Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt

by Charles Gati

Book Overview

Winner of the 2007 Marshall Shulman Prize

The 1956 Hungarian revolution, and its suppression by the U.S.S.R., was a key event in the cold war, demonstrating deep dissatisfaction with both the communist system and old-fashioned Soviet imperialism. But now, fifty years later, the simplicity of this David and Goliath story should be revisited, according to Charles Gati's new history of the revolt.

Denying neither Hungarian heroism nor Soviet...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804756066
• ISBN13: 9780804756068
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Insightful and disturbing

This is the first book I've read on the Hungarian Revolt, but I found it well doicumented, insightful and disturbing. I've read alot of books on history and this was truly riveting. I, like so many Americans, am very ignorant of Eastern European History and felt truly enlightened by this analysis. I also felt it particularly relevant to what is happening today. Our country's inaction then and and our actions today show little understanding of the peoples or culture or politics of other societies. We in this country have a great heritage and enlighted leaders,such as Lincoln, who set up a government we can be proud of. However, today we are acting in a way that shows blindness and misguidedness.. We have shown again that we have not learned anything from events such as the Hungarian Revolt. Our leaders want to spread democracy but are doing it in a way that is both ignorant and arrogant. We did it then and are doing it now. I'm glad a man such as Mr. Gati was able to immigrate to this country and contribute to it. I look forward to readin more books by him.

Excellent analysis of the Hungarian-Soviet-Western interaction

Gati's book is written with the perspective of the forces at work in Budapest, Moscow and Washington before and during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He briefly recounts his own experience as a young Hungarian journalist during the 12 days of the Revolution, and then proceeds to profile in detail the events and personalities of that time. He manages to capture the spontaneity of the event, and how leaders in the three capitals misinterpreted and finally acted (or failed to act), often with limited understanding. The book is well-researched (almost every page has footnotes), and despite criticism by an earlier commenter, is quite in line with more recent interpretations of the 1956 events, using recently released Soviet, American and Hungarian archives, which were not available to earlier authors. As it has been mentioned by another reviewer, it is a human story, not an encyclopedic one, and I found it engrossing.

A remarkable and exceptional book

When I read Charles Gati's prize winning "Hungary and the Soviet Bloc," I then thought that he had written the last and best word on our understanding of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 during the Cold War. Then, unexpectedly, several years later the Berlin Wall came down, Hungary and the USSR's East European satellites regained independence, and heretofore closed Cold War archives began to open. From archives in Budapest and Moscow as well as from dozens of interviews with participants of '56 both East and West, Professor Gati has written a classic of Cold War history and analysis which arguably will become the definitive account of the multi-sided, tragic events of 1956 in Hungary. No stone has been left unturned -- the author has read the minutes of the Politburo meetings in the Soviet Union and Hungary, as well as the interrogation and trial transcripts from the last days before his execution of Imre Nagy, former Prime Minister of Hungary. This fluently written, masterfully organized, and exeptionally well integrated small volume deserves to sit on the Cold War history shelf along with Allison's "Essence of Decision," the study of another major event of the era, the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his overarching Introduction, Gati includes a brief but fascinating autobiographical recounting of his own experiences in Budapest as a young reporter during the tumultuous years after his high school graduation in 1953 to his flight with tens of thousands of Hungarians across the Austrian border after Soviet troops crushed the revolution in late 1956. The author's thesis is the existence of the possibility of an alternative "limitationist" approach to demands, expectations, methods, and outcomes by all parties to the challenges of Hungary '56. Instead, however, as is vividly recounted in the book, the Hungarian leadership, the Budapest insurgents, Moscow, and Washington displayed variably, vacillating responses, revolutionary romanticism, imperial intransigence, and absolutist anti-communism, all of which produced disaster and great bloodshed for Budapest and its population 50 years ago this early November. As the author makes clear, it need not necessarily have ended in a zero-sum tragedy, but with some restraint on all sides might well have become a non-zero-sum outcome. All parties to the failed revolution come in for well deserved criticism -- Nagy for his ineffectiveness as a leader (his portrait from the 1930s to his death in 1958 is the most complete and nuanced account of a foreign leader I have ever read), the young Hungarian insurgents for their unbridled demands and intemperate actions, Washington for the hypocrisy of its East European policies of "liberation" and "rollback," and most of all the Soviet Union for the extraordinary brutality and violence it rained down upon the people of Budapest. In his splendid Epilogue, Charles Gati's well told story of the "failed illusions" of a half century ago, as well as his own life as a former Hung

A HumanJourney

Take the experts' word that this study is a reliable, extensive, and insightful account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. What strikes me is the personal element. We go from the recollections of a young, unsophisticated journalist of 22, caught in the tide of momentous events he does not understand, to the retrospection of a highly sophisticated scholar revisiting those events and doing his very best to look behind history's curtain to resolve their meaning. It is a gripping, honest, and personal account, rendered with the binocularity of five decades of study. A century from now, this will still be the book to read, not just for the facts but also for the feel of one of the 20th century's signal struggles.

First rate history

Gati's definitive account of the Hungarian revolution and the American role in it reads like a LeCarre novel with documentation.