HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION (1956). The KGBwas unable to
provide the Soviet leadership any warning of the October 1956 rev-
olution that deposed the pro-Soviet Hungarian government. The
archives show that both the Soviet embassy and Moscow were
stunned by the level of violence, and the executionof Hungarian
party and security police officials. The KGB did play, however, an
important role in the restoration of communist power in Hungary.
KGB officers identified Hungarian militants for arrest and persecu-
tion; more than 300 were executed, including nationalist leader
Imre Nagy. The KGB also helped reestablish the Hungarian secu-
rity organizations.
The KGB repeatedly warned the Soviet leadership in the fall of
1956 that the Hungarian revolution could have consequences for So-
viet society. The leadership, they argued, could not allow Magyars
greater rights that Balts, Ukrainians, and Russians. Filip Bobkov,
later a deputy chair of the KGB, noted in his memoirs that the Hun-
garian revolution set off student protests in several Soviet universi-
ties, but the KGB squashed the protests and ensured the punishment
of their leaders.
Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov was deeply influenced by
events in Budapest. As KGB chair from 1967 to 1982, Andropov of-
ten told people that he wanted to ensure that no such explosion could
ever happen again inside the Soviet bloc. Andropov’s strong support
for a crackdown on the PragueSpring in 1968 undoubtedly sprang
from his experiences in Budapest in 1956. Andropov’s decisions to
harshly punish Soviet dissidentsand to push for the exileof Alek-
sandr Solzhenitsyncan also be explained by his fear that intellectual
dissent could lead to counterrevolution.- I –
IGNATIEV, SEMYON DMITREVICH (1904–1983). Following
Viktor Abakumov’s arrest in 1951 by Joseph Stalin, Ignatiev was
appointed minister of state security to supervise the arrest, interroga-
tion, trial, and executionof Stalin’s enemies within the Communist
Partyand the police. In Stalin’s last days, Ignatiev supervised the
preparation of the Doctors’ Plot, which was meant to implicate sen-118 •HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION (1956)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 118