Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (5)
The little-known Hungarian uprising of 1972
In his diary entry dated 3 August 1972, Anatoliy Chernayev wrote:
Today I learned that on March 15th and 21st in several cities in Hungary there were student disturbances “with nationalist and anti-Soviet slogans.” It is not the first time that I read in TASS and the cables that economic reform led to a major shift of income to the “private-cooperative” sector. There are high incomes for academics, professors, doctors, and other intelligentsia. There are murmurs from the working class. The student groups were broken up with batons. Sixteen arrests. The “instigators” have not been found yet.
Meanwhile, in recent years Hungary seemed to be the most prosperous country from “our camp.” Everybody expected an explosion in Bulgaria (after Poland in 1970). But here you go!
Like many others interested in the subject, whenever the chain of major anti-bureaucratic uprisings in Eastern Europe was discussed, I would think of the June 1953 uprising in East Germany, the 1956 events in Hungary and Poland, the 1968–69 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1970 demonstrations in Poland known as the “Coastal Massacre”, and the 1980–81 Solidarność [Solidarity] movement. [*] Until I translated Chernayev’s 1972 diary into Turkish, I had been unaware of the mass student protests that took place in Hungary that year and eventually escalated into an uprising. I had never come across any mention of these protests -spreading across several major cities- in any of the sources I had read until then.
Even today, it is remarkably difficult to find information about the major Hungarian student uprising of 1972. However, in the course of my online research, I came across an English-language article dated 14 March 2025 on the Daily News Hungary website, which outlines the historical significance of 15th March and how the 1972 protests were suppressed.
According to the article, the vast majority of those who took part in the protests were young people. On 15th March, a group of students who had broken away from the regime’s official “Communist” youth events attempted to march to the Petőfi statue. [**] The police blocked the demonstrators’ path at Astoria. In the evening, students regrouped in the Castle District, where they once again faced police intervention. As a result, 88 people were arrested; some were put on trial on trumped-up charges. Several students were expelled from university, and fifteen young people were sentenced to prison.
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| Hungarian writer Mór Jókai addressing a crowd in front of the Petőfi statue on 15th March 1898. |
A noteworthy detail is that Chernayev recorded these lines in his diary on 3rd April – nearly three weeks after the protests had begun on 15th March. This delay clearly demonstrates how slowly news of the events reached Moscow, and how effectively they were concealed from both the general public and international audiences. Even when developments were promptly reported, the Soviet intelligence and diplomatic apparatus would first subject such “sensitive” matters to a filtering process before passing them on to a select few.
Another striking detail in Chernayev’s notes is that, in the early 1970s, the Kremlin anticipated a fresh wave of social unrest in Eastern Europe -and identified Bulgaria as the potential epicentre.
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| Protesting workers in Plzeň (1953). |
[**] 15th March marks the anniversary of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution and is regarded -particularly by the country’s youth- as a symbol of freedom and national independence. Although the Stalinist regime sought to appropriate the date for its own propaganda by means of official events such as “Revolutionary Youth Day”, dissident sections of youth and society continued to uphold it as a symbol of resistance to the regime.
See also:
Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (1): The poverty of bureaucratic planning
Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (2): Selling off Siberia to the imperialist powers
