Hungary: Russia's Pyrrhic Victory

Abstract

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is documented in two books published in the spring and summer of last year. The first is a comprehensive collection of speeches, documents, radio reports, and newspaper articles arranged chronologically to trace the uprising from its first stirrings in the Petofi Circle and the Literary Gazette to its prolonged and anguished death under the Kadar repression. Its method is impressionistic, designed to convey the hope, determination, uncertainty, and desperation of the participants in two weeks of national revolution, and to “observe a revolution and a war with a thousand eyes” (p. 7). It succeeds in transmitting the mood of the revolution by careful editing of the selections, many of them eloquent and impassioned; and it develops a much more complete picture of the revolt than most North Americans could imagine from newspaper and radio reports during the uprising. It leaves many questions unanswered, and some unasked; the editor, Melvin J. Lasky, presents die collection with its ambiguities unresolved. He does not attempt to draw his own conclusions from the incomplete evidence that he has collected. The book does, as the editor hopes, tell the story of the tragedy with directness and sympathy. It implies more than it says.