The First Actions
Although students admired the Hungarian revolutionaries, they were somewhat reserved as concerns their leader, Imre Nagy. Nagy had lived in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1944, and, by their own experience, Romanians saw communist leaders brought in and installed by the Red Army to be far worse than home-grown communists.
The students who were watching the situation in Hungary were also attentive to the international situation. Although Western radio stations assured the revolutionaries of the West's support, Romanian students were quite sceptical as they saw the United States' and the Western European powers' passive attitude and abstention from armed intervention.
Despite these doubts, the first protest actions began within days after the Hungarian Revolution started. Similar ferment existed not only in Bucharest, but in other university cities too, particularly in Timişoara, Cluj and Iaşi. Although information on what was happening did travel between these cities, coordinating actions would have been impossible in the highly repressive state that Romania was at the time, and students in each city acted independently of one another.
Read more about this topic: Bucharest Student Movement Of 1956
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“The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)