The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
A History in Documents
Edited by Csaba Békés, Senior Researcher and
János Rainer, Director, both at the Institute
for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Budapest
Malcolm Byrne, Research Director of the National
Security Archive in Washington D.C.
With a foreword by Charles Gati and an Introductory
Essay by Timothy Garton Ash
"The
Hungarian revolution began with mass demonstrations
in Budapest in October that shocked the Russians and
encouraged American officials hoping for a crack in
the Soviet empire...Today, Hungary is in NATO and the
Soviet Union is no more. But the experience faced by
American officials, as they tried to balance two crises
and watched events spin
out of their control, is illuminated in "The 1956
Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents,"
a new book of archival material published by the Central
European University Press in cooperation with the National
Security Archive in Washington."
--The New York Times
"One cannot stop reading. It is a sad story of
hopeless struggle, of reckless Soviet actions, of the
passivity of the west, and of the death of thousands
of Hungarians. Nevertheless, it is also the tale of
a heroic struggle that fatally wounded the Soviet empire
and undermined the communist regimes, leading to victory
in the long run." - Slavic Review
"With the use and inclusion of hitherto unknown
material recovered from Russian archives, the book will
be a gold mine for any future interpretive work... an
unsurpassed, thoroughly up to date collection of documents
that is likely to stimulate further research and interpretation
by future generations of scholars." - Contemporary
Austrian Studies
"...scholars and general readers alike will find
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution extremely handy in collecting
these and many more documents under one cover ... an
indispensable research tool." - H-Net Book Review
If there had been all-news television channels in 1956,
viewers around the world would have been glued to their
sets between October 23 and November 4. This book tells
the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original
documents, ranging from the minutes of the first meeting
of Khrushchev with Hungarian bosses after Stalin's death
in 1953 to Yeltsin's declaration made in 1992. Other
documents include letters from Yuri Andropov, Soviet
Ambassador in Budapest during and after the revolt.
The great majority of the material appears in English
for the first time, and almost all come from archives
that were inaccessible until the 1990s.
"There is no publication, in any language, that would
even approach the thoroughness, reliability, and novelty
of this monumental work. Unlike all the other documentary
collections, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution is based
mainly on recently opened original sources in the Hungarian,
Soviet and US archives."
- István Deák, Columbia University
2002
600 pages
ISBN 978-963-9241-48-0 cloth $67.95 / €57.95 / £43.95
ISBN 978-963-9241-66-4 paperback $35.00 / €25.95 / £18.95
This is the third volume in the series National Security
Archive Cold War Readers, editor: Malcolm Byrne ISSN
1587-2416
|
