POST-1956 TRANSITION Just as the 1956 uprising demonstrated the emptiness of the Party’s pretentions to represent the working class, so too did those brief days of liberation, and the slight lessening of control that preceded them, expose the shallow depth of support within the Churches for their leaders’ collaboration. As
Thousands came day after day. Under a sprawling tent known as the canvas cathedral, they gathered to hear a captivating young Baptist preacher. It was his first major city crusade, supposed to last for three weeks. But, such was the demand, Billy Graham stayed in Los Angeles for two months
FAILURE The problem with the assertions and assurances issued by the hard-line Czechoslovak plotters and their sponsors was not just that they failed to materialise, but that they were contradicted clearly and publicly. The events from the late night of 20 August through to the 23rd, stripped all potential legitimacy
“Through Kádár, therefore, Brezhnev was still attempting to make Dubcek the Kádár of 1968; a dynamic and popular Party head implicated in “excessive” reforms but nevertheless co-opted as the face of a Soviet-imposed ‘domestic’ alternative. This had clearly also been Brezhnev’s hope in his astonishing phone call with Dubcek on
KÁDÁR’S DUAL PERSPECTIVE Amid the stern Soviet-sphere rejection of Czechoslovak arguments for, and defence of, the Prague Spring, there was an exception. And it came from the man and the Party which knew the most about what had actually happened in Hungary’s 1956. From March to June (and afterward), Hungarian
Part I* The Prague Spring is widely considered to have begun in the deep of winter, 5 January 1968, when the Central Committee of the Komunistická strana Československá (KSČ – Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) removed Antonín Novotný from the First Secretary post he had held on to for fifteen years
“This is Budapest”, began the live radio dispatch of legendary Dutch reporter Alfred van Sprang shortly before eight that morning. Just the tone of those opening three words, historian Hans Olink relates, stopped Dutch men, women and children in their tracks as they began their day of rest. They held
The new Kádár-led regime beginning with earl-mid November 1956 was faced with a pre-eminent political task connected with a defining historiographical one. The need for the new government to establish its legitimacy and authority was intricately tied to the interpretation of what they had replaced. Both tasks began as soon as the second and decisive Soviet intervention did. The Soviets, having since 1 November maintained the charade of negotiating withdrawal
For a day at least, Vienna was honouring, rather than merely profiting from, the source of its lustre, as the casket of Otto von Habsburg was borne from Stephansdom to the Kapuzinerkirche. Otto, who died at his Bavarian home on 4 July 2011, had been the last living link with
At noon on 31 October 1956, the streets of Ferencváros, like the rest of the Budapest, were free of fighting. The Red Army, who twelve years before had smashed its way into the city, was gone. It had been just a week earlier (24 October) that the Soviets had deployed their 92nd Armoured Division to the capital, from its base in Székesfehérvár 70 kilometres
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