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In the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, close to two hundred thousand Hungarians crossed into Austria.  About thirty thousand of these refugees were allowed to enter the United States. Their common experience of living under totalitarian communism and participating or being a witness to the exhilarating thirteen days of the revolution and their sudden, previously unplanned, departure from the homeland gave them a collective identity that was different from the one shared by the people of previous waves of Hungarian influx to the United States. The high educational level of the refugees attained before and after their arrival made their absorption into the mainstream relatively easy. The integration process was facilitated by the shaping of a positive image of the 1956 refugees by the US government and the media.  The reestablishment of the communist system in post-1956 Hungary contributed to the perception that, for the refugees in the United States, there was no hope for return to the homeland.  This assumption strengthened the attitudes of those who wished to embrace the American melting pot model.  Many of the 1956-ers in the United Sates, however, were also comfortable with the notion of ethnic pride and believed in the shaping of a dual national identity.

Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states. The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a \"neo-corporatist\" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality. Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise. One Day That Shook the Communist Worldis the best account of these unprecedented events.

A decade after the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China established their formidable alliance in 1950, escalating public disagreements between them broke the international communist movement apart. InThe Sino-Soviet Split, Lorenz Lüthi tells the story of this rupture, which became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Identifying the primary role of disputes over Marxist-Leninist ideology, Lüthi traces their devastating impact in sowing conflict between the two nations in the areas of economic development, party relations, and foreign policy. The source of this estrangement was Mao Zedong's ideological radicalization at a time when Soviet leaders, mainly Nikita Khrushchev, became committed to more pragmatic domestic and foreign policies. Using a wide array of archival and documentary sources from three continents, Lüthi presents a richly detailed account of Sino-Soviet political relations in the 1950s and 1960s. He explores how Sino-Soviet relations were linked to Chinese domestic politics and to Mao's struggles with internal political rivals. Furthermore, Lüthi argues, the Sino-Soviet split had far-reaching consequences for the socialist camp and its connections to the nonaligned movement, the global Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The Sino-Soviet Splitprovides a meticulous and cogent analysis of a major political fallout between two global powers, opening new areas of research for anyone interested in the history of international relations in the socialist world.

In Freedom's Fury, the history of Soviet occupation of Hungary at the end of World War Two is interwoven with the country’s emergence as a an international waterpolo powerhouse in the 50s. The journey of the 1956 Hungarian waterpolo team and its rising star Ervin Zador to the Melbourne Olympics then becomes the rallying cry for justice as Freedom's Fury explores the larger human tragedy of a popular, democratic uprising that is brutally crushed by the Soviet Red Army in November 1956, just two weeks before the Olympics begin in Australia (over 15,000 people were killed or executed). The story is now finally told about the infamous water polo showdown between Hungary and the Soviet Union, also known as \"the Bloodiest Game in Olympic History.\"

Tibor Fischer’s novel, Under the Frog (1992), as I shall argue, could be conceived as a narrative expansion of collective memory, or rather postmemory (Hirsch), partly triggered by famous press photos. The novel exists in a productive interrelatedness with the Western European myth also inspired by these photographs about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The book added life to the dead photos which, although part of an interpretation, were only skeletons of the story of 1956. The fictional recontextualization of scenes and figures experienced as two-dimensional images creates a valid narrative of the events of 1956 that verifies our notions and images we construct mentally about this historical moment. This fictional narrative engages in a dialogue with the author’s posterior knowledge about the scenes and characters previously encountered in the widespread Western press photos of the Revolution. My thesis that crucial scenes in the novel can be regarded as textual evocations of wellknown photos about the events leads to interesting questions about Under the Frog . These are related to what is the cultural background of the novel’s treatment of the representations of the Revolution, what new meanings are added to the photos by the book and how Western discourses, represented by the press photos and the novel, modify Hungarian cultural memory of the 1956 Revolution.

The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers.

On this edition of Meet the Press: former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt talks about her trip to the Soviet Union.

THIS IS AN AUDIO RECORDING OF THIS EDITION OF MEET THE PRESS. On this edition of Meet the Press: Vladimir Peremsky, leader of the anti-communist underground in Russia discusses his work in the Soviet Union and his visit to the United States.