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Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Cold War International History Project)

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When I read Charles Gati's prize winning "Hungary and the Soviet Bloc," I then thought that he had written the last and best word on our understanding of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 during the Cold War. Then, unexpectedly, several years later the Berlin Wall came down, Hungary and the USSR's East European satellites regained independence, and heretofore closed Cold War archives began to open. From archives in Budapest and Moscow as well as from dozens of interviews with participants of '56 both East and West, Professor Gati has written a classic of Cold War history and analysis which arguably will become the definitive account of the multi-sided, tragic events of 1956 in Hungary. No stone has been left unturned -- the author has read the minutes of the Politburo meetings in the Soviet Union and Hungary, as well as the interrogation and trial transcripts from the last days before his execution of Imre Nagy, former Prime Minister of Hungary. This fluently written, masterfully organized, and exeptionally well integrated small volume deserves to sit on the Cold War history shelf along with Allison's "Essence of Decision," the study of another major event of the era, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In his overarching Introduction, Gati includes a brief but fascinating autobiographical recounting of his own experiences in Budapest as a young reporter during the tumultuous years after his high school graduation in 1953 to his flight with tens of thousands of Hungarians across the Austrian border after Soviet troops crushed the revolution in late 1956.

The author's thesis is the existence of the possibility of an alternative "limitationist" approach to demands, expectations, methods, and outcomes by all parties to the challenges of Hungary '56. Instead, however, as is vividly recounted in the book, the Hungarian leadership, the Budapest insurgents, Moscow, and Washington displayed variably, vacillating responses, revolutionary romanticism, imperial intransigence, and absolutist anti-communism, all of which produced disaster and great bloodshed for Budapest and its population 50 years ago this early November. As the author makes clear, it need not necessarily have ended in a zero-sum tragedy, but with some restraint on all sides might well have become a non-zero-sum outcome.

All parties to the failed revolution come in for well deserved criticism -- Nagy for his ineffectiveness as a leader (his portrait from the 1930s to his death in 1958 is the most complete and nuanced account of a foreign leader I have ever read), the young Hungarian insurgents for their unbridled demands and intemperate actions, Washington for the hypocrisy of its East European policies of "liberation" and "rollback," and most of all the Soviet Union for the extraordinary brutality and violence it rained down upon the people of Budapest.

In his splendid Epilogue, Charles Gati's well told story of the "failed illusions" of a half century ago, as well as his own life as a former Hungarian citizen, came full circle when he witnessed Nagy's cermonial reburial in Budapest's Heroes Square late spring 1989, with the demise of the Communist system in Hungary and East Europe in sight just months away. This is a remarkable and exceptional book.

Take the experts' word that this study is a reliable, extensive, and insightful account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. What strikes me is the personal element. We go from the recollections of a young, unsophisticated journalist of 22, caught in the tide of momentous events he does not understand, to the retrospection of a highly sophisticated scholar revisiting those events and doing his very best to look behind history's curtain to resolve their meaning. It is a gripping, honest, and personal account, rendered with the binocularity of five decades of study. A century from now, this will still be the book to read, not just for the facts but also for the feel of one of the 20th century's signal struggles.

Gati's treatment of the Hungarian Revolution and its actors gives the impression that he wrote a book with preconceived conclusions supported by selected documentation and by omission of those not fitting in his concept. Exploitation of the 50th anniversary of the seminal historic event is evident in the timing of publication. He treats Imre Nagy, the Freedom Fighters and America unfairly. He unrealistically expects the revolutionaries to be practitioners of real politic. His assumption of Soviet willingness to compromise, to meaningfully revise its relationship with its satellites seemed so hopefully evidential only in the flashlight of the revolution. It is surprising that Gati is still dazzled.

There is very little new in Gati's "new history" of the Hungarian Revolution that is significant. Robert Murphy in his autobiography: Diplomat among warriors explained the American inaction regarding the Hungarian Revolution in a few pages more concisely, with more insight than Gati does in his book. There is no surprise that Gati neglects to mention him and his views.

Murphy concludes his assessment of why the Hungarian Revolution was defeated, or in better words, why it was left to be defeated, with this remarkably humble statement:

"For sheer perfidy and relentless suppression of a courageous people longing for their liberty, Hungary will always remain a classic symbol. Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give the Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way."

This evaluation remains the most authoritative, most honest, factually correct and durable judgment of American - or for that matter the free World's - inability to
act at a time when action was warranted.

- so Hungary's fate in '56 should come as no real surprise. Gati has done a good job in reassessing the course of a pivotal cold war event, and fleshed out the narrative through incorporating new documentation and memoirs. In this regard, however, there is really little that is new to add over an uprising scholars have steadily picked to the bone for half a century.

Gati's real contribution here is his Rashomon-like critique of the revolution and of its five main protagonists: Americans, Soviets, Hungarian Communists, insurgents - and Imre Nagy, caught between the latter three. The US illusion was its belief that, since it could not start World War Three over a Soviet satellite, inciting rhetoric was its only sufficient recourse rather than pragmatic realpolitik. The Soviet illusion, and that of its Hungarian allies, lay in Moscow's belief that the uncorked, anti-Stalinist genie could be stuffed back in the vodka bottle. Nagy's illusion - and that of the reformist intellectuals around him - was that he and Moscow spoke a common political language that could open serious dialogue. And the insurgents' illusion lay in their faith that, not only could they overturn the "Communist regime," but that Moscow would morally capitulate as the Free World rushed to aid Hungary's struggle.

Gati takes apart all these, but then concludes that the revolution's failure was not inevitable after all. One must ask why not, after he has spent so much time marshaling evidence of this rampant political blindness. As an American reader, the most interesting part to me was his analysis of American actions and motives. The tantalizing remark of Richard Nixon's, that it would be very convenient for the '56 presidential race if the Soviets pulled some brutality in Eastern Europe, coupled with RFE's inflammatory broadcasts soon after, suggest a cynical collusion that - given what we know about CIA black operations of the period - isn't as farfetched as some might wish to believe. The US, for its part, behaved as it did because - like the USSR - it was led by unimaginative men stuffed just as full of illusions of their own. (Witness their equally confused, floundering handling of the Cuban Revolution a mere two years later.)

The final illusion to fail, if one reads Gati correctly, is his: namely, his young man's belief that a democratic socialism with a human face could ever have arisen out of the Stalinist muck in which it was planted. Of course, this did eventually arise after 1985 - too late to save the system after three decades more of accumulating rot. Perhaps the chief criticism to be made of Gati's account is his expectation that those caught up in the passions of '56 could display the maturity and insight he's gained fifty years after the event. That is surely the chief failed illusion of all armchair historical analysis.

Gati's definitive account of the Hungarian revolution and the American role in it reads like a LeCarre novel with documentation.

Gati's book is written with the perspective of the forces at work in Budapest, Moscow and Washington before and during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He briefly recounts his own experience as a young Hungarian journalist during the 12 days of the Revolution, and then proceeds to profile in detail the events and personalities of that time. He manages to capture the spontaneity of the event, and how leaders in the three capitals misinterpreted and finally acted (or failed to act), often with limited understanding. The book is well-researched (almost every page has footnotes), and despite criticism by an earlier commenter, is quite in line with more recent interpretations of the 1956 events, using recently released Soviet, American and Hungarian archives, which were not available to earlier authors. As it has been mentioned by another reviewer, it is a human story, not an encyclopedic one, and I found it engrossing.

This short and well written book is primarily an analytic overview of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. This is not a detailed narrative and some background knowledge of Cold War history and the Hungarian Revolt is helpful in getting the most out of this book. The author, Charles Gati, has an interesting background. An academic political scientist specializing in Eastern Europe, he is himself an emigre who left Hungary as a young man after the failure of the Revolt. This book contains some interesting, and in one case, moving anecdotes about his experience in 1956, but the heart of the book is a rigorous and objective analysis of key issues related to the Revolt. Gati focuses on the role of the doomed Hungarian reform communist Imre Nagy, the actions of the Soviet Politburo, the actions (or to be more precise, lack of actions) of the Eisenhower administration, and because of considerable prior controversy, the role of the Hungarian language broadcasts of the US-supported Radio Free Europe.

As is generally known well, the Hungarian Revolt was an essentially spontaneous event brought about by the fluctuations of de-Stalinization in Eastern Europe. Conflicts within the Hungarian Party between the Stalinist factions and reform communists like Nagy, and inconsistent policies within the Soviet Politburo, produced paralysis in Hungary and generated an atmosphere in which small events could lead to considerable popular dissent. Gati shows well that the nature of the Hungarian governments in the years leading up to the Revolt had a great deal to do with the internal politics of the Soviet Politburo. One factor, for example, in the weakening of Soviet support for the Hungarian reform communists was the successful coup against Lavrenti Beria, the ruthless former NKVD head who was the most intelligent and imaginative of Stalin's successor. Gati poins to the prior crisis in Poland, where an analogous crisis resulted in a Soviet-Polish compromise solution forestalling Soviet military intervention. There was, however, no Hungarian equivalent to the Polish leader Gomulka, who faced down the Soviets. Gati shows Nagy, a relatively humane and decent man but also one dedicated to the Communist cause and the leadership of Moscow, as unable to seize leadership in the early days of Revolt. When he did finally achieve primacy, events had resulted in unrealistic demands and expectations from the rank and file of the Revolt, producing a situation that the Soviets could probably not accept.

Gati has a similarly acute discussion of the debates and uncertainties among the Soviet leadership, which shows them as willing to accept certain changes in the Hungary, perhaps even more than they accepted in Poland, but fluctuating quite a bit and responding in not always clear or rational ways to events in Hungary. The analysis of Washington's behavior is very interesting. The Eisenhower administration's policy was talk loudly and carry no stick. Despite considerable rhetoric about "roll back" and liberating Eastern Europe, the cautious Eisenhower and his advisors had no intention of doing anything substantial. Gati comments that the Eisenhower administration's policy statements had less to do with the realities of Eastern Europe than the political dynamics of the Republican party and Eisenhower's need to outflank the right wing of the party. Washington, in truth, was remarkably poorly prepared for events in Hungary. Not only did the Revolt take Washington by surprise (as it did the Soviets and the Hungarian leadership) but Washington had virtually no intelligence reources in Hungary and no contingency plans for any response. Gati is particularly and appropriately critical of Washington's inability to produce any kind of diplomatic response that might have given the Soviets a way to avoid a military intervention. A reflection of Washington's rhetorical posturing was the aggressive broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, which apparently encouraged unrealistic expectations on the part of the Hungarians and tended to undermine Nagy's position.

Gati concludes with an interesting counterfactual. If Nagy had been a Gomulka and exercised some imaginative leadership at the beginning of the uprising, dampening the demands and expectations of Hungarians, he might have been able to obtain some concessions from the Soviet leadership and avoid a miltary intervention. This might also have been made possible by creative diplomacy by the Americans. A solution without Soviet military intervention might have produced both a more humane Hungary and also facilitated a more realistic and productive US-Soviet relationship. Gati admits that this is unlikely but presents a plausible scenario.

This book is well written and documented very well. Gati draws on a substantial body of both English language and Hungarian scholarship, including original archival research, some of it in Soviet archives. Gati also interviewed quite a few of the participants. When reading this book, I strongly recommend careful attention to Gati's footnotes, which sometimes contain as much interesting information at the body of the text.

This is a book that leaves a lasting impression. Gati, in Budapest at the time of the 1956 revolt, returns to the subject some fifty years later, offering a sophisticated multi-dimensional picture of the unfolding crisis, as seen as from Budapest (insurgents and the party), Moscow and Washington. His core argument, it appears, is that 1956 was a major missed opportunity for Hungary. If the insurgents were not so radical, or if Imre Nagy, the reformist Prime Minister was not so weak-willed, if the Americans (through the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe) did not push for the all-or-nothing democratic revolution, and if the Soviet leadership sided with the moderates (such as Anastas Mikoyan) and exercised greater patience, Hungary could have come out much better, perhaps with much greater independence frm Moscow. The Polish and even Yugoslav scenario for Hungary was thus within the realm of possibility but for unwise and short-sighted policies on all sides.

The argument is appealing, although one wonders, for example, whether Gati's very critical treatment of the US policy (he especially goes after the Hungarian Desk of the RFE staffed by anti-Communist emigres) is warranted. Repeatedly, he talks of US hypocricy and cynicism, Washington's betrayal of the Hungarian democratic cause, of unwillingness to act, etc. He argues that rather than encourage the Hungarians (many of whom thought that US help would be forthcoming), the Americans should have prodded the insurgents towards a compromise. It is not clear though that the lynching of Communists on October 30 could have been prevented by milder radio broadcasts (which were anyhow jammed in Hungary), or by having 10 CIA staff on the ground in Budapest instead of one. To the extent that Khrushchev's decision was heavily influenced by this one particular episode - the lynching of Communists - did it really matter what the US did or did not do?

Compared to the extensively researched Hungarian side of the story (here we could hardly hope for a greater depth of analysis), the Soviet side is somewhat under-researched. The key events are there: Gati recounts the decision-making in the Kremlin and the crucial change of heart on Khrushchev's part on October 31. But some known episodes are completely overlooked. Not a word, for instance, is said about the Chinese role in the Soviet decision-making, even though there was a delegation headed by Liu Shaoqi on the ground in Moscow at the time - he even participated in some of the Politburo discussions. A wealth of potential Soviet sources - for example, Soviet Foreign Ministry archives - were never made use of, even though Gati had done some research in Moscow (we learn that much from his story of being threatened with a gun by a Russian archivist - a bit dubious, actually).

On the Hungarian side, Gati seems to overstress the benefits of a Polish scenario for Hungary. He repeatedly says that Poland got elbow room as a result of 1956, and Hungary remained under the Soviet boots. I am not so sure that, in the end, Poland's elbow room was that much greater than in Kadar's Hungary. Actually, Romania, without ever rebelling against the Soviet rule, had much greater elbow room than Poland and Hungary combined. In other words, "wise" pursuit of moderate demands would not necessarily leave Hungary much better off. By contrast, a full-blown anti-Soviet rebellion that actually took, place undermined the legitimacy of Soviet Communism and dealt a blow to the international communist movement from which that movement was never to recover. Consider the impact of the Hungarian events on the Chinese decision to break away from Soviet tutelage. Wise or not, the events of 1956 dealt a fatal blow to the Soviets; on this point, Richard Nixon, dismissed by Gati several times as a cynical manipulator, was right on the money: Hungary was a major defeat for Khrushchev and, in the longer perspective, the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

This is the first book I've read on the Hungarian Revolt, but I found it well doicumented, insightful and disturbing. I've read alot of books on history and this was truly riveting. I, like so many Americans, am very ignorant of Eastern European History and felt truly enlightened by this analysis. I also felt it particularly relevant to what is happening today. Our country's inaction then and and our actions today show little understanding of the peoples or culture or politics of other societies. We in this country have a great heritage and enlighted leaders,such as Lincoln, who set up a government we can be proud of. However, today we are acting in a way that shows blindness and misguidedness.. We have shown again that we have not learned anything from events such as the Hungarian Revolt. Our leaders want to spread democracy but are doing it in a way that is both ignorant and arrogant. We did it then and are doing it now.
I'm glad a man such as Mr. Gati was able to immigrate to this country and contribute to it. I look forward to readin more books by him.