Revolutions generate their own mythologies, iconologies and pieties. Every schoolboy has heard of the 'storming' of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg on the night of November 7th (old style: 26th October) 1917, or the 'storming' of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789. But not every schoolboy knows that the insurgents practically walked into the Winter Palace, which was guarded by cadets, a women's battalion and a few cossacks; nor that the main preoccupation of the mob, once inside, was to consume as much of the Tsar's favourite French vintage as possible before the supply ran out. Perhaps slightly more schoolboys know that the Bastille, guarded by veterans unfit for active service who were backed up by thirtytwo Swiss grenadiers, boasted just seven inmates on the day it was stormed-four forgers, two lunatics and one 'deviant' aristocrat (it would have been two, but the Marquis de Sade had just moved out to the lunatic asylum at Charenton). It is the propagandists (in the Russian case the ideologically committed artists and filmmakers) who have turned inglorious or sordid events (the Paris mob went on to engage in an orgy of looting and lynching) into heroic symbolic moments. At the Winter Palace or the Bastille, so we are encouraged to believe, the apocalypse occurred, the old regime collapsed, the new era was born.
One remarkable aspect of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary is that it lacks a Bastille or Winter Palace image, not least because the cathartic deliverance that such an image would have symbolised was delayed for thirty-three years. During that time the levers of propaganda were firmly in the hands of those who were anxious to portray the participants as no more than a mob. No effort was spared in traducing the forradalom (revolution) by representing it as the ellenforradalom (counter-revolution), which in Hungarian political rhetoric reeked of a return to reactionary government and Horthyism. Paradoxically therefore, the failure of the Revolution, and the concomitant failure to establish an iconology of its success, has meant that truly heroic scenarios have retained their integrity as historical events to a

remarkable degree, while the least edifying incident (the massacre of Köztársaság tér) has never been airbrushed out of the narrative. Indeed, in two of the books under review, the latter incident has been confronted with an almost painful honesty. Establishing truths, even uncomfortable ones, belongs to the honour of the Revolution as an episode of national self-realisation, all the more so because of the unrelenting efforts of an illegitimate regime to dishonour that episode. The relative 'success' of that regime's efforts over three decades puts one in mind of Sir John Harington's cynical epigram: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." Harington's cruel paradox helps to explain the vital significance attached to terminology such as 'revolution' and 'counter-revolution', a debate which might otherwise seem a little abstract to outsiders. 1956 was, by common consent, a national uprising, which is why party boss Ernő Gerő, most of whose career had been dedicated to subordinating his country to the interests of a foreign power, while cloaking his treachery in a supra-national ideology, hastened to characterise the initial mass march to Bem tér as a 'nationalistic protest' (italics mine).¹ It is an unfortunate element in Hungary's polarised political rhetoric that the distinction between patriotism and nationalism is often deliberately blurred, on the right to lend respectability to nationalism or worse, on the left to tar the patriotism of political opponents with the brush of nationalism and chauvinism. The word 'counter-revolutionary', with its baggage from previous regimes of reaction and fascism, was an opportune verbal weapon for the regime to distract attention from the national solidarity of Hungarians at this desperate moment in their history. It should not be forgotten that Imre Nagy, to whom the mendacious slogans of party propaganda were still second nature, continued to refer to the uprising as 'counterrevolutionary' up to the 28th of October, when the panic-stricken Central Committee decided it would be politic to rechristen it the 'national democratic movement.'²

Dent has grouped his scenarios topographically round the city, covering each place where something significant happened. His method may be exemplified by examination of his account of two crucial (though not in fact pivotal) clashes, the heroic defence of the Corvin Passage (Corvin köz), which is near the junction of Üllôi út and the Great Boulevard, and the 'massacre' on Köztársaság tér (Republic Square), which is to the south of Rákóczi út and best known to tourists from the Erkel Opera House at its north-west corner. In the hermeneutics of the revolutionary narrative, these two names are associated respectively with its most glorious and its most ignoble moments. In the one case we have the story of resourceful and courageous revolutionaries pinning down much larger forces by skilful use of the terrain; in the other we have revenge killing, a mob lynching. No clearer example than these could be given of the struggle for possession of historical legitimacy, or its forfeiture, as traditionally conveyed through the claims or denial of 'victim status.' The fighting at the Corvin köz was a David and Goliath affair, retrospectively tapping into one of the most deeply resonant and powerful motifs of human consciousness, the nobility and cunning of the underdog. The Köztársaság tér massacre, on the other hand, is a propaganda gift to the opposition, and is deplored by an otherwise approbative liberal consensus as besmirching the underdog's credentials. Bob Dent includes both locations, both as cicerone and in his written guide to the 1956 locations of drama. But will such an ambivalent toponym as "Köztársaság tér" ultimately form part of what the Assmanns have dubbed the nation's 'cultural memory'?
The Corvin Cinema area was surrounded by tall buildings overlooking the Üllôi út/Great Boulevard junction, while the interior passageway (köz) itself could only be accessed by narrow alleyways, the whole complex making a perfect defensive and subversive position. So ideal was it, as Bob Dent points out, that the Kádár regime, in its propagandist White Books, claimed that this proved the ('counter'-) revolution was well planned and organised by professionals. In fact the defence began spontaneously with some 40-50 people, which grew to 800 as new recruits arrived, finally 1,000 to 1,200. In a fascinating passage Dent dissects the social compositon of the extremely youthful defenders of the Corvin köz (now memorialised in situ by the statue of a boy holding a rifle). The White Books mendaciously branded them as 'fascists and criminals', but there were all sorts present, ranging from disillusioned Communists and soldiers, or people convicted of non-crimes under Stalinism, to some from the extreme right and several teenagers. In other words the group was not significantly different from those active at other revolutionary incidents. Significantly, in view of the oft-repeated mantra that the 1956 Revolution was not about dismantling Socialism,⁵ Dent, Lendvai and others have revealed an ideological split between the leaders of the Corvinists. László Iván Kovács, who seems to have been ousted in a coup on 1st November, was a leftist, while his replacement, Gergely Pongrátz was on the right, described by one witness as strongly anti-Communist and anti-socialist (my italics).⁶ This was a cue for the White Books to claim that Pongrátz "openly boasted of his fascist past", which would have been rather an empty boast, as he was 12 years old and living in Transylvania when the Arrow Cross rose to power.
Dent's treatment of Köztársaság tér as a "location of drama" displays a similar attention to detail and is based on differing perspectives offered by Ervin Hollós with co-author Vera Lajtai (1976), Miklós Horváth (1994) and László Gyurkó (1996), whereby the Hollós/Lajtai account represents the "point of view of the defenders of the building", as Dent chastely puts it. The massacre that took place had a complex progression, in which misunderstandings played a significant role. One of the most farcical was the firing on the Party Headquarters by the tanks sent to relieve it, evidently in error rather than in support of the insurgents. Non-combatants attending to the wounded in the square also came under fire from the defenders.⁷ When the shooting stopped, two army colonels and the Budapest Party Secretary emerged from the building bearing white flags, but were shot at, after which the two officers were lynched. Some of the insurgents entered the building and committed further atrocities, while others tried to prevent further lynchings. In Lendvai's equally detailed account, we are given the actual balance of the casualties (20 insurgents killed, 25 defenders lynched). Although (again according to Lendvai) common criminals were mostly responsible for the lynchings, it is also true that a belief that the building was a main centre of ÁVH detention, interrogation and torture, which it wasn't, fuelled the fury of the crowd. Sir Francis Bacon famously described revenge as "a kind of wild justice", but lynching is simply the wildness without the justice, since innocent people are included among the victims. On the other hand, exactly where do you draw the line between 'innocent' and 'culpable', when virtually all ÁVH recruits and workers at the Party Headquarters could be seen as cogs in a vast machine of cruelty, terror and oppression?

All commentators have expressed their disgust at the sadism and brutality that burst out on Köztársaság tér-obviously nobody wants to be seen to be gloating over dismemberment and torture. It is a merit both of Lendvai's vivid and wellwritten narrative⁸ and Bob Dent's collage technique that we are edged a little beyond ritualistic condemnation and made to think about the wider context of what happened. In The Voice of Freedom: Remembering the 1956 Revolution, a splendid collection of oral reminiscences edited by Katalin Bogyay, István Molnár (a witness) makes the following observation on the massacre:

It was very sad that it happened that way, the massacre and the hangings, but you have to put it into the context of what was happening to the people. For example, one of my mates had his fingernails pulled out while being made to confess, or I don't know why.⁹

Lendvai adds a cold statistical perspective: the number of recorded lynchings up to the reimposition of Communist control in November was 37,

mostly suspected ÁVH members. By way of contrast, Bob Dent relates that one of the ÁVH lieutenants in command of the Party Headquarters was saved by a group of the besiegers, who gave him a change of clothes so that he could escape in a lorry posing as a kitchen worker. In the light of the foregoing years of torture, judicial murder and persecution, not to mention the massacres of unarmed protesters during the Revolution itself (over 100 in Mosonmagyaróvár alone),¹⁰ the general absence of gratuitous brutality is as eloquent as its very rare occurrence. Also significant, as Lendvai underlines, was the virtual absence of anti-Semitic outbursts, notwithstanding the substantial representation of Hungarian Jews in the machinery of oppression, though he adds that the time was short and "nobody could exclude the possibility of a later wave [of anti-Semitic incidents.]"¹¹ It is a feature of the competing narratives of victim status that the dead and mutilated can be exploited cynically by propagandists who themselves have not the slightest scruples about committing, or ordering, or supporting the most savage crimes against humanity. As Lendvai puts it:

Although the acts of revenge [on Köztársaság tér] were immediately and sharply condemned by revolutionary leaders, the free press, the Writers' Association and a whole range of democratic and revolutionary organisations, from Moscow to Paris to Peking the grim pictures of the victims of lynch law were exploited by Communist organs of propaganda to smear the revolution as 'counter-revolutionary terror', and 'a witchhunt against Communists'¹²

and this from a movement whose primary modus operandi was the witchhunt against supposedly deviant Communists and non- Communists! Such propaganda was not entirely ineffective and occasionally one even gets the impression that it has leaked into the liberal consensus narrative of 1956.¹³ This seems to be the case when the thesis is advanced that the massacre of Köztársaság tér was the event that tipped the Russian leadership, those sensitive souls, in favour of reintervention. Reviewing former ambassador Peter Unwin's book in these pages, George Gömöri has castigated this view as a "gross exaggeration". Be that as it may, such a theory has a subliminal attraction for the 'realists' of foreign policy debate, in that it shifts ultimate responsibility back onto Hungarian shoulders. ("Look, the Russians had no choice if people were being hung from lampposts!")
Nevertheless almost all commentators regard the events of Köztársaság tér as a blot on the revolutionary escutcheon that cannot and should not be explained away. In Bob Dent's eight-page Appendix on "Köztársaság tér Revisited ", he examines at some length the selective amnesia and plain distortions of those who could not come to terms with the fact that 'their side' had committed atrocities. That is always one of the most difficult psychological challenges when one's own nation is involved in what is otherwise perceived as a 'just war' (and even more so if the war is widely perceived as 'unjust'). In reality, the overwhelming perception of the Hungarian Revolution in the free world honoured it as "one of the least bloody of all time".¹⁴
Not only that, the Hungarian people were perceived as unequivocally having possession of the 'victim narrative', something reinforced by their clear, simple and ideologically uncontaminated demands: internal freedom, no Russian occupation, independent judicial procedures and the rule of law. Professor László Péter, interviewed by Katalin Bogyay, makes another important psychological point: after years of political disasters and pariah or semi-pariah status, Hungary regained its national selfconfidence in 1956: "Hungarians came out of the War as a desperately pessimistic, downtrodden people. We didn't really have any self-confidence, as officially the country was labelled 'Hitler's last ally'. Suppressed again and confined to the Trianon borders, Hungarians lost self-confidence. That selfconfidence was rebuilt through that marvellous failure, which was really the work of young, working class boys who were shooting at Széna tér and at Corvin köz."
Here I think we see the glimmerings of something that seems to me to be largely lacking in the literature of 1956, namely an interpretive narrative that is not wholly wedded to the liberal consensus, but more conservative in nature. The claim that 1956 was all about 'reforming', or even 'rescuing', socialism rests on two admittedly powerful pieces of evidence. Firstly there was the magnificent performance of the Csepel workers with their spontaneous democracy of workers' councils and their long and heroic resistance to the new dispensation, far longer indeed than that of the students and intellectuals. Bob Dent's coverage of this is particularly powerful and moving. Secondly there is the famous declaration of the General Secretary of the Smallholders' Party, Béla Kovács, underlining that Nagy's reform government, of which he was now a part, rejected a return to Horthyism: "No one should dream of the old order. The world of counts, bankers and capitalists is buried forever. Anyone who today thinks in the same way as in 1939 or 1945 is no true smallholder."¹⁵ This attitude is understandable from the leader of a party whose supporters had been radicalised by the quasifeudal conditions of Hungarian agriculture prevailing right into the 20th century, and who owed their initial liberation to a popular land reform instituted by the Communist Imre Nagy-only to land in an even worse situation subsequently through forced collectivisation and compulsory deliveries. But the Smallholders had achieved 57 per cent of the vote in the first fully free elections after the Second World War, and a fair proportion of their supporters must have been bourgeois urban conservatives.¹⁶ What had happened to this huge electoral pool in the meantime? Furthermore the potential conservative vote had many components (Democratic People's Party, Christian Democrats and so forth), well analysed by Lendvai in his book.¹⁷ In a multiparty system with a secret ballot (not yet promised at the time Kovács made his remarks), it seems more likely that Hungary would have jettisoned almost all leftist ideologies, save a form of social democracy which in practice accepted-even welcomed-the wicked bankers and capitalists, provided they operated within a legal framework that disallowed the abuses of the past.

This is after all what happened in Austria, a country that also had an authoritarian clerico-fascist state between the wars and then suffered military occupation until 1955, the most unwelcome part of the latter again being the Russian presence with its attendant asset stripping. Although the situation in the two countries was not identical (Hungary lacked Austria's substantial tradition of moderate Social Democratic government at the local level), the first free elections in Austria after the war (albeit still under four-power occupation) produced a result that surprised everyone, except perhaps the voters: the conservative non-Nazi right (hastily relaunched and rebranded as the People's Party) got just under 50 per cent of the vote, the Socialists a little over 44 per cent and the Communists (to the utter incredulity of their Russian paymasters) precisely 5.41 per cent. It is interesting that this result for the Austrian KPÖ is precisely the one for the new-look Hungarian Communists, were free elections to be held, that was prophesied by the shrewd and cynical Georg Lukács during frantic October discussions about the rebranding of the party as the "Hungarian Socialist Workers" Party'.¹⁸ Hungarian intellectuals however dreamed of a 'third way' between capitalism and Communism. Lendvai quotes the view of the distinguished writer László Németh that the Revolution had been fought for a "multi-party system based on common principles, which would succeed in combining the ideological strength of socialism with the flexibility of the parliamentary system".¹⁹ István Bibó, who had written so insightfully about Hungary's political culture and the disintegration of Central Europe, evidently believed something similar. At the end of his essay on the crisis of Hungarian democracy, written in 1945, he had spoken of the possibility of Hungary serving "as a practical example for the beleaguered democratic forces throughout the rest of the Continent by becoming the synthesis of Anglo-Saxon and Soviet-style democratic practices."²⁰
The almost tragic naiveté of this idea, coupled as it is in the body of the essay with an extraordinarily penetrating analysis of the Communist mentality and tactics as they actually were, throws into sharp relief the yearning of Hungarian intellectuals for a middle way between Communism ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"-Bibó) and the uneasy mix between neo-feudalism and capitalism of the Horthy era ("the return of a reactionary regime"-Bibó).²¹ In his retrospective essay on The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó writes of "the prejudice [sic] shared by orthodox capitalists and orthodox Communists, according to which socialism or [a] society free of exploitation, can be successfully realised only by discarding the Western techniques of freedom for a lengthy period of time". And later he asserts that

after [my italics] the defeat of the Revolution a broad and quite definite public consensus emerged without any difficulty regarding the methods for maintaining a socialist society combined with the Western techniques of freedom, through a multi-party system limited to parties which accept socialism as a common platform.²²

A politically conservative narrative of the Revolution would, I think, challenge these assertions. One objection might be that, had the Revolution been successful, such an analysis would increasingly sound like that of the majority of unsuccessful generals in history, whose problem is that they are still fighting the previous war. A further objection is that the idea of "socialism as a common platform" is meaningless without defining what socialism would mean in practice. And last but not least, the "quite definite public consensus" (the perceived existence of which doubtless underlies the oft repeated claim that the revolution was not about replacing 'socialism', but about giving it a human face) is, one very much suspects, a consensus arrived at chiefly by the intellectuals who write the revolutionary narrative. The secret ballot has a way of overturning truths that intellectuals regard as self-evident, as was the case with the Austrian ballot cited above.

That the 'third way' might very well have turned out to be the 'Austrian way' (rather than 'Finlandisation') is at least partially made plausible by the last of the books here under review. Ibolya Murber and Zoltán Fónagy have edited an extremely interesting collection of studies in Die ungarische Revolution und Österreich 1956. The first part with contributions from János M. Rainer and Csaba Békés, covers familiar ground, while the third part deals with the reception and treatment of Hungarian refugees in Austria. Space permits me only to concentrate on the second part, which discusses the implications for Austria, for which I hope the authors of the other studies will forgive me. It does not imply disparagement of the detailed descriptions they provide of the everyday realities confronted by refugees and their hosts. However, the second part of the book is of particular interest for its excellent treatment of the delicate situation in which Austria found

itself, and is not without relevance to some of the issues I have raised above in relation to Hungary. Austria had only regained its full independence with the signing of the Staatsvertrag the previous year (15 May, 1955). However it had had a functioning, freely elected government since November 1945, albeit one subject to overall constraints imposed by the occupying powers. Although not stipulated in the Staatsvertrag, all political parties represented in the Nationalrat unanimously passed an act on the 26th October following, by which Austria committed itself to perpetual ("immerwährende") neutrality. In reality this was part of the deal which Austrian delegates had agreed with the Soviet Union a month before the Staatsvertrag and which was summarised in the "Moscow Memorandum". The basic model for neutrality was that of Switzerland, which is to say that the country engaged to actively defend its borders and to participate vigorously in international institutions. On the other hand, and this was perhaps the most important element for the Russians, it undertook not to join any military alliance, nor to allow military bases of foreign powers on its soil, and under no circumstances to intervene militarily in other countries. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 immediately presented a major challenge to the country's freshly baked independence and neutrality, a challenge to which the nation (and especially the government) responded with considerable aplomb.
Not surprisingly, it was Austria's neutrality which the Soviet Union sought to manipulate in its own interest through its Sprachrohr, the Austrian KPÖ. In an extremely interesting and well-researched contribution Renáta Szentesi documents how they set about this. The strategy of the KPÖ was to claim it was acting solely in defence of Austria's neutrality, which (according to the Communists) the government was putting in jeopardy. For its part, the coalition conservative-social-democratic government under the conservative Chancellor, Julius Raab, showed a remarkable and courageous self-confidence. Raab himself, in a radio address, enraged the KPÖ propagandists by remarking that military neutrality should by no means be confused with a colourless neutrality in political questions.²³ And Raab had caught the mood of the people: the unpopularity of the KPÖ increased (there were even incidents and scuffles outside KPÖ offices and at events it organised) and in the elections held three years later the party lost its remaining representation in Parliament. Most of the specific accusations that were made by Soviet propaganda, and echoed by the KPÖ (for example, that there had been transport of weapons to the Hungarian revolutionaries with the complicity of the government), could be shown to be groundless.
On the other hand, the Austrian government was somewhat embarrassed by the overwhelming solidarity with the revolutionaries that found an outlet in fiery press articles, and indeed it appealed more than once to the press to behave with more responsibility and restraint. It also expelled Ferenc Nagy, the Smallholder Prime Minister of the 1945 Hungarian government, who had travelled to Austria to see if he could raise a contingent of emigré fighters, on the grounds that his presence and activities "could shed a bad light on the [humanitarian] transports" to Hungary.²⁴ But perhaps the most important lesson from all this was that neutrality, as has been underlined by historians and most politicians, only works as a legal concept in respect of military activity. In a free country it cannot be made to encompass restrictions on free speech and press freedom, nor to restrict the transport of humanitarian aid that 'objectively' speaking assists the revolutionaries.²⁵ Indeed, one might say that neutrality gives a greater moral weight to free speech than it might otherwise have, while it is a feature of neutral countries that they direct a great deal of energy and enterprise to humanitarian activity that the status of neutrality actually makes it easier to carry out.
Of course the Russians did not seriously fear a military intervention by Austria in Hungary, and they must have known that America, despite the incredibly cynical and irresponsible behaviour of Radio Free Europe in Munich, showed not the slightest sign of mobilising to help the Revolution. To the contrary, a certain confidence that the West would not interfere, based on private assurances to the effect that the Yalta deal still held, emboldened them in their decision to intervene and suppress the Revolution, however much embarrassment and loss of face that would cause them.²⁶ What indeed they and the propagandists of the subsequent Kádár regime feared most was precisely what Austria offered: an example of a free, neutral and politically unaligned country that functioned well as a moderately social democratic or moderately conservative society within the rule of law and benefiting from the energy of a socially regulated capitalism. As I argue in this review, it is unlikely that such a model right on the doorstep of Hungary would have had no impact on future developments there, had the Revolution been successful.