MEFESZ (Union of Hungarian University and Academy Students)

MEFESZ (Magyar Egyetemisták és Főiskolások Szövetsége, Union of Hungarian University and Academy Students) was an independent student organisation re-established in October 1956, when Hungarian students broke away from DISZ, the official youth organisation they were all obliged to join, and it became the flashpoint that turned the political crisis of the autumn of 1956 into an uprising.

Founding

On 16 October 1956, at a meeting in the main lecture hall of the Faculty of Arts in Szeged, students decided to withdraw from DISZ, the official youth organisation, and to establish an independent organisation to defend their interests. DISZ had been a single youth organisation that students were obliged to join. On 20 October they adopted the organisation's rules and a list of demands at the same hall, and other university cities soon joined.

Demands and the demonstration of 23 October

The demands adopted at the 20 October meeting were not limited to university life; they also set out political goals. Among the political demands were that those responsible for the crimes of the preceding period be brought before a court in proceedings conducted with the widest publicity, freedom of information and the press, the return of the previously expelled reform communist leader Imre Nagy to the leadership, wage reform, the abolition of capital punishment for political offences, and a free democratic electoral system. Together with the demands drafted by students of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, MEFESZ's demands became the famous Sixteen Points of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the demonstration in Budapest on 23 October set off with exactly those points behind it.

Repression after the revolution

The revolution that began on 23 October was crushed by the second Soviet intervention of 4 November 1956. Mass arrests followed: MEFESZ members and workers' council activists were arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned, and teaching at the universities was suspended for a time. Estimates of the scale of the punishments imposed after the suppression still differ. One count has 26,000 people brought before the Hungarian courts, 22,000 sentenced and imprisoned and 13,000 interned, with 229 executed; Géza Jeszenszky, Hungarian foreign minister in the early 1990s, estimated that about 350 were executed.

Significance

MEFESZ was an attempt by students to walk out of an obligatory single youth organisation and to build an independent body to defend their interests, and that unremarkable step produced the demonstration of 23 October 1956 and turned reform demands into nationwide political ones.