Category: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

MEMORANDUM: HUNGARY , A SCANDAL AND A HOPE OF THE WORLD1 Excerpts István Bibó The social and political thinker István Bibó (1911-1979) was a Minister of State in the last Imre Nagy government of 1956, delegated by the re-established Petőfi Party (in 1945 the National Peasant Party). While the closest circle of Imre Nagy, with their families, sought refuge at the

IMRE NAGY AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION1 Excerpt CHAPTER 9 REVOLUTION When Mikoyan deposed Rákosi on 17 July and sent him into exile in the Soviet Union, he was removing from the scene the strongest personality in Hungarian political life. Rákosi was hated, discredited. His judgement had failed, he was on the run. But there was no one else in the Party with anything like his experience of power and office.

INTERVIEW WITH ISTVÁN B . RÁCZ, 19571 Columbia University Research Project Hungary, 1957–59 István B. Rácz was born in Túrkeve, Hungary, in 1923. He was educated at the local Jewish school because his mother knew that he would get the best education there. He was Calvinist. He went to the University of Economics in Budapest.

MY REVOLUTION Recollections of the 1956 Revolution* Part II “IF THE RUSSIANS RETURN, WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT” János Martonyi “Student meeting! Tonight at 7.00 p.m. at the latest, we want to respond to the call of the Budapest university students. Let’s make a free, truly democratic, independent university life! Everybody should come!” Szeged, 16 October 19561 “JOIN

In the war the Gestapo laid hands on Mitzi’s possessions in Austria, and after the war the Communists laid hands on her possessions behind the Iron Curtain. Real estate, it turned out, could fly away. These were facts of life; totalitarian orders were doing what they had been set up

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

Hungary’s future will depend on its citizens, but who will those citizens be? What will be their mindset, who will teach them, how will they remember our past? Outside Hungary’s borders, about five million people live throughout the world, who are Hungarians or have a Hungarian ancestry. Hungarians, due to

Simon Hall, 1956. The World in Revolt, Faber & Faber, London, 2016 1956 was a year of change, tumult and rebellion all around the world. So many events were compressed into just twelve calendar months that looking back on 1956 it seems that it was a time of global revolt.

October/November 1956 occurred at the exact moment that I was entering both actual and political adolescence. Boys of my age — I became fourteen in April of that year — were fighting and ferrying the wounded in Budapest that Fall. It was a crash course in political maturity. I was

Strictly speaking, iconoclasm refers to the destruction wrought on images by believers who think that members of their own faith have strayed from some ur-prohibition, for example the injunction against “graven images” of the Ten Commandments, or Islam’s prohibition of depictions of Mahomet and other visual taboos spelled out in