Two chapters contain many new details uncovered by recent research about the events in Washington, Moscow and Budapest that led up to the Revolution. The author provides a succinct, fifty-odd page history of the "thirteen days that shook the Kremlin" (to borrow the title of Tibor Méray's book), though it has to be said that this takes no account of events outside the capital. It is not new, but the general public may not be aware of the process that led Imre Nagy, who in the days immediately after 23 October was still "a prisoner... of his own Communist past" (p. 150) and who spoke of a counter-revolution (though he was opposed to the intervention of Soviet troops), to declare a week later, on 30 October, the restoration of multi-party democracy. His close supporters (and subsequent fellow martyrs) had a big part in this, and the thumbnail sketches of these figures that the book offers are one of its major strengths. Even more important is what Gati relates about the number of insurgents, their background and their thinking, based on the most recent publications (especially by László Eörsi and László Gyurkó). Their numbers (around fifteen thousand armed combatants) was not substantial; however, in effect they had the whole country behind them. Within a couple of days the state and party apparatus throughout the country collapsed without offering any resistance, so on that point I cannot agree with Gati's comments about people being found on both sides of the barricades. As regards public sentiment, there were no two sides. It was a tiny minority of party functionaries and the ÁVÓ security police, no more than a few thousand, at most tens of thousands, who-primarily on account of their past and the crimes that they had committed-were ranged against the whole country, the entire Hungarian nation (including those cut off by frontiers). It was the voice of the people that was relayed to parliament by their delegations, and their appeal was likely to have played at least as big a part in persuading Nagy to make his about face at the end of October as the arguments of his immediate associates, such as Miklós Gimes, József Szilágyi, Tamás Aczél, Ferenc Donáth, Géza Losonczy, Miklós Vásárhelyi and Szilárd Újhelyi. In a radio address on 28 October, Nagy identified himself with the aims of the "broad, democratic mass movement", proclaimed a ceasefire and announced that agreement had been reached with the Soviet government on a withdrawal of Soviet military units from Budapest. On 30 October he announced the end of the one-party system and the formation of a cabinet based on the coalition parties of 1945. It seemed that a miracle had occurred and that the Revolution in Hungary was victorious. Or so the whole country believed, including the writer of these lines, then a 15-year-old schoolboy who, after joining the protest march to the statue of General Bem that kicked off the uprising, turned up at all the main locations; who looked down the barrel of a Russian machine gun that was levelled at him; who stepped with a shudder over the limecovered corpses of dead Russian soldiers; but whose most indelible memory is of the sheer joy and happiness that could be seen on everybody's face after those announcements at the end of October. The joy was legitimate: two of the most prominent Soviet leaders, Mikoyan and Suslov, in negotiations with Nagy and Zoltán Tildy, the former Smallholder Party leader, had agreed to all of the sixteen points demanded by the revolutionaries on 23 October; in addition, a communiqué issued by the Soviet government on 30 October promised to place relations with "the other socialist states" on a completely new footing of equality and state sovereignty. The sensational statement also included an acknowledgement that the Soviet Union was prepared to discuss the matter of its military presence in Hungary.

It has been known for some time that one day later, on the night before 31 October, the Soviet leadership, with Khrushchev at the fore, changed its mind and decided to occupy Hungary and install a puppet government. That decision was unquestionably influenced by the Suez Crisis that blew up on 29 October as the armies of Great Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt, but the decisive factor must have been a fear that the collapse of the Communist regime in Hungary, quite apart from the enormous loss of face that it would entail, might set off a chain reaction of protests against the equally loathed Communist governments in other satellite states. The Hungarian government was informed by the following day that fresh Soviet units were crossing the country's frontiers. Nagy had no illusions: the disappearance of Kádár and Münnich, two less compromised prominent Communists, could only be taken as a bad omen. His declaration of Hungarian neutrality later that day and then, after the news of the military encirclement of Budapest and Soviet ambassador Andropov's lies, the announcement on 3 November of the country's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were two last desperate attempts to avert the threat of attack. The fact that Khrushchev received unanimous backing in a series of lightning visits that he paid on the Polish comrades at Brest, on the Romanians, Czechs and Bulgarians in Bucharest, and on Tito on the island of Brioni-indeed, he was urged by them to intervene militarily against Hungary-has also been known for some time. Gati cites as a final crucial factor the continued infighting for power within the Soviet leadership, and the opportunity offered to Khrushchev to counter any accusations of being too soft. He also suggests that if the insurgents in Budapest had not entertained "illusions about their courageous insurgency forcing the Soviet Union to retreat", if Hungary had not rejected the one-party system, and if Imre Nagy had been more in charge of the situation and been able to check outrages such as the siege of the Party headquarters in Republic (Köztársaság) Square and the ensuing lynchings; then perhaps the Soviet Union would not have started its aggression on 4 November and "the revolt might well have succeded" (p. 220). The author claims that there were other factors, too, in Moscow and Budapest that might have helped events to take another, more favourable course.
Painfully interesting though this hypothesis is, I am not the only one to consider it unhistorical. Gati is quite right that those who took up arms were not only young; they were also-as in all modern revolutions- mostly uneducated and unskilled workers (p. 157). It would indeed have been hard for any well-informed, educated person to believe what the brave young boys (and girls) of Budapest, with their primitive weapons, believed. Entirely worthy of admiration as they were, they did not have any realistic chance against the Soviet superpower. It is easy to understand how, under the influence of early successes against a Soviet army that viewed them as a counter-revolutionary rabble and was unprepared for guerrilla fighting in a city, the political demands of the insurgents became so radicalised that they no longer sought merely to ameliorate the system but to transform it. In this regard they concurred with the supporters of parties that had operated in Hungary's short-lived multiparty democracy (1945 and 1947) before they were banned and persecuted, and which had been resurrected in a matter of days. In many cases, these people had been released from prison or internment during Imre Nagy's first term as premier; they now exercised their newly won freedom to reject not only communism but socialism in all its varieties. Nobody, however, wished to see a return of the Horthy regime. If one wants to put a label on the goals of the masses, then social democracy and Christian democracy would be the two poles around which the mushrooming number of political parties defined themselves. The Revolution swept the Communist regime aside, and all Nagy did up until 30 October was to acknowledge and legitimise that fact. The idea that Nagy and the whole Revolution might have been able to limit itself, that there was no necessity for it to run to demands for multi-party democracy and complete independence from the Soviet Union is simply unrealistic. Even if he had been more forceful and resolute, Nagy would have been unable to contain public feeling. Even supposing that he had succeeded in putting on the brakes, it is highly unlikely that this would have mollified Moscow. After all, it was precisely the lessons of 1956 that stopped the Czechs in 1968 where, according to Gati, the Hungarians should have stopped in 1956: a programme of democratic socialism with a human face that did not defy Moscow-but to no avail.

When the Solidarity movement in Poland carried through a 'self-limiting revolution' in 1980-81 by battling only for the social demands of the workforce, leaving the political élite in place and not trying to break free from the geopolitical cage, a Soviet leadership that was a good deal more enlightened than it had been in 1956 was unwilling to allow even that. Given these subsequent examples, I would hazard a guess that insofar as Imre Nagy would have wanted a "Big Compromise" amounting to a milder form of communism, of the form advocated by Gomulka and, later on, by Khrushchev himself, that truly would have spared a few hundred lives. On the other hand, the one-party system and the ultimately ruinous economic policy would have been left intact, and it is far from certain that the Communist dominoes would have fallen as they did 33 years later.

For an alternative that was not realised in 1956 but stood a realistic chance, one has to look not to Budapest or Moscow but to Washington. In a volume that was published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, the distinguished British historian Hugh Seton-Watson, son of R.W. Seton-Watson (Scotus Viator), who was so critical of the Hungarians before and after the First World War, expressed his doubts:

Contributors to this book rightly emphasize that there was no contingency planning on the Western, especially American, side for revolution in an East Central European state and that the diplomatic representatives of the Western allies has virtually no contact with the Nagy government. We must ask ourselves the question: Could nothing have been done? I have spent many hours in the last twenty years discussing this with British and American diplomats, journalists and even a few politicians; and all have insisted that nothing could have been done. And yet I confess that I am not convinced. Of course, American military invasion of Hungary was not possible, still less a nuclear ultimatum to Moscow. Of course, formal diplomatic notes could achieve nothing. But was it really impossible for the United States government, using all the private and public channels of communication available to it and all the means of pressure at its disposal, to have convinced the Soviet government that the consequences of invasion would have been very much more unpleasant for it than the consequences of letting the Nagy government, which was in control of Hungary, stay in power until a settlement, acceptable to all parties concerned, including the Great Powers, could be worked out? The truth is that the United States government did not even try. Dulles revealed himself an empty demagogue. Nobody tried because everyone was obsessed with the presidential election and the Suez Canal.¹

Gati, too, claims that Hungarian illusions are not solely responsible for the failure of the Revolution. His analyses of Washington's policy makes for the most valuable part of his book, and I have to admit that his conclusions have led me to modify my own earlier understanding.² Like most contemporaries and later commentators, I too was of the opinion that the United States could not be accused of abandoning Hungary, because military intervention on its part could easily have led to a world war or a nuclear catastrophe. Where I found fault with the Western powers was over their failure, once the Hungarian revolt had broken out, to delay their long-planned invasion of Egypt, which completely overshadowed Hungary's plight. Above all, I found America's behaviour at the United Nations, which at the time enjoyed far greater prestige and power than it does today, hard to excuse.
Contrary to general belief (which the younger Bush appears to share), America and the Soviet Union did not divide Europe up at the Yalta conference in 1945. America would only have been able to halt the Sovietization of East-Central Europe that was completed in 1948 by using or at least threatening to use nuclear weapons, which the American public would never have accepted. But the Truman administration did guarantee Western Europe's security with its policy of containment and the creation of NATO. Even after Eisenhower's victory in the 1952 presidential election, the Republican Party, with its much tougher anti-Communist rhetoric and talk of "liberation", was unwilling to commit the United States to war against the Soviet Union and its allies. It failed even to envisage the possibility that a spontaneous revolt might break out in a Communist country. Gati's researches in the archives also support Bennet Kovrig's earlier claim³ that any talk of "liberation" was no more than empty propaganda sloganising, that the U.S. government had no concrete plans of that kind. The American intelligence services were as good as powerless against Hungary's totalitarian police state, which goes some way to explaining why the reforms that were brought in by Imre Nagy in 1953 were accorded no significance. Gati presents a balanced view of Radio Free Europe (RFE), set up in 1951, and the impact it had on Hungary, bearing out Gyula Borbándi's findings.⁴ RFE fulfilled the important function of providing trustworthy information both about the Soviet bloc and the free world, and it kept alive the hope that the "captive nations" would one day regain their independence. The station's Hungarian staff did not know, and thus listeners could not suspect, that the American government was not in the least ready to carry out the professed objective of overthrowing communism. "Inflated rhetoric" with "no underpinnings in policy" (p. 111) are the harsh epithets that Gati applies to the Eisenhower administration's policy in Eastern Europe; it is no justification, indeed it only makes things worse, that they themselves believed their anti-Communist rhetoric would produce the hoped-for and promised result.
Thanks to the US Freedom of Information Act, Gati had a chance to study official files that are still classified as confidential. These confirm that America, far from having done anything to prepare the way for the Hungarian Revolution, was in fact caught totally unprepared. Gati discerns three major defects in United States Hungarian policy in the Fifties. Firstly, while it flirted with support for an extension of Titoism to Central and Eastern Europe, this was found not to be politically attractive enough and so was discarded. The result of this was that RFE's Hungarian section, in accordance with instructions from the State Department and the CIA, continually voiced support for radical demands. Second, America failed to appreciate Imre Nagy's importance and, indeed, still set no store by him even after the turning point at the end of October. The gravest fault of all was the failure of American leaders, while the Revolution was in progress, to turn to the Kremlin with any meaningful proposal that was worthy of consideration. Eisenhower was worried that the Soviet Union would respond aggressively if it perceived that the tacitly accepted post-1947 division of Europe was under threat. After 23 October his main goal was to reassure the Soviet leadership that the United States was not going to endanger Soviet interests in Eastern Europe and was not seeking to overthrow the Communist regimes there. On October 27th, having first cleared it with the President, Secretary of State Dulles delivered an important speech in Dallas, Texas. He offered economic aid to the captive nations that followed independent policies, but he did not suggest that they needed to change their social system as a condition for such assistance: "The United States has no ulterior motive in desiring the independence of the satellite countries. We do not look upon these nations as potential military allies."⁵
Had the Soviet Union been well-intentioned and anxious for peace and cooperation, the speech might have provided a good argument for not intervening militarily; however, what Moscow's hardliners read into it was a carte blanche offer to go ahead, as they would not have to reckon with an American intervention. Meanwhile the RFE's Hungarian staff in Munich went on with their confrontational propaganda with the blessing of their superiors, unaware that there was no political backing behind it and that America never had the faintest idea how the promised liberation was to be achieved. Left to their own devices, guided by their own feelings, it is no wonder that the station's Hungarian editors enthusiastically welcomed what they thought was the downfall of communism at home in Hungary.