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    One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy
    One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy
    One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy
    Ebook279 pages6 hours

    One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy

    By Paul Lendvai and Ann Major

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    On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe.


    Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise.



    One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 16, 2010
    ISBN9781400837649
    One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy
    Author

    Paul Lendvai

    Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian-born Austrian journalist and author, was the Vienna correspondent for the Financial Times for over twenty years. His most recent books, both published by Hurst, are The Hungarians (second edition); and Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman, which won the Prix du Livre Européen.

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    • 4/5
      Paul Lendvai is a personal witness of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 who offers both the Hungarian insider's and the Financial Times Foreign Correspondent's outsider's perspective. His smooth narrative offers an excellent account of the events and the actors, only marred by his constant name-dropping of supposedly eminent Hungarians. A dramatis personae would also have been helpful, although a thorough index partly remedies this. The unplanned character of the revolution doomed its outcome. Only the control of the Hungarian army might have stopped the Soviets. Once the Soviets decided on a violent resolution, the insurgents did not stand a chance. Lendvai's account of Kadar's quick ruthless retribution which was followed by a general liberalization (an approach recommended by Machiavelli) explains the paradox that in a 2002 survey, the traitor Janos Kadar ranked 4th just behind his victim Imre Nagy in the ranking of favorite historical figures. In the first two places one finds two heroes of the 1848 revolution that was also crushed by the Russians. The Hungarians are truly unlucky in war and politics. Just like their Austrian brethren their true skills lie in food and music.

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