Customer Reviews

Cry Hungary Uprising 1956

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Although this book predates by three years the fall of Communist Hungary, it gives an accessible picture of what had been known then about the 1956 revolt. This, as later accounts reiterate, was in fact an attempt to make for socialism a more human face, and was not an anti-Communist rebellion so much a popular uprising against Stalinist/Soviet occupation and collaboration in the wake of Khruschev's denunciation of Uncle Joe and Polish student/worker calls for a more liberal shift in Warsaw Bloc policy. While U.S. Cold War propaganda tried to capitalize on the rebellion to make it an anti-Red one, in fact Radio Free Europe only worsened the plight of the revolutionaries by falsely raising the hopes of the embattled and trapped freedom fighters. The role of Imre Nagy is muddled here; Gadney interprets that he was more of a figurehead caught between the rebel's radical demands that he could not satisfy and the puppet regime's hold over their former prisoner and the nascent Hungarian transitional committees that had no real time to establish power before the Soviets' duplicitious crushing of the uprising. Janos Kadar gets off pretty lightly in Gadney's rather sympathetic portrayal, as one who turned tail and fled so as to save not only his own hide but allow an eventual semi-liberal economy, by Soviet standards, to emerge in later decades in Hungary--by the time of Gadney's interpretation. Given that all involved at any level were familiar with Stalinism, the decisions made to keep surviving the purges by individuals, in retrospect, cannot be faulted but being human ones, if less than ideal and moral, then those of frightened and weak people knowing how cruelly the Soviets would treat any who crossed them.

As journalists reported from Budapest, naturally, nearly all of the book studies the capital's resistance to the Soviets, with very little balance from the rest of the nation. Given the information restrictions pre-the fall of the Wall, however, and the post-1989 regimes' continued prevarication even 50 years later about the role of informers (estimated by Gadney at one in ten of the population) and the role of spies and the AVO, this less than complete panorama of what occurred in October/November 1956 may not be so surprising to veteran students of or veterans from Hungary since WWII.

The Western powers, as documented well here, diddled away at the Suez Canal and ignored Hungary's appeals, leaving the scene as more of an sudden bloody spill behind the Iron Curtain for the Russians to mop up. Most books printed in the West offer few photos on the revolt; this is a welcome exception. John Sadovy's snapshots published here, originally for Life magazine, of young fighters and the execution of AVO secret police as they were driven from their headquarters make up the most dramatic of the excellent array of photos here.

For English-language beginners to the events of 1956 needing to fill up on more than the bare bones narrative here, go to Sandor Kopesci's (Budapest's police chief) memoir of the revolt and his imprisonment along with many of the other leaders, "In The Name of the Working Class." Also recommended is a photo history of the subsequent Kadar regime, "Unfinished Socialism," and Tibor Fischer's novel of 1944-56, "Under the Frog."