On October 23, 1956, a group of university students began the revolt against the Soviet occupation and communist oppression in Budapest.
Following the student demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people listened to the speech in front of the Parliament of Imre Nagy which promised reforms.
In the evening an armed revolt broke out because of the bloody blows to the unarmed crowd.
The protesters demolished the statue of Stalin in Dózsa György street, symbol of the communist dictatorship, and occupied the Hungarian Radio building at dawn.
Although in the following days the legally constituted government of Imre Nagy took the first steps towards democratic transformation and began the retreat meetings of Soviet troops, Russian tanks launched a war on November 4 against the capital.
Around November 10, the dominant force overcame the resistance of armed civilian insurgents.
Hundreds of thousands have fled the country in retaliation, but the Kádár regime has imprisoned thousands of people and put hundreds of revolutionaries to death.
After the revolution was suppressed, it was forbidden to commemorate or even mention October 23rd.
The official communist position was that there was a “counter-revolution” organized by “reactionary” and “public law” elements.
On October 23rd, only those who emigrated abroad could preserve their memory.
Here in the late 1980s, when the system weakened, the true story of ’56 began to be made public.
On October 23, 1989, the then deputy head of state, Mátyás Szűrös, proclaimed the symbol of III. Hungarian Republic
The new democratically elected Parliament declared October 23, 1991 as an official national holiday and was confirmed by the Basic Law of 2012.
Traditionally, the Memorial Day commemorates the ’56 victims and heroes after the commemoration of the national flag at important sites of the revolution (at the University of Technology, the statue of Bem, the Hungarian Radio and the clashes in Budapest).