Ádám Szesztay: The Hungarian Minorities in the Revolution of 1956. The Reactions of Minorities on the Revolutionary Situation

Minority issue did not play any role in the 1956 revolution, although the revolution was an important event in the life of minorities living in Hungary. The study from one hand collects those events in which people of some minority took place and whose affiliation to the certain national minority group is recorded in documents, from the other hand the study takes into consideration those movements of which specific national minority requirements were in connection with the revolution. The most part of these requirements (mainly in the circles of Serbians, Horvats, and Slovenians and Romanians called „south-Slavs“ was oriented on restraining assimilation and on creation of communal self-determination, but there were examples that some village occupants protested against classifying them as minorities, and requested to stop the obstacles of assimilation.

In Hungary the minorities on local level defined generally citizenship requirement: joined the revolution. Although the intelligentsia elite of the south-Slavs and Romanians came forward with specifically nationality, but strongly different requirements. Their similarity was that both the south-Slavic and the Romanian efforts aimed at the restrain of assimilation, but their attitude to the mother country was different. The Slovak papers on local level defined specific efforts. We have no records on the action of nationality character of the Germans, if we do not consider compensation requirements of the Germans in some villages of Transdanubia due to the property confiscation at the end of the forties.