Demonstration against the Power: The Soc(cer)ialist Revolution of Hungary, July 4-6, 1954

Abstract

In socialist Hungary in the years following the political turn of 1945–48, the first larger manifestations of discontent broke out on the streets on July 4, 1954, the evening of the Hungarian national soccer team’s loss to West Germany in the World Cup final in Bern, Switzerland. The demonstrations which took place in Budapest after the 1954 World Cup final can be seen as the first seditious street protests in post-1945 Hungary and are regarded by several historians as the precursor to the 1956 revolution. More than 10,000 people demonstrated in Budapest, but there were also street protests in other cities across the country. For some time in the evening of that day, the demonstrators occupied the building of Hungarian Radio. The demonstrations lasted for three days; initially the protests and the anger of the people was directed at the soccer players and at the coach, but later it was aimed at the party leadership and became the first street protests against the socialist regime. The 1954 street demonstrations can best be interpreted using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, and the concept of ‘Eigensinn’ from the historiography of everyday life.