Hypocrisy without
limit; medieval cruelty; dogmas and slogans devoid of life or meaning;
national pride outraged; poverty for all but a tiny handful of leaders
who lived in luxury, with mansions on Rózsadomb, Budapest's
pleasant Hill of Roses (nicknamed by people 'Hill of Cadres'), special
schools for their children, special well-stocked shops for their wives
- even special bathing beaches at Lake Balaton, shut off from the
common people by barbed wire. And to protect the power and privileges
of this Communist aristocracy, the A.V.H. - and behind them the ultimate
sanction, the tanks of the Soviet Army. Against this disgusting caricature
of Socialism our British Stalinists would not, could not, dared not
protest; nor do they now spare a word of comfort or solidarity or
pity for the gallant people who rose at last to wipe out the infamy,
who stretched out their yearning hands for freedom, and who paid such
a heavy price.
Hungary was Stalinism incarnate.
Here in one small, tormented country was the picture, complete in
every detail: the abandonment of humanism, the attachment of primary
importance not to living, breathing, suffering, hoping human beings
but to machines, targets, statistics, tractors, steel mills, plan
fulfilment figures . . . and, of course, tanks. Struck dumb by Stalinism,
we ourselves grotesquely distorted the fine Socialist principle of
international solidarity by making any criticism of present injustices
or inhumanitites in a Communist-led country taboo. Stalinism crippled
us by castrating our moral passion, blinding us to the wrongs done
to men if those wrongs were done in the name of Communism. We Communists
have been indignant about the wrongs done by imperialism: those wrongs
are many and vile; but our one-sided indignation has somehow not rung
true. It has left a sour taste in the mouth of the British worker,
who is quick to detect and condemn hypocrisy.
(4)
Peter
Fryer,
Hungarian Tragedy (1956)
The crisis within the
British Communist Party, which is now officially admitted to exist,
is merely part of the crisis within the entire world Communist movement.
The central issue is the elimination of what has come to be known
as Stalinism. Stalin is dead, but the men he trained in methods of
odious political immorality still control the destinies of States
and Communist Parties. The Soviet aggression in Hungary marked the
obstinate re-emergence of Stalinism in Soviet policy, and undid much
of the good work towards easing international tension that had been
done in the preceding three years. By supporting this aggression the
leaders of the British Party proved themselves unrepentant Stalinists,
hostile in the main to the process of democratisation in Eastern Europe.
They must be fought as such.
They were Stalin's men.
They did what he told them and they were dependent on him. To what
extent is an open secret inside the Party. The famous programme The
British Road to Socialism, for example, issued in February 1951
(without the rank and file being given a chance to amend it) contained
two key passages, on the future of the British Empire and of the British
Parliament, which were inserted by the hand of one Joseph Stalin himself,
who refused to let them be altered.
These men remain Stalinists.
But Stalinism has been revealed, both in theory and practice, as a
monstrous perversion of Marxism. Leaders who still believe in it and
still practise it cannot be trusted to go on leading, and cannot protect
themselves from exposure by an appeal to the Communist principles
they have grossly betrayed.
(5) Terry Brotherstone, The Guardian (3rd November, 2006)
The death of Peter Fryer aged 79, comes 50 years to the week since his honest reporting of Hungary's 1956 revolution for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) split the Communist party of Great Britain, and changed his own life. A loyal CP member since 1945, and a Worker journalist for nine years, he immediately wrote a short, passionate book Hungarian Tragedy in defence of the revolution - and was expelled from the party.
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".
Sent by the then Worker editor, Johnny Campbell, to report on a "counter-revolutionary" uprising, Fryer's loyalty was to communism, Marx's "truly human society", not to the CPGB's Stalinist line. Realising that he was witnessing a popular uprising of students and workers, he sided with the revolutionaries. His dispatches were savagely edited, then suppressed.
In 1949, Fryer had covered the Hungarian Stalinist regime's show trial of Hungarian party leader, László Rajk. In good faith, he reported Rajk's "confession" - made with the promise of being spared, but resulting in his execution - as proletarian justice. So, when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's revelations about Stalinism at the 1956 Soviet Party congress were followed in Hungary by Rajk's cynical "rehabilitation", Fryer's engagement with the CPGB's crisis was personal. The "doubts and difficulties" shared by many members, for him meant confronting the part he felt he had played in Rajk's murder.
Held up at a border town on the road from Vienna to Budapest, Fryer saw his first dead bodies - 80 people shot during a demonstration. It was his turning-point. Attending the election of a workers' council at a state farm was the last straw. An apology that it was taking all day because "we have absolutely no experience of electing people" made him think: "So much for 'people's democracy'."
In late October 1956 there was a lull which followed from the brief Soviet withdrawal and ended with the Soviet army's return to Budapest on November 4 to crush the revolution. During that period Fryer offered to edit an English-language paper, and he was proud to read, in a 1961 Hungarian emigré bibliography of the revolution that this was "of capital importance as regards the character of the insurrection: the only foreign journalist who decided to act for the sake of Hungary was a Communist".
Hungarian Tragedy played a big part in the CPGB's fierce internal discussions which followed the Soviet invasion and led up to its Easter 1957 Hammersmith congress. But the party proved irredeemable. By then Fryer was working with the Trotskyist "club" of Gerry Healy (obituary December 18 1989), for which he edited the weekly Newsletter and co-edited Labour Review. These publications represent one of the few attempts by British Trotskyists to engage in serious dialogue and for a while they attracted a wide range of authors.
The narrow-minded, and sometimes brutal, authoritarianism Healy substituted for Marxist politics soon drove Fryer away. For quarter of a century, he lived another life, writing on the history of Portugal, Grundyism, censorship, and, above all, black history and music.
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