Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Cold War International History Project)
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Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 943.9052
EAN: 9780804756068
ISBN: 0804756066
Label: Stanford University Press
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 280
Publication Date: 2006-08-22
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Release Date: 2006-08-22
Studio: Stanford University Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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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 brutality, Failed Illusions nevertheless modifies our picture of what happened. Imre Nagy, a reform communist who headed the revolutionary government and turned into a genuine patriot, could not rise to the occasion by steering a realistic course between his people's demands and Soviet geopolitical and ideological interests. The United States was all talk, no action, while Radio Free Europe simultaneously backed the insurgents' unrealizable demands and opposed Nagy. In the end, the Soviet Union followed its imperial impulse instead of seeking a political solution to the crisis in the spirit of de-Stalinization.
Failed Illusions is based on extensive archival research, including the CIA's operational files, and hundreds of interviews with participants in Budapest, Moscow, and Washington. Personal observations by the author, a young reporter in Budapest in 1956, bring the tragic story vividly to life.
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Summary: The Fate of All Illusions
Comment: - so Hungary's fate in '56 should come as no real surprise. Gati has done a good job in reassessing the course of a pivotal cold war event, and fleshed out the narrative through incorporating new documentation and memoirs. In this regard, however, there is really little that is new to add over an uprising scholars have steadily picked to the bone for half a century.
Gati's real contribution here is his Rashomon-like critique of the revolution and of its five main protagonists: Americans, Soviets, Hungarian Communists, insurgents - and Imre Nagy, caught between the latter three. The US illusion was its belief that, since it could not start World War Three over a Soviet satellite, inciting rhetoric was its only sufficient recourse rather than pragmatic realpolitik. The Soviet illusion, and that of its Hungarian allies, lay in Moscow's belief that the uncorked, anti-Stalinist genie could be stuffed back in the vodka bottle. Nagy's illusion - and that of the reformist intellectuals around him - was that he and Moscow spoke a common political language that could open serious dialogue. And the insurgents' illusion lay in their faith that, not only could they overturn the "Communist regime," but that Moscow would morally capitulate as the Free World rushed to aid Hungary's struggle.
Gati takes apart all these, but then concludes that the revolution's failure was not inevitable after all. One must ask why not, after he has spent so much time marshaling evidence of this rampant political blindness. As an American reader, the most interesting part to me was his analysis of American actions and motives. The tantalizing remark of Richard Nixon's, that it would be very convenient for the '56 presidential race if the Soviets pulled some brutality in Eastern Europe, coupled with RFE's inflammatory broadcasts soon after, suggest a cynical collusion that - given what we know about CIA black operations of the period - isn't as farfetched as some might wish to believe. The US, for its part, behaved as it did because - like the USSR - it was led by unimaginative men stuffed just as full of illusions of their own. (Witness their equally confused, floundering handling of the Cuban Revolution a mere two years later.)
The final illusion to fail, if one reads Gati correctly, is his: namely, his young man's belief that a democratic socialism with a human face could ever have arisen out of the Stalinist muck in which it was planted. Of course, this did eventually arise after 1985 - too late to save the system after three decades more of accumulating rot. Perhaps the chief criticism to be made of Gati's account is his expectation that those caught up in the passions of '56 could display the maturity and insight he's gained fifty years after the event. That is surely the chief failed illusion of all armchair historical analysis.
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Summary: Insightful and disturbing
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Excellent analysis of the Hungarian-Soviet-Western interaction
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Nothing new in Gati's "new history" of the Hungarian Revolution
Comment: Gati's treatment of the Hungarian Revolution and its actors gives the impression that he wrote a book with preconceived conclusions supported by selected documentation and by omission of those not fitting in his concept. Exploitation of the 50th anniversary of the seminal historic event is evident in the timing of publication. He treats Imre Nagy, the Freedom Fighters and America unfairly. He unrealistically expects the revolutionaries to be practitioners of real politic. His assumption of Soviet willingness to compromise, to meaningfully revise its relationship with its satellites seemed so hopefully evidential only in the flashlight of the revolution. It is surprising that Gati is still dazzled.
There is very little new in Gati's "new history" of the Hungarian Revolution that is significant. Robert Murphy in his autobiography: Diplomat among warriors explained the American inaction regarding the Hungarian Revolution in a few pages more concisely, with more insight than Gati does in his book. There is no surprise that Gati neglects to mention him and his views.
Murphy concludes his assessment of why the Hungarian Revolution was defeated, or in better words, why it was left to be defeated, with this remarkably humble statement:
"For sheer perfidy and relentless suppression of a courageous people longing for their liberty, Hungary will always remain a classic symbol. Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give the Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way."
This evaluation remains the most authoritative, most honest, factually correct and durable judgment of American - or for that matter the free World's - inability to
act at a time when action was warranted.
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Summary: A remarkable and exceptional book
Comment: 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 Hungarian citizen, came full circle when he witnessed Nagy's cermonial reburial in Budapest's Heroes Square late spring 1989, with the demise of the Communist system in Hungary and East Europe in sight just months away. This is a remarkable and exceptional book.
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