Category: History

‘Warsaw is lying at Your Majesty’s feet’, declared Field Marshal Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich to Tsar Nicholas I on 8 September 1831, after the Polish capital had opened its gates to him early at dawn the same day. Paskevich did not fail to call the Tsar’s attention to the fact that

András Tömpe and the Long War within Communism* A tall dignified man in his late fifties, whose English moustache only accentuated his military bearing, András Tömpe brought two guns to work one day at Vörösmarty Square. He wanted to be sure. The disciplinary verdict was due to be read at

Hungary and the UN, 1956–1963Excerpt II The surface-level events and those under the surface amounted to two entirely separate stories: one written for public consumption, the other the result of raw, sometimes brutal pragmatism behind the scenes. That for some this was hard to bear is confirmed by the story

The Story of István VasdényeyPart II ‘The train departed a second time.’1The title of István Lengyel’s conversation with the poet Erzsi Szenes, an inmate of the Kistarcsacamp. See: István Lengyel, ‘A vonat másodszor is kirobogott… Beszélgetés Szenes Erzsi költőnővel,a Hunsche-Krumey per tanújával’ (The Train Departed a Second Time … Conversation

Like all Hungarians of my generation, I grew up and lived during the Cold War in a country under Soviet domination. In our optimistic moments we believed that our offspring would live to see the end of that domination, and of communism. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Case of Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 In December 2021, two volumes entitled Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, Band X: Das kulturelle Leben. Akteure–Tendenzen–Ausprägungen were published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. This publication marks the end of a project on the history of Central Europe from the middle of the nineteenth

Fulbright, Arkansas, and the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the FulbrightProgram, 1946–2021Part III CENSURE, OMISSION, AND SILENCE The seventy-fifth anniversary commemorations also illustrated the extent to which the State Department has had problems addressing the paradoxical political biography of Senator Fulbright that became an object of contention at the University of Arkansas

A Family Story PREQUEL: INTRODUCTION TO COMMUNISM One of my earliest recollections is of when I was around four years old—in the middle of the night, being carried in the pouring rain to a truck waiting in front of our house, on a street ironically named ‘Amerikai út’, which is

Hungary and the UN, 1956–1963Excerpt Hungary’s membership of the United Nations in December 1955 and the tangible change this brought to the country’s room for manoeuvre in foreign policy must have contributed to Hungary’s hopes and ever increasing political ferment in the summer of 1956. Henceforth it was not only

The Story of István VasdényeyPart I ‘All the outrages that must have been committed,and all the holy deeds that were done.’János Pilinszky ‘It was here that the outlines of our century were sketched […]. Like the props of the passion drama, almost all the tools of our civilization were immersed