makes no sense without reference to Wyspianski's play The Wedding, and, finally, the student march in Budapest on October 23, 1956, that led to the uprising had quite different aims than just "commemorating the
Hungarian revolt of 1848" against the Austrians, who at the time ruled but had not "occupied" Hungary.
The Arab world is like the old Soviet empire: the
Hungarian revolt in the mid-1950s, the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the 1980 Solidarity movement in Poland, and the Russian dissidents throughout those decades ultimately peaked and broke through in 1989-1990 to engineer the collapse of Soviet authoritarianism.
At that time, "Mr K", as he was known to the world press, was perhaps the most famous man in the world, following his denunciation of Josef Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and his ruthless crushing of the
Hungarian revolt against communism.
Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956
Hungarian Revolt. Cold War International History Project.
Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956
Hungarian Revolt, by Charles Gati.
Each retained or sought to retain the one-party system and, with the exception of Gorbachev, was determined to preserve the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe--hence the brutal suppression of the
Hungarian revolt and the shutting down of the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring.
Both before and after the
Hungarian revolt, the pattern of American duplicity was there for all to see.
Failed illusions; Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956
Hungarian revolt.
Documentarian Miklos Gimes grew up wondering about his father, a heroic martyr of the
Hungarian revolt, but discovers that the greater mystery is his mother.
Grace; 1921: Death of John Boyd Dunlop, inventor of the pneumatic rubber tyre; 1946: United Nations General Assembly met for the first time in New York; 1954: Britain, US, France and the USSR agreed to end the occupation of Germany; 1956: The
Hungarian revolt against Soviet oppression began; 1966: George Blake, serving a 42-year sentence for espionage, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison; 1972: Access credit cards were introduced in Britain; 1987: Lester Piggott jailed three years for tax evasion.
After Kronstadt, there were the Purge Trials in the 1930s, the Khrushchev report and the
Hungarian revolt in the 1950s, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the Gulag in the 1970s, and martial law in Poland in 1982.
His other novels include The Fires of Spring (1949), about a boy growing up in Pennsylvania; The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), about the Korean conflict; Sayonara (1954), about Japanese-American relations in Japan; The Bridge at Andau (1957), about the 1956
Hungarian revolt; Caravans (1963), set in Afghanistan; The Drifters (1971), about young people wandering around the world; and Space (1982), about astronauts.