276 The Presidential Years
Russians to smother the “counterrevolution.” That same night, the Red Army
moved into action. The rebels tried desperately to resist, but the following
morning Khrushchev was able to send Tito an exultant dispatch: “Hurry, hurry,
hurry, our troops are in Budapest!”^67 On 5 November, Tanjug (Telegrafska
Agencija Nove Jugoslavije), the Yugoslav press agency, supported the bloody
Soviet intervention, since it had been dictated by the need to “save socialism.”^68
At dawn on 4 November, Nagy asked for political asylum at the Yugoslav
Embassy, in the company of numerous collaborators and their families, fifty-
two people in all. However, in the following days he resolutely refused the
Soviet diktat, conveyed to him by his hosts, to renounce his premiership. At
this point, an unforeseen quarrel erupted between Tito and Khrushchev: Tito
asked the Kremlin to allow Nagy to live freely in Budapest or to give him safe-
conduct to travel to Yugoslavia. Khrushchev, considering Nagy a traitor who
should be punished, gave the marshal an unpleasant choice: if he consigned the
rebel and his followers to Kádár, the collaboration agreement reached between
them in September would be valid; however, if he insisted on saving the repro-
bates, he would be denounced as a supporter of this Hungarian “counter revo-
lution.”^69 In order to give more weight to his words, he moved Soviet tanks
to the Slovenian-Hungarian border, in the Mura region, and surrounded the
Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest with troops. A Soviet soldier even opened fire,
shooting a Yugoslav diplomat who was seated at his desk.^70 Tito’s indignation
at these provocations was further strengthened by Enver Hoxha’s article, pub-
lished by the official Tirana newspaper, Zeri i Popullit (People’s voice), in which
the Albanian leader attacked fiercely “the new forms of socialism” that should
be put on the “scrap heap of international opportunism.” Obviously he had
Yugoslavia in mind. The article was republished by Pravda and in this way
achieved particular resonance.^71
The reply soon followed. On 11 November, in the Istrian town of Pula, Tito
gave a speech for LCY activists in which he condemned the first Soviet inter-
vention, the one that took place following Gerő’s invitation, as a “catastrophe,”
since in that moment popular fury could still have been channeled in the right
direction. The second intervention, although bad, was to be considered a lesser
evil, since it aimed to prevent the chaos of civil war and counterrevolution in
Hungary, thus saving the world from a possible major conflict between the
blocs. In part contradicting this assertion, he reconfirmed his firm opposition
to every foreign intervention in the internal affairs of other states, stressing
that the Hungarian tragedy had been caused by Stalinist practices still alive
in the Soviet Union and in the majority of the satellite countries, saying:
“They understood where the main cause of all these difficulties lay and at the
Twentieth Congress they condemned Stalin’s acts and his policy up to then,