Putin in Hungary

Russian President Putin is in Hungary for a visit, and today said Russia took "moral responsibility" for crushing the 1956 uprising. The 50th anniversary of the uprising is coming up in October of this year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday acknowledged Moscow's moral responsibility for the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising 50 years ago.

The Kremlin sent Soviet tanks into Hungary on Nov. 4. 1956, to crush a revolt after Hungarian Prime Minister and Communist reformer Imre Nagy formed a coalition government, proclaimed neutrality, ended censorship, and withdrew from the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet army installed Janos Kadar as premier. Nagy, who was in power only 10 days, was arrested and later executed. Some 200,000 Hungarians fled the country and many more were imprisoned.

Putin, making the second visit to Hungary by a Russian leader since the collapse of the Soviet Union, noted that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had come to Hungary in 1992 and condemned the Soviet role in crushing the revolt.

"Of course, modern Russia is not the Soviet Union, but we can still feel some sort of moral responsibility for these events,'' Putin said. "Our task is not to forget the past and to think about the future.''

The marquee event of Putin's two-day visit was the formal return of a trove of priceless, centuries-old books seized by the Soviet Army during World War II and taken to Russia. Budapest has long demanded them. But lurking below the surface was the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion.

To this day, Hungarians who were alive then remember how US President Eisenhower failed to come to the aid of Hungary, and they do not think fondly of Ike.

The Suez crisis occupied much of the West's attention at the same time, and certainly war with the Soviet Union would've been no small thing, with a nuclear threat ever present.

However, the US and Europe failed to act, and Communisn brought its brand of brutality to Hungary.

We are faced with a similar threat today, with the rise of Islamofascism. It takes sacrifice to stand up to tyranny. And yet, how much are we willing to let the terror masters gobble up, as we allowed the Soviets to gobble up Hungary?

How much was the Soviet Union emboldened by the lack of response? Certainly the Soviets were not deterred in Prague in 1968. We have emboldened the terrorists by our feeble response to numerous attacks since 1979.

President Bush deserves enormous credit for refusing to leave the people of Afghanistan and Iraq under the heel of their dictators. Do we have the will to continue the fight? Or, will we throw a nation somewhere like Hungary to the wolves as long as our territory is left alone?