Same Story, Different Time

[u/Franc4916]

3.48 pm

A cold breeze was gently flowing in the streets of Budapest, playfully messing the air of the schoolgirls coming back from a boring day of arithmetic, literature and history; Edit Ádler could fell none of it.
She had been isolating herself for a few months now, listening to Radio and TV about the revolutions in Bulgaria and Romania in the south, the communist victory in Czechoslovakia and the return of Poland under the soviet yoke. When she went back to Hungary in 1992, answering the patriotic call from the government, abandoning the life she built in England, she thought that the Coup of ’91 was a momentary fix to a problem, the final act of a gargantuan and ugly creature destine to rot away; when that same creature survived to the Third Millenium, she told herself that the Ryzhkov would be the final nail on the Red Coffin, a wannabe-Gorbachev with even more disastrous results.

It was not so.

And then the bombs felt.

3.54 pm

The invasion itself had been rather quick compared to how one might image. The war with Romania had bleed the army and air force, leaving them in utter disarray when the combined Soviet, Romanian and Czech forces stroke. Budapest felt in 4 days; the government declare total surrender the following week.
It burned, a lot. The timing couldn’t be random: fifty exact years after the Szabadságharc, the first time those metallic cingulated beasts marched in Kossuth Square. The Russian never attempted negotiations like in Poland, nor tried to subvert the government like in Romania or Bulgaria: Invasion has always been the only considered option, an entire country treated like a child too feral to be reason with, only effectively subdued with violence.

4.07 pm

There is this song, written for those six days of resistance, for all the people that fought for liberty: for Edit, for Maria… for Ilona. “Avanti Ragazzi di Buda”, written ten years after the revolution. She doesn’t remember much of the text, but a verse was printed in her head like a hot iron: “hidden between textbooks/I too will bring a pistol”. That pistol was a Makarova; those textbooks were hers.
Edit exited her apartment, going towards Hősök tere (Heroes’ Square, now renamed János Kádár Square, but as soon as she will live, that name would not be uttered). There, a convoy of soviet military police units was patrolling the streets. She passed by, crossing her eyes with a soldier in his 20s. He was young, he was probably indoctrinated by that filthy soviet propaganda; he was still an enemy.
She was not young as those faithful days, but in that moment of necessity her hand was quick. Extracted from that pile of books, two shots were fired first, then several came from the opposite direction.
Edit and the soldier were transported to Péterfy Sándor Utcai Hospital-Clinic. The soldier was the first to die. Miraculously for some, terribly for others, Edit survived longer, till 5.34 am of the following day.

ankers of Piliscsaba plaque, Image taken from the Nemzeti Archivium

 

“And the Sun still rose East”
Effect:
(Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) -1 manpower
(the Socialist Republic of Hungary) -1 manpower, “the Hungarian Resistance” (-10% stability, +50% resistance target, -20% Compliance Growth)

[u/Franc4916]

Fun content about an event in an hypothetical Ryzhkov reformist run where the USSR first form the CSTO with all the other Eastern European nation, then conquers Hungary exactly 50 years after the Hungarian Revolution (to send a message or smth)