In July ’56, First Secretary Rákosi, the arch-toad, the arch-Stalinist, was dismissed on the orders of the Moscow Politburo. In October, they exhumed László Rajk, hanged after a show trial in ’49 (his old friend Kadar had persuaded him to ‘confess’), and reburied him with state honours at the Kerepes cemetery. In Warsaw the Poles defied Krushchev, and across Budapest, as the weather turned crisp and hoar frost glittered on the trees along the Danube, the first mass meetings began. Here, at the Technical University, the evening of the 22nd, Jozsef Szilágyi and István Marián spoke of ‘the sunrise of modern Hungarian history’, and the next day a crowd of students and workers (many of the latter still in their overalls from the factory floors) marched to the statue of the Polish hero, General Bern, and crossed the bridge to Parliament Square. ‘Now or never!’ they chanted. ‘Russians out! Nagy into government!’

From believing they could do nothing, the people were suddenly convinced of their power. Changing the world might, after all, require nothing more than the belief that change was possible. In the space of a few hours, thousands of minds blossomed with the same remarkable idea: freedom. On a rooftop by the square, László saw a young woman waving a Hungarian tricolour with the Soviet insignia torn from the middle. By nightfall the bronze Stalin at City Park had been toppled and the radio station was under siege. The government panicked; threatened crackdowns; appealed for calm; offered amnesties; but nobody was listening to them any more. Bookstores were raided and Russian books burned on bonfires on the streets. Councils were formed. Armouries looted. On the boulevards, Russian tanks, twitching on their own fuel slicks and belching clouds of diesel fumes, hunted their invisible enemy. Everywhere, rumours of fresh fighting, of massacres, of victory. And under the dust from shelled apartment blocks and burned-out shops, under the tangled tramlines and the red and golden leaves of shattered trees, corpses lay in postures exclusive to the dead, many of them Red Army conscripts no older than László, boys from Kharkov and Kiev, who must at the end have wondered how they had earned such hatred, why children were killing them.