The fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in October 2006 unfolded against the background of a political crisis in the country, sparked by revelations that the socialist Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, had lied to the public in order to win parliamentary elections during the spring. Many of the radical-right protestors who took to the streets in response appropriated the memory of the 1956 Revolution to advance their cause, using it as a rhetorical stick to beat Gyurcsány, the effective leader of the party that is the legal successor to the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party that ruled the country for just over thirty-three years following the defeat of the Revolution.

As the political polarization in evidence on the streets revealed the troubled and contested legacy of 1956, the Hungarian state celebrated an official view of the Revolution as sowing the seeds of Hungary’s successful transition from state socialism to liberal democracy in 1989 and 1990. The contrast of the celebratory tone of official commemoration with the bitter atmosphere generated by the political crisis created a surreal situation – a situation which ought to compel historians to examine again the history of the Revolution and state socialism more broadly. Despite the fact that the polarization of political opinion, and its connection to painful memories of Hungary’s recent past had been visible for several years prior to the events of 2006, no-one took the opportunity to present a systematic rethinking of the meaning of 1956 in the light of these events.

The book under review is an English translation of a book published in German in 2006 as part of the wave of commemoration, written by the Austrian political commentator of Hungarian origin, Paul Lendvai. Lendvai, as a young political journalist working for the Esti Hírlap newspaper, was himself an observer of the events of the Revolution, but later left for Austria as the post-revolutionary regime of János Kádár consolidated its hold on Hungary. The book shares many of the weaknesses of other publications that saw the light of day on the Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary. It takes as its starting point that as a consequence of Hungary’s change of system in 1989 it is possible to “present by and large reliable conclusions about the fifty-year old drama and its global consequences” in marked contrast to the situation prior to the end of the 1980s, when, the Revolution was “partly presented in a blatantly deceptive light” (p. 1). While this is substantially correct, Lendvai neglects to mention that unhindered scholarly research into the events of the Revolution became possible in the early 1990s, and that during the first half of that decade the public record of the events of the Revolution was corrected substantially, not only by empirical research but also by the actors in the revolutionary events being able to recount their experiences in public. Given that Lendvai’s book was written at least ten years after the myths of the socialist era about 1956 were overturned, it is difficult to see what new perspectives this book offers on the events of the Revolution.

Lendvai’s account lacks the subtlety of much recent research into the politics of the Hungarian Revolution in assessing the course of events and the processes that lay behind them. For all his attempts to unmask the lies of the socialist regime that ruled Hungary between 1956 and 1988, his account reproduces many of the arguments that informed Western accounts of Hungary’s early socialist decades during the Cold War. This lack of subtlety is especially marked in his attempt to argue that the Revolution simply represented a “War of Independence”, echoing the language of official commemoration in post-socialist Hungary. He does this by consistently overstating the extent of Soviet control over events in the country. This is not to deny that Hungarian sovereignty was anything other than seriously constrained by Moscow, and that the Soviet leadership was intent on ensuring that a loyal, one-party, Marxist-Leninist regime remained in power in Budapest. What he misses is that the dynamics of politics both prior and during the Revolution, as well as during the post-Revolutionary phase under János Kádár, were characterized by a complex interplay in which actors in Moscow were not always united, and were far from being the sole players in the drama. They were joined by those who jockeyed for position within the divided ruling party in Hungary, and Hungarian society itself, which lived through the Rákosi years, took to the streets in 1956, and eventually accepted Kádár’s rule following the Revolution.

This lack of subtlety also appears again in his discussion of the resistance that followed Soviet intervention throughout the autumn of 1956 and winter of 1957. Lendvai suggests that this resistance – concentrated in the workers’ councils – remained unified until the state “made strikes and ‘the incitement to strike’ punishable by death” in January 1957. In fact, workers’ resistance was uneven from late November 1956 onwards, and tended to be provoked, rather than crushed, by acts of repression. Weariness with the strike, the growing restrictions on the payment of strike-pay imposed by the state on enterprises, and economic collapse following the Revolution, was far more important in beating back resistance.

Perhaps because of his involvement as a participant, Lendvai has a tendency to make judgements which can at best be described as tendentious and at worst could be considered unscholarly. He describes Hungary’s Stalinist leader from 1948, Mátyás Rákosi, as “one of the most evil politicians in Hungarian history. Without doubt he was the ugliest” (p. 30). While some may wish to debate the issue of Rákosi’s physical attractiveness, it can hardly be considered relevant to a critical appreciation of his rule; furthermore, it seems to this reviewer to be difficult to see how a blanket condemnation of any politician as “evil” can be justified by evidence, or be seriously sustained as scholarly analysis. At other points in the book, Lendvai blurs the lines between scholarly analysis and opinion. In a discussion of the likely levels of support for non-communist political parties after the apparent triumph of the Revolution at the end of October, he states that “it is extremely likely that in the prevailing atmosphere the Social Democrats would have come out the winners in free elections” (p. 133). This statement is made in the face of the fact that there exists no reliable evidence of the likely levels of political support for new parties that had only been formed a matter of days previously, leaving any such judgements a matter of pure speculation.

Despite the shortcomings of his account of the Revolution itself, Lendvai’s discussion of the ways in which the memory of the Revolution was distorted and manipulated under János Kádár, and has been contested politically since 1989, are the strongest part of the book. He shows how 1956 has become implicated in a longer history of political polarization within Hungary during the twentieth century that has shaped the way it has formed part of political culture in the country. As the official commemoration progressed in conference and concert halls and in other public buildings during autumn 2006, it was this more contested legacy that played a role in events on the streets. This ought to point the attention of historians to the ways in which the events of 1956 were acted out in the context of longer-term polarization: those who argued within the party, took to the streets, or built the Kádár regime alongside the Red Army, had experienced the trauma of defeat, revolution, and counter-revolution in 1918–1919; the territorial contraction and its impact on interwar Hungary; World War II and the Holocaust; and the building of the socialist regime. The politically contested experience of these prior events clearly acted as a backdrop to the decisions of individuals and groups during 1956.

Hopefully, by the time of the Revolution’s sixtieth anniversary historians will have abandoned the Cold-War myth – that has survived in the culture of Hungary’s official post-socialist commemorations of 1956 – of the nation unified against the system. Should they do so, we will gain a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the course of events in Hungary in October and November 1956, that situates these events in the context of political division across the twentieth century.