The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression, 1953-1963
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Publisher: Longman Pub Group
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Excellent - This is the first true book about the Hungarian Revolution.
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Comfortingly authoritative and dispassionate - Reviewed by PETER UNWIN in International Relations, Volume XIII, No3, December 1996 - Forty years ago this autumn the world was convulsed by two acts of aggression: the Franco-British invasion of Egypt and the Soviet assault upon Hungary. Both aggressions have long since been vacated, that against Egypt almost immediately, that against Hungary seven years ago, in Europe's year of miracles. But historians have perhaps not yet fully explored the significance of either event; as Mao said of the French Revolution, it is perhaps too soon to tell.
Until recently, exploration of the Hungarian Revolution and its repression presented particular problems. In Hungary itself and in the Soviet Union, the two main protagonists of the tragedy, the subject was officially closed. Anniversaries were marked only by official, and entirely partial, statements and publications. Honest historical research of the Revolution was forbidden, and even discussion of what happened so long ago was politically dangerous. Official oblivion may not have prevented Hungarians and even Russians reflecting on what happened in 1956 but it stood in the way of any informed examination of the question and ruled out publication of objective research about it. It was left to people outside the Soviet world, and to Hungarian emigrés above all, to brood over the facts and theories about October-November 1956 and to weave them into memoirs and history.
Hungary's freedom in 1989 changed all that, and since that time Hungarian scholars have worked openly on what was without doubt the most significant series of events in Hungary's twentieth-century history. A group of historians at the Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution in Budapest have now published some of their work in English in time for the anniversary. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is the result.
The book, a much modified and compressed version of a Hungarian original, provides a workmanlike account of the antecedents of the Revolution; of the dramatic and ultimately tragic events of late October and early November 1956; and of the retribution which followed when Soviet tanks had crushed Hungarian hopes. It skilfully explores the significance of the Revolution: at the time and over the decades since, in Hungary itself, in what was the Soviet empire, and in the wider world. For that dwindling band of readers of English who still care about what happened in Hungary in 1956, it provides a reliable and convenient guide.
But it also presents an interesting historiographical puzzle. `This study', the publishers claim, `is the first authentic history of the uprising which sent shock-waves through the Cold War world ... All previous accounts have been limited by incomplete or unreliable evidence. This important text takes full advantage of the wealth of newly available material following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It includes domestic and foreign archival material, and also private papers and eyewitness reports by individuals who can at last put their experiences on record without fear.'
With some allowance for book-promotion hyperbole, all this is true. But it is fascinating to observe how little the book in fact adds to the material in English which became available within a decade of the extinction of the Revolution. Press reporting at the time, a United Nations Committee report immediately afterwards, a volume of essays written by Imre Nagy in 1955-56 and smuggled clandestinely to the West in 1957, a dozen books by Hungarian emigrés living in Western Europe and the United States, all these taken together gave us by the early 1960s almost as much information about the Hungarian Revolution as scholars working in freedom in Hungary have been able to piece together forty years later.
In 1963 I sat down to write a biography of Imre Nagy. I had lived in Hungary for the three years that immediately followed his execution and had breathed the air of that terrorized nation, logging rumours of arrests, trials and executions; but it was quite impossible for a diplomat in those years to find Hungarians who dared to talk about the Revolution. I had worked through the mendacious propaganda with which the Hungarian regime sought to put the best face on their repression, but there was nothing more objective, from Hungarian or Russian sources, to back it up. So I fell back on what I had smelt in the Budapest air, on the Nagy essays, the United Nations report, the emigrés' memoirs, and from all this I cobbled together a book. For a variety of reasons extraneous to Hungary it was not published at the time; and when my Voice in the Wilderness. Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution finally appeared nearly thirty years later, in 1991, it was in a very different form. But apart from a number of post-1989 conversations with Hungarians who had been involved in the tragedy of autumn 1956, I still relied on those scrappy sources to which I had turned three decades earlier.
So I have had a very particular interest in comparing the information in Gyorgy Litvan's The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with the facts and arguments I first discovered in those sources in the early 1960s. There are points on which he scores. He achieves a dispassion of which few of the emigrés were capable in the years immediately after the Revolution. He documents their allegations and speculations - but more often to confirm than to contradict them. He provides more precise documentation than the United Nations report could achieve on a number of incidents, and in particular on developments in Moscow and eastern European capitals at the time. He gives us accurate figures on losses in the fighting on both sides and on arrests and executions afterwards, figures which opinion in the West long afterwards still exaggerated. He is magisterially and unexcitingly right on the relationship between the Suez and Hungarian tragedies. His assessment of the true nature of the revolution and of its significance over the decades which followed breaks new ground. He and his collaborators have, in short, produced a worthy piece of work, but they leave the main outlines of our knowledge, and much of the detail, totally unaffected.
I record all this not to decry the work of historians but to suggest that we should not undervalue the impressions and facts assembled in the heat of the action by participants in great events and recorded by them, often in haste, soon afterwards. The western journalists suddenly dumped in the middle of chaos in the streets of Budapest in October 1956 mostly got things right. So did the freedom fighters who made their dangerous escapes from Hungary in November and December and sat down to record their memories soon afterwards. The young intellectuals awarded a grant and a desk in a western university while they went to work to make sense of their mysterious country for outsiders got things in pretty fair proportion. And the Committee which produced the United Nations report weighed up its witnesses and listened to their evidence and somehow made its way to conclusions which stand the test of time.
So The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is a good book to have by one, comfortingly authoritative, dispassionate, removed from the cross-currents of the time. But it really tells us very little that we did not know in the late 1950s and the early 1960s about the Hungarian drama and tragedy of October-November 1956.
PETER UNWIN
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