Some things change; some things stay the same…

… or change, anyway, much more slowly than we might like.

Bela Kiraly (source: The Telegraph/Paul Grover)

The leader of the resistance fighters in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising died recently.  Bela Kiraly was asked by Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister who fronted the revolt against Soviet control, to command the Hungarian “military”– a “National Guard” made up of about 30,000 Hungarian troops and another 25,000 civilians.

In 18 days (October 23- November 10) those Nationalists were crushed by a Russian force of over 100,000 troops, backed by 4,500 tanks.

Nagy and his political cohorts were captured and executed, but Kiraly made it across the border into Austria, and from there to the United States (where he earned a PhD and became a college history professor).  After the collapse of Communism, Kiraly returned to Budapest, where he was elected to Parliament.  He died there, at age 97, this month.

Further details of his remarkable life can be found in the obits in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the (London) Telegraph, the (London) Guardian… and of course, Wikipedia.

Kiraly wrote copiously about Hungarian history and the 1956 revolution, which he saw as the first step toward democracy in Hungary.  “It was the start of the series of events — the end of communism — for which we had to wait another 33 years,” he said.  And surely it was.

As we read about and listen to and watch the protests in Iran (and Myanmar and …), hoping for progress toward freedom and reform, we might hear Kiraly’s words as a caution.  For all of the excitement– justified excitement– over the “color revolutions” that washed through some Former Soviet Republics (and the corollary optimism about the new technologies that abetted them), we should be cautious about generalizing their applicability.  Those uprisings were against governments themselves relatively new, deeply dysfunctional,  and not very well supported by their old “parent” state.

The uprising that begins Kiraly’s tale is more resonant of, say, Tiananmen Square…  which happened 20 years ago; Hungary’s long wait, of the decades-long struggle against apartheid in South Africa.  It stands to reason:  the deeper-seated and better organized/armed the “authority,” the harder the “opening.”

Still, a journey only becomes a journey when it starts.  As Kiraly observed,

I believe that it was the beginning of the end. The Hungarian Revolution was an inspiration for resistance against Bolshevik rule, resistance against Soviet imperialism.

It’s just that the journey can be long.  And arduous.  It’s a frustrating, indeed a sad, lesson to take from a life as inspiring as Kiraly’s.

But it seems to me a very important lesson: that it can be harder and take longer than we might hope or expect to begin to achieve meaningful freedoms.  This doesn’t make those freedoms any less critical to attain; it just makes them more precious.

So we have to guard against the erosion-by-fatigue of our excitement about what’s happening on the streets of Tehran.  We have to keep focused, even if we’re disappointed to learn that Twitter isn’t the not-so-secret weapon that can topple autocracies at the speed of light; we have to be disciplined in staying informed after news media gets tired of the story and moves on.

By that same token, noting that essentially every conflict presents itself as a “battle for freedom,” we have to sift out those that are in fact struggles for broader, more meaningful self-determination.  And then we have to be alert to those struggles around the world– sadly, most of them– that for whatever reason (no bureau nearby, celebrity felonies crowding the front page, whatever) aren’t getting much coverage in the press.

Most of all, if we mean to give our fellow humans the support that, in their shoes,  we would surely hope from them, we need to steel ourselves to be helpful in whatever ways we can, for as long as we can.  We need to be there, in ways that matter, for the the long run.

It will be lovely if the race for freedom turns out to be a sprint.  But Bela Kiraly’s extraordinary story reminds us that it’s prudent to prepare for a marathon.