Sixteen Points (1956)

How the text was drafted

The first draft of the sixteen points was written on 20 October 1956 by the Hungarian Federation of University and College Students' Associations (MEFESZ), founded at the University of Szeged, and the final wording was settled two days later, on 22 October, by a student assembly of delegates from universities across the country held at the Budapest Technical University. Demands had in fact been drafted in several places in the preceding days, at the universities of Szeged and Debrecen and at the largest industrial plant in Miskolc, but it was the points of the Budapest technology students that won the widest fame.

Reading and circulation

The first stop of the Budapest student demonstration on 23 October was the Petőfi statue in the inner city, where the sixteen points were read out after Imre Sinkovits recited the National Song. Yet relatively few people, even in the capital, knew the full set of points that day. Because the students who copied, duplicated and stencilled the text began work from different versions, it circulated in several variants (10, 11, 14, 16 and 17 points), and the order of the points also varied. Reproduced first by stencil and later in print, the demands reached many places and were handed out during the demonstration, but it cannot realistically be assumed that most of those who took to the streets had read them. They became genuinely well known in the days that followed.

The content of the demands

Taking the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops as its first point, the list demanded elections from below by secret ballot in the Hungarian Workers' Party and the convening of a party congress; a new government under Imre Nagy and the dismissal of the leaders of the Stalinist-Rákosi era. It demanded a public enquiry into Mihály Farkas and his accomplices and the return and trial before a people's tribunal of Mátyás Rákosi. It called for nationwide general elections by secret ballot with several parties, a new National Assembly, and recognition of the workers' right to strike. On the economy it demanded the reorganisation of economic life under specialists; publication of foreign trade agreements and the real figures of reparations; information on uranium deposits, their exploitation and the Soviet concessions, and the right to sell uranium freely at world market prices; a complete revision of industrial norms and adjustment of wages; a minimum living wage; a new system of distribution and equal treatment for individual farms. In the political and judicial sphere it demanded review of all political and economic trials by independent courts and the release and rehabilitation of the innocent; the immediate repatriation of prisoners of war and of civilians deported to the Soviet Union; freedom of opinion, the press and radio, and a newspaper for MEFESZ; removal of the Stalin statue and a monument to the martyrs of 1848-49; the old Kossuth arms in place of the existing emblem and new army uniforms; and the declaration of 15 March as a national holiday and 6 October as a day of national mourning. The final two points declared solidarity with the workers and students of Warsaw and Poland and announced a Youth Parliament for 27 October.

Character and limits

The sixteen points did not explicitly demand the banning of the Communist Party or the abolition of socialism. The demand for general elections by secret ballot, however, presupposed an end to one-party rule, which suggests that the abolition of socialism was already regarded as conceivable. Much of the list aimed at changes touching the foundations of the existing political system, and the economic demands likewise questioned the planned economy itself. Béla Király, military commander of the revolution in Budapest and later a historian, called the sixteen points the actual programme of the revolution and said it spread "like wildfire" through the country. With some 100,000 Soviet troops stationed in Hungary, there was no realistic prospect of actually realising the later points concerning fundamental freedoms.

The fate of the document and its evaluation

One of the main causes of the armed clash in front of the Radio building on the evening of 23 October was that its management refused to read out all the points, despite the demand of several thousand demonstrators. Reports in the press the following day omitted the most sensitive points, including the demand for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. On 26 October the Somogy county committee of the Patriotic People's Front adopted a separate sixteen points demanding, among other things, Hungary's complete neutrality and withdrawal from military alliances, full amnesty for the insurgents, a new electoral law, the transfer of factories to workers' councils, and freedom of conscience and religion. This was a document distinct from the students' demands.

Assessments diverged. At the trial of Imre Nagy, the sixteen points were characterised as counter-revolutionary in content. The prosecution argued that the points were aimed at changing the system, breaking with the Soviet Union and subverting Hungary's constitutional order, and denounced the demand that they be read on the radio as a manoeuvre to gather a crowd in front of the Radio building and use it as cover for an armed attack. Alongside this, the argument was also made that the demands fundamentally conveyed the radical and legitimate claims of the university students. How the changes the document sought should be characterised remains bound up with the wider question of how the Hungarian Revolution itself is classified.