Imre Nagy again went on Hungarian radio. This time he announced that his government would henceforth be based ‘on democratic cooperation between the coalition parties, reborn in 1945.’ In other words, Nagy was forming a multi-party government. Far from confronting the opposition, Nagy was now basing his authority increasingly on the popular movement itself. In his final sentence, celebrating a ‘free, democratic and independent’ Hungary, he even omitted, for the first time, the discredited adjective ‘socialist’. And he appealed publicly to Moscow ‘to begin the withdrawal of Soviet troops’, from
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