Paperback / softback
December 1, 2002
9789639241664
English
664
9.57 Inches (US)
6.69 Inches (US)
2.29 Pounds (US)
$50.95 USD, £36.95 GBP
v2.1 Reference

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution

A History in Documents

Edited by Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne and János M. Rainer
Preface by Árpád Göncz, Foreword by Charles Gati, Contributions by Timothy Garton Ash

If there had been all-news television channels in 1956, viewers around the world would have been glued to their sets between October 23 and November 4. This book tells the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the minutes of the first meeting of Khrushchev with Hungarian bosses after Stalin's death in 1953 to Yeltsin's declaration made in 1992. Other documents include letters from Yuri Andropov, Soviet Ambassador in Budapest during and after the revolt. The great majority of the material appears in English for the first time, and almost all come from archives that were inaccessible until the 1990s.

About the Authors

Csaba Békés is Founding Director of the Cold War History Research Center, Budapest, Hungary. He is Professor of History, Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of International Studies. Malcolm Byrne is Director of Research at the National Security Archive where he coordinates a program involving Russian and East European scholars in documentary research, conference preparation and publications relating to the Cold War. János M. Rainer is Historian, Director of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (1999-2011), professor at Eszterházy Károly College, Eger. Árpád Göncz was a Hungarian writer, translator, and liberal politician, who served as President of Hungary from 1990 to 2000. Charles Gati is Senior Research Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His previous positions have included teaching Central and Eastern European as well as Russian politics and foreign policy at Union College and Columbia University. 

Reviews

"One cannot stop reading. It is a sad story of hopeless struggle, of reckless Soviet actions, of the passivity of the west, and of the death of thousands of Hungarians. Nevertheless, it is also the tale of a heroic struggle that fatally wounded the Soviet empire and undermined the communist regimes, leading to victory in the long run."—Slavic Review

"The Hungarian revolution began with mass demonstrations in Budapest in October that shocked the Russians and encouraged American officials hoping for a crack in the Soviet empire...Today, Hungary is in NATO and the Soviet Union is no more. But the experience faced by American officials, as they tried to balance two crises and watched events spin out of their control, is illuminated in "The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents," a new book of archival material published by the Central European University Press in cooperation with the National Security Archive in Washington."—New York Times

"This collection of documents on the 1956 Hungarian revolution-perhaps the last in Europe that can be called truly spontaneous-is well worth its hefty price. Two prominent scholars from the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest (Csaba Bekes and Janos Rainer) and one from the National Security Archive (Malcolm Byrne) have edited this third volume in the series of Cold War readers published by the Central European University Press.... The 1956 Hungarian revolution is an indispensable research tool for scholars and advanced graduate students."—International Affairs

"...scholars and general readers alike will find The 1956 Hungarian Revolution extremely handy in collecting these and many more documents under one cover ... an indispensable research tool."—H-Net Book Review

"With the use and inclusion of hitherto unknown material recovered from Russian archives, the book will be a gold mine for any future interpretive work... an unsurpassed, thoroughly up to date collection of documents that is likely to stimulate further research and interpretation by future generations of scholars."—Contemporary Austrian Studies

Endorsements

"There is no publication, in any language, that would even approach the thoroughness, reliability, and novelty of this monumental work. Unlike all the other documentary collections, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution is based mainly on recently opened original sources in the Hungarian, Soviet and US archives."
—István Deák
Central European University Press

9789639241664 : the-1956-hungarian-revolution-bekes-byrne-rainer
Paperback / softback
664 Pages
$50.95 USD

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